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awesome-engineering-team-management

đź‘” How to transition from software development to engineering management
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-engineering-team-management

Last synced: 8 days ago
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Agile

Delivery

Tickets

Building Teams

  • What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - “Google's data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. (…) The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.”
  • Developer Tropes: "Google does it" - It's cargo-cultish to imitate the big names in our industry as a path to success. Instead, the take home from this article “would be that managers and other leaders should be like ecologists; who measure, observe and nurture their ecosystems. Doing so will help build a unique workplace that will yield great results.”
  • What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - “Google's data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. (…) The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.”

Career

Performance Reviews

  • Get your work recognized: write a brag document - There's this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay. In practice, it's often more complicated than that.
  • Incentive Pay Considered Harmful - “Incentives (or bribes) simply can't work in the workplace. (…) Most software managers have no choice but to go along with performance review systems that are already in place. If you're in this position, the only way to prevent teamicide is to simply give everyone on your team a gushing review”.
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  • Performance review generator - Tired of writing reviews? Automate it!

Presentations

Promotion

  • The Evolution of Management: Transitioning up the ladder - Describe the path and expectations at each management level.
  • If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion - This essay deconstruct why management ends up being seen as a promotion, how its new acquired privileges and powers creates an implicit hierarchy, which in turns creates bad incentives because of loss aversion. At the end, the only way forwards is to change the organization's culture.
  • How to discipline overeager engineer - Over-achieving talent is looking for a management promotion. Management does not recognize effort. Engineer become disgruntled and management is looking to discipline him. A case-study of a bad situation in which both side shows clumsiness.
  • source - Do not chase promotion for the title only.
  • For all you future CTOs, consider your incentive schemes carefully - How a promotion scheme marked the end of Uber's engineering excellence and the start of what made the company turn into a bureaucratic mess.
  • How to get promoted - The cynical take: “an opportunist's career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for slow systemic adjustments, don't make anyone look bad, perform rituals with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this sincerely.”
  • How to discipline overeager engineer - Over-achieving talent is looking for a management promotion. Management does not recognize effort. Engineer become disgruntled and management is looking to discipline him. A case-study of a bad situation in which both side shows clumsiness.
  • How to get promoted - The cynical take: “an opportunist's career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for slow systemic adjustments, don't make anyone look bad, perform rituals with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this sincerely.”

Cognitive Tools

Behavioral

  • Disney's Frozen
  • Intellectual Humility Cheat Sheet - “is about being open and able to change your mind about important things, and being able to discern when you should.”
  • On Bullshit - This HN comment perfectly describes the concept. “Unlike lying/fraud, where falsehood is instrumental, Frankfurt defined bullshit as potentially false speech where the truth simply wasn't important. Bullshit is characterized by giving the surface appearance of confidence, intelligence, or a convincing argument; whether it's actually true or not is besides the point.”
  • Programmer Interrupted - Research shows the devastating effect of interrupting developers: 1. 15 min is required to resume work; 2. A programmer get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day; 3. Worst time to interrupt: during edits, searches & comprehension.
  • Disney's Frozen
  • On Bullshit - This HN comment perfectly describes the concept. “Unlike lying/fraud, where falsehood is instrumental, Frankfurt defined bullshit as potentially false speech where the truth simply wasn't important. Bullshit is characterized by giving the surface appearance of confidence, intelligence, or a convincing argument; whether it's actually true or not is besides the point.”
  • Avoiding Intellectual Phase Lock - Anticipating an important result so much, humans by nature are susceptible to introduce subtle confirmation bias. To combat IPL, you might introduce random unknowns to suppress any attempt to game the system toward the object of your desire. I.e. avoid to cheat yourself to success.

Brainstorming

  • Yes, and… - “A rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy (…). It is also used in business and other organizations as a principle that improves the effectiveness of the brainstorming process, fosters effective communication, and encourages the free sharing of ideas.”
  • Strong Opinions, Weakly Held — a framework for thinking - “Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the 'strong opinion' part. Then – and this is the 'weakly held' part – prove yourself wrong.”

Collections

Explaining

  • Hanlon's razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” My favorite flavor of Occam's Razor, and a crucial mantra to defuse rampant paranoia in a highly political setting.
  • Regression toward the mean - Or why after a period of intense euphoria and ambition, things slowly get back to their usual mediocrity.
  • Locus of control - A framework on “the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.”

Problem Solving

Communication

Documentation

Knowledge

  • Chesterton's fence - “If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first.” It's not we'd like to play conservative here, but because we need to fix the knowledge hole as described above.
  • You're Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You're Managing a Team of Writers - Because writing software is “a creative process which is by its nature unpredictable and personal, in an environment which craves certainty, predictability and consistency.”
  • What senior engineers do: fix knowledge holes - “This is the textbook definition of a senior engineer. You see a problem, you solve it (thoroughly), you document it and you level up your team.”

Presentations

  • It's time to start writing - On “Jeff Bezos's dotcom-era policy of banning PowerPoint within Amazon”, and how “this is neither about powerpoint nor about reading - it's about thinking.”
  • Presentation Rules - A set of 16 rules to avoid boring and ineffective presentations, and have your message reach your audience.
  • The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen - “1. Name a big change in the world; 2. Show there'll be winners and losers; 3. Tease the promised land; 4. Introduce features as "Magic Gifts"; 5. Present evidence that you can make the story come true.”
  • Some tips on public speaking - “If you ever find yourself buffering on output, rather than making hesitation noises, just pause. People will read that as considered deliberation and intelligence.”

Reading

  • How to Read a Paper - Outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.
  • How to Read a Paper - Outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.

Style

Writing

Compensation

Equity

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  • On VC funding and huge growth - “Startups need an exit strategy. (…) The idea is to raise money fast, hire experienced people for ancillary services and develop the application in a way so that it is able to hold up till IPO. Defer all costs for post IPO.” So from this angle, the only reason to join a startup is for future money windfall.
  • Equity Compensation - Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes—a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up and made to be improved over time.
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Salary

Culture

Procrastination

  • Adaptation vs adaptability - There is a spectrum between perfect efficiency and being completely flexible. This article explores ecosystems and the flows of material and energy between different organisms within the ecosystem. (hinted by HN comment)
  • Meaningful differences that makes Google offices more productive - “The people are smarter, your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you and it's easy to move.”
  • It's Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind - “It's harder to be kind than clever”, or put another way by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”
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  • source - At one point, even with the most unselfish of intentions, your attempts to elevate the culture might stall. It is not fair, but it's probably the time to leave.
  • You have only 4 options - “1. Change you; 2. Change the other; 3. Fly; 4. Stay and suffer.” A more concise way of saying the same thing as above.
  • Netflix Culture - “The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”
  • A Conversation with Werner Vogels, Learning from the Amazon technology platform - Scaling systems is not only a technical challenge. It has to be about teams and culture too. One lesson learned from the early days of AWS: “Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. (…) You build it, you run it.”
  • The principles of Amazon service-oriented collaboration - A compilation of anonymous sources from AWS which ehoes the interview above: “teams are ostensibly autonomous and can make any important decision needed to meet their goals.”
  • hacker-laws - Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful.
  • It's Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind - “It's harder to be kind than clever”, or put another way by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”
  • High Performance Organizations Reading List - A list of books, web pages, and videos about how to design better organizations, divided into 3 categories: organization and motivation, health and wellness, and software development specific.
  • Netflix Culture - “The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”
  • The IT revolution and southern Europe's two lost decades - If you still doubt management culture could make or break an industry: “inefficient management practices have kept southern European firms from taking full advantage of the IT revolution”.

Engineering

Engineering Practices

  • Software Engineering's Greatest Hits - When scientific method meet the practice of software development. My takeaways: the best metric is less lines of code, there is no 10x developers, too much unused configuration options, pair programing is for transfer of domain-specific knowledge and hackathon don't produce long term projects.
  • Code reviews at Google - “Why Should Code Reviews Be Fast? (…) To optimize for the speed at which a team of developers can produce a product together, as opposed to optimizing for the speed at which an individual developer can write code.”
  • Embedded Rules of Thumb - Guidelines and heuristics to provide a reasonable approximation of the truth while developing embedded devices. Most also applies to software projects in general.
  • How to Misuse Code Coverage - “If a part of your test suite is weak in a way that coverage can detect, it's likely also weak in a way coverage can't detect.” I.e. the great benefit of a coverage report is that it tells you what you forgot to think about when you wrote the test suite itself (source).
  • Google Engineering Practices - Explains how to perform code reviews and how to submit them.

Systems Complexity

Technical Debt

  • Tech Due Diligence Calculator - A list of questions by topic to help understand how you are building your tech and engineering team, trying to highlight red flags.
  • Technical debt as a lack of understanding - “The problem lies in "never reorganizing [the code] to reflect your understanding." (…) Organizationally, you pay in velocity and turnover; talented people are going to leave after a few rounds of bullshit.”
  • The Framing of the Developer - Default framing is around the backlog, which leads to an asymmetry in which failure is blamed on lacks of developer performance, and success is celebrated as the full realization of the PM's vision. But “technology is the bank that gave credit”, and technical debt should be called product debt “because product took the credit to get a feature faster and must pay back by investing the time to clean up.” The alternative? “Companies today need a frame of impact. In this world-view success is defined by impact.”
  • Goodbye, Clean Code - “My boss invited me for a one-on-one chat where they politely asked me to revert my change. I was aghast. The old code was a mess, and mine was clean! (…) I see now that my 'refactoring' was a disaster in two ways: I didn't talk to the person who wrote it; My code traded the ability to change requirements for reduced duplication”.
  • Technical Debt Is Like Tetris - Another way to explain technical debt: “Scenarios like these create technical debt within the product code. A buried gap in Tetris represents technical debt. (…) Paying down technical debt keeps you competitive. It keeps you in the game.”
  • The Framing of the Developer - Default framing is around the backlog, which leads to an asymmetry in which failure is blamed on lacks of developer performance, and success is celebrated as the full realization of the PM's vision. But “technology is the bank that gave credit”, and technical debt should be called product debt “because product took the credit to get a feature faster and must pay back by investing the time to clean up.” The alternative? “Companies today need a frame of impact. In this world-view success is defined by impact.”

Technology

The Technical Engineering Manager

  • Do engineering managers need to be technical? - Yes. “Looking forward to the next 30 years of management trends, only a few things seem certain: Managers should be technical, and the definition of technical will continue to change.”
  • If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You're More Likely to Be Happy at Work - “Although we found that many factors can matter for happiness at work – type of occupation, level of education, tenure, and industry are also significant, for instance – they don't even come close to mattering as much as the boss' technical competence.”
  • source - Another way of putting it: managers needs domain knowledge and to know the work their reports do.
  • source - This quote is from David Packard (HP co-founder), decades before current management fad.
  • If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You're More Likely to Be Happy at Work - “Although we found that many factors can matter for happiness at work – type of occupation, level of education, tenure, and industry are also significant, for instance – they don't even come close to mattering as much as the boss' technical competence.”

Engineering to Management Transition