November 7, 2020.
When you’re writing an engineering strategy, what you put in is important, but it’s almost as important to be deliberate about what you choose to leave out. The full list of things to exclude is uncountably vast, but there are a few worth emphasizing in particular.
November 7, 2020.
Before attempting to document what an engineering strategy ought to be, it’s useful to sharpen a related problem statement: why do engineering teams decide to write an engineering strategy?
November 5, 2020.
One of the projects from my time at Stripe that I’m proud of was writing our engineering strategy, which I later sanitized into a public version in Magnitudes of exploration. The strategy was an elegant document that carefully reconciled two worldviews that had initially appeared incompatible within the engineering organization. While it was both a conceptually pure and utterly pragmatic document, in the end, it wasn’t particularly useful. It reflected how we described making tradeoffs as opposed to how we genuinely made tradeoffs.
October 18, 2020.
While writing Managing technical quality in a codebase, I wanted to find a good reference on running developer productivity surveys, but could only find one related article That’s a totally _fine _article, but it’s advice is much more focused on running an internal survey in general rather than running a developer productivity survey, so I decided to jot down some notes.
October 17, 2020.
If there's one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it's that there's a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren't prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have. Of course, you should feel free to replace "engineers" with "Product Managers" or "executives" if that feels more comfortable. It's a compelling narrative with a clear villain, and it conveniently shifts blame away from engineering leadership. Still, like most narratives that move accountability towards the folks with the least power, it's both unhelpful and wrong.
October 8, 2020.
There are only a few magic spells to attain a Staff-plus role: negotiate for the title while switching roles or find a supportive environment to bake in place while building your internal credibility with an empowered sponsor who’ll advocate for you. The most important reagent in both spells is picking the right company to perform them at. The good news if you’re applying to a new company is that while you might invest weeks of energy into determining if you can get a Staff role there, you won’t need to invest years. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a company to join and grow within, you’re embarking on a years-long journey into an unknown organization. This is a daunting decision to make, and picking the right company for you will have a considerable impact on whether you attain a Staff-plus role.
October 1, 2020.
My father was a professor of economics. After he completed his PhD in his late twenties, he started teaching at one university, got tenure at that university, and walked out forty-some years later into retirement. Working in technology, that sounds like a fairytale. There are very few software companies with a forty-year track record, and even fewer folks whose forty-year career consisted of one employer. There used to be a meme that many engineers spent either one or four years at each company to maximize their equity grants and then bounced on to the next. If that ever happened, it certainly isn’t common behavior for folks who aspire towards or reach Staff-plus roles.
September 26, 2020.
In part "stuck away from friends due to pandemic" inspired, I've been wishing there was a tech writing community for semi-serious writers. As an experiment, I'm trying to spin such a thing up at techwriters.dev
September 24, 2020.
Bert Fan’s best advice for those trying to reach a Staff-plus role was, "often reaching Staff is a combination of luck, timing, and work."
September 17, 2020.
A popular recurring idea around reaching a Staff-plus role is that first you need to successfully complete a 'Staff project.' A project that is considered complex and important enough that the person who completes it has proven themselves as a Staff engineer. However popular this idea is, if you’re pursuing a Staff-plus role it’s important to pierce the mythology of these projects and focus on the experiences of folks who’ve walked the path before you.