Items tagged management in 2021
Filters: Year: 2021 × management × Sorted by date
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
— Tyler Cowen # 23rd August 2021, 8:02 pm
The way you motivate someone who doesn’t need the money is the same way you should motivate people who do need the money: by giving them meaningful roles with real responsibility where they can see how their efforts contribute to a larger whole, giving them an appropriate amount of ownership over their work and input into decisions that involve that work, providing useful feedback, recognizing their contributions, helping them feel they’re making progress toward things that matter to them, and — importantly — not doing things that de-motivate people (like yelling or constantly shifting goals or generally being a jerk).
— Alison Green (Ask a Manager) # 17th August 2021, 11:01 pm
Product Hunt Engineering Principles (via) Product Hunt implement “Collaborative Single Player Mode”, which they define as “A developer should be able to execute a feature from start to finish -- from the database to the backend, API, frontend, and CSS. The goal is never to get blocked.” I’ve encountered this principle applied to teams before (which I really like) but not for individual developers, which I imagine is more likely to work well for smaller organizations. Intriguing approach.
They also practice trunk driven development with feature flags: “Always start a feature with a feature flag and try to get something to production on day 1.”
And “If a product decision is missing, try to make this decision yourself—it’s better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.” # 16th August 2021, 3:35 pm
There’s three ways to handle work assigned to you. If you say you’ll do it, do it. If you say you can’t, that’s ok. But if you sign up for work and drop the ball, the team fails. Learn to say no.
— Chris Jones, original Internet Explorer team # 14th August 2021, 8:16 pm
GitLab Culture: The phases of remote adaptation. GitLab claim to be “the world’s largest all-remote company”—1300 employees across 65 countries, with not a single physical office. Lots of interesting thinking in this article about different phases a company can go through to become truly remote-first. “Maximally efficient remote environments will do as little work as possible synchronously, instead focusing the valuable moments where two or more people are online at the same time on informal communication and bonding.” They also expire their Slack messages after 90 days to force critical project information into documents and issue threads. # 22nd June 2021, 12:37 am
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding. By Camille Fournier, author of my favourite book on engineering management “The Manager’s Path”. Number one is “How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it”. # 6th June 2021, 10:17 pm
I strongly suspect that the single most impactful thing I did during my 5+ years at Linden Lab was shortly before I left: set up a weekly meeting between a couple of leads from Support and Engineering to go over the top 10 support issues.
— Yoz Grahame # 23rd February 2021, 4:49 am
People, processes, priorities. Twitter thread from Adrienne Porter Felt outlining her model for thinking about engineering management. I like this trifecta of “people, processes, priorities” a lot. # 22nd February 2021, 5:21 pm
One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that humans aren’t pure functions: an input that works one day and gets one result, then again another day and get an entirely different result.
— Sarah Drasner # 19th February 2021, 12 am
Finally, remember that whatever choice is made, you’re going to need to get behind it! You should be able to make a compelling positive case for any of the options you present. If there’s an option you can’t support, don’t present it.
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss # 8th February 2021, 3:21 pm
Generally, product-aligned teams deliver better products more rapidly. Again, Conway’s Law is inescapable; if delivering a new feature requires several teams to coordinate, you’ll struggle compared to an org where a single team can execute on a new feature.
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss # 5th January 2021, 4:33 pm