57 items tagged “management”
2024
One big thing that a lot of people love to do is create new role types. For any new thing a company wants to do, the tendency is to put up a new job description.
I think a lot of people notice this and chafe at it when the role is for the new hotness. For example, every company wants to rub some AI on their stuff now, so they are putting up job descriptions for AI engineers.
If you’re an engineer interested in AI sitting in such a company, you’re annoyed that they’re doing this (and potentially paying that person more than you) when you could easily rub some AI on some stuff.
— Dan McKinley, Egoless Engineering
How I ship projects at big tech companies (via) This piece by Sean Goedecke on shipping features at larger tech companies is fantastic.
Why do so many engineers think shipping is easy? I know it sounds extreme, but I think many engineers do not understand what shipping even is inside a large tech company. What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.
Sean emphasizes communication, building confidence and gaining trust and the importance of deploying previews of the feature (for example using feature flags) as early as possible to get that crucial internal buy-in and feedback from other teams.
I think a lot of engineers hold off on deploys essentially out of fear. If you want to ship, you need to do the exact opposite: you need to deploy as much as you can as early as possible, and you need to do the scariest changes as early as you can possibly do them. Remember that you have the most end-to-end context on the project, which means you should be the least scared of scary changes.
How to succeed in MrBeast production (leaked PDF). Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos (here’s a 2022 Rolling Stone profile if you’re unfamiliar), this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read.
It’s a snapshot of what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation in the 2020s, as well as a detailed description of a very specific company culture evolved to fulfill that mission.
It starts in the most on-brand MrBeast way possible:
I genuinely believe if you attently read and understand the knowledge here you will be much better set up for success. So, if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000.
Everything is focused very specifically on YouTube as a format:
Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
The MrBeast definition of A, B and C-team players is one I haven’t heard before:
A-Players are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in Youtube, see the value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job. B-Players are new people that need to be trained into A-Players, and C-Players are just average employees. […] They arn’t obsessive and learning. C-Players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company IMMEDIATELY. (It’s okay we give everyone severance, they’ll be fine).
The key characteristic outlined here, if you read between the hustle-culture lines, is learning. Employees who constantly learn are valued. Employees who don’t are not.
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6-10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1-3, 3-6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Chapter 2 (pages 10-24) is about creating content. This is crammed with insights into what it takes to produce surprising, spectacular and very expensive content for YouTube.
A lot of this is about coordination and intense management of your dependencies:
I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.
It also introduces the concept of “critical components”:
Critical components are the things that are essential to your video. If I want to put 100 people on an island and give it away to one of them, then securing an island is a critical component. It doesn’t matter how well planned the challenges on the island are, how good the weather is, etc. Without that island there is no video.
[…]
Critical Components can come from literally anywhere and once something you’re working on is labeled as such, you treat it like your baby. WITHOUT WHAT YOU’RE WORKING ON WE DO NOT HAVE A VIDEO! Protect it at all costs, check in on it 10x a day, obsess over it, make a backup, if it requires shipping pay someone to pick it up and drive it, don’t trust standard shipping, and speak up the second anything goes wrong. The literal second. Never coin flip a Critical Component (that means you’re coinfliping the video aka a million plus dollars)
There’s a bunch of stuff about communication, with a strong bias towards “higher forms of communication”: in-person beats a phone call beats a text message beats an email.
Unsurprisingly for this organization, video is a highly valued tool for documenting work:
Which is more important, that one person has a good mental grip of something or that their entire team of 10 people have a good mental grip on something? Obviously the team. And the easiest way to bring your team up to the same page is to freaken video everything and store it where they can constantly reference it. A lot of problems can be solved if we just video sets and ask for videos when ordering things.
I enjoyed this note:
Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.
And this bit about the value of consultants:
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. […] In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you.
Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:
Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
And to finish, this note on budgeting:
I want money spent to be shown on camera ideally. If you’re spending over $10,000 on something and it won’t be shown on camera, seriously think about it.
I’m always interested in finding management advice from unexpected sources. For example, I love The Eleven Laws of Showrunning as a case study in managing and successfully delegating for a large, creative project.
I don’t think this MrBeast document has as many lessons directly relevant to my own work, but as an honest peek under the hood of a weirdly shaped and absurdly ambitious enterprise it’s legitimately fascinating.
We respect wildlife in the wilderness because we’re in their house. We don’t fully understand the complexity of most ecosystems, so we seek to minimize our impact on those ecosystems since we can’t always predict what outcomes our interactions with nature might have.
In software, many disastrous mistakes stem from not understanding why a system was built the way it was, but changing it anyway. It’s super common for a new leader to come in, see something they see as “useless”, and get rid of it – without understanding the implications. Good leaders make sure they understand before they mess around.
(Blaming something on “politics” is usually a way of accidentally confessing that you don’t actually understand the constraints someone is operating under, IMO.)
Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You (via) This barnstormer of an essay is a long read by Charity Majors, and I find myself wanting to quote almost every paragraph.
It thoroughly and passionately debunks the idea that generative AI means that teams no longer need to hire junior programmers.
This is for several key reasons. First is the familiar pipeline argument - we need juniors in order to grow new intermediate and senior engineers:
Software is an apprenticeship industry. You can’t learn to be a software engineer by reading books. You can only learn by doing…and doing, and doing, and doing some more. No matter what your education consists of, most learning happens on the job—period. And it never ends! Learning and teaching are lifelong practices; they have to be, the industry changes so fast.
It takes a solid seven-plus years to forge a competent software engineer. (Or as most job ladders would call it, a “senior software engineer”.) That’s many years of writing, reviewing, and deploying code every day, on a team alongside more experienced engineers. That’s just how long it seems to take.
What does it mean to be a senior engineer? It’s a lot more than just writing code:
To me, being a senior engineer is not primarily a function of your ability to write code. It has far more to do with your ability to understand, maintain, explain, and manage a large body of software in production over time, as well as the ability to translate business needs into technical implementation. So much of the work is around crafting and curating these large, complex sociotechnical systems, and code is just one representation of these systems.
[…]
People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.
But I find the most convincing arguments are the ones about team structure itself:
Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team
[…]
Have you ever been on a team packed exclusively with staff or principal engineers? It is not fun. That is not a high-functioning team. There is only so much high-level architecture and planning work to go around, there are only so many big decisions that need to be made. These engineers spend most of their time doing work that feels boring and repetitive, so they tend to over-engineer solutions and/or cut corners—sometimes at the same time. They compete for the “fun” stuff and find reasons to pick technical fights with each other. They chronically under-document and under-invest in the work that makes systems simple and tractable.
[…]
The best teams are ones where no one is bored, because every single person is working on something that challenges them and pushes their boundaries. The only way you can get this is by having a range of skill levels on the team.
Charity finishes with advice on hiring juniors, including ensuring that your organization is in the right shape to do so effectively.
The only thing worse than never hiring any junior engineers is hiring them into an awful experience where they can’t learn anything.
Seriously though, read the whole thing. It contains such a density of accumulated engineering management wisdom.
Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people. That team might cost $50 to 100 million in salary a year. So as a CEO, when you hear from your eng leaders that ‘Engineering is an art, and you can’t predict how it’s going to work,’ it’s frustrating. They’re sitting there thinking, ‘They’re telling me this is art, but I’m spending $100 million on this art each year.’ That’s not reassuring.
The leader of a team - especially a senior one - is rarely ever the smartest, the most expert or even the most experienced.
Often it’s the person who can best understand individuals’ motivations and galvanize them towards an outcome, all while helping them stay cohesive.
I think most people have this naive idea of consensus meaning “everyone agrees”. That’s not what consensus means, as practiced by organizations that truly have a mature and well developed consensus driven process.
Consensus is not “everyone agrees”, but [a model where] people are more aligned with the process than they are with any particular outcome, and they’ve all agreed on how decisions will be made.
2023
Create a culture that favors begging forgiveness (and reversing decisions quickly) rather than asking permission. Invest in infrastructure such as progressive / cancellable rollouts. Use asynchronous written docs to get people aligned (“comment in this doc by Friday if you disagree with the plan”) rather than meetings (“we’ll get approval at the next weekly review meeting”).
The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this:
Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on.
But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is always a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.
Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis (via) Will Larson’s 49m video discussing engineering strategy: what one is and how to build one. He defines an engineering strategy as having two key components: an honest diagnosis of the way things currently work, and a practical approach to making things better.
Towards the end of the talk he suggests that there are two paths to developing a new strategy. The first is to borrow top-down authority from a sponsor such as a CTO, and the second is to work without any borrowed authority, instead researching how things work at the moment and, through documenting that, write a strategy document into existence!
Patrick Newman’s Software Engineering Management Checklist (via) This tiny document may have the highest density of good engineering management advice I’ve ever encountered.
Should you give candidates feedback on their interview performance? Jacob provides a characteristically nuanced answer to the question of whether you should provide feedback to candidates you have interviewed. He suggests offering the candidate the option to email asking for feedback early in the interview process to avoid feeling pushy later on, and proposes the phrase “you failed to demonstrate...” as a useful framing device.
On Endings: Why & How We Retired Elm at Culture Amp (via) Culture Amp made extensive use of Elm—a ML-like functional language that compiles to JavaScript—between 2016 and 2020 while building their company’s frontend. They eventually decided to move away from it, for reasons described at length in this post primarily relating to its integration with React. This piece is worth reading mainly as a thoughtful approach to engineering management challenge of deprecating a well-loved piece of technology from the recommended stack at a company.
Just a reminder, the way you evaluate yourself as a leader is how much both the individuals and teams in your organization grow in their capacity to achieve hard goals. Everything else is a distraction.
2022
People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software. That’s great, particularly if you avoid writing software with strict dependencies. Some managers get energy from coaching others. That’s great. Some get energy from doing exploratory work. Others get energy from optimizing existing systems. That’s great, too. Some get energy from speaking at conferences. Great. Some get energy from cleaning up internal wiki’s. You get the idea: that’s great. All these things are great, not because managers should or shouldn’t program/speak at conferences/clean up wiki’s/etc, but because folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.
Building Layoffs on a Healthy Foundation (via) Kellan provides some valuable guidance for running layoffs in as humane a way as possible.
Reduce Friction. Outstanding essay on software engineering friction and development team productivity by C J Silverio: it explains the concept of “friction” (and gives great definitions of “process”, “ceremony” and “formality” in the process) as it applies to software engineering, lays out the challenges involved in getting organizations to commit to reducing it and then provides actionable advice on how to get consensus and where to invest your efforts in order to make things better.
2021
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.
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
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.”
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
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.