I recently attended a conference for engineering leaders based in San Francisco. It was a 2-day affair, and along with the usual talks and networking, the organizers smartly set up their venue for roundtables, 1:1s, and other peer-to-peer conversations that served as a direct contrast to the virtual Zoom conferences these past few years....
It's a fateful coincidence that 2 of the most consequential social networks of the past decade—Twitter and Facebook—have undergone substantial layoffs in the past year, for different reasons. At the same time, the CEOs of both companies have called for flatter organizational structures, particularly within their massive engineering teams: engineering managers...
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast," so the saying goes. I learned that lesson early on in my first management classes, via books like The Score Takes Care of Itself. The idea is to build a strong cultural foundation first, which will shape the team that conforms to those norms and leverage them to...
Meetings are terrible, right? Certainly, meetings get bloated with too many participants—the stereotypical "this could have been an email" type of get-together that always feels like it'd run better with half as many folks. It's common enough that Shopify auto-deleted all meetings with more than 2 people earlier...
In engineering management circles, a common question that gets asked—in podcasts, in job interviews, and sometimes in peer coaching sessions—is whether managers should stay technically proficient, and if so, how and how much....
Ah, the 360° feedback process. It's a common practice for HR teams of larger companies to implement, as a way to counteract managerial biases and singular points of view, by involving more perspectives...
