When making the move from individual contributor to manager as a software engineer, it's natural to anticipate that the kinds of things you'll work on will change. What may be less obvious is that the rhythm of the work itself is upended: what was, in the
Chat tools like Slack and Teams are pretty ubiquitous here in 2024. They can be a source of info overload, but I've found some strategies for working in them effectively. These are based on years of experience working with Slack specifically, since I have not been blessed/cursed
At first it feels rude. You're asking something of a colleague on another team at work, a conversation something like this, perhaps in Slack or Teams: You: "Hey, can you please get this database access set up for me?" Them: "Sure! Will do" Then
The more I learn about management, the more I feel I have to couch any recommendation with a hidden step 0: "Build and maintain trust." It seems like a cliché, but it really is true. Without trust, seemingly innocuous actions can be seen in a nefarious light. With
Many of us have been in the interminable daily standups going around to each person for the standard "Did, Doing, Blockers" routine. It often dissolves into a haze where the updates all sound like "Worked on thing A, going to try to wrap up thing A today,
I recently saw some chatter on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter around this post from Cory House with some advice for engineering managers: If I were a dev manager again, here's a stat I'd track: PR comment/approval ratio. Examples: Bob made 0 PR comments
1:1s can take many forms. Some employees bring a long list of topics to cover, some bring only the burning issues, and others bring nothing at all. The best 1:1 meetings are consistently held and go beyond a project sync. A project sync can be a component of
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