The Engineering Leadership & Wellbeing Newsletter 🌱 #13
“HAY” there, Tomek here.
Just one quick announcement before we dive into your lucky number 13 edition of Engineering Leadership & Wellbeing 🌱.
Spaces are filling fast for our Effective Engineering Manager Course that will take place at the end of June. Be sure to secure your spot if you’re looking for an intimate and interactive workshop on becoming a better engineering leader.
Topics for the day: AI helping EMs, Managers as debuggers, Communication, Spotify’s Squads Model, Growing beyond senior developer, Managing high performers, Career advancement, Perils of refactoring, Interview techniques for engineering managers
How AI Can Help Engineering Managers
Engineering managers frequently balance project management, team coordination, and the need to stay ahead of the latest technological trends. Fortunately, AI can alleviate some of these burdens.
Read more: How AI Assistants Are Transforming the Role of Engineering Managers
Are Managers the Best Debuggers?
Camille Fournier explores the idea that the best engineering managers excel as debuggers because both roles demand an unyielding quest to uncover the "why" behind problems. This pursuit is crucial, whether addressing system bugs or resolving team issues.
Read more: The Manager as Debugger
Managing Expectations + Effective Communication
Communication is a crucial element that enables effective teamwork, maintains relationships, and helps individuals navigate challenges. This blog post discusses how distractions, polarization, and internal doubts often cloud our communication, leading to misconstrued personal realities fueled by our egos.
Read more: Communication, high performers and keeping up with the expectations.
An Experiment With Spotify’s Squads Model
After leading teams for a decade at the same company,
decided to experiment with Spotify's 'Squads Model' due to the increasing workload that hindered new developments. The Squads Model organizes teams into autonomous, cross-functional groups similar to small startups and was introduced to address these challenges and enhance efficiency.
“What gets you to senior won’t get you past senior.”
Advancing beyond the position of senior developer requires developing new skills as the previous ones are insufficient. In this post,
discusses three critical skills necessary for leveling up: learning to scale yourself by maximizing your impact directly and through others, navigating ambiguity by making informed decisions amidst uncertain and vague situations, and influencing without authority to align diverse groups towards a common goal.
Advice on Managing High Performers
“Even the best performers need structure and guidance.” Stay Saasy discusses how management advice often focuses on addressing low performance, leaving a gap in guidance for managing high performers. This post emphasizes the importance of actively managing high performers rather than allowing them autonomy without oversight.
Read more: Managing High Performers
“Who Pays You? And Why?”
Brian Kihoon Lee at Modern Descartes encourages developers to ask these two critical questions when they feel stuck and want to find new opportunities. Advancing in software engineering requires not just technical skills but the ability to navigate business and technical ambiguities, influence without authority, and align personal goals with organizational needs. Understanding these can dictate career success and satisfaction.
Read more: Who pays you? And why?
Why Refactoring Sometimes Results in Calamity
I really enjoyed this post by
and how he finds a funny parallel between taking the initiative to clean up and his learnings from refactoring. Before refactoring, Anton recommends two crucial steps:✅ Consider the future. Are there significant features scheduled to be added to the codebase soon? If there aren't, it might be wise to hold off on the refactor; those features may never materialize.
✅ Truly understand the existing code. Allocate a few days for a developer to thoroughly explore and comprehend the current code. Many teams dive into complex refactoring without spending even a single day understanding the code they aim to replace.
10 Interview Techniques That Engineering Managers Could Use
wants to become the best interviewer in the world. Her research on interviewing could also be quite useful for Engineering Managers and Tech Leaders in preparing for interviews when finding their next software developer.
Did you like this edition of ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP & WELLBEING 🌱?
If you're looking for a specific subject to read about or maybe would like to collaborate on a project, reach out to me at tomek@howareyou.work.
Thanks for the share Tomasz!