David Loftesness is now the head of engineering at eero and the co-author of Scaling Teams . There’s an all-too-common cycle in tech these days. Startup avoids management. Founder makes all the decisi
A lot of things in management become clearer when you realize it’s much easier to measure a team’s progress than its state. A team produces 30 units of “x” in a week. Is this good? Well, we could star
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce thei
I’ve never stepped into a leadership role without it quickly becoming clear why a new leader was needed. I think it’s normal for companies to hire new leaders when there are problems that need to be a
Someone once said to me “you’re good at change management” and I was like, what? I sat with the idea for a couple of weeks and eventually realized: Oh! That is what I do! I take teams that are struggl
If you’re a software engineer who works on a team, some of the following will probably be familiar: You work with mostly decent, geeky people At least one person will have an unusual keyboard There wi
Week in Review Leadership Comms Originally posted Jul 31, 2018 • More resources on effective communication As an Engineering Director at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, I sent a “Week in Re
Patrick Collison ( @patrickc ) is the cofounder and CEO of Stripe, an online payments company and emerging core part of the internet’s infrastructure. Patrick cofounded Stripe with his brother John Co
Published in Making Meetup · 7 min read · Jul 23, 2018 -- During my time as fractional VPE at Meetup , I’ve had the honor of partnering with recruiter Michelle Heng to make improvements to the recruit
E veryone remembers the 2002 movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding . It’s a hilarious story about the struggles of Toula (the daughter of a traditional Greek family) as she tries to fall in love and get mar
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The most commonly held belief about creativity is that it’s elusive, esoteric and unique only to the anointed few. The ancient Greeks believed that creativity was a divine attendant spirit that came t
Get more users and fewer support requests by leveling up your writing and technical documentation. 7 min read · Aug 26, 2016 -- If you’re working on the web, at some point you’re going to need to writ
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My role exposes me to a lot of career conversations. I meet a lot of peoplepursuing roles that they perceive to have a lot of authority. They want to bethe decision makers. It sounds good on paper but
One of the most common anti-patterns I see that can create conflict in anotherwise collaborative environment is people asking for permission instead ofadvice. This is such an insidious practice that i
Michael Yarish/AMC Larry Ellison has executive presence. So did Steve Jobs. Advertisement Advertisement Although very different people, they both had that confidence and composure that allowed them to
Delegation is a necessary survival skill for senior executives. But when executives delegate their discovery-related innovation tasks, the odds of them finding the surprising insights that often spur
ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud Kakivaya et al., EuroSys’18 ( If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following
It would be ridiculous to plan a bus trip up the side of a steep and winding mountain road, planning every detail of the trip in advance, and then demand that the driver checks with you for any deviat
The word “Process”... strikes fear in the hearts of some but can be a huge turn on for others. A single word which became partially synonymous with “Corporate Culture” is our topic for today :) The wo
Time is the only truly scarce resource we possess. We should spend it with alevel of care befitting its nature. While few of us would ask to borrow moneyfrom one another regularly, many of us casually
Software Testing Anti-patterns 21 Apr 2018 Introduction There are several articles out there that talk about testing anti-patterns in the software development process. Most of them however deal with t
I thought it’d be useful to share out some of the tools and resources that I use as part of my workflow as a manager. Below is a link to a number of Google docs, which if it sounds interesting to you
Published in The Composition · 16 min read · Apr 16, 2018 -- Or: Collective problem solving in music, art, science, and software. ( video , or TL;DR ) At the end of this post is an audacious idea abou
Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL . I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been cons
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Examining an often-misunderstood element of success 4 min read · Mar 7, 2018 -- Alignment, in the teamwork sense, means “a position of agreement or alliance.” It is one of the critical qualities that
(Two years ago, at Microsoft’s TechEd in San Diego, I was involved in a conversation at an after-conference event with Harry Pierson and Clemens Vasters, and as is typical when the three of us get together, architectural topics were at the forefront of our discussions. An crowd gathered around us,…
Last week, we ran a piece with Adil Ajmal , CTO of LendingHome — the 300-employee strong startup remaking the mortgage industry — in which he focused exclusively on how to hire (and close) the best en
Is software development a craft? I think this might be a decently long post, so let’s come back to that, to journeyman idealists, and to some of the finer points of what counts as “software craftsmans
One day in 2007, in Seattle, Rich Barton, the C.E.O. of the real-estate Web site Zillow, was getting ready for the company’s annual reviews. The process—talking to each employee about his or her perfo
An episode of “Bad Management Habits” 2 min read · Jan 12, 2018 -- I have a bad habit. I noticed it today as I was leaving a comment in a strategy document. I’d highlighted some text that I found uncl
(discuss on Hacker News ) I believe that many team leaders feel constantly under fire because nobody tells them the entire story. They are too busy loading the ship with goods and pushing it forward,
Credit: MaxPixel “Managing up” can seem like a dirty word, I definitely thought so for a while, and deludedly aspired to be the kind of manager who did not need to be “managed up” (thankfully I have f
Confession time : I used to quiz people on FizzBuzz on their job interview when I started interviewing people for my own company five years ago. I no longer do that—instead, I try to create an environ
Let’s say that you’ve just hired Emma, one of the most talented [title goes here] on the face of the planet! How cool is that, right?! If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably prepared a powerful (m
Connecting with others is at the heart of human nature. Recent research emphasizes that the power of connections can help us be creative, resilient, even live longer. But we can easily overlook the im
Op-Ed Contributor Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter Credit... Bryan Thomas for The New York Times Like many Jewish journalists who reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, I spent the 2016
This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles , a series of posts about Software Architecture . In them, I write about what I’ve learned about Software Architecture, how I think of it, and