(this is a keynote for Mob Programming Conference, April 2018) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins of Opera. Part…

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 consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible,…

How Patreon Levels Engineers Today we are excited to share Patreon’s revamped Engineering Leveling Guide . In Patreon’s early years, we had little in the way of objective criteria for leveling engineers. We’ve come a long way since then, and our engineering organization is much stronger and fairer…

Examining an often-misunderstood element of success Alignment, in the teamwork sense, means “a position of agreement or alliance.” It is one of the critical qualities that determines success in an organization, particularly at higher levels. Many individual contributors (ICs) get stuck at a certain…

(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 engineering candidates for your team. It struck us exactly how much tactical advice Ajmal has to offer…

Category: The Life of a Programmer 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 craftsmanship” a little later. Before that, please indulge me in story…

According to an H.R. director, many job applicants now say, “I read this on Glassdoor. How do you respond?” Illustration by Janne Iivonen Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. One day in 2007, in Seattle, Rich Barton, the C.E.O. of the…

An episode of “Bad Management Habits” 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 unclear and commented: “Do you mean X or Y? Because I don’t think it is reasonable for us to do Y” This is one of my bad management…

(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, without thinking about their crew, their ship, or for that manner, the big blue ocean and the…

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 friends like Camille to call me on my bullshit). Now I can accept that 100% my team have to manage up…

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 environment where people can strive and show their best: on production code, on their machine, with me…

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 (mac)laptop and a gigantic, cinema-size screen waiting for her arrival. But you didn’t stop there,…

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 importance of these bonds. As popular writer and researcher Adam Grant has noted , the pressure of…

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times Like many Jewish journalists who reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, I spent the 2016 election being harassed by a motley crew of internet racists who coalesced around the future president. They sent me threats, photoshopped me into gas chambers and…

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 on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous…

I almost got fired once. My friend, and CTO at the time, Dustin Moskovitz pulled me into a room onemorning. He told me I would no longer be working on News Feed, which wassurprising because at the time I was the only engineer keeping it running.Instead they were going to hand it off to someone else…

The Department of Labor’s increasingly heated dispute with Google over a gender pay gap began, innocently enough, with a routine audit. As a federal contractor, Google must comply with the US government’s nondiscrimination and affirmative action statutes. In 2015, Google’s number randomly came up…

Notice board at Ericsson, Stockholm (pic by DeirdreS ) Many of us have worked with them: the engineering jerk who is brilliant at what they do, but treats others like trash. Some companies have a policy not to hire them (eg, Netflix's " No Brilliant Jerks ", which was one of the many reasons I…

Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently Agile started off as a set of values . Values are subtle and abstract, so as agile spread, what spread wasn’t the values but the practice of working in cycles. Cycles are easy to explain and easy to copy. People in our industry think they stopped…

I’ve written about the gender pay gap before and every time I do I get people who respond by insisting that there is perfect equality in the workplace and any imbalances that exist must be because women have different preferences and make different choices that result in them making less money in…

A phrase I’ve heard quite a bit lately when discussing roles on a product engineering team, or whether a given engineer should be on a team at all, is “well, surely someone is better than nothing. We’re still getting more done than if we didn’t have them”. The context varies, but the assumption…

One of the underlying truths of the wave of #MeToo stories is that when human beings are reduced to sex objects—whether they’re directly preyed upon or merely undermined—it doesn’t just cause them personal trauma. It also influences the industry they’re in by driving smart people to take their…

In the spirit of Adam Wiggins’ inspiring list of Herokuvalues which was published when he left the company that heco-founded, I wanted to publish a list of my own now that I’ve transitionedaway. My time at Heroku was easily the most valuable learning experience of my life,and I’ll always remember my…

One of the areas I often see senior engineers struggle with, is raising junior engineers to the next level. Often this is because we don’t give them the space to explore, learn and understand how to approach problems for themselves. We’re going to look at three different scenarios to illustrate how…

O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We…

I recently read a story here titled “ We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made. ” Lets have a seat, you and I. We need to talk. If you haven’t read the story I linked to, take about 10–15 minutes or so, read up, and soak it all in. Done? Fantastic. Lets dissect this, because there is so…

“You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” And so our resident genius, our Dr. Jekyll, explosively completed his transformation into Mr. Hyde. He declared this in front of the product design team,…

Neasden Control Centre for HBR I was at a dinner with eight highly successful professional women recently, ranging in age from 35 to 74. Their stories were typical of research I have been conducting on dual-career couples. One had just been given a huge promotion opportunity in another country, but…

In 2014, Monroe was a trafficking victim in California. She found her clients by advertising on SFRedbook, the free online erotic services website. One day, she logged into the site and discovered that federal authorities had taken it down . Law enforcement hoped that closing the site would reduce…

A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to assess prospective new people managers, or Talent Leads, as they are called at trivago. There were 24 candidates in total, and I got to interact with eight of them. The judges teamed up in pairs. My colleague Anita and me did a one-on-one simulation…

Marion Barraud for HBR Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite , receive lower salaries , and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men . Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to…

Your coworker asks you a slightly unclear question. How do you answer? I think asking questionsis a skill (see How to ask good questions ) and that answering questionsin a helpful way is also a skill! Both of them are super useful. To start out with – sometimes the people asking you questions don’t…

Rebecca Garcia was 12 years old when she bought her first domain name. She asked her dad for his credit card to purchase the address. He didn't think she knew how to actually buy a site. "When my parents saw the credit card bill and it had, like, XoAeriesGirloX or something, they called the company…

#Antifa and #Berkeley were hot topics last weekend in America — and in Russia Social media has an important role in shaping perceptions of current events, as well as influencing mainstream news coverage of those events. Platforms like Twitter provide real-time access to events going on around the…

When we asked Fidji Simo what she wanted to share with our readers, she polled her team at Facebook to see what they would highlight as her core competency. What attribute or habit has prompted her rocket-fueled rise through the company’s ranks? There was quick and enthusiastic consensus: Simo has…

In the past week, Dr. Jennifer Conti has seen two patients who would be perfectly screwed if House Republicans had their way. One, Conti told Vogue, was lied to at a crisis pregnancy center posing as an abortion clinic: told that her pregnancy was 12 weeks along when in fact she was 21 weeks in, and…

Techniques for collaboration Asking for help can be hard, but it’s a great chance to practice collaborative problem-solving. Photo by Samuel Zeller . You reboot your development server, but it happens again: err_node_unsafe . This wasn’t here yesterday. What changed? It’s 9:48 in the morning and…

All my models start messy. Yet, I find that my messy models are actually quite useful. It forces me to acknowledge my ignorance. The longer I feign ignorance, the longer it takes for the mess to surface. The more I appeal to my ego with “Hey, look! My model is very cool!”, the longer I delay…

Writing declarative, readable and flexible React components using render props instead of HOCs Yes, I’m breaking up with higher order components in React. Mostly. I’d been seeing this other composition pattern on the side for a while. We met initially in some libraries like React Motion and the…