Week in Review Leadership Comms Originally posted Jul 31, 2018 As an Engineering Director at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, I sent a “Week in Review” document every two-ish weeks to my whole team. This doc helped me set records straight, disseminate info to lots of people at once, and…

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 Collison in 2010 after personally experiencing the difficulty developers face when implementing a way…

During my time as fractional VPE at Meetup , I’ve had the honor of partnering with recruiter Michelle Heng to make improvements to the recruiting and interviewing process for the Engineering team. One of the main projects we worked on together was a new “tips for hiring managers” doc, based on what…

Four Pillars to Increase Your Influence Both at Work And in Life Photo by Headway on Unsplash 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 married.…

If you’re eyeing a promotion at work, it’s a good idea to have a strategy in place to increase your chances of success, and part of that strategy should include understanding best practices for asking for a promotion, as well as common pitfalls to avoid. After all, whether or not you’re granted the…

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 to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. They…

Get more users and fewer support requests by leveling up your writing and technical documentation. If you’re working on the web, at some point you’re going to need to write — even if you’re a designer, a developer, a programmer, a not-writer. For example, almost everyone needs to write technical…

The value of products no longer gets locked behind iron-clad paywalls. SaaS is a buyers' market in which users expect to be able to try before they buy. More and more companies have had to lead their sales process with a free trial to demonstrate the worth of their service and tempt users to buy.…

Influence Over Authority 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 in practice I think the goalof gaining authority is misguided. Facebook…

Ask for Advice, Not Permission 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 it not only sounds reasonable,it actually sounds like the right thing…

Michael Yarish/AMC Larry Ellison has executive presence. So did Steve Jobs. Although very different people, they both had that confidence and composure that allowed them to connect with others. Chances are, you may need executive presence, too, to get venture capital for your business, motivate your…

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 transformative-growth businesses decrease dramatically. This thought crossed my mind as I…

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 the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site ). Microsoft’s Service Fabric powers many…

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 deviations along the way. Every break or sharp turn to avoid plunging off a cliff would become a point…

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 world is divided into 4 types of people: In what bucket do I fall? I am an experienced anti-corporate. I…

Time > Money Time is the only truly scarce resource we possess. We should spend it with a level of care befitting its nature. While few of us would ask to borrow moneyfrom one another regularly, many of us casually barrage one another with meetings, messages, and quick visits which tax a much more…

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 the lowlevel details of the programming code, and almost always they focus on a specific technology…

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 I encourage you to copy for your own purposes. I’d also love to hear what tools you use in the…

(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…