There’s an all-too-common cycle in tech these days. Startup avoids management. Founder makes all the decisions. Startup gets traction. Hiring takes off. Management is suddenly needed. Founder turns to his best engineer: “I’m drowning. Can you manage this team for me?" David Loftesness , Twitter’s…

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 start by asking what the value of each unit is, or by looking at the contributions of each individual on…

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 their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten. Most of…

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 addressed. So I suspect that as the congratulations die down, it’s also normal to look at the set of…

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 struggling and help them focus, align, and start delivering at their potential, i.e. change management. The…

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 will be occasional flashes of technical brilliance (or at least, the occasional smart and surprising…

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…

Subscribe 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…

Lara Hogan 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 recruiting and interviewing process for the Engineering team. One of the main projects we worked on together was a new “tips for hiring…

Four Pillars to Increase Your Influence Both at Work And in Life Matt Russell Jun 5, 2018 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…

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. Tracy Osborn Aug 26, 2016 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…

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.…

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 rejects authority. It is…

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 to do: “Hey, I was thinking…

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…

Loading... Delegation COMMENT 8.95 BUY COPIES Loading... 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…

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: The junior anti-corporate who is seriously infected with FOP…

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 precious…

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…

John Cline Feb 25, 2018 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…

the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming Jessica Kerr Apr 15, 2018 ( video , or TL;DR ) 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…

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 Valerie Lanard Apr 10, 2018 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…

Examining an often-misunderstood element of success Camille Fournier Mar 6, 2018 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…

(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…

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 time. Or, backstory time, as it were.…

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” Camille Fournier Jan 11, 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 unclear and commented: “Do you mean X or Y? Because I don’t think it is reasonable for us to do Y” This…

(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,…

Loading... Emotional intelligence COMMENT 8.95 BUY COPIES Loading... Executive Summary The pressure of tight deadlines and the pace of technology mean that fewer Americans are finding friendship in the workplace. But connecting with others at work shouldn’t be a nice to have. Research shows that…

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 election being harassed by a motley crew of internet racists who coalesced around the future…

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 how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous…