Why Software Estimates Are Hard
Every quarter, someone asks me the same question in a slightly different costume. Sometimes it is a board member who wants a date for the new ledger...
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Leadership — Page 4
Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Early in my career I thought managing up was a euphemism for office politics, the kind of thing people did instead of shipping. I was wrong, but not entirely....
12 min507Read →
Mentoring vs Coaching: Knowing the Difference
Somewhere around my third year leading engineering, I realised I was using two words interchangeably that I had no business confusing. I told a senior backend...
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How to Onboard an Engineer in Their First 30 Days
I have onboarded enough engineers over the years to know that the first thirty days are not about ramping someone to full productivity. They are about...
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The Quiet Power of Writing Things Down
Early in my career, I believed that the strongest engineers were the ones who could hold the whole system in their heads. They could talk through a payment...
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Why Your Roadmap Keeps Slipping
Every engineering leader I know has a version of the same recurring conversation. A roadmap gets committed in a planning session, everyone nods, the quarter...
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Running Retrospectives People Do Not Dread
The retrospective is the one ceremony almost every team keeps and almost no team protects. When schedules tighten, the demo survives, standup survives, and the...
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Hiring for Potential vs Experience
Every hiring decision is a bet on the future, but the two ways we frame that bet could not be more different. When I hire for experience, I am betting that the...
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The Case for Architecture Decision Records
Somewhere in every engineering organization there is a decision that nobody can explain. A queue sits between two services that could just as easily call each...
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Building Psychological Safety on Your Team
Every engineering leader I know says they want psychological safety on their team. Far fewer can tell you what they actually changed to get it. The phrase has...
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The True Cost of Context Switching
Every engineering leader I know can recite the headline statistic about context switching: it takes something like twenty-three minutes to fully recover focus...
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How to Give Feedback That Lands
I have given a lot of feedback over the years, and for a long time I was bad at it. I confused honesty with effectiveness. I thought that if I said the true...
10 min437Read →