Culture
It’s the Future 5 minutes read.
Warning: engineering jokes inside that would make you laugh so hard to a point you'll start making some funny noises. Share it with other engineers in your company, and yes, you can thank me later. As always, my humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.
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The Catch-22 of Being "Too Junior" 4 minutes read.
I appreciate Jenn's courage to share how she was fired for being "too junior", and learned a lot from her advices about hiring junior engineers. Some things that worked well for me: try to carefully explain how'd you want them to approach others with questions when they're stuck. How much should they try on their own? Make it explicit. Be clear when you say that they should write what they've learned, so they'd be able to pull themselves out of situations they were in before. Explain that you'd measure there success by looking at their growth curve rather on immediate results.
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What Kind of Leadership Is Needed at Flat Hierarchies? 6 minutes read.
We have a flat engineering team currently in my company, with 15 highly versatile engineers and devops, and it's a real challenge to make sure people both feel productive on their day-to-day work, while also feel that someone is helping them with their long-term career planning. It requires me to bring up a lot of conscious questions and decisions, trying to clearly explain how I want us to work together as we scale the team. How should the daily standup be like? How should Design Reviews be? How to take ownership of their time, and make their work more transparent to others? Which tools do we need to in order to make code, deployments and monitoring a team's ownership rather than a single person's ownership? This one is key: "When there are technically no titles and no bosses, everyone needs to step up and be the leader." -- just make sure that people enjoy this process, and that you hire people who fit this kind of dynamics. I'm not sure we'll remain flat for the long run, but we will figure out a process that will best fit our needs as a company and a group of people who enjoy doing things in a certain way. After all, it's people over process.
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Why I Believe in Intentional Efforts to Increase Diversity 12 minutes read.
Tough topic. I feel that every time someone picks up this topic and dares to open their mouth, they get attacked for even trying. I'm glad that Rand Fishkin (of MOZ) shared his views, and how they made some non trivial changes at MOZ along the years. Where do you stand? How do you think we can make it better? Have a discussion at work over lunch, maybe you could make a difference.
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