Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Three Powerful Conversations Managers Must Have to Develop Their People
12 minutes read.

"Your people will grow with or without you. The question is who will they grow into?" -- like culture, don't let the wrong inertia set the tone. Do everything you can to help them build their network and think about their long-term goals: "It’s so important for your employee to know how much you’re supportive of them, and how far you’re willing to go to make sure they achieve their dream job. That inspires loyalty like nothing else."

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When You Delete a Line of Code That You Thought Was Useless...
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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How Etsy Ships Apps
6 minutes read.

Sasha Friedenberg (once a release engineer at Etsy) shares the story of scaling deployments and enabling other engineers to run their own show. A lot of ideas to take and implement, if your team is facing the same bottleneck: "The end result of Ship is that we’ve distributed release management. Etsy no longer has any dedicated release managers. But it does have an engineer who used to be one — and I even get to drive a release every now and then."

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Invite Your Engineers to Talk Business. Here's Why.
3 minutes read.

What I love most about this post is the discussion it will create after sharing it with other engineers and product managers in your organization. The way I deal with it is to remind myself and my team that we should fall in-love with the problem and not the (current) solution. Try to set some rules that will help you balance the right investment at the right time.

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What I Learned Working at A "Scale-Down"
5 minutes read.

The best lessons learned are often from failures. Andrew Rodwin shares his story. My favorite takeaways: "When you hire execs, hire for emotional intelligence" and "Train managers" -- it sounds trivial, but very few companies play this right.

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How to Set the Technical Direction for Your Team
4 minutes read.

Share this post with your Senior Engineers and talk about their initial thoughts on your next 1:1. Help them put their long term and short term vision into words so they could share it later on with the team.

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How to Communicate Effectively as an Engineer Without Resorting to Management Speak
8 minutes read.

Tom Bartel's posts are simply a gold mine for engineers who want to improve the way they communicate with others. This one is no exception, really enjoyed it and already shared it with a few teammates.

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Why Netflix Doesn't Tolerate Brilliant Jerks
3 minutes read.

It's never really worth the value, but I do think it's worth investing the time to figure out if they're coachable. Just keep expectations explicit, and draw a very clear line into the behaviors you're willing the deal with.

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@omervk: It's important to be able to say "wait, I want to think about what you said for a moment" during a meeting. More so to be able to accept it.

@tottinge: "A code base isn't a thing we build, it's a place we live. We don't seek to finish it and move on, but to make it liveable"