Planning the work for infrastructure engineering organization can be a challenge, in part due to a lack of clarity around what such an organization contributes value to the company it operates within. I have thoughts, and a simple thinking aid, for that. | Continue reading
When Uber Engineering reached 800 engineers, engineering was divided across roughly five engineering directors. Most engineering and process issues were resolved locally within these five organizations. This worked well for the most part, but meant there was little consistency wi … | Continue reading
Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated? Maybe you only made it to your second slide before unrelated questions derailed the discussion. Maybe you worked through your entire presentation only … | Continue reading
When I joined Yahoo In 2008, I received a small number of options. I don’t remember how many–it was very few–but I do know my strike price was roughly $16. I don’t remember that because my strike price was particularly lucrative, but rather because some of my coworkers would comp … | Continue reading
A few years ago while interviewing Nelson Elhage for Staff Engineer, he mentioned “estimation” as a particularly valuable skill. I hadn’t thought much about the idea of estimation as a skill, but his comment made me remember one of the best architecture interviews I’ve ever given … | Continue reading
Some years ago, I was explaining to my manager that I was feeling a bit bored, and they told me to learn how to read a Profit & Loss (P&L) statement. At the time, that sounded suspiciously like, “Stop wasting my time,” but operating in an executive role has shifted my perspective … | Continue reading
We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work: supporting your family, children, exercise, being a mentor and a mentee, … | Continue reading
I recently got an email about moving into an engineering management role too early in the email writer’s career: I became an engineering manager two years ago, which was also two years into my career. The reason is mainly that we were a small team and when the time came to add li … | Continue reading
There are few things more exciting than being at a company during hypergrowth, but it’s easy to let hypergrowth get away from you, and to end up reacting instead of planning. It’s hard to steer when you’re rebuilding a plane mid-flight, but you can always nudge it in the right di … | Continue reading
Recently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors, as distinct from general engineering management: I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have written I’ … | Continue reading
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth.After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of compan … | Continue reading
With the recent news of Twitter’s board accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, some folks are talking about leaving Twitter. In the long scheme of things, being founded in 2006 makes Twitter a young company, but the internet is different and over the past 16 years it’s becom … | Continue reading
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any comp … | Continue reading
This is an early version of a chapter for Infrastructure Engineering.Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infra … | Continue reading
Ellen Chisa has a new newsletter on product management, and I particularly enjoyed this week’s piece on 34 Product Lessons. | Continue reading
Some folks think of their promotion packet as the capstone of reaching a Staff-pus role, but I’ve seen many folks succeed by taking an opposite approach: starting to write their first Staff promotion packet long before they think they’re likely to be promoted to Staff, much the w … | Continue reading
A few days ago, I got to have a delightful chat with Katie Wilde, digging into a question that we’ve both found difficult to answer: what distinguishes managers perceived to have good judgment from those perceived to have bad judgment? In exploring that question, the topic of men … | Continue reading
For a long time, the path to engineering manager began with a prolonged stint of technical leadership. Then you’d transition into an initial management role that balanced people and technical responsibilities. Some companies call this a tech lead manager role. Folks entering thos … | Continue reading
As organizations grow more complex, the folks running them interface with reality through increasingly incorporeal abstractions. On the smallest teams, leadership might be deep in the code on a daily basis. A bit larger, and you’re talking about tasks in sprints. Larger still, an … | Continue reading
At work, the Staff engineering team has a monthly meeting. The agenda varies but most recently we talked about a common theme: how do you find career progression after reaching your organization’s terminal level? | Continue reading
While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools a … | Continue reading
Designing a system which scales to a high number of requests isn’t critical for most applications, but you’ll never know that it was important until after the fact, so it’s worth putting some thought into ensuring your architecture can grow with your success. | Continue reading
Quite a few companies run you through their interview process, send you an offer nestled in a beautifully designed packet, and finish with a recruiter who’ll ask whether you accept the offer. This is the foundation of a hiring funnel, but it’s missing one valuable step: the closi … | Continue reading
Shortly after a senior leader joins a new company, sometimes you’ll notice them quickly steer the organization towards a total architectural rewrite. Perhaps this is a switch from batch to streaming computation, perhaps a switch from a monolith to a services architecture, perhaps … | Continue reading
Being burnt out at work feels like this year’s life crisis. Almost every conversation I have with a friend in the industry lingers on the topic of struggling to focus at work. Last week, I was chatting with a friend and we diagnosed their core career ambition as the deep desire t … | Continue reading
Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. Many of the infrastructure engineer teams I’ve been a part of have struggled to make the transition from maintenanc … | Continue reading
Along with slow technical migrations, I believe reorganizations are the second largest activity which cause quickly growing companies to slow down. Here is a framework for running an engineering reorg effectively. | Continue reading
A few months ago around nine on a Wednesday evening, my vision blurred, and I lost my sense of balance. It seemed like a fine time to go to bed. When I attempted to explain my predicament to my wife, it turned out I’d also lost my ability to communicate verbally. I was having a s … | Continue reading
A friend is six months into supporting a sixty person engineering group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of their teams believe they have urgent hiring needs. It’s a great question, and captures a deeply challenging aspect of leading an organization: keeping the path after you’ve e … | Continue reading
Building on the framework in | Continue reading
It’s hard to write about engineering leadership in 2020 and not mention the research from Accelerate and DORA. They provide a data-driven perspective on how to increase developer productivity, which is a pretty magical thing. Why aren’t they being used more widely? | Continue reading
A while back I wrote Build versus buy, which discussed evaluating vendor tools against building in-house solutions. A short summary of that piece is that I think most companies should use more vendor tooling. That said, I think rather than advice on how to select vendor tools, fo … | Continue reading
A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone's career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of their … | Continue reading
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why m … | Continue reading
When I get the chance to speak with engineering leaders, I sometimes get asked to endorse an already underway plan to spin up a “follow the sun” on-call rotation. My advice is probably not what folks anticipate: please don’t. | Continue reading
If there's one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it's that there's a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren't prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineer … | Continue reading
My father was a professor of economics. After he completed his PhD in his late twenties, he started teaching at one university, got tenure at that university, and walked out forty-some years later into retirement. Working in technology, that sounds like a fairytale. There are ver … | Continue reading
Bert Fan’s best advice for those trying to reach a Staff-plus role was, | Continue reading
Shortly after a senior leader joins a new company, sometimes you’ll notice them quickly steer the organization towards a total architectural rewrite. Perhaps this is a switch from batch to streaming computation, perhaps a switch from a monolith to a services architecture, perhaps … | Continue reading
We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work: supporting your family, children, exercise, being a mentor and a mentee, … | Continue reading
There’s a lot to say about engineering hiring, and I’ve written a fair amount about it, but as I was chatting with a few folks over the past couple weeks, I realized one thing I haven’t written about is the recurring challenges that you’ll often see new hiring managers encounter. | Continue reading
Designing a system which scales to a high number of requests isn't critical for most applications, but you'll never know that it was important until after the fact, so it's worth putting some thought into ensuring your architecture can grow with your success. | Continue reading
Learning to influence without authority is the keystone leadership skill to transition from early to mid career. It becomes an even more important skill later in your career as you need to partner effectively with your peers, executives and board members. | Continue reading
Some months ago, a friend recommend Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. I hadn't heard of it before, and as I started poking around I realized that this was the second of a series of three books, and recommendations generally pointed me to start instead with The Timeless … | Continue reading
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against pop … | Continue reading
A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for roughly thirty-tw … | Continue reading
Recently I got an email asking about evolving your engineering career after you’ve hit the career level, but before you feel like you’ve accomplished what’s important to you. I wrote up my response here in case others are interested. | Continue reading
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with _successes_ compounding … | Continue reading