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March 13 · Issue #135 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by https://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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Dealing with information overload In a conversation this week, someone asked me how do I deal with the flood of information as a technical leader. There are countless sources of general information (newsletters like this, news sites, twitter, reddit, slack/discord communities, internal email, etc) and then you have company/team specific communication channels to also keep on top of. In this intro, I want to share a few tips on how I generally approach this and maybe it sparks a few new ideas for you too:
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Accept there will be too much - It’s natural to feel FOMO, especially in tech where new technologies, tools and approaches emerge all the time. You literally can’t digest all the available information. If it’s important, you’ll see it re-emerge. If not, it probably wasn’t so important.
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Define your interests - Once you accept you can’t absorb all the information, answer the question, “What are you interested in?” No one can answer that for you. As an example, over the past year, I’ve had five research themes. As I read, if some content is related, I might spend a bit more time reading those. If it’s not related, I can quickly discard this. For example, as I focus on technical leadership topics, I don’t worry too much about keeping up with the latest CSS approaches, or the latest JS web UI framework.
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Purposely browse - Although it’s important to have your core interests, I find it also useful to purposefully step outside of your normal sources and simply click through on some topics. When I do this, I time-box myself (e.g. 5 mins of serendipity) to get exposed to different opinions and ideas.
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Focus on principles - Why is the learning curve for your first programming language steeper than your second, third or fourth? It’s because you’re not only learning the syntax and tooling but you’re also learning core programming principles. Once you master a programming language, you have a foundation set of programming principles. When you learn a second programming language, you’re not starting completely from scratch again. Good principles like well-refactored, well modularised, high cohesion and low coupling apply regardless of programming language. It simply looks different. When I read, I’m trying to discover if I’m learning a new principle, or a principle I already know explained differently.
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Learn to skim - I’m lucky in that I can read very quickly. Part of this is scanning headlines, keywords, paragraphs to see if an article or content is interesting. If so, I might spend the time to read it all. If not, I’ve saved time and can move on to the next topic.
Those are just a few tips I find myself regularly using to keep on top of the information firehose. Have any tips you’d like to share with me? Drop me an email. Stay safe out there 💙💛. If you enjoy this week’s newsletter, please pass it on to a friend or colleague who might benefit.
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It's easy to feel overwhelmed
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1 day, 20 speakers, 1000+ engineering leaders Join engineering leaders from Stack Overflow, Netflix, Slack, Netlify, and more at INTERACT on April 7th for a free virtual event designed to help engineering leaders continuously improve.
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Claire Donald, VP of engineering, on being a woman in tech
Reading time: 7mins In this recent interview published for International Women’s Day, IT veteran and current VP Engineering, Claire Donald (@Scottish_Claire) shares a little bit about her leadership journey. |
Black managers in tech: 'You cannot be what you cannot see'
Reading time: 10mins
Amber Burton (@amberbburton) from Protocol reports on a sad but probably common scenario underrepresented people experience in the workplace. I especially like the lessons that all leaders can use to better understand and support their team 🙏.
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Levels of Technical Leadership
Reading time: 8mins I liked this article from Raphael Poss (@kena42) as it shares a concrete example of how they follow the Trident Model of Career Development, recognising the need to emphasise leadership skills on a track distinct from both management and true individual contributor (IC) career tracks. |
Level up your communication skills and click the banner to find out more
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Cascading failures in large-scale distributed systems
Reading time: 17mins This is a really comprehensive article written by Harri Fassbender about a common but difficult challenge for modern software systems - cascading failures.
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The Micro-Frontends future
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Optimize Development Cold Start
Reading time: 6mins I love the term that Zach Wolfe (@zdwolfe) uses in this article, the “Development Cold Start.” I’ve found that high-performing teams invest carefully to make sure that new contributors or team members minimise this. Read on to find out why you should improve on this and what to focus on for improvement. |
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🌟🌟🌟 Reach thousands of engineering leaders around the world. Maybe you want to share a leadership role you’re looking to fill? Interested in becoming a sponsor? Get in touch for details for a sponsorship slot in 2022. 🌟🌟🌟 |
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The State of Burnout in Tech 2022
PDF Report: 34 pages I recently came across this first report looking at burnout in tech companies with 32,644 responses from across 33 countries. There’s a good explanation about what is burnout and also some short tips at the end for leaders/managers on what you can do to prevent burnout for your team.
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How to make software architecture trade-off decisions
Reading time: 6mins Senior Software Engineer from Uber, Alex Wauters (@alexwauters), looks at the process of making software architecture decisions and thinking deliberately about trade-offs. Some nice advice 👏. |
Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety
Reading time: 9mins (HBR paywall)
Timothy R. Clark (@timothyrclark) is spot on that psychological safety is the difference between “agile done well” and “agile by the book.” For me, the essence of many agile practices is about learning and to learn you need psychological safety. I would have liked to see more on the role that retrospectives can play to build psychological 🤷♂️.
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A great thread (click to open) about managers not being the 💩☂️
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I wanna talk about being a "shit umbrella" for a second. This is a term I've heard for most of my career. But my understanding of it has gone through lots of different phases. And today I try hard to convince managers not to be a "shit umbrella". https://t.co/yo4f3oiF4t
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A lesson in how to not welcome staff back to the office 👇
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In the lobby of an office building in Toronto. I guess to make sure employees are flooded with resentment the instant they walk in the door? https://t.co/oWUDofGvzK
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A bonus tweet this week to end with some laughter 🤣 Probably especially relevant for partners of those who work in tech 😅
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, send me feedback and share it with others! |
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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