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March 20 · Issue #136 · 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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“If you don’t do it, who will?” I find myself repeating this to leaders again and again. In my workshops and coaching sessions, I hear statements like, “We never get to work on technical debt,” or “I never find the time to work on my priorities,” or “We’ve got such a slooooow build process.” When I hear statements like these examples, I ask some questions and discover that the leader expects someone else to take action, make a decision or give them direction. We end up with some variation of the question, “If you don’t do it, who do you expect will?” One of my favourite definitions of leadership is “ the act of leading a group of people.” It’s not about titles. It’s not about permission. It’s about taking action. It’s natural that leaders sometimes get stuck and see invisible boundaries. They tell themselves, “I am not allowed to do that,” or “Someone else is responsible,” or “Someone else will fix that.” When spotting future leaders, I often look for agency, or “ the ability to take action or to choose what action to take.” Good leaders cannot afford to wait, hoping that someone else will take action. Your challenge for this week is to look for an opportunity to show leadership by taking a small action to improve something or solve a small problem that helps your team or organisation. Don’t wait, hoping someone else will take care of it. If you don’t do it, who will?
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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Leaders don't wait for others, hoping to take action
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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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How Engineering Managers Are Set Up To Fail
Reading time: 7mins As part of some focused workshops aimed at Managers of Managers (e.g. Directors+), I wanted to capture and share some useful points of how they might set up EMs to fail (and what to do instead).
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CTO last day: reflections, mistakes, and some learnings
Reading time: 7mins Big shout out to Daniel Lebrero (@DanLebrero) for demonstrating vulnerability in this post as he shares his reflections and lessons learned as a CTO. 14 short, but useful lessons learned.
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IT leadership: 4 ways to boost your emotional intelligence
Reading time: 4mins I’ve lost count of the number of times I have worked with early grade technical leaders to build their Emotional Intelligence, sometimes referred to as EQ. Fortunately, EQ is not a fixed trait. You can grow it, like with any skill and Chris Federspiel (@chrisfeder) covers four ideas to show us how.
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Cilck the banner to sign up for a course now
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Using Your Phone in Times of Crisis
Reading time: 8mins Given the horrible war that is taking place in Ukraine, it makes you think about the role that tech plays. Secure communication is important for creating safety and I’m very grateful that Andrés Arrieta (@andres_base) covers this when it comes to basic communications. Please share with your personal networks to keep people as safe as possible. 💔🇺🇦
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Why the FTC’s case against Weight Watchers means death for algorithms
Reading time: 13mins After working in tech for so long, it’s amazing to see how legal and regulatory bodies respond. Kate Kaye (@KateKayeReports) covers a fascinating case in which a company must destroy their AI models. Strong implications as a precedent and curious to see how this will play out.
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Why Spotify Switched Their Data Orchestration Service
Reading time: 7mins I love reading case studies and Senior Product Manager at Spotify, Guillaume Perchais, details why they decided to move their 20K data pipelines across 1K+ repositories (🤯) away from Luigi and Flo to Flyte.
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Struggling with time? Improve your time management skills with this course
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Headcount Tracking for a Medium-Sized Org using a Spreadsheet
Reading time: 5mins I always joke that I should offer spreadsheet training for EMs 😅. It’s a tool all technical leaders use heavily and Chase Seibert (@chase_seibert) reminded me of this with his practical article about headcount tracking.
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Five Tips on Managing a Remote-First Development Team
Reading time: 10mins I know a lot of managers are learning how their process for managing remote teams changes. This article from Marcelo Wiermann offers some practical advice for managing remote-first teams. I especially enjoyed his concluding statement, “A good manager is the difference between team members being able to enjoy the benefits of working remotely, anywhere in the world, or dreading that IM notification sound or no-camera Zoom call”
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How Measurement Makes Deep Purpose Work
Reading time: 8mins (Forbes paywall) I enjoy reading a lot of Steve Denning’s (@stevedenning) thoughts and in this article, he looks at the role measurement has at Amazon and Microsoft to turn purpose into north star.
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Protip:
🙅♂️ do not compliment coworkers with "nice regex" 👏 rather, compliment them with "well sed"
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A great thread 🧵 worth reading that I found nodding at a lot 👇
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In 1999, a little book by @ started explaining Extreme Programming (XP) to the masses.
23 years later, it's still true to every word.
But we, the developers, chose to ignore half of its learnings.
In this thread 🧵I'll fix that for you. 👇👇👇 https://t.co/FWvWH4KAHt
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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