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April 24 · Issue #141 · 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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(Some) stress often means growth In one of my very early leadership roles, I was leading an extremely large team for a client with demanding deadlines. I was in a great position. I worked with some excellent co-leaders who I trusted and could lean on in tough situations and we had a great team. There was just an overwhelming number of things to do at the same time. Given various reasons and despite a good support network, the stress started to compound. I started losing sleep which eventually led me to falling ill, literally losing my voice and forcing me to take time out from the team. Despite good intentions, great skills and experiences, everyone is susceptible to the boiling frog syndrome and the straw that broke the camel’s back. Having time out was essential for me to recover. If you have ever lifted weights, you might know the feeling of DOMS (aka good muscle soreness) and a key part of any healthy training program is recovery. In my situation, the forced time out from my team gave me a chance to reflect. Being the systems thinker that I am, I realised that a long-term solution wasn’t about getting rest, “topping up my tank” and jumping straight back in. I needed to fix some of the contributing causes and change the system. Reflecting deeply on factors that added to my stress, I realised I was taking on too much responsibility and not delegating enough (i.e. the typical leadership problem). But, I realised that I would need to delegate differently because I had different team members with a varying mix of experience - some who could lead teams themselves, and others very very new to the industry. This is where I introduced the idea of Feature Leads to delegate ownership of different areas and I could adjust my support for the Feature Lead to the riskiness/significance of that area and the people’s experience. One other significant factor I wanted to address was the imbalance in work-life. Unbeknownst to my team, I would take topics home and use my evenings to do “leadership work” such as thinking about how to break “big” problems into smaller problems, plan how I might run a certain conversation or simply get through some administrative tasks. I made sure not to write any code in the evenings as I didn’t want to set that example. To break this bad habit, I took up running. I’m not at all a great runner but I signed up for a half marathon and started training to force myself to find a better balance. Having a training schedule forced me to “turn off” work mode and make sure I was balancing it out with other activities. Ever wonder why CEOs of companies seem to take on extreme activities like marathons, climbing mountains, etc? It’s probably in response to stress. I like to share my example in my training courses because I think many leaders might benefit. In order to grow, we need to experience some level of stress. I do hope, however, that the stress doesn’t put your health or other family situations at long-term risk. But stress is not enough. When you have stress (or a challenging situation), you also need a regular time out. For some leaders it might be meditation, a long weekend, a longer holiday or for others, having a more support outlet like a mentor/coach to force a regular support cadence and also provide outside perspectives. Learning often means doing things differently - building new skills, adjusting old habits and growing but you need the time to gather and reflect on feedback, not simply repeat the old habits. Your challenge for this week is to reflect on the level of stress you have in your current role. Is that manageable or are you ready for a time out? Do you have a place to reflect and space to learn? If not, what can you do to create it? Enjoy this week’s newsletter and please pass it on to a friend or colleague who might benefit.
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Stress (but not too much) can be a healthy sign of growth
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Why Agile Velocity is the Most Dangerous Metric Looking to improve your software organizations? Top VPs of Engineering have stopped using agile velocity and you should too. Learn why velocity is dangerous - and get improved alternatives.
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11 Principles of Engineering Management
Reading time: 6mins This is a great list of principles that Alan Johnson (@AlanJay1) offers for newer Engineering Managers. I found myself nodding along with all of them, especially his point that “management and leadership are personal,” so everyone has their different approaches. 👏
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The Cone Model for Teams' Support Network
Reading time: 5mins
Shy Alter (@puemos) is spot on with the idea of aiming for a cone to build a peer support network over creating a single point of dependency on you as a leader/manager. They’ve also supplied some great visuals that reinforce the idea of an (upside down) cone.
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The Top Three Priorities for Engineering Leaders in 2022 and beyond
Reading time: 10mins Interim VP Engineering at Pluralsight, Lilac Mohr, shares their views on what engineering leaders should be prioritising in the current time. Are you taking these into account in your role?
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Learn how to increase your impact as a technical leader with this course in May
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Transformers for software engineers
Reading time: 26mins Since I’ve not spent a lot of time working in Machine Learning (ML)-land, I felt I wasn’t so familiar with the idea of Transformers (other than maybe Transformer-like patterns such as the Adapter from the Gang of Four). Although a relatively long article, Nelson Elhage (@nelhage) offers a good overview that helped me understand Transformers in greater detail. A good article for technical folk wanting to get into data engineering or move towards ML.
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Open sourcing Feathr – LinkedIn’s feature store for productive machine learning
Reading time: 8mins (Note: I seem to be doing a lot of reading around ML this week 😅) In this article, LinkedIn announces a new open source project to improve the productivity of teams deploying many ML models into production 🥳. I love how our industry looks at ways to automate repetitive work and open source allows others to benefit!
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Innovating beyond libraries and frameworks
Reading time: 7mins CTO at Netlife Bergen, Nils Norman Haukås, gives us a good reminder not to get too obsessed with the latest framework and/or library and that maybe it’s better to focus on the principles and patterns.
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Level up your communication skills to increase your impact as a technical leader
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Making operational work more visible
Reading time: 11mins I really enjoyed this article by Lorin Hochstein (@norootcause) who is a Senior SE at Netflix and I think more organisations and teams would benefit from some of the ideas.
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Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas
Reading time: Reading time: 9mins I learnt about Dunbar’s number during my consulting days when we talked about office and department size, yet I agree with Matt Webb (@genmon) who says not enough people in software aware of this. In this article, he shares a little bit more about Dunbar and some of the research associated with it.
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Dell trials 4-day work week in Netherlands as massive UK pilot starts
Reading time: 6mins Fascinating to read this announcement that the large tech giant Dell trials a 4-day work week in parts of Europe. If the results repeat some of the findings of 4-day work week experiments in Finland and other parts of the world, I’m interested to see how quickly other organisations might adopt this 🤓.
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Your team is a system. Your org is a system. 90% of "performance" factors are systemic.
I'm currently propagating for my garden, and I could write harsh reviews of the seedlings that didn't sprout. But I'd really be reviewing my propagation environment. https://t.co/fox2lyHzeP
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Another great twitter thread 🧵 about ML but just how easy they are to manipulate/game. Click the tweet to read it all👇
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We're in the middle of a giant machine learning surge, with ML-based "classifiers" being used to make all kinds of decisions at speeds that humans could never match: ML decides everything from whether you get a bank loan to what your phone's camera judges to be a human face. 1/ https://t.co/devIE0B6FA
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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