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May 1 · Issue #142 · 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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Finding balance between being available (i.e. interruptible) and focus time Good leaders want to make themselves available to support their team. This might mean providing context, coaching them to unblock themselves or sometimes sharing their own knowledge or expertise to help someone progress. But it’s hard to predict when someone may want help, so it’s tempting to make yourself always interruptible. Interruptions have their cost though if they are continuous. Where do you get your uninterrupted focus time? Here are some tips I share that may help you find a good balance:
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Build a support network within the team - Last week I shared the cone model for a support network where team members might try to find help first within their team who might be working in more relevant areas. Pair programming and mob/ensemble programming have this built-in by default. This can help reduce interruptions to you (but you also need to balance this out with interruptions to other team members)
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Agree on boundaries - Don’t feel like you have to be available all the time. Discuss what works for you and what works for the team. If the team cannot operate without you for a good part of the day, I’d guess you have bigger problems than interruptions to worry about. Agree on a signal about when you are/are not interruptible. This might a status message on Slack, calendar blockers, or a verbal agreement and reminder in the daily stand up or weekly team meeting.
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Share what you’re working on - Team members may interrupt you because they may not know what you are working on. Are you working on key strategic planning which requires deep focus and thought, or are you skimming your email? Your team cannot read your mind so create visibility about what you are working on.
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Improve the system - You may find you get zero interruptions, which is also potentially a bad sign. Are team members blocked for weeks when asking for help might have unblocked them? If so, spot check if your team has enough psychological safety. Too many interruptions? Think about what’s the root/systemic causes and treat them.
The hard part about leadership is finding the best balance that works for you and the team. Your challenge for this week is to reflect on if you’re getting enough focus time for the week. If you’re getting enough focus time, are you doing so at the cost of ignoring issues? If you’re being interrupted too frequently, think about systemic/root causes and see what you can do to reduce them over time. Enjoy this week’s newsletter and please pass it on to a friend or colleague who might benefit.
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A lot about good leadership is finding a healthy balance
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2 Data Points You Should Show Your CEO Every Week Are you struggling to get your CEO to understand what it means to run an engineering organization? We’ve got data that will help.
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When should a software engineer switch into management?
Reading time: 5mins EM at Esty, Ilana Sufrin (@ilanasufrin), explores the question of how long to wait/not wait before moving into engineering management. IMHO, not everyone needs to (nor should 😉) |
Why We Micromanage (Even If We Don’t Want to)
Reading time: 6mins No one likes being micromanaged, yet we have all experienced it. So why do we sometimes micromanage others? Kevin Eikenberry (@kevineikenberry) explores some of the reasons why. |
Building bridges with difficult co-workers
Reading time: 13mins (May require free registration)
Sally Lait (@sallylait) covers an important and rarely touched topic - working with people you don’t like 😅 This article is relevant for everyone and not just technical leaders. Everyone, at some point in their career, will need to interact with someone you just don’t get along with. Sally shares some great tips and advice on navigating that time.
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Join an online course on May 25/26 to level up your technical leaders skills. Click the banner to find out more
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Stanford University Publishes AI Index 2022 Annual Report
Reading time: 3mins (full report 230 page PDF 😅)
Anthony Alford (@anthony_alford) writes on the recent 2022 AI Index annual report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) which identifies top trends in AI. Visit this link to download the 230 page PDF report (page 3 has the executive summary).
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Using Fault Injection Testing to Improve DoorDash Reliability
Reading time: 19mins A very cool case study on using one practice from Chaos Engineering, Fault Injection Testing, with Filibuster to improve the resiliency of microservices at DoorDash. A good introduction to the practice, tool and how it played out as written by Christopher Meiklejohn (@cmeik)
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Native Vs Cross-Platform App Development
Reading time: 4mins (Medium Paywall) I often get asked about whether teams should invest in Native or Cross-Platform app frameworks. This short article by Sannan Malik (@SANNAN_HOBBS) covers the trade-offs you might consider. |
Struggling to find time? Learn practical tips on improving your time management skills
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A Cautionary Tale from the Decline of SourceForge
Reading time: 2mins (Paper 22 pages)
Greg Wilson (@gvwilson) recently highlighted a great paper detailing something you don’t get to read about so often - some of the factors that lead to the significant decline of a community (in this case SourceForge). Some of these include organizational siloing, the lone wolf effect, frequent changes of ownership, and the steady accumulation of technical debt in the site itself. While this is centred on an open-source project, the paper offers lessons for all technical leaders. Original paper link here.
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Indeed SRE: An Inside Look - Indeed Engineering Blog
Reading time: 8mins A short article from Ted Tratsiakou over at Indeed, who describes the responsibilities of their SRE team, short backgrounds of four SRE team members and a couple of tips if you’re considering the SRE path 👏
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Delivering Large-Scale Platform Reliability
Principal Engineer at Roblox, Alberto Covarrubias, shares a good overview of why reliability matters, what to measure and some practices you can use to improve this. Hopefully, these are going to help them avoid the 72 hour outage they experienced last year 😅 |
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Interesting thread on Air B'n'B’s new remote working approach. Click the thread to find out more 👇
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Today, we’re announcing that Airbnb employees can live and work anywhere.
Our design for working at Airbnb has 5 key features:
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A good visual model of how things evolved over time
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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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