At the start of the week I took part in an online panel titled, "The Multiple Faces of Technical Lead
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July 12 · Issue #48 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by http://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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At the start of the week I took part in an online panel titled, “ The Multiple Faces of Technical Leadership” with Anna Shipman (@annashipman), Omosolo Odetunde (@omosolatweets) and moderated by Piergiorgio Niero (@pigiuz). In one part of the discussion, Omosolo brought up the term, “role inertia” which I really loved. We were discussing the idea of calling roles out explicitly and this ideas has so many implications for org design and particularly org evolution. In the video you can hear me discuss the implications of “role inertia” (around about the 50min mark) which I see as particularly problematic when people attach their identity or value-add to a role. As the organisation’s needs change and different roles and skills are required, “role inertia” makes transitions much more difficult. You’ve experienced this if you’ve worked on “digital transformation”, or “agile enablement” or “hosted to cloud” based migrations. To counteract “role inertia,” it’s important leaders cultivate psychological safety, a growth mindset and offer retraining opportunities. I hope you enjoy this week’s content. If you find it useful, please forward to someone else and send me feedback. Stay safe and healthy 🙏 |
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Panel on "The Multiple faces of Technical Leadership"
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Making GAINS (💪) in Reddit Engineering
Reading time: 5mins Building trust and establishing credentials is essential for any leader and Sam Carow (@samcarow), EM at Reddit shares the impact its had on Sam’s personal growth and how Reddit built a program to accelerate the growth of others. This GAINS program is an excellent example of leadership, taking a personal practice and amplifying it in the organisation. Great emoji choice too 💪! |
Making Time to Change, Part 1
Reading time: 9mins I’m not used to seeing articles like this coming from AWS, so congrats to Phil Le-Brun (@pleb1) for a different tone. Leading change is an important part of leadership and effective managers (and engineers) understand why you rarely want to operate a system at 100%. Making time to change is a key leadership and management responsibility and I look forward to the follow up parts. |
It’s Time to Reset Decision-Making in Your Organization
Reading time: 15mins In the classic IT management book, “ High Output Management” Andy Grove shared his perspective that leaders and managers can measure their output by the number of decisions made. This perspective is underscored in this article by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott from Havard Business School. This article also shares a number of good behaviours of modern day leaders (e.g. from commanding to coaching, building a communication plan) and many other useful leadership tips. |
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10 Years of “Continuous Delivery” (and competition to win a signed, first-edition of the book)
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Visio, draw.io, LucidChart, Gliffy, etc - not recommended for software architecture diagrams
Reading time: 4mins I’m a huge fan of drawing models for building software and Simon Brown (@simonbrown) is excellent at showing people how to diagram these for software. He explains some of the challenges of using general purpose diagramming tools here.” |
What Happened To Programming In The 2010s?
Reading time: 7mins It’s helpful to understand where we’ve come from to better appreciate why we ended up where we are today. Matthias Endler (@matthiasendler) offers a nice perspective of how programming has evolved over the years which explains why we have what we have today. |
The Designer Of The NES Dishes The Dirt On Nintendo's Early Days
Reading time: 13mins If you grew up with a Nintendo system, like I did (the LCD games + Famicon) then this article will make you smile. In this article Matt Alt (@Matt_Alt) interviews Masayuki Uemura, hardware designer for the NES (and more) to highlight some hidden gems. I loved the sense of humour or playfulness that seemed to come across with this 75 year old ☺️. |
Go is Boring...And That’s Fantastic!
Reading time: 14mins I’m hearing more teams experimenting with Go, so this article from Distinguished Engineer, Jon Bodner (@jonbodner) from Capital One is a fascinating perspective about why. He also links to an interesting research paper from 2017 called “ A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github”, which came to the conclusion that the environment (e.g. process, team size, commit size, etc) matters more than the programming language when it comes to measuring quality. Another reason why I believe effective technical leadership is essential in today’s world. |
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23 Alternative Career Paths that Software Developers Can Grow Into
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Questionable Advice: Can (Individual) Engineering Productivity Be Measured?
Reading time: 6mins Those who don’t understand Systems Thinking well are destined to reduce systems to their elements and manage them individually. Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) responds to a question many leaders ponder about, “Can you measure the individual productivity of an engineer?” My tl;dr You’re asking the wrong question… 🤔
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Goal based performance and progress tracking
Reading time: 5mins I know a lot of leaders are doing reviews at the moment, or going through goal setting processes for Q3. This article from Ranjan Sakalley (@rnjn) offers very practical advice about both setting goals and following up. There’s even a downloadable template to help someone set goals for themselves. 👏 |
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please stop turning good engineers into bad managers by "promoting" them
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Continuing with this theme is a great analogy 😂
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Going from Staff Engineer IC to new manager is like getting your black belt in Taekwondo and then deciding competitive swimming is a great next endeavor.
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The replies to this 🧵 are eye opening
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I once had an SVP who required at least one woman be on every hiring panel. I thought this was to ensure women candidates got a fair shot and felt welcome. Soon I realized this was also to ensure only candidates able to work in a gender diverse workplace were hired.
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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