Thoughts on software engineering and engineering management
Hero image by Comfreak from Pixabay You know the feeling. You’ve worked on this thing for weeks — much longer than anticipated. You have faced unexpected complications. You have struggled with bad documentation. You had to implement functionality yourself that you thought the framework provided out of the box. But now you’re done, despite all those challenges. You feel real accomplishment. You…
Think of a well-known song. Say, “Happy birthday”, or “Row, row, row your boat”. You tap the rhythm of the song on a table, while somebody else is listening. Do you think the listener can guess which song you’re tapping? In a well-known experiment , about 50% of tappers predicted that the listeners would be able to guess the song. However, in reality, the listeners succeeded in only 2.5% of times.…
One of the most surprising things I learned as a new manager was that people actually don’t give each other that much critical feedback. Even if there is something that has been pissing them off for months, maybe years: Most people will not pull the other person aside, tell them what bothers them, and suggest to do something differently. Instead, one of three things usually happens. One, people…
Furiously, I banged the desk in front of me. I actually banged the desk. I had been invited to a meeting that I thought was a waste of time. Reluctantly, I went there, and it turned out as vague and as badly prepared as I had feared. I had already been frustrated with having too many distractions that kept me from doing “my actual work”, so when the organizer of the meeting asked me to invest more…
It used to make little sense to me. Every year, when performance reviews were due, my organization evaluated everyone on several skills. Leadership was one of them. I would wonder: “Leadership? Everyone? How can I score an individual contributor on leadership? It’s not their job to inspire, motivate, and guide others. Why don’t we only score the team leads and department leads on leadership?” It…
My learning curve had flattened. I was reasonably good at what I was doing, but I had been doing the same things for too long — mainly people management, organizational tasks, and communication. One colleague once called me the counselor of engineering, because of the many one-on-ones I was doing, and because a lot of people trusted me. A colleague who held a position similar to mine had a…
Lucy was feeling overwhelmed. She was leading a small team of four developers, and wherever she looked, more work was piling up with no end in sight. Her email inbox was overflowing, let alone all those unread Slack messages! It looked like the team had overcommitted in the current sprint again, so they had to drop some work and could not make the improvements to the build system they wanted.…
We all know them: Conversations that we should have, but keep postponing and avoiding. We just know that they will blow up. We know that they will most likely not end well. And yet, it keeps bugging us. Why is the operations team blocking our work? Why does my colleague revert my code changes without talking to me? Why does my boss pass off my work as his? There should be a way to have these…
A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to assess prospective new people managers, or Talent Leads, as they are called at trivago. There were 24 candidates in total, and I got to interact with eight of them. The judges teamed up in pairs. My colleague Anita and me did a one-on-one simulation with each of our candidates. Either I played the role of an employee and Anita would be an invisible…
TL;DR: Rapport is a close and harmonious relationship between people. In order to establish it with your employees, you can follow various strategies: Knowing what is going on, challenging, encouraging, being aware, standing up for them, and some others. As a reward for your efforts, you will have the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations. No matter if adult or child: The stronger your…
TL;DR: If you are unsure whether you should pursue a career in management, ask yourself certain questions: Do you truly care about your co-workers? Can you enjoy working with people? Can you listen? Can you spot talent? Do you feel fully comfortable in your technical field? Only if you can answer a majority of these questions with “yes” should you switch to management. Advanced engineers sometimes…
TL;DR: If you do not have a lot of time to prepare for a one-on-one, try to get at least five minutes. During these five minutes, review your notes, think about the person and their team, and potentially about personal growth. Lists of tried and tested one-on-one questions can help. I believe that one-on-ones should be an essential part of a department’s communication structure. They help to…
TL;DR: If you want to have a high impact as a manager, consider these activities and strategies: Delegating, connecting people, saying “no” to the right things, teaching, teaching how to teach, giving up control, and encouraging your people to take initiative. Emails. Incident reports. One-on-ones. Fine-tuning the new development process. Onboarding a newcomer. A request from another department.…
TL;DR: The famous Still-Face Experiment from the 1970s demonstrates that children suffer when they are deprived of feedback and connectedness. It can serve as a reminder that these are basic human needs, and most people will not thrive without them. Managers especially should make sure that nobody on their team goes unnoticed. A baby boy, just a few months old, is sitting opposite his mum, and…
TL;DR: There are times when your time is so fragmented that you feel entirely dictated by your calendar. There are ways out of that trap: Blocking time way in advance, thoughtfully saying “no” to meeting invites, batching things, or disappearing altogether. A couple of days ago, I was talking to a very esteemed colleague of mine and asked him: “Do you know these days when your entire time is so…
TL;DR: Engineers like to be concise, but a concise communication style is not always the most effective one. Being a bit more verbose can increase clarity, emphasize important points, and create an atmosphere that allows for more creative exploration. I used to hate running meetings. I still don’t particularly like it. Sometimes it feels like I am throwing words at people who would much rather get…
TL;DR: If used wisely, titles provide a clear decision structure. They do not prevent the free flow of ideas, as long as people feel that it is safe to come forward with new suggestions. Careful design is needed so that titles and promotions are comprehensible and reproducible. Many young companies are proud of their flat hierarchies, short decision paths, and of everybody having a say about the…
TL;DR: Shuttle diplomacy is ineffective, because it quickly degrades into “he said, she said”. Choose supervised confrontation instead. Or hold people accountable to having a direct conversation. Patrick is an engineering manager and has twelve direct reports. These direct reports are members of several teams, so Patrick cannot sit with all of them every day, and does not notice everything that is…
TL;DR: Between our observations and our emotional response, there is often something else: We tell ourselves a story that explains the observations. If we are not careful, we treat our story as fact, and let it affect our communication skills. In critical situations, you have to master your stories if you want to have effective and constructive conversations. Bob is angry. He was put on an…
TL;DR: There are a lot of situations when you cannot actually tell people what to do. In these cases, persistent and reliable nudging can help. It’s not about annoying people, but about holding them accountable. There are good tools out there that can remind you to remind them. Developers around me are usually pretty busy. There are features to implement, problems to solve, sprints to plan,…
TL;DR: If you shield your team from unsustainable work hours, you might be accused of a lack of “output orientation”. However, there is more to “output” than meets the eye. Make your critics see that. As a team lead, or engineering manager, you often read that you should be a “shit umbrella” for your team: Shield them against the bad stuff happening outside the team so that the developers can…
I published my first article just over a year ago, with the goal of pushing out one blog post each week. Now, roughly 52 weeks later, it’s time for a little resumé. Post count With 49 blog posts on my own site, I have not quite hit the one-post-per-week target. I am close, though. If you count my posts for the trivago Tech Blog , I am even up to 51 ;-) Effect on me The mere act of writing and…
For a lot of companies, the hiring process looks similar: Review CVs, have a round of one or more phone screens, Skype, or Hangout sessions, then some personal interviews, and finally a hiring decision. A work sample test (e.g., write some code that does this or that) might be asked for at some point or other. This sequence of different steps has a couple of advantages, after all: Before spending…
This is the third in a series of three posts illustrating some core insights from Slack by Tom DeMarco. The first post is on unhealthy busyness , and the second post is on the white space in the org chart . TL;DR: Substantial change is hard for people, because it makes them turn from experts to novices. The most important ingredient for successful change is safety. It has to be ok to fail. In a…
This is the second in a series of three posts illustrating some core insights from Slack by Tom DeMarco. The first post is on unhealthy busyness , and the last post is on facilitating substantial change . TL;DR: The white space between the lines and boxes of an organizational chart is an important indicator of an organization’s health. If this white space is vibrant and communicative, then this is…
This is the first in a series of three posts illustrating some core insights from Slack by Tom DeMarco. The second post is on the white space in the org chart , and the last post is on facilitating substantial change . TL;DR: Tom DeMarco’s “Slack” is an awesome book. A few clerks might make your workplace more productive. Sometimes, people choose busywork intentionally to save face. There is such…
If all you do day in, day out, is write code, you might wonder at some point if this is all you are here for. Writing code is fun, and software engineers should enjoy it - otherwise, they will have a problem sooner or later. However, if every day looks the same, and every week looks the same, then you are probably not using the full range of your potential, or growing as much as you could. It is…
In the timeless classic Peopleware , the authors tell the anecdote of an employee who was, at first glance, not visibly standing out in terms of any particular ability. One thing was striking, though: Projects she was involved in had a significant higher chance of being successful than projects she was not a part of. The secret? Tom DeMarco writes: “After watching her in class for a week and…
There has been a lot of discussion lately about Steve Blank’s article in which he argues that Tim Cook leading Apple is comparable to Steve Ballmer leading Microsoft: Both followed after iconic visionaries - Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, respectively - who embodied the company like no one else. Both were able to increase revenue and profit numbers at an impressive scale. However, both also failed to…
Do you remember Math in school? If you were good at it: Did you help others when they were struggling? Did you always succeed? I remember that I did not. There were these recurring situations that left me clueless on how to make my point, and how to get my tutee to understand. For example, I would try to explain to a friend how to solve a simple equation with X as an unknown. This would go…
TL;DR: As a first-time engineering manager, you will have to spend a substantial fraction of your time on non-technical work. Therefore, you will see others surpass you in technical abilities. This is usually unavoidable, but scary nonetheless. Find ways to preserve some technical abilities, and remind yourself that you are developing other skills instead. Who do you think will be able to run…
I am a middle child, with an older brother and a younger sister. My brother was pretty jealous of me when we were little, so, in order to avoid triggering his jealousy, I learnt early on to care about his interests, sometimes as if they were my own. When my sister entered the scene, this tendency was even intensified. She was the first girl in the family, and under “special parental protection” -…
Situation: I noticed that one team had almost no discussions around their code changes before they were merged. Other teams did. They would make suggestions for improvement, point out flaws, and sometimes do several rounds of commenting and re-committing before code was actually merged. This was the point of code reviews, after all. In this one team, this was not happening. Some developers outside…
One of the most interesting things I took away from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is the distinction between territory and hierarchy . Pressfield introduces the concepts as follows: “In the animal kingdom, individuals define themselves in one of two ways - by their rank within a hierarchy (a hen in a pecking order, a wolf in a pack) or by their connection to a territory (a home base, a…
Earlier this year, I was told about a discussion among higher-ups at a tech company. There had been a survey among all employees, and the result was that many of them were dissatisfied with the lack of perspective they saw in terms of personal advancement and development. There were no career tracks, nor were there personal development plans of any sort. A higher-up manager’s reaction was rather…
When I was about to finish this post, I discovered Why Startups Should Train Their People by Ben Horowitz, which was written in 2010 and covers most of what I am writing below, plus some additional points. If you have time only for one of the two, I advise you to go and read that. If you are still here, thank you. Let’s go: If you are a manager in a knowledge intensive industry, you should strive…
In a previous post , I tried to provide an analogy to help non-technical people understand why the number of produced lines of code (LOC) is not a good measure of developers’ productivity. While there may be a demand for such an analogy, the demand is probably even higher for an analogy for refactoring. I sometimes view refactoring as the eternal apple of discord between developers and…
It’s 2016. And still, some business managers seem to think that using lines of code (LOC) produced is an appropriate KPI for the productivity of a developer, or a software engineering department. Since history has a tendency to repeat itself, I have a feeling that this will even be the case in, say, ten years. Software engineers themselves know, of course, that measuring productivity in LOC is not…
I recently read Drive by Dan Pink, and the most surprising thing for me was how rewards can lead to decreased performance and intrinsic motivation. This is counterintuitive - usually, you think of rewards as something that should increase people’s motivation. However, Pink recites a couple of fascinating studies and findings. One example that made a big impression on me is the experiment from the…
A lot has been written on servant leadership, but I have a question on it. I first read about this concept in Team Geek , where it says: “[Servant leadership] is a nice way of saying the most important thing a manager can do is to serve her team, much like a butler or majordomo tends to the health and well-being of a household. […] This may mean removing bureaucratic obstacles that an engineer…
Dear blogging diary, I try to publish one post per week, but do you know this feeling when you just don’t have any good ideas? You browse through your list of potential topics, and all the time, you think: “Naaah, this one is not really interesting. No, already kind of written about that one in a previous post. Naaah, there is this great post on that one by someone else. He has said it all, and I…
Recently, I was amazed at what I could contribute to a technical meeting without any technical expertise on the subject matter discussed. In this particular meeting, there were two sides participating: On the one side, there was a team - let us call them Blue Team - who was starting to use a certain technology to solve a certain problem. On the other side, there was an engineer from a different…
Like many relatively new managers, I have trouble handing things over. Instead, I do too many things myself, or - worse yet - they are delayed. However, if a manager wants to increase his leverage, then delegation - which means not doing everything yourself - is an indispensable tool which I want to highlight a bit more. Like I said, I am not a delegation expert by experience, so I write this post…
When you become a mum or dad, you are definitely in for some funny and surprising moments where your children react in a totally unanticipated way. Example: I sit at my computer and fill out my tax return. My three year old son comes in and asks: “Daddy, may I help you at the a-pluter (computer)?” - “No, sorry, Max, you cannot help me here.” The result: Max throws himself on the nearby couch in…
I set up a couple of workshops recently, some with external trainers, and some internally. I have to admit, it is not the most fun part of my job. You make appointments, you write emails, you book rooms. Not very exciting. However, it is also really important, because it benefits a lot of people, and investing in your skill set is crucial for every software developer. Theoretically, setting up a…
“I left a comment in the ticket, what else am I supposed to do?” Jacob does not see his part in the delay of a new feature. After all, it was Rebecca, the designer, who did not react, and blocked him for two days. He wrote a comment, saying that he needed her to provide a different version of the image. But she did not get back to him. Ticketing systems are theoretically great for managing a…
Giving critical feedback is an unpleasant situation for many new team leads. Let’s consider Robert. Not too long ago, Robert was “one of us”, a developer in the trenches who was producing high-quality code, and still found the time to help other developers solve hard problems. Now, he is supposed to do this thing called “managing”, but he does not see himself as a manager or as a boss. He sees…
Effective one-on-one conversations should produce some insight. Either your employee should learn something he did not know before, or you, as his manager, should learn something you did not know before. Ideally, of course, both would learn something. This learning can be almost anything. Maybe the employee needs to find a new flat until the end of the month and is a bit stressed because of that.…
Robert is a newly promoted engineering manager. Not too long ago, he was “one of us”, a developer in the trenches who was producing high-quality code, and still found the time to help other developers solve hard problems. Now, he is supposed to do this thing called “managing”, but thinking about himself as a manager or boss makes him feel rather uncomfortable. He sees himself more like what some…
Becoming an engineering manager is a paradigm shift that many struggle with at first. I think that one of the psychological difficulties for new engineering managers, and certainly one that I was having, is that of perceived productivity. To a developer, managing people can feel mind-numbingly unproductive because you seemingly “cannot get anything done”. This is not surprising when you consider…