Software Lead Weekly

Google Fires the Engineer Who Wrote That Viral Memo Criticizing Its Diversity Efforts
5 minutes read.

This week the internet went crazy after Google's employee internal memo, criticizing its diversity, spread within Google. Put aside any specific opinion on the content in it, I feel that companies need to take a clear stand to their view on it so it won’t confuse their employees. As an employer, when someone hurts the safety of others it’s hard to say “everyone have their own opinion”.

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8 Rabbits, Aka 1 Rabbyte
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. This one is 100% 🤓.

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We Are All Product Owners! An Impact Guide for Engineers (And Everyone Else)
8 minutes read.

A fantastic post on defining impact and figuring out how to measure it to show business value. I believe that everyone should look at their tasks, framing it the way Eran Davidov did with "How to Think about Impact". Share this post internally with everyone who contributes to the product, and discuss how to frame their current actions into measurable impact.

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What I Learned Scaling Engineering Teams Through Euphoria and Horror
10 minutes read.

Tim Howes shares his lessons learned about the leadership skills required for hyper-growth companies. At scale, I'd pay extra attention around Tim's "Make Peace with Repeating Yourself " -- it may be annoying sometimes (managers with an engineering background like the DRY principle), but you get the benefit only when people repeat the words and attitude when no one is looking.

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Yesterday I Met Someone at a Tech Conference. They Introduced Themself and When I Asked What They Did, She Replied: "I'm Not Technical". (thread)
4 minutes read.

Kelsey Hightower's behavior shows a lot about the kind of person he is, and the kind of attitude we need more of in our industry: "The moral of the story is that we gave this person room and respect and she did the rest."

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Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer
4 minutes read.

This post is so good, I've shared it with all of our engineers in my company. The first 3 principles, when done right, is your best way to increase your impact on the organization.

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When Your Tech Debt Comes Due
5 minutes read.

Kevin Scott (CTO at Microsoft) talks about his days in LinkedIn, standing in front of a group of product managers with a painful message: "We were going to freeze new feature development at LinkedIn for the next two months to rebuild our software development infrastructure". In every company, the hardest part is to understand how much Tech Debt you're willing to pay based on company's current position in the market, and managing that Tech Debt in a way people will feel the situation is in control.

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Chief Technology Officer Job Description: What Does a CTO Do?
4 minutes read.

Often, when we try to guide engineers on our team, we need to be able to understand their desired career path (at least for now) and explain the behaviors & skills they'll need to improve to make that step forward. Posts like this give you some good overview of how various CTOs see their role.

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@lpolovets: If you ask for feedback, take notes. When you pick someone's brain but don't pick up a pen or open TextEdit, you're wasting everyone's time.

@james_clear: Here's the only productivity tip you'll ever need: do the most important thing first each day. Sounds simple. No one does it.