Software Lead Weekly

Psychological Safety in Operation Teams (PDF)
11 minutes read.

John Looney will help you think about setting the stage for Psychological Safety in your company, with some focus on Operations teams, although it's applicable to all teams. My favorite parts was John's story on "Make It Obvious When Your Team Is Doing Well" -- don't let your people famous only when shit hits the fan.

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Security Researcher at Work
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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One Rubric Changed Box's Engineering Performance
15 minutes read.

Sam Schillace will give you a lot of material to think about how to scale your engineering team, focusing on what you can do in the early days to allow a smooth transition. This resonated well with me: "If you can't write down your expectations of an engineering team, then you don't understand performance very well — and you're not actually going to get a good performance culture over time." -- Write more. Write more. Write more.

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Chaos Engineering: Compaines, People, Tools & Practices
5 minutes read.

A wonderful map to explore different companies and tools if you're new to Chaos Engineering (which I believe we all are). Shared it with some of my teammates as we're starting to explore options to make our system more robust.

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Why Aren’t My Engineers Taking Initiative?
4 minutes read.

I'd take Jean Hsu's table format around "Rate the things that drain the most productivity from your day" and ask my teammates how they feel about it. It can be a score with some space to write examples and suggestions.

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Not Everyone Is a Manager (And That’s OK)
6 minutes read.

Reading how engineers feel about taking a managerial position and then shifting back to the Individual Contributor role is important because you have to think how to allow it to happen: People need to explore, to try things out, to learn about themselves and what makes them happy and productive. Shem Magnezi shares his story.

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Becoming Your Future Self
4 minutes read.

Leo Polovets made me think a lot of his thought experiment: "What will your job look like in 1 year? In 5 years? Which existing responsibilities will you no longer have and what new responsibilities will you accumulate?" -- these questions are worthwhile even if you're not a founder. Thinking about scaling yourself to achieve bigger impact is relevant in any position. What would be your answer? Use Leo's advice: "Talk with peers you respect and get advice from them about areas where they have the experience that you lack."

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Managers, Screw the Golden Rule
3 minutes read.

"You shouldn’t treat other people the way you want to be treated because the other person isn’t you." -- an important insight to keep in mind when you give feedback to others. Use Claire Lew's questions to learn more about your teammates and their preferences.

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@jyhsu: The idea just crossed my mind to have end-of-year reviews for my 2yo and 4.5yo. That's...normal, right?

@patio11: Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.