Posts tagged with Engineering Management
Is Ralph Wiggum the Future of Coding?
Autonomous AI coding doesn't fail because models aren't smart enough. It fails because we give them too much context, vague goals, and no hard definition of success. The Ralph Wiggum approach flips that on its head. Short contexts, brutally clear tasks, hard completion signals, and relentless...
Think Like a Farmer
You don't grow crops by yelling at plants and you don't grow team velocity by pressuring engineers. Great managers prepare the ground. Give clarity, tools, and trust. Focus on support, not blame. Remove blockers, nurture growth, match people to problems, and improve yourself first.
Finding the Reasons for your Team's Performance Problems
Great managers strive to create high performing teams. So if they observe or are presented with a problem with an employee, they swiftly seek to understand and solve it. And the best leaders realize the surface issue most likely isn’t the real issue. They need to go below the surface to under...
Code for your Fellow Humans
According to the classic book Clean Code, the ratio of time spent reading code to writing code is well over 10 to 1. And most of the time "writing" code is for maintenance reasons. So writing any "brand new" code represents a tiny fraction of a developer's day. It's critical to get that right.
Want a Good Team Now or a Great Team Later?
The goal of our teams is to deliver results for the company. So when we prioritize work, we consider two factors. Level of effort and impact. Engineering managers have a third factor to consider. Career development. Guiding people to learn new skills and be the best version of themselves is c...
The Power of Pre-Mortems in Software Development
The software post-mortem is well known. It’s a standard best practice that really marks the end of any software project. It also fits in well with the Agile manifesto, specifically the retrospective - always be reflecting, always be improving. Post-mortems are usually only conducted when thin...
Don't Ask for Feedback, Ask for Advice
Everyone wants feedback. In fact, studies show employees who get regular feedback are more engaged and higher performing. The problem is, unless you have a strong trusting relationship with a person you are asking, you may not get the concrete feedback you are looking for. People don’t want t...
Code Reviews by Phase and Expectations
Code reviews are amazing for many reasons. And everyone on the team should contribute. Interestingly, the behavior of an engineer with respect to code reviews changes based on seniority or tenure within a team or code repository. I like to refer these changes as “phases”. This document attemp...