Tag technical-leadership

Describes complete staff work, a management technique that improves local autonomy, prevents going back and forth, and carves out greater responsibilities for yourself.

If you're a Staff or Principal in title, one of the things you are obligated to teach your Juniors is how and when to be petty with professionalism. How to tell superiors and managers something is wrong or outright stupid. How to scuttle a bad idea management has decided is going to happen despi...

If you're a senior person dealing with someone junior always always ALWAYS go into the interaction thinking "how do I be the senior that I would've needed as a junior?"

ewan green (@ohnorobot)Tue, 10 May 2022 14:24 +0000

Junior engineer: Take this tightly defined feature & build it Mid-level engineer: Take this vaguely defined feature & build it Senior engineer: Take this known problem & figure out how to solve it Staff engineer: Take this goal & find the problems we should be solving

Zain Rizvi 🔬 (@ZainRzv)Sat, 12 Mar 2022 07:40 GMT

https://twitter.com/ksylor/status/1494675737793728518

One thing I didn't realize when I was younger is the absolute joy of being proven wrong--it almost always means there's a better way of doing things, and at the same time you end up with more ownership and a broader understanding of the problem.

Annie Sullivan (@anniesullie)Fri, 18 Feb 2022 14:23 GMT

A very underrated skill in senior engineers is knowing that sometimes you have to let other engineers make choices that you think are wrong. Most likely, they will learn from their mistakes, just like you did.

Katie Sylor-Miller (@ksylor)Fri, 18 Feb 2022 14:10 GMT

One of the key lessons I've learned as as an "architect" is that if you can't influence the design of the org, the design of the tech and systems is a futile activity.

Damian Hickey (@randompunter)Sat, 29 Jan 2022 20:51 GMT

As a senior engineer, you should learn how to be less reactionary and more strategic. Reactionary behavior creates tactical solutions. Tactical solutions create more problems. Learning to think big and fix foundational issues sometimes makes hard problems disappear.

Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll)Wed, 19 Jan 2022 20:02 GMT

"My job is to nuke barriers out of your way so you can be successful."

Sharat Chander 💜🦦 (@Sharat_Chander)Tue, 11 Jan 2022 19:44 GMT

Juniors don’t fail, seniors fail to support their juniors.

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A rant on behalf of a junior. Asking your junior engineer to "build their manager's trust back" means something went HORRIBLY HORRIBLY WRONG.

Jenn (@geekgalgroks)Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:18 GMT

Jenna Charlton they/them 🏳️‍🌈 (@TheyWrestleTest)Thu, 06 Jan 2022 11:42 GMT

Something I really love about being involved in @nodejs is that I get to have a leadership role in a fairly large organization without having a single person "reporting" to me.

Rich Trott (@trott)Mon, 13 Dec 2021 22:04 GMT

This diagram explains the different shades of being a very senior software engineer, very concisely. One of the best advice I got was from a mentor who recognized I had to split myself into the TPM role. They immediately saw it and helped me to make changes. Beware!!

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Roles overlapping in tech and the intersection you should be beware of...

Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz)Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:40 GMT

Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll)Wed, 08 Dec 2021 17:27 GMT

Roles overlapping in tech and the intersection you should be beware of...

Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz)Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:40 GMT

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1468606386439344139

Issuing a correction / addition.

Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz)Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:45 GMT

are there any female-identifying engineering leaders who have tried both the manager and IC tracks who'd be willing to talk me about how and why they chose the path that they did? i'd love to hear about the pros + cons of each path and how you knew which one was right for you :)

Vaidehi Joshi (@vaidehijoshi)Fri, 22 Oct 2021 15:08 +0000

What advice would you give to someone leading their first distributed engineering team?

Taylor Poindexter (@engineering_bae)Mon, 18 Oct 2021 01:48 +0000

A good manager should never surprise you. Never ever. Not during performance reviews. Not during re-orgs. You should always know where you stand and where you're going.

Lily (@lilykonings)Fri, 06 Aug 2021 19:58 +0000

💥 Excited to announce... I wrote a book! A lot of engineering leaders worked to be best engineer they could be… and then we were promoted. It's tough to transition roles. I wrote the book I wish I had when I started leading teams. engmanagement.dev

● Sarah Drasner ● (@sarah_edo)Tue, 06 Jul 2021 13:37 +0000

okay so I try to avoid the 10x engineer discourse but like if your team needs to call you a bunch of times for debugging help when you go on vacation? you're not a force multiplier, you're a bottleneck.

shelby spees (@shelbyspees)Thu, 24 Jun 2021 20:02 +0000

Explaining how “senior” is an overloaded title in tech to my husband and he’s annoyed just knowing about it 😂

Laurie (@laurieontech)Thu, 27 May 2021 22:56 +0000

I felt this twitter.com/ginnyghezzo/st…

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I fantasize about retiring ... to write code

Ginny Ghezzo (@GinnyGhezzo)Wed, 26 May 2021 18:22 +0000

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman)Thu, 27 May 2021 06:31 +0000

I fantasize about retiring ... to write code

Ginny Ghezzo (@GinnyGhezzo)Wed, 26 May 2021 18:22 +0000

A Senior Apple Engineer I look up to and respect told me he pair programs every week to work through his problems. Ngl this broke my brain. He's one of the best engineers I know. We're conditioned to think asking for help means you're junior. Time to normalize this.

Novall Swift (@NovallSwift)Wed, 26 May 2021 01:52 +0000

Tim 🚪 (@timdorr)Sun, 16 May 2021 14:28 +0000

The biggest perception problem in our industry is, as an IC, you grow up to be an architect who design systems. No. There are very senior people whose job is only to maintain very critical tools and libraries that doesn't require much system design work.

Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll)Mon, 10 May 2021 06:05 +0000

I still write code for a bunch of reasons. Some of that even runs in production (mainly via open source contributions) or inspires code that does. Prototypes for discussion, demonstrating something to a customer, demos, data analysis, exploration.

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It’s not just VC - there is pressure in executive leadership roles to be further and further from the work itself. You don’t have to do that - you may not be the critical path engineer anymore, but you can stay writing code forever if you want/like it. twitter.com/terronk/status…

Adam Jacob (@adamhjk)Sun, 09 May 2021 00:56 +0000

Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr)Sun, 09 May 2021 09:37 +0000

It’s not just VC - there is pressure in executive leadership roles to be further and further from the work itself. You don’t have to do that - you may not be the critical path engineer anymore, but you can stay writing code forever if you want/like it.

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I’ve been told by some VCs not to code at all, because of how it will make me look “Junior.” I learn so much more by actually writing the code than by reading about the product. This may seem obvious to a programmer. But I promise you it’s not obvious to most VCs.

🟣 Lee Edwards (@terronk)Sat, 08 May 2021 20:09 +0000

Adam Jacob (@adamhjk)Sun, 09 May 2021 00:56 +0000

the best engineers i've worked with are not ones who write "great" code (whatever that means!) but instead are the ones who are extremely skilled communicators.

Vaidehi Joshi (@vaidehijoshi)Tue, 23 Mar 2021 17:57 GMT

If *any* engineer screws up (not just juniors), use it as a chance to see where your processes, tools, docs, or training have let them down. Everyone makes mistakes. If the screw up has a big impact, that's arguably on the business for not mitigating the risk, not the individual

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If a junior engineer screws up, make sure you tell them it's ok - we all make mistakes. Don't leave them sat at home feeling miserable during a pandemic

Jonty Wareing (@jonty)Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:54 GMT

Sally Lait (@sallylait)Fri, 19 Mar 2021 08:38 GMT

When I'm mentoring, the biggest difficulty I'm seeing when engineers go from senior to higher level positions is about "measuring" their work. They get nervous (and I was too) that previous ways of measuring impact don't work anymore.

Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll)Thu, 18 Mar 2021 19:16 GMT

If a junior engineer screws up, make sure you tell them it's ok - we all make mistakes. Don't leave them sat at home feeling miserable during a pandemic

Jonty Wareing (@jonty)Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:54 GMT