For the last 5 years, I have been using the 7 areas of software management as a rubric for how I do annual performance reviews of engineering managers, at all levels — from line managers to VPs. …

We are excited to have you here! We put a lot of emphasis in our interviewing for what people bring to the table in taking us to the next level. Your experiences while at a BigCo are a large part of that. …

(or devops engineers, or production engineers, or systems development engineers, or SRE-SE, or cloud engineers, etc) 1. Introduction The purpose of this post is to talk about how I have learned to appreciate the need for Systems Engineers, and what I have learned in terms of managing them well (both hiring and…

TLDR: Each functional hierarchy costs you agility at the square of total count, and there is a lot of functions in agile devops software development. 1. Overview Over the last 20 years, the software development industry has faced two independent, similar but sometimes conflicting revolutions fundamentally about bringing together different functional expertises…

What is a fortnight? — (noun) BRITISH a period of two weeks Used as “biweekly” is ambiguous. What is the TLDR? Every 2 weeks we walk up the org tree, writing a short number of bullet points of wins and challenges for the last 2 weeks. …

Why optimizing for business value is not the right thing for the business — (Part Four, subpart two, of The Seven Areas Of Software Management) Introduction The last post introduced why understanding your team’s motivations was fundamental to people management. That turns to the next problem, which is what motivates your team members is sometimes/usually different to what business needs would immediately have them do…

It’s all about having authentically honest 1:1s — (Part Four, subpart one, of The Seven Areas Of Software Management) “If I want to say to the world ‘eating people is wrong’, and that’s what I have to say — I might as well not say it. …

Is the built thing going to keep running? — (Part Three of The Seven Areas Of Software Management) Overview When I entered the industry at the turn of the millennium, it was for a company doing “boxed software” drops twice a year, for which there was little operational burden — staffing a “tier 3 support” email rotation to triage field…

(Part Two of The Seven Areas Of Software Management) Overview This is the second easiest area to get on top for new managers, as it’s usually one of the reasons they are made a manager: the ability to get groups of people to coordinate to execute and deliver. …