Let's learn about Engineering Management via these 261 free blog posts. They are ordered by HackerNoon reader engagement data. Visit the Learn Repo or LearnRepo.com to find the most read blog posts about any technology.
Engineering management is the discipline of combining engineering skills with management principles to lead technical teams and projects. It is vital for bridging the gap between technical execution and business objectives, ensuring the efficient delivery of innovative solutions.
Unique tips & tricks on boosting your productivity as a Software Engineer.
Ockam is sharing their engineer ladder in an effort to provide transparency and help junior engineers understand their potential career path.
Based on my own experience, I know what motivations and development paths lead to the emergence of in-house tools.
Strategies for optimizing resource allocation in backend teams, ensuring project efficiency and success from a backend leader.
Hello, Hacker Noon people! Technology guilds are a popular but still fresh way of implementing communities of practices in companies. Still, there are many questions, especially related to guild responsibilities and organization. Together with Andrew Kozin, I've prepared this post for you as a summary of our personal experience and understanding of the role of a technology guild nowadays.
How to Use - and NOT Abuse - Software Engineering Metrics
Creating a consistent style guide for your codebase can help your team be more consistent and productive. Here's how Google's Python Code Style Guide looks like
A story of an impossible situation and the light at the end of the tunnel.
Software Engineers have many competing priorities; how to build a culture with a stable product and green CI build is the first of these priorities.
Thinking of transitioning away from Engineering Manager to Individual Contributor? That is exactly what I did! Let me tell you a little bit about it.
It has become a constant temptation to praise engineering leaders and undervalue engineering managers, but maybe we shouldn’t be focusing on their differences but on correctly understanding their roles.
In this blog post, you'll learn about why you should be testing IaC and the best platforms to get started with.
This year, 30% of engineering leaders have figured out how to turn AI into a substantial competitive advantage. Have you?
Majority of software developers are aspired to be not only a competent professional but also a great one.
What can cause managers to play safe—pass on great opportunities, refuse to take risks and do the work they’ve always done before?
In traditional software operations, software would be "thrown over the fence" to operations teams. Technical operations teams would be aided in operating a service using Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
What are DORA metrics and how can engineering teams use these metrics to identify high and low-performing dev teams?
Every conversation I have with CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leaders eventually gets to the “Which Metrics Should We Measure?” discussion.
When Peter Drucker said in 2006 that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he did not mean that strategy is not important. Rather an effective strategy is crucial to organizational success. A good strategy is the key to successfully implementing the vision. But a strategy by itself cannot push any organization to achieve tremendous growth and success. What gives life to that strategy are its people.
Modern methods of software measurement do not provide a strong base for continuous improvement. This article tries to fill this gap.
We think of Software Development as a pursuit grounded in logic. From this perspective it can be shocking that software projects have high failure rates - 31% in 2014. And some projects fail to the tune of billions. How is this level of chaos possible in an apparently logical discipline?
I often wondered about the difference between junior, mid-level, and senior developers, so I decided to write a short article about the topic.
Disconnect and poor communication are key challenges of managing a remote or hybrid development team. As a hybrid team, we share tips on effective management.
The problems with promo-culture
Software engineers create all those great platforms and tools for every other industry, and yet, engineering leaders struggle to understand the work of their engineering teams. They struggle to correlate engineering output to business value.
Let's figure out how the coding style increases and then degrades.
In the last article, which you can read here, I was talking about which PC components are crucial for programmers. Basically, I listed all the components to worry about, but I’ve also said that you need to keep the Bottleneck in mind. Because, there’re a lot of people who don’t know what is a bottleneck, in this article, I’ll try to explain what that is.
The classic code review process contains several severe flaws and should be redesigned. The story depicts how to do so.
Engineering enablement cannot start with the tools and the process; great enablement must start with the engineers. And your engineers start with onboarding.
This article goes into 2 aspects of how to deal with software incidents: The practices that one needs to instill in their software platform and more.
Organizations that thrive are run by leaders who see opportunity in uncertainty, who cut through ambiguity, and who lead with the mindset to gain clarity.
This post is the fifth and final article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
Learn everything you need to know about Management via these 447 free HackerNoon stories.
This post is the third article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
Effective leaders, though rare, are inspirational. They bring people together and enable them to collectively achieve great things together.
During periods of market turbulence and high growth, core values provide a valuable grounding point for decision-making for engineering managers.
A good strategy needs an excellent team to execute, and managers who don’t pay attention to their team’s execution speed end up with a mediocre performance
There is plenty of content out there describing what Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are. But what are these processes for in the first place?
Learn when to over-engineer a project to ensure a successful rewrite and high velocity with the Jobs to Be Done framework and when not to do such a thing
Scrum is a buzzword, the virtue signal of choice for middle-management in software organizations.
What is a Product Roadmap?
A guide for engineering managers (and ICs) about the different types of compensation schemes as well as the advantages and disadvantages of those schemes.
Demand for developers leveled off, but it didn’t dip.
I wasn’t a big fan of managers in my decade long programming career. I took pride in my accomplishments as a developer, the individual contributor. After all, I was the one making things happen or part of the team that made things happen. We built features, fixed critical issues and in my view, only reason business existed was because developers worked hard.
Every individual has strengths and weaknesses; it’s easy as a hiring manager to hire people who display similar strengths as yourself. That’s because these strengths are easier to identify since you have experience and interest in said area and more confidence in your evaluation. However, people like you may also have similar blindspots. These blindspots, amplified on a group of people, will become much more detrimental. As a manager, I would want to reduce the number of weak areas on my team.
What ACTUALLY happens when your manager writes your quarterly performance review? Learn their tricks to get the promotion you deserve.
Will adding people or cutting scope help you reach your project deadline? Learn how planning and spreadsheets can help you find answers.
A book review of ''The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change'' by Camille Fournier. Find out whether the book is right for you.
Daily standups feel like a waste of time. I will teach you two new techniques the will make every minute count.
The Tara founding team at San Jose HQ
Hiring a full stack development company or developer reduces the need to hire too many resources in-house for product development. Broadly speaking, the software development process is divided into two parts:
AI-native systems don’t just ship faster, they drift silently. Learn how proof-oriented delivery makes trust measurable, auditable, and reliable.
Before starting a new coding task, I find it’s usually worthwhile to spend at least a little time trying to find a related working example, especially when the task touches on unfamiliar libraries or concepts.
I explain four strategic levers for CTOs and software engineering to improve developer productivity, ship faster and get better outcomes.
Learn how to build a culture of code quality to improve maintainability, scalability, and efficiency, and stay ahead of the competition.
Looking for Software Development Methodologies for your next project? Check out the updated list of some of the best methodologies with its pros and cons.
How do you measure quality in software engineering? I guess this is the question there will always be a debate on. There are so many approaches to this question that finding only one answer is just impossible. In this article, we will be listing the quality-related metrics that the top engineering teams have been keeping track of, and see when and how you should use them.
One of the many responsibilities of any great engineering leader or manager is that of making decisions. In terms of how to best do that, there are many decision-making models, including the OODA loop model.
How to build a proactive and happy engineering team? What should you know to manage and lead the team of engineers more effectively? Here we’re going to share the startup guide with the helpful tips to make you a better manager and leader.
I'm working as a software developer for 7 years. You can read my background and how I got into the industry here. There are a few things I wish I learned earlier. Knowing these in advance would have made my job a lot easier. Some of this might sound pretty obvious, but not for me. If you're in the early stages of your career, doing a few of this will make you stand out.
“I would describe an engineering manager as a Sergeant Major. They are very much part of the mission delivery team and manage a group of experts to perform specific tasks,” says David Ives, Engineering Manager at Pusher.
Learn about Continuous Merge and how it should be added to your CI/CD pipeline.
Engineers often complain about product strategy, but this post goes through why it is so hard and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Data is critically important for organizational success. As IT professionals, you understand the benefits of establishing clear metrics to gain visibility into how your organization is driving value. The right metrics provide insights into what the organization needs to change and where it is winning.
AI has accelerated software delivery, yet the SDLC remains outdated—still following decades-old steps: planning, requirements, development, testing, deployment.
I’ve been a huge fan of the personal README (or user manual) ever since I first heard of the concept.
At the outset of its existence, a startup involves a limited number of people. Basically, it consists of cofounders, whose roles are rather tentative. Soon, however, if that startup succeeds, it requires other specialists for help—specialists whose qualifications are high enough that they can work efficiently in a startup-like atmosphere.
The ladder of inference is a powerful mental model that explains how we make these quick assessments or decisions.
I don’t have many regrets in my professional career. In fact, I have none. Regretting is useless and a waste of time.
Hold daily standups. Ideally, this will take an hour every day.
Learn everything you need to know about Leadership via these 327 free HackerNoon stories.
Internal documentation can help improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
One of the most common mistakes early managers make is to focus on being a "shit shield". Learn why this backfires, and what to do instead.
High-performing teams proactively develop their engineers to address the team's skill gaps, using methods such as tutorials, mentorship and stretch assignments
Software Engineering KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable values that indicate the progress of engineering teams’ performance towards business objectives. Therefore, they need to be consistent, broad enough to consider everyone’s effort, and, most importantly, measurable.
Some of the most toxic managers I have worked with had no clue they were contributing to a toxic work environment. Otherwise pleasant to talk to, these managers seemed to genuinely care about their people. However, what appeared on the outside was not in tune with what went inside their teams. Their good intentions didn’t always translate into the right action.
An honest, personal reflection on leadership in software teams—covering trust, culture, remote work, and how real leadership starts by showing up.
Ted Lasso's leadership style is rarely seen in media.
What traits can we learn from Ted to make us successful leaders?
Cheslav Novytskyi, Engineering Manager at Innovecs, shares his experience which may be useful for software developers in advancing their careers
Practical leadership tips for a tech lead of a software engineering team.
We’re right on the precipice of a reality that’s more agile than Agile — as we move from Agile development and a DevOps culture to autonomous development
Spec-Driven Development can't deliver the promise of production-ready code. Because it's expensive to maintain and doesn't have all context.
Take a look at some of the most interesting findings of the 2022 State of Engineering Management report, and become a better engineering manager today!
The following principles will save you time, money, energy, and increase the probability of your organization’s success.
Annie is a software engineering leader on Square’s platform & infrastructure engineering organization. Prior to Square, she worked at a number of startups across a spectrum of industries from consumer products to enterprise solutions, as well as a wide variety of teams from sales to engineering.
That's likely a question that you've never asked yourself, but as a manager, it's an important one. Career conversations are an important part of career development. We’re going to define 5 levels that will make it easier for you to have a better career conversation. Through self-reflection or 360 feedback, it should be relatively easy to know where you stand. You can then set the next highest level as a tangible goal to improve.
PMs are ideally placed to create a workplace culture around preventing and responding to technical debt. Here are 7 actionable strategies to help PMs.
Effective leadership, within most engineering domains, hinges as much on technical fluency as it does on vision, empathy, and adaptability.
High morale in a team turns obstacles into opportunities, gives them the courage to stay resilient in the face of challenges.
Every product or company goes through a similar set of steps on the path to success. In previous posts, we’ve looked at different aspects of going to market — from launching to building and measuring a funnel to pricing — with some ideas about how to measure things and know when you’re off track. In this post, we’ll take a step back and walk through all the stages of GTM that you’ll typically experience.
When it comes to computer engineering, there are plenty of titles and the wide variety makes it more confusing than it needs to be. DevOps and SRE are two roles
Technical debt clearly slows down new development - but that on its own doesn't mean that we should be fixing tech debt everywhere
Software development is a complicated process. Using specific KPIs in software development can make the procedure more manageable.
This post is the fourth article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
What does the hardware design look like? What are the most innovative product engineering approaches? How to build a product that will really stand out?
What’s the overall performance of your engineering team? Let’s look at how we can improve your team’s performance.
We used to think that the secret to getting better at anything was directly linked to the timed dedicated to practice (we’ve all heard about the 10, 000 hours that stand between us and achieving mastery in any field) but, as in turns out, it’s not how much we practice but also how we do it. According to psychologist Andres Ericsson, “deliberate practice” is what matters and makes a huge difference in achieving expert performance.
Management is just doing The D.A.M.N job: providing Direction; fostering Alignment; maintaining Motivation, and making sure there's No Blockers.
Effective communication as an engineering leader is about striking the right balance between clarity and engagement.
Does your team feel its alignment with business where what it delivers solve business problems and achieve business desired outcome?
The performance of verification and configuration management is essential to the ARP4754A document and other avionics development documents. ARP4754A, officially titled Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft And Systems, is concerned with “the development of aircraft systems taking into account the overall aircraft operating environment and functions.”
“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Henry Ford.
Uncover the five essential skills every successful machine learning engineer should have. Boost your ML engineering career with these invaluable insights.
How do you measure how well your engineering team is doing and how do you find the bottlenecks where you can improve things the most?
Books are the best resource for sharing knowledge in a not-assisted way. They go deep into a topic, or more briefly over a bunch of them. Although, as a Software Engineer, I learned a lot from blog posts, tweets, and conference talks, it was books that prepared me for the Tech Lead role.
Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, once said:
Most agile teams do sprint retrospectives at least once a month, to iterate and improve on their software development process and workflow. However, a lot of those same teams rely only on their feelings to “know” if they have actually improved. But you need an unbiased reference system if you want to compare how two sprints went.
Being a CTO can be hard and frustrating, but also fun and satisfying. During my time in the last seven years as CTO, R&D manager, and software architect both at Walla!NEWS, Careerpage, and Appwrite, I have collected some insights that helped me do my jobs and achieve my company’s goals. For a long time, I have thought about sharing my ideas, and in this post, I will try my best to give away some of those insights based on my personal experiences.
Hey, I've been nominated for the Noonies 2022 and this is my interview to help you know more about me and how I worked to become an engineering manager
This post is the second article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.
Learn how to navigate the complexities of translating business requirements into technical solutions.
[112. Our SaaS Contract Renewal Came In 18% Higher.
We Paid It. Then We Built the Exit Plan.](https://hackernoon.com/our-saas-contract-renewal-came-in-18percent-higher-we-paid-it-then-we-built-the-exit-plan)
An 18% SaaS renewal forced an honest reckoning: vendors know your switching cost better than you do. Here's the math, the exit, and the lessons.
Achieving a €260,000 with My Central European Software Engineering Leadership Venture.
Discover how AI can significantly enhance the Developer Experience (DX), boosting productivity and innovation.
Performance reviews play a big role in the operation of the organization.
Internal API platforms are becoming the operating system for modern enterprises. Learn how API strategy turns engineering into a growth engine.
A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session.
As all Spider-Man comic book fans know, with great power comes great responsibility, and being a great manager isn't just about being good at telling people what to do. It turns out that effective engineering managers aren't mind-bending wizards — they're just good at a few things. Here's a few of them:
Below is an excerpt from our conversation with Alex Roetter, former SVP of Engineering at Twitter, Managing Director and General Partner at Moxxie Ventures, and featured in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
When senior teams stop questioning decisions, systems don’t break, they drift. A systems view of why alignment can quietly become a hidden risk.
Many companies or individuals often decide to build a website, so they hire web development companies to build one for them. But can a single developer or a programmer build a whole website or is it a team game?
We see hard-working product teams struggling all the time, even under the best of conditions. Often, it’s not due to a deficiency or lack of skill within the team. Rather, the team has fallen into one—or more—of the most common dysfunctions in product management.
How to map UML to TypeQL. Read how the European Space Agency migrated their spacecraft engineering models from UML to TypeQL for use in a TypeDB database.
Preparing for a board meeting is a stressful experience for everyone. For many CTOs, it’s also an exercise in futility, trying to zero in on engineering KPIs that accurately represent everything that’s happened in the department. The information that usually makes it to the board deck — information on completed features and incident reports — doesn’t tell the whole story.
A list of features shows what the team accomplished, but doesn’t reveal anything about how the team works. It can’t reveal process issues that need to be addressed or highlight challenges the team has overcome. Similarly, incident reports might illuminate problems in the codebase, but they’re devoid of context about how the team is dealing with those issues. Other departments have self-evident, objective KPIs. Sales, for example, can walk through their pipeline from demos booked to contracts signed, using objective measurements to chart their department’s progress over time.
Engineering leaders, on the other hand, must get creative to provide that level of clarity.
You’ll need to think carefully about the story you want your slides to tell, then choose engineering KPIs that map to those specific insights. When considering a metric, we recommend asking:
This post is the first article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series.
Managers are burdened with issues that should be handled by their subordinates. How to manage those 'monkeys'?
Many Engineering Managers promote Pull Requests as part of the development workflow. It’s a consolidated practice that brings lots of benefits. It consists of comparing the changes of a branch with the repository’s base branch (conventionally called master).
I was asked to answer the Quora question, “Why is the Agile model the best”.
Hear Rukmini Reddy's story - Slack SVP of Engineering and Twilio Developer Searchlight Honoree
Learn why code quality matters, the most important metrics you need to manage quality, and how to track and manage code quality issues.
The article introduces the Specification-First approach in software development, emphasizing its benefits for project managers and development teams.
We’re going to look at what sprint velocity is, how it can affect your development cycle, and what formulas you can use to measure sprint velocity.
It creates more time when you dont sleep!
I have read multiple definitions for Lead Time and Cycle Time over the last years. Recently, I shared why I prefer using the first over the later.
5 easy steps to create a sustainable tech community in your company that everyone loves.
When your team is building a software product, the majority of the work that they do is invisible. As a manager, you have to rely on in-person cues for blocked work or frustrated engineers. When they move to a remote workflow—your team also becomes invisible, and all those critical signals are dropped.
In-person, you might notice:
How to apply UX design principles to develop supportive and efficient engineering cultures
“Our analysis is clear: in today’s fast-moving and competitive world, the best thing you can do for your products, your company, and your people is institute a culture of experimentation and learning, and invest in the technical and management capabilities that enable it.” – Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, Accelerate.
The definition and content of activities of the software development manager can vary widely.
OKRs vs. KPIs, what are the differences? That’s a common question I hear from managers of Engineering Teams. KPIs are more straightforward to explain than OKRs, which can be tricky and more complex. They don’t mean the same, although they are connected.
Modern engineering is about results, not hype. Explore why AWS Serverless is the "boring" choice that wins on scalability, cost, and operational focus.
Becoming a manager is usually one of the biggest challenges of an engineer’s career. We are usually used to algorithms and state machines, which are predictable and have specific outputs depending on the input.
A practical look at DevOps, traditional ops, and embedded SRE—and why embedded SRE may be the best way to reduce burnout without slowing teams.
Nick Cosentino is a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft that creates content aiming to help level up software engineers with articles and videos
A postmortem is the analysis of an event after it occurs.
Locating and securing a knowledgeable and reputable software developer is no easy task. It can take weeks, months or even years to locate the perfect candidate, and there are very few companies who can afford to wait an extended amount of time to fill their roster.
It’s been two weeks since we took action and made working from home mandatory for all the team members. Our top priority remains the health and safety of our team members. We have a responsibility to support our communities through the health crisis caused by COVID-19.
A developer with low salary and monotonous work is likely to end up burned out, it’s obvious. Yet what about overpaid workers with no relevant skills or experie
Discover 5 practical tips for more effective job interviews with developers. Improve your process and find the best fit for your team.
The secret sauce to an engineering team's success is an effective tech lead guiding the team to be on the right track.
A tech leader shares why stepping back from management to return to coding reignited their passion—and revealed a deeper form of leadership.
Learn to enhance decisions with strong arguments and meaningful metrics while avoiding the pitfalls of vanity metrics and overemphasis on data.
Most teams can spot bad on-call, but few can define healthy on-call. Here’s what sustainable, well-designed on-call actually looks like.
The following article is based on a talk Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, gave at our annual Engineering Leadership Conference and a subsequent interview. Watch the full talk here, and see the slides here.
Scrum isn’t just about speed—it’s about sustainability. Developers run sprints, but Product Managers run the marathon, ensuring momentum, focus, and long-term s
Most of us who have worked on IT projects feel the resonance of Hofstadter's Law:
Model-Based Engineering (MBE) is getting more attention these days and in order to explore it, I came up with this certain sort of a roadmap.
Starting in 2009, I've worked as a software engineer, lead developer, engineering manager, vice-president of engineering, and chief product officer. During this journey, I had the opportunity to support talented engineers in different career transitions, from individual contributor to lead developer, from lead developer to engineering manager. I found many shared struggles while mentoring them; that's why I'm writing a series on how to get prepared to move into these positions.
Being a new engineer can be challenging, but you can rock the role if you know how. Hint: not deleting the production database helps.
Internships are not about coffee runs, you can get a great experience that can make you stand out when applying for your first job out of University.
We hear about scalability all the time: Zillions of data, billions of hits on a website, millions of tweets, etc. With everything around us scaling to never seen before, the limiting element in all this is organization. Can we apply the knowledge of scaling software to scaling an organization?
10/14/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!
AI agents fail when management fails. Define-Deliver-Drive helps you manage agents like human teams: clear specs, WIP limits, and a delegation ladder....
This article explores the gap between engineering teams and their leaders, highlighting the importance of cohesion and alignment
Explore effective one-on-one leadership and strategic growth planning for engineering managers in tech startups, driving team success.
Engineering managers often rely on subjective clues to assess how their team is doing. But decisions made based on gut feel and imperfect measurements are less than ideal — sometimes they result in team success; other times they result in disappointment.
What is planning? What makes a plan good? Does planning slow you down? What are the key aspects of planning? A deep dive into engineering planning for managers
Not a developer yourself, but ended up in charge of a bunch of them? Here are 8 tips to working with them effectively without being too annoying or a bother.
As companies across the world continue to take precautions against COVID-19, many teams find themselves "suddenly remote" and adjusting to a new set of challenges on top of their daily work. At Exponent, we've been operating as a remote team for most of the past year, with engineers, designers, and PMs spread across several time zones—not to mention thousands of users around the world who are part of our Slack community and Interview Practice forum.
Here are a few tools that help make your Google Calendar work a little harder for you! These tools use AI tech to enhance the value you get from your Calendar.
Organisations spend a huge amount of time and resources to hire smart, talented and self-motivated individuals who show a strong passion and commitment towards their own growth and success of the organisation.
The five methods of facilitation I use to create collaborative meetings from over a decade of experience as a software engineering leader.
Raji Arasu is the visionary mind and engineering leader that occupies the position of SVP of Engineering at Intuit, making her one of the few female leaders at a major technology company. She is aware of this thing and supports women leaders in technology both within the company and across the industry.
How Rishabh Agarwal drives scalable engineering impact through performance optimization, system design, and values-driven technical leadership.
A data leader reveals the hidden cost of success: Sunday panic attacks, the "savior complex," and the struggle to find rhythm in a chaotic role.
The four key DevOps metrics are an exciting set of measurements. They’re getting more and more relevant since the book Accelerate has been published. I firmly believe they’re essential for engineering teams seeking effectiveness and efficiency.
A complete guide to hiring engineering managers, including how to identify what to interview for. Includes a full interview plan with interview questions.
Use this easy exercise to figure out who is responsible for what. Handy for teams and individuals.
If you’ve ever wished for a Sancho Panza to handle the mundane chores of programming while you focus on the grand vision, you’re not alone.
The best engineering teams share four traits: full commitment to decisions, separating ideas from identity, pragmatic judgment, and informed captains.
That technology is here to stay is an obvious duh. If and how well-prepared companies are to deal with the constant need to increase investments in technology, that’s not as simple. Another obvious axiom is that software engineers and developers are highly valuable resources. Weather having more or putting the ones you have to better use is the best approach, that is less obvious.
The only way to solve the Context Tax is to treat your work artifacts and your code, your meetings, and your tickets are as living documentation.
A well-known expression states “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst” — I was repeating it to myself over and over again while traveling between countries and offices with my 6 hours long, 220 slides, just-theory-no-practice incident management training. It was a fantastic experience, and I got great feedback. But today, three years later, I think it was one of the most stupid ideas of mine.
I'll list a few platforms and tools to keep an eye on in the AI/ML-driven space for DevOps, software development, and SRE.
One critical engineering metric can help you innovate faster, outrun your competition, and retain top talent: Cycle Time. It’s your team’s speedometer, and it’s the key to everything from developer satisfaction to predictable sprints. And Cycle Time has implications beyond engineering — it’s also an important indicator of business success.
That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of our new book, The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time. For those looking to boost their team’s efficiency and productivity, we offer a data-driven approach, backed by research, case studies, and our own experience as an industry-leading Engineering Intelligence platform.
An engineering manager is a technical leader responsible for managing and developing a team of engineers, ensuring quality output, and driving projects.
Master the magic switch of software development - feature flags. Learn how to release features fearlessly, improve efficiency, and reduce bugs.
There is no universal standard for which metrics should be used in specific cases.
Want to inspire and motivate your individual contributors? Try setting clear goals and expectations, providing ongoing feedback and support, encouraging career
As you prepare for your board meetings, you might be struggling to find some good news to share with the board. Sure, it’s a mistake to go into a board meeting pretending everything is going well — board meetings are a valuable opportunity to share your startup’s challenges and get guidance from a panel of trusted advisors.
Annie leads the business operations platform engineering group within Square’s platform & infrastructure organization. Prior to Square, she worked at a number of startups across a spectrum of industries from consumer products to enterprise solutions, as well as a wide variety of teams from sales to engineering. Having worked with many different managers, she’s formed her own leadership philosophies.
One of the most harmful behaviors I’ve observed in ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room. Chaos comes in many flavors: A decision was reached about an important architecture question weeks ago, but someone suddenly insists that you revisit the project’s fundamental goals at the 11th hour. An executive insists that their project is most important, and pushes it onto the roadmap. Or maybe you leave a productive meeting without concrete next steps, and are right back where you started in a week.
Here is the breakdown of the new reality, and why "Prompt Engineer" isn't just a meme—it's your new architectural responsibility.
Use an engineering handbook, open it to all, and see your process flourish
What goes into an Annual Performance Review that inspires employees? Learn the format that has resulted in real growth over seventy reviews.
Andrew Lau speaks to Hackernoon about starting Jellyfish, the excitement of solving real problems for software engineering leaders, and how he measures success.
You'll see "junior" level DevOps and SRE roles. You'll also see several people asking how to get into DevOps or SRE as a junior-level candidate.
This article offers insights, strategies, and best practices to excel in the challenging, yet rewarding, environment of Engineering Leadership.
Prioritizing the company roadmap was a challenge in my first engineering job.
Every person at some point in their career may need to ask themselves “Do I really want to be a manager?” The question may seem straightforward, but the answer is not. It requires digging deeper and finding answers for ourselves without relying on what others believe is the right thing for us to do.
What work does a data engineer actually do? Let me tell you one thing: it’s not what you think they should be doing, especially not the part where they are running around collecting data for you or building yet another one of those dashboards that will only be used for a few weeks.
Discover how tech organizations thrive by prioritizing principles, trust, innovation, and learning in the dynamic digital landscape. Adapt or fade.
80% of sales value is generated by 20% of products. 80% of the results are generated by 20% of the employees.
Here are tips for choosing job levels when headcount planning.
Task estimation is an art that every front-end engineer and engineering manager should master. With a well-structured framework that covers F.A.T.E (Feedback, A
Proactive (software) engineering leadership means you’re not a firefighter all the livelong day.
How to manage technical documentation effectively, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure that your knowledge base stays accurate and up-to-date in software developm
Why delivery failures rarely happen suddenly, how risk accumulates quietly in complex systems, and what teams miss when they focus only on incidents.
Most organization don't build enough software and are therefore missing out on possible value.
Our concepts of Lead Time and Cycle Time came from the field of Operations Management and Production Engineering. As such, I think it’s beneficial to all of us to maintain coherent with them and use the same semantics in Software Engineering Management as well.
If you’re an engineer curious about transitioning towards the business side, don’t underestimate how transferable your toolkit is.
Software engineering metrics help daily stand-up meetings to be more productive for the team. They can become tedious or irrelevant for many developers when they frequently exceed the fifteen minutes time box or even sound like a work report.
Good leadership is the key to any successful business, let
alone one that relies heavily on technological products.
It’s crucial to reflect on the inherent shortcomings of most PM processes, especially as they pertain to engineering culture.
In the Atlassian playbook, it states that Sprint Retrospective’s goal is to identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and why. Usually, the meeting consists of brainstorming what the team did well and what the team needs to do better.
Invest in managing software engineering efficiency, not only measuring individuals' performances.
We have entered a critical time in the life cycle of many companies around the world. The world has shifted away from a period of immense growth, and as many struggle to meet revenue expectations, companies and their leaders face a ton of pressure both internally and externally.
Faced with the disastrous consequences of a voluntary departure of employees for the company, keeping its teams as long as possible becomes a major issue. To gain in productivity, you must as a business leader, find the ways and means necessary to motivate and retain your employees.
Mastering Delegation: The art of embracing release
Hank Scorpio achieved something special in The Simpsons.
He got Homer Simpson to CARE about his job.
How did he do it?
Learn to master delegation as a growing developer. Embrace trust, avoid micromanagement, and unleash team potential. Transform from coder to leader.
DevOps is all the the rage insert fancy clothes and glass of champagne. Interestingly enough, many organizations are hiring for it and have no idea what its pur
I couldn't find any good resources on how to interview prep for a management role in cybersecurity, so I decided to make one.
Explore the parallels between scientific knowledge development and IT engineering, drawing insights from disciplines like physics and geometry.
Taking on a management role in engineering may be daunting at first. Here are some tips for getting through the initial period, based on my experience.
Make a plan. Be transparent about the plan. Keep everybody updated as the plan unfolds and evolves.
Engineering managers are in charge of tech teams. It means there are tens or maybe hundreds of people supporting them. Generally, they need to ensure the best practices around software development, hire and train engineering staff, align and motivate the team towards the company’s goal, manage the team’s performance, and be accountable for all technical decisions.
The conflict of top star developers is almost inevitable if you have several top people with identical specialization in one team.
These guys are tech stars and they know just everything about the technology that is used. They are used to command the technical solution and others usually recognize their talents and follow their ideas. The problem is when these top guys meet in one team where they have to cooperate closely.
Stop masking organizational failures with your weekends.
Being a successful Engineering Manager is not easy. Learn about 4 common pitfalls of failure that Engineering Managers need to watch out for.
On average, a software development team reworks about 26% of its code prior to release. Even after accounting for necessary changes, those wasted hours can cost a medium-sized business upwards of $4.7M a year.
Still, when engineering leaders look to cut costs, they often look at departmental spending. Software licenses, discretionary expenses, and even salaries may come under scrutiny.
But not all costs come with such a clear price tag — inefficiencies in the software development process are harder to quantify, but much more expensive.
According to a 2017 DORA white paper, Forecasting the Value of DevOps Transformations, the cost of Rework in software development is staggering, setting businesses of all sizes back millions of dollars a year.
Ever wondered what key metrics other engineering teams are tracking?
The short answer: it varies completely. Even within the same organization, different teams
Today’s business world is increasingly (and dizzyingly) complex. Traditional methods of navigation through this complexity are obsolete. C-suites admit that they don’t have enough of the right information at the right time, because their inner reports are no longer reliable.
Ensuring that a system and application are performing the way they're supposed to isn't anything new.
IT was once thought of as a purely supportive function, one whose primary responsibility was “keeping the lights on,” so to speak. Today, however — as technology has come to permeate every element of our lives and our companies — IT has become a crucial business asset, fundamental to maintaining sound operations and to driving business forward more generally.
Today's interview is with Marek Tihkan, CTO at Dashbird talking all about Dev team leadership and management.
Gathering context and showing empathy may be the most difficult parts of a performance review, but they’re also the most important — this year, more than ever.
In this blog post, you'll learn why it's important for a manager to stay technical and how it can help grow your business.
Use this advice to lead an existing engineering team to success, regardless of different coding languages or systems.
When was the last time you felt like bolting out of the conference room either bored to death or incredible frustrated and feeling like your time was carelessly and disrespectfully wasted? We bet it was as close as yesterday. What, is happening now? Well, get out now!
When giving feedback, the quality of it matters as much as its quantity. Feedback can be damaging to a team's productivity and performance if not given well.
We focus so much on external change - getting approval from executives or people on other teams. To enact real change, focus on what you can control.
A hackathon judge shares the forensic signals - git logs, package manifests, ghost dependencies, fake tests - that reveal more about a project than any demo.
I am going through what one might call “career puberty”. I’m growing up and moving to an engineering manager role. It’s more of a recognition of a position I reached organically and a job I’ve been de facto doing for some time now, rather than an abrupt change dictated by external factors.
Today, the demand for remote IT teams is growing at a breakneck pace, and considering the recent COVID-19 outbreak that has led businesses into extreme work challenges reflecting the rise of engineering requirements.
Value Stream Management (VSM) aims to help management and leadership teams determine the value of software development and CICD efforts for the organization.
Here are the strategies I use to prevent burnout in Agile software teams. Getting wellbeing strategies right helps improve productivity and work-life balance.
Processes are essential for effective management. They keep people in sync, making it possible for team members to come together and achieve a shared goal. But they’re also dangerous. Processes can create the illusion that things are running smoothly because they’re moving along according to the shared understanding of how they’re “supposed to” run.
This is the Fallacy of Process — the idea that by adding consistency and predictability to a shared workflow, a given process is inherently valuable.
Too often, process becomes canon. A team develops an effective way of doing something, then returns to that framework indefinitely, long past its expiration date.
Recently, I read a blog post titled "VPE and CTO — The first 90 days". It’s a brief article in which James Turnbull shows a mind map with four areas that “every new technical leader needs to, at least, think about and explore when starting at a new organization.”
I’ve been playing bass since I was 15. I play other instruments as well, but I have always been primarily a bass player.
There are two lessons here: 1) Think before you code - this one I regularly forget. 2) Don’t be afraid to throw away your code.
I believe that the most exciting technology of the present is Javascript because it can be used for multiple platforms (Web, Mobile, Backend).
Find out how engineering data can help you remove blockers, encourage professional growth, and empower excellence on your team.
Eric Gong talks about how to uncover a candidate's motivations during an interview and why that's so crucial to understanding if they are a culture fit or not.
Learn how to effectively evaluate engineering managers beyond code and output. This guide explores setting clear expectations, using structured feedback, tracki
Between January 29th and March 5th, we conducted a survey to get a technology landscape of the Brazilian startups and companies. We released the full report with the results of the study.
Information technology has had a high growth rate for years and there is a reason for that: a constant flow of innovations in technology, but also in business processes, as growing competition on the market has made innovation a must for every organisation. On the other side, the top skills missing among job applicants in the current world are problem solving, critical thinking, innovation and creativity.
AI killed the task layer — drafts, summaries, and code now take seconds. But the real bottleneck moved.
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