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Scaling Distributed Engineering Team: Managing Fast Growth in Remote
How would you scale a distributed engineering team?
It doesn’t involve just hiring more people, but also scaling communication, defining processes, making the culture strong enough and defining the vision, so you can build the new team on a solid foundation. It’s layers upon layers of work with no end. Juan Pablo Buritica, ex-VP of Engineering at Splice has managed it more than once, and explains how he pulled it off in this interview.
[Podcast + Blog post]
Mail bag for December 2019: when your team wants your job, personal brand, and service registries.
This post covers three interesting questions you should learn about as an engineering manager: how to handle your team competing with you, how should a CTO prioritize building a personal brand, and how to handle internal service registries?
Delivering Constructive Feedback
Everyone screws up, everyone makes mistakes. When we err, hopefully, someone pulls us aside and tells us about our blunder. Feedback, when delivered on time and in a constructive manner, is critical to learning and growth. Three things that have made my feedback stick: 1 provide it as quickly as possible, 2. be firm and kind, and 3. suggest how you would have acted in that situation.
Intercom’s Rich Archbold on Becoming a Manager of Managers
Talk with any engineering manager who regrets leaving coding and you’ll understand that management is not for everyone. In fact, Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom, believes that managing others is a life’s work.
The Seven Habits of One Highly Effective Manager of Managers: Things I Learned from Charity Majors
When I started managing, I knew I was learning a craft. I was willing to suck at it. I was willing to put in the work every day for years to someday be great at it. I accepted that there were no shortcuts or hacks to becoming a great manager overnight. And I laughed my ass off a few years later, when I noticed there was one thing that did truly make me a better manager almost instantly: reporting to Charity Majors.
An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader
Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do you think I should do?" or "Can you tell me what is next?". People would ask for permission, over forgiveness - and get scolded when they went ahead without involving these people.
How GitHub’s CTO Architects Engineering Teams That Scale
If building a high-powered engineering team is hard, successfully scaling it through hypergrowth is near impossible. So we were thrilled to welcome Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub, to speak at our Annual CTO Summit earlier this year where he shared more than a dozen discrete tips on architecting engineering teams that scale.
Here’s What I Learned During My First Year as a People Manager
’ve always been interested in management and used to wonder whether or not it was a path I would eventually take. Over the course of my career as a product designer at BuzzFeed, I loved the design work I was doing, but also loved the other parts necessary to make the design work happen:the people, the processes, the communication, the documentation.
Distributed, not remote
Every company may be a software company, but many software companies are now becoming distributed software companies. By adopting an everyone remote culture, we can hire, empower, and enable employees, wherever they happen to be.
Listening 7: Deliberate Appreciation
Appreciation suffers from a tragedy of the commons effect that we talked about before, as well as a Kitty Genovese effect with respect to “obviously” high achievers (“they’re so amazing, surely other people are already telling them how amazing they are, they don’t need to hear from me”). More often than not, the person you appreciate would be doing better if you told them so.
What You Should Do Now
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About the author:
Gabor Zold is a content marketer and tech writer, focusing on software development technologies and engineering management. He has extensive knowledge about engineering management-related topics and has been doing interviews with accomplished tech leaders for years. He is the audio wizard of the Level-up Engineering podcast.