🎉 It’s happeninggg!!!
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us is now on sale!
I’m so excited to finally release this after so much went into it. 50% of all of my profits will go to She Code Africa!
I named our first dog Sudo, so I can say “Sudo sit”. Dizzy the second one Beam for the Erlang runtime. We’re naming this one Pico because I like the nano/pico editor, and because Pico means smol.
That's another widespread misconception about mob programming: that less experienced people will get ousted during the session. None of that ever happens. Even the least experienced members quickly rise to the occasion & get full support from the mob. Friendly atmosphere.
There's this magical, quiet period during the winter break when hardly anyone is in the office + there are few (if any) meetings
and a person can spend almost the entire day reading/writing docs; writing/reviewing code; testing features; and catching up on podcasts + tech talks
Other stats to surface on the twitter UI:
- num of people who saw your tweet and eye-rolled
- ratio of many pets you want to have vs current amount
- how gassy you feel, scale of 1-10
- how much you like Elon 1-10 (anything below 5, and you’re suspended as a bot)
A dev who can build something alone quickly may not have the skillset to evaluate these tradeoffs. Deciding that if you are smart and can’t figure it out, it must be broken is irresponsible.
This is why a curious mindset is one of the greatest strengths an engineer can possess.
If you have a lot of hubris with no curiosity, you might not understand:
- how to build upon lessons learned from the old system
- the opportunity cost of trying something new
- the complexity of a massive rewrite, or why the system became complex for the current features
How are they testing any of that new infrastructure, and given that this is probably a multi-year project, what’s the plan for shipping new features in the interim? Who is going to set up security and trust reviews for the changes they are making (critical in social media)?
Even if all of those were easy, which they aren’t, and even if they had a perfect new system all set up, what about the cost and risk of a massive migration? Migration costs are huge, and ensuring stability in that process even more so.
Let’s say a massive rewrite was even feasible for them, which I have high doubts of. This doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost of the time spent doing this.
Do they have SLOs in place? How will they maintain those while rebuilding?
Good devs are curious: they explore context before they get to work.
None of that happened, under the assumption that “I’m so smart, I can figure everything out on my own, quickly.” You see this a lot with junior devs or folks who haven't had to maintain large systems over time
When the staff were fired/walked out the door, they took with them all of this context. The existing code can tell you what it does and how, but it can’t tell you why.
Legacy and heavily used systems have decision accumulation over the years:
some decisions were made because of the technology available at the time, some due to a feature need, some due to dependency management, some were made to make the system more secure or to test it.
Most of us who work on heavily used systems at scale saw this one coming, and that they would propose a rewrite as they just have, and we also don’t think this is the answer.
This is why hubris is a very counterproductive quality in engineering.
Why do we all agree on this?
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I used to be the Android Tech Lead of Search on this bird app
I passed the 6 months probation period, shipped multiple features, onboarded engineers, fixed very serious tech debt, and was project lead for some 🔎 features on all clients
Turns out when your new fancy search function needs to worry about things like scalability, design system consistency, abuse mitigation, multi-device support, and multi-language support, it's going to take a lot longer than two weeks to get a deployment out.
Wild, huh?
I have a question:
How long can the richest (aherm, 2nd richest!) man on earth afford to lose >$5MM a day ($150MM a month)? Remember, margin call cover sales,
can drive stock price down further.
I told y'all, you can be 4ch*n, or you can make money. You can't do both.
Fascism happens one step at a time.
Each step is seemingly small, but when you look back it’s hard to believe how far it’s gone.
What seemed outrageous, starts to feel normal.
This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy…
If I’m only working on directly what’s in front of me, I’m reactive. Not making a difference. I’m also not taking opportunities that I might have that others don’t, to make wider and more lasting change.
My resolution to myself is to try to think as broadly as I can next year.
And then there’s the analysis of the whole system, even things outside of my control, and work to influence and support enough people in that system that have similar goals and perspectives that we can make broader shifts together over time
This is going to require a lot of introspection on a regular cadence. Things like:
- something didn’t work properly -> fix it but also think about what the base cause may be -> what technical and people problems were set up in such a way that problems like this are symptoms
Sometimes poor negotiating is due to assumptions:
- assuming that we know the counterparts needs and perspective
- assuming prioritizing our argument will be effective
- assuming they know what we want and why
IMO, sometimes negotiation is about engaging curiosity
If you’re a manager in any function or ever aspire to be a manager, this is a worthwhile read. Hopefully a lot of the ideas she shared will be familiar, but her experience gives them a lot more depth. Too many great bits to share here, but get a copy.
It’s happeninggg!!!
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us is now on sale!
I’m so excited to finally release this after so much went into it. 50% of all of my profits will go to She Code Africa! @SheCodeAfricahttps://amazon.com/Engineering-Management-Rest-Sarah-Drasner/dp/B0BHX8BQ9C/…
An Idaho woman who is miscarrying and been denied an abortion because of state law has been documenting herself getting sicker and sicker over the last two days