What I'm Reading: January 1

Career

• The Art of Self-Organizing Engineering Teams

  • On the importance of team-level goals, streamlined delivery processes, and a culture of autonomy

• Managing up better by giving your manager the information she needs

  • Let her know:

    • What's slowing the team down

    • Where the tech debt is

    • What support you need to get better at your job

    • What issues she should be escalating

• More on managing up

Tech

• Reconstituting the monolith

• Code that changed the world, from the popup ad to Google's PageRank (brief summary of a book)

• Engineer's bad SQL leads to headaches later on, and team lets it go to production to ship code quickly

  • Surely having Bob change one bad SQL query during code review couldn't have slowed down delivery timelines that much. Something bothers me here, and I think it might be this:

  • Of all the lessons learned, the author missed what I think is the biggest one: lack of a culture of shared ownership. Saying, "Well, I mentioned it in code review (I told you so)" but blaming the tech lead for telling them to ship it indicates a problem with how the team accepts responsibility (or doesn't) for its decisions. When the team makes a decision, each person should own that decision as if it were his own, because each member of the team has accountability for what get shipped. No "I told you so's" after the fact if things go wrong, and no throwing your tech lead under the bus. If you think something needs to change, make your case for why. But once the decision is made, we all own it as a team.