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190 Stories To Learn About Engineering Management

by Learn RepoApril 30th, 2023

Too Long; Didn't Read

Learn everything you need to know about Engineering Management via these 190 free HackerNoon stories.

featured image - 190 Stories To Learn About Engineering Management

Let's learn about Engineering Management via these 190 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the /Learn Repo to find the most read stories about any technology.

1. What Is Bottleneck in PC World

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.

2. What Makes You a Great Programmer on The Team?

Majority of software developers are aspired to be not only a competent professional but also a great one.

3. In Brief: What You Should Expect from A Full-Stack Dev

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:

4. Engineering Leadership versus Engineering Management: What's The Difference?

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.

5. 3 Software Ownership Models and Joint Care for Dev Teams

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).

6. How to Test Terraform the Right Way

In this blog post, you'll learn about why you should be testing IaC and the best platforms to get started with.

7. How a Clean Codebase Becomes Unmaintainable

Let's figure out how the coding style increases and then degrades.

8. Why I Left Engineering Management and Moved Back to Individual Contribution

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.

9. 7 Rules to Track Software Engineering Metrics Correctly

How to Use - and NOT Abuse - Software Engineering Metrics

10. Did You Know Developer Hunting is a Thing?

Demand for developers leveled off, but it didn’t dip.

11. My Top Three Priorities as a Software Development Manager

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.

12. So, You Read Accelerate. Now What?

“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.

13. What Differentiates a Junior, Mid-Level, and Senior Developer

I often wondered about the difference between junior, mid-level, and senior developers, so I decided to write a short article about the topic.

14. Code Reviews And Why They Matter For Developers Performace

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.

15. Product Managers Can Avoid Delays By Reducing Technical Debt

PMs are ideally placed to create a workplace culture around preventing and responding to technical debt. Here are 7 actionable strategies to help PMs.

16. Top 10 Software Engineering Metrics To Track If You Lead An Agile Team

Every conversation I have with CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leaders eventually gets to the “Which Metrics Should We Measure?” discussion.

17. DevOps vs. SRE: Which Career Direction is Right for You?

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

18. True Engineering Enablement Starts with Onboarding

Engineering enablement cannot start with the tools and the process; great enablement must start with the engineers. And your engineers start with onboarding.

19. How to Make Your Team Miserable: 3 Anti-Patterns (not) to Follow

Hold daily standups. Ideally, this will take an hour every day.

20. The Ultimate Guide to DORA Metrics

What are DORA metrics and how can engineering teams use these metrics to identify high and low-performing dev teams?

21. 7 Years In Tech Leadership: What I've Learned

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.

22. SDLC Is a Complex Black Box and We Must Build Teams Accordingly

Invest in managing software engineering efficiency, not only measuring individuals' performances.

23. How to Be a Terrible Engineering Manager

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.

24. Startup Interview with Andrew Lau, Co-founder and CEO of Jellyfish

Andrew Lau speaks to Hackernoon about starting Jellyfish, the excitement of solving real problems for software engineering leaders, and how he measures success.

25. Should Anyone be Called a DevOps Engineer?

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

26. From Mid-level Developer to Engineering Manager: A Story of Professional Growth

Cheslav Novytskyi, Engineering Manager at Innovecs, shares his experience which may be useful for software developers in advancing their careers

27. The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier [Book Review]

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.

28. Why You Should Use Lead Time Instead of Cycle Time

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.

29. Writing an Annual Performance Review that Inspires Employees

What goes into an Annual Performance Review that inspires employees? Learn the format that has resulted in real growth over seventy reviews.

30. Now Available: The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time [eBook]

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.

31. Should You Hire More Software Engineers or Better Manage the Ones You Have?

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.

32. 3 Book Recommendations For Tech Leads (And Those Aspiring To Be)

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.

33. Tech Debt Calculation: Velocity-Based Vs. Issue-Based Vs. Quality-Based Measurements Explained

Technical debt clearly slows down new development - but that on its own doesn't mean that we should be fixing tech debt everywhere

34. 6 Tips for Working With Analysts and Data Engineers

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.

35. Code Reviews For Non-technical People. Explained.

36. Code Review Is Inherently Flawed. Here’s How to Fix It

The classic code review process contains several severe flaws and should be redesigned. The story depicts how to do so.

37. Startup CEOs: Here’s Good News You Can Include in Your 2020 Board Deck

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.

38. A Tactical Guide to Shorter Cycle Times: The Virtuous Circle of Software Delivery

This post is the first article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series.

39. Increasing Engineering Efficiency with Software Development Analytics

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

40. How Do I Handle Ambiguity as a Leader?

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.

41. Why Application Performance Monitoring Matters

Ensuring that a system and application are performing the way they're supposed to isn't anything new.

42. 4 Core Principles of Pragmatic Engineering

The following principles will save you time, money, energy, and increase the probability of your organization’s success.

43. The Most Important Enginnering KPIs for Your Board Deck

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:

44. Software Engineer Performance Review are a Paradox

Performance reviews play a big role in the operation of the organization.

45. Learning Management: My Adventure as an Acting Delivery Manager

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.

46. Code Isn't the Only Solution; and 8 Other Dev Lessons, 7 Years Later

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.

47. 4 Leadership Traits That'll Set Your Tech Startup Up For Success

Good leadership is the key to any successful business, let alone one that relies heavily on technological products.

48. Can You Land a Junior Role as a Dev Ops Engineer?

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.

49. 50 Shades of Lead Time: Measuring Each Part of the Development Process

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.

50. Verification and Configuration Management for Avionics Systems

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.”

51. How to Build Loyalty and Motivate Your Employees

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.

52. 5 Metrics Engineering Managers Can Extract from Pull Requests

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).

53. 20 Trackable Metrics to Make Software Development Teams More Efficient

Software development is a complicated process. Using specific KPIs in software development can make the procedure more manageable.

54. 4 Focus Areas for New Engineering Managers Who Give a D.A.M.N.

Management is just doing The D.A.M.N job: providing Direction; fostering Alignment; maintaining Motivation, and making sure there's No Blockers.

55. Microsoft Principal Software Engineering Manager Nick Cosentino Talks About His Writing Process

Nick Cosentino is a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft that creates content aiming to help level up software engineers with articles and videos

56. Would your engineers recommend your company to others?

How likely are our customers to recommend our products to others? - a simple yet powerful tool customer service teams use to gauge and sense.

57. It Is Time To Make Tough Engineering Decisions

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.

58. "Being Glue" is Holding Women Back in Tech, but Documentation Can Help

Internal documentation can help improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

59. What Engineering Managers Need To Understand About Compensation

A guide for engineering managers (and ICs) about the different types of compensation schemes as well as the advantages and disadvantages of those schemes.

60. The Best Leadership Advice? Don't Create Chaos

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.

61. How to Select Software Engineering Metrics and Set KPIs that Matter

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.

62. 3 Ways to Maintain Company-Wide Calm Through a Crisis

Make a plan. Be transparent about the plan. Keep everybody updated as the plan unfolds and evolves.

63. The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Empowering Excellence with Data [FREE ebook]

Find out how engineering data can help you remove blockers, encourage professional growth, and empower excellence on your team.

64. Hacking Quarterly Performance Reviews

What ACTUALLY happens when your manager writes your quarterly performance review? Learn their tricks to get the promotion you deserve.

65. Engineering Metrics: The Moneyball Approach

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.

66. Why Your Team Needs to Add CM to Its CI/CD Pipeline

Learn about Continuous Merge and how it should be added to your CI/CD pipeline.

67. How to Scale Organization

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?

68. The Joys and Sorrows of Corporate Meetings

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!

69. How to Properly Estimate Tasks So You Never Miss Another Deadline

Will adding people or cutting scope help you reach your project deadline? Learn how planning and spreadsheets can help you find answers.

70. How Engineering Teams Can Leverage the Power of Metrics

Ever wondered what key metrics other engineering teams are tracking? The short answer: it varies completely. Even within the same organization, different teams

71. Main Qualities Of A Great Lead Developer

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.

72. Level Up Your Team: Proven Methods for Developing Software Engineers and Driving Results

High-performing teams proactively develop their engineers to address the team's skill gaps, using methods such as tutorials, mentorship and stretch assignments

73. A Q&A With Slack's Rukmini Reddy on Data-Driven Mentorship, Career Paths, and Belonging

Hear Rukmini Reddy's story - Slack SVP of Engineering and Twilio Developer Searchlight Honoree

74. WTF is a Postmortem

A postmortem is the analysis of an event after it occurs.

75. How To Prepare For A Cybersecurity Manager Job Interview

I couldn't find any good resources on how to interview prep for a management role in cybersecurity, so I decided to make one.

76. Everyone Fails with Software They Don’t Build

Most organization don't build enough software and are therefore missing out on possible value.

77. How To Use Guilds For Better Knowledge Transfer Between Engineers

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.

78. How Engineering Managers Can Organize Remote Workflow

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.

79. 8 Tips for Managing Developers for Non-Developers

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.

80. A Guide to the Best Security Practices and Strategies for Remote IT teams

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.

81. The Importance of Building a Diverse, Well-Rounded Engineering Team

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.

82. Subtle Culture Problems That Often Go Unnoticed

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.

83. Your Superpower: Change What You Control

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.

84. Build Your Product Roadmap for 2020 Today With One of These Great Tools

What is a Product Roadmap?

85. 7 Software Development Methodologies Loved by Enterprises in 2022

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.

86. I've Been Playing Bass Since I Was 15 And That Made Me A Better Team Lead

I’ve been playing bass since I was 15. I play other instruments as well, but I have always been primarily a bass player.

87. 5 Ways Engineering Managers Can Motivate Individual Contributors

Want to inspire and motivate your individual contributors? Try setting clear goals and expectations, providing ongoing feedback and support, encouraging career

88. When Over-Engineering Is A Good Idea

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

89. The Problem With Promotion-Obsessed Cultures

The problems with promo-culture

90. How Google’s Python Code Style Guide Can Help You Speed Your Engineering Team

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

91. Pro-Tip: Deliver Feedback as a Cop and Not as a Messenger

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.

92. Building Efficient Engineering Cultures with UX Design Principles

How to apply UX design principles to develop supportive and efficient engineering cultures

93. The ROI of Git Analytics tools

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.

94. "With $10m I would invest in advancing education using technology" - Noonies Nominee

I believe that the most exciting technology of the present is Javascript because it can be used for multiple platforms (Web, Mobile, Backend).

95. What's the difference between Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery?

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?

96. Code Search is a superpower

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.

97. Headcount Planning? Here are 4 Tips for Choosing Job Levels

Here are tips for choosing job levels when headcount planning.

98. Can This Ownership Exercise Improve Your Collaboration Habits

Use this easy exercise to figure out who is responsible for what. Handy for teams and individuals.

99. Reasons Your Process Needs to be Open Source

Use an engineering handbook, open it to all, and see your process flourish

100. Have You Hacked Level 4 of Career Conversations Yet?

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.

101. Measuring Sprint Velocity

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.

102. How Engineering Leaders Can Prioritize Code Quality

Learn why code quality matters, the most important metrics you need to manage quality, and how to track and manage code quality issues.

103. Engineering Levels Ladder Explained

Ockam is sharing their engineer ladder in an effort to provide transparency and help junior engineers understand their potential career path.

104. Positive Behavioral Metrics: How to Identify, Implement and Share KPIs

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.

105. Tech Teams in Brazil: 42% Deploy Daily, Another 38% Deploy Weekly [Study]

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.

106. Field Notes from My Journey into Engineering Management

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.

107. Leading the Pack: The Exciting Role of an Engineering Manager and How to Excel in It

An engineering manager is a technical leader responsible for managing and developing a team of engineers, ensuring quality output, and driving projects.

108. 5 Prompts to Help You Define Core Values at Your Early-Stage Startup

The Tara founding team at San Jose HQ

109. Ted Lasso’s Leadership Lessons Made Me a Successful Leader

Ted Lasso's leadership style is rarely seen in media.

What traits can we learn from Ted to make us successful leaders?

110. Engineering Management: The Nine Challenges

“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.

111. How to Not Screw Up Your Product Strategy

Engineers often complain about product strategy, but this post goes through why it is so hard and how to avoid common pitfalls.

112. Are You Contributing to a Toxic Work Environment Without Realizing It?

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.

113. OKRs vs. KPIs: What's the Difference for Engineering Teams?

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.

114. Strategies to Improve Your Sprint Retrospectives with Data

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.

115. Agile is "The Best"!

I was asked to answer the Quora question, “Why is the Agile model the best”.

116. Top 3 Metrics For Engineering Team Performance

What’s the overall performance of your engineering team? Let’s look at how we can improve your team’s performance.

117. How to Prevent Code Reviews from Wasting Everyone’s Time

This post is the fourth article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.

118. Creating a Strong Code Quality Culture in Your Organization

Learn how to build a culture of code quality to improve maintainability, scalability, and efficiency, and stay ahead of the competition.

119. How to Win as an Associate Software Engineer

Being a new engineer can be challenging, but you can rock the role if you know how. Hint: not deleting the production database helps.

120. On Bloom's Taxonomy and Why Agile Training is Not Enough

121. What Are The Responsibilities Of Software Development Manager?

The definition and content of activities of the software development manager can vary widely.

122. Incident Management: Onboarding Tips and Tricks

“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Henry Ford.

123. What I've Learned in My First Year as a Software Engineering Team Lead

Practical leadership tips for a tech lead of a software engineering team.

124. DevOps: I Measure The Metrics A Bit Differently. Here's Why

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.

125. Who Owns Your Company Roadmap?

Prioritizing the company roadmap was a challenge in my first engineering job.

126. Incident Management Process: How to Train For The Tech-Fu

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.

127. 5 Ways A Bad Dev Hire Will Cost Your Company More Than You Think

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.

128. 3 Things Great Engineering Managers Do

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:

129. How to Not Suck as a New Engineering Manager in 2020

Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, once said:

130. Solving the Last Mile Problem for Continuous Delivery

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.

131. How Does Innovative Product Engineering Work?

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?

132. How Metrics Lead to Effective Sprint Retrospectives

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.

133. Uncovering Motivation in Engineering: an Interview with a Technical Recruiter

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.

134. Why Tech Startup Leaders Should Still Spend Some of their Time Coding

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.

135. Setting Up a Dedicated Distributed Team at a Fintech Startup [A How-To Guide]

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.

136. How Engineering Managers Benefit from Synthetic Metrics

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.

137. The 4 Common Pitfalls We Fall Into As Engineering Managers

Being a successful Engineering Manager is not easy. Learn about 4 common pitfalls of failure that Engineering Managers need to watch out for.

138. Running A Tech Community in Your Company: An Ex-Principal Engineer’s Guide

5 easy steps to create a sustainable tech community in your company that everyone loves.

139. Model Paradigm for Engineering

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.

140. Becoming a Manager of Engineers: How to Focus on Visibility and Predictability

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.

141. A Programmer's Guide to Crack 'Twice the Work, Half the Time' Code

Modern methods of software measurement do not provide a strong base for continuous improvement. This article tries to fill this gap.

142. 3 Tools to Help Your Remote Team Stay Productive

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.

143. Conflict of Top Star Developers

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.

144. 3 Ways to Align IT Team Activity with Bottom-Line Business Objectives

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.

145. How I got into programming and my thoughts on its future

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

146. How Do Salary and Job Satisfaction Influence Developer Burnout?

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

147. Optimism - Curse of Big IT Projects and How to Manage It

Most of us who have worked on IT projects feel the resonance of Hofstadter's Law:

148. Benefits of Business Intelligence in Leading Your Engineering Team

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.

149. Rework Costs Your Company Millions — How to Cut Back?

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.

150. How to 10x Your Skills and Become a More Efficient Tech Lead

The secret sauce to an engineering team's success is an effective tech lead guiding the team to be on the right track.

151. Spacecraft Engineering Models: How to Migrate UML to TypeQL

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.

152. Why is Making Software so Difficult?

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?

153. How Splice Applied the Scientific Method to Unblock Deployment

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.

154. How to Prevent Code Reviews from Becoming Bottlenecks to Shipping Out

This post is the third article in our Tactical Guide to a Shorter Cycle Time five-part series. Read the previous post here.

155. Software Quality: The Top 10 metrics to build confidence

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.

156. Five Things I Would Have Done Differently

I don’t have many regrets in my professional career. In fact, I have none. Regretting is useless and a waste of time.

157. How to Tailor Your Innovation Efforts to Work in an IT Work Environment

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.

158. Overwelming Formula For Goal Achievement As a Tech Lead In 90 Days

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.”

159. Is VSM the New Way to Measure DevOps?

Value Stream Management (VSM) aims to help management and leadership teams determine the value of software development and CICD efforts for the organization.

160. Marketing 401 for Engineers: Stages of Going to Market

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.

161. Managing an Engineering Team: A Guide for Startups

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.

162. What is an 80/20 Manager and How Do You Become One?

80% of sales value is generated by 20% of products. 80% of the results are generated by 20% of the employees.

163. How to Reshape Performance Reviews for a Difficult Year and Beyond

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.

164. Upskill Your Managers With Mini-M Support Groups

A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session.

165. Managers: Beware the Fallacy of Process

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.

166. Leveraging Data as a Proactive Engineering Manager

Proactive (software) engineering leadership means you’re not a firefighter all the livelong day.

167. AI-Driven DevOps: Everything you Need to Know

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.

168. How is a Dev Team Structured?

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?

169. Managing Remote Engineering Teams: How, Why, When

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.

170. Why Do I Want To Become A Manager

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.

171. Successfully Change Collaborative Meetings With These Five Proven Methods of Facilitation

The five methods of facilitation I use to create collaborative meetings from over a decade of experience as a software engineering leader.

172. Combatting Overengineering: Don't Be Afraid To Throw Away Your Code

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.

173. The Essential Data for Leading a Remote Engineering Team

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:

174. How To Create an Engaging and Collaborative Delivery Team For Your Business

Does your team feel its alignment with business where what it delivers solve business problems and achieve business desired outcome?

175. On Discussing Engineering Metrics to Direct Your Team's Focus, Daily

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.

176. Engineering Management Trends in 2022

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!

177. "Continuous Learning, Growth & Preparation for New Challenges is the Main Motivator" - Marek Tihkan

Today's interview is with Marek Tihkan, CTO at Dashbird talking all about Dev team leadership and management.

178. Was Hank Scorpio a Good Boss?

Hank Scorpio achieved something special in The Simpsons.

He got Homer Simpson to CARE about his job.

How did he do it?

179. Important Work Life Lessons on How to Effectively Manage an Existing Engineering Team

Use this advice to lead an existing engineering team to success, regardless of different coding languages or systems.

180. The OODA Loop Model: How Great Engineering Managers Identify and Respond to Challenges

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.

181. Throwing Top Engineering Internship Myths out the Window

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.

182. How To Assess And Improve Your Software Engineering Team's Performance

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?

183. Using AI To Enhance Your Calendar And Other Productivity Hacks & Tools for Manager

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.

184. 10 Common Product Management Mistakes that Could be Slowing Your Progress

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.

185. Scaling An Engineering Team Effectively: SVP Raji Arasu's Advice

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.