culture

Helicopter Management and Other Mistakes

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You are a freshly minted manager. You come full of rage and frustration at the poor management you’ve endured and witnessed in tech, and you are god damn determined not to repeat all of those mistakes.

You are tired of reporting to a manager who isn’t transparent with you, who hoards critical information and isn’t forthcoming about changes that impact you. You are tired of not being listened to or treated like a cog, so you swear to really listen and take your reports seriously.

You have seen sooooo many managers who failed to develop their people or sponsor them for growth opportunities, who blamed their team and hung them out to dry instead of having their back behind closed doors. Managers who didn’t seem to care about you as people, or who never made it feel safe to say, “I need a mental health day”. Managers who dangled the promise of a promotion, but even though you are doing the work, the recognition never comes.

Fuck that shit. You aren’t going to do ANY of it.

And … you don’t! 🎉

🌸🍃 You make time in your 1x1s to ask about their personal lives and hobbies — you are careful not to pry or be intrusive, just showing that you care. You urge them to take vacation, often. You remind them, firmly, not to be a hero. You model the behavior of taking mental health days to show that not only is it safe, but managers need them too.

🌸🍃 You ask them about their career goals and aspirations. You make it your personal mission to get them promoted, so you frequently check in with them to make sure they’re on the right path. You keep an eye out for things they do that are above and beyond, and for strengths that make them special. They always know you are on their side.

🌸🍃 If you hear about a clash or a conflict between them and another team member, you quickly jump in to figure out what’s going on and make sure it gets resolved, with each person feeling heard before the conflict has time to marinate or fester.

🌸🍃 When reviews comes around, you write warm, passionate essays for each of your direct reports, listing all the things they have done and all the ways they have grown. You go in to manager calibrations fully prepped to advocate for each of your people to get the promotions and rewards they so richly deserve.

🌸🍃 If someone on your team ends up needing more help, whether that’s keeping them productive and on track or helping with prioritization or conflicts… whatever it is, you are there to help turn the situation around. This person was struggling under their old manager, maybe even close to being let go, but under your care they are thriving.

🌸🍃 Nobody ever leaves your team. This is a point of quiet pride for you. People want to transfer to your team, but never from. There may have been a couple close calls, but you are always able to save the day by talking it out with the person and figuring out what they need in order to stay.

🌸🍃 You take pride in your transparency and the democratized ethos of your team, where you collectively determine your priorities and no one feels pressured into doing something they don’t want to do.

Bottom line: you are a GREAT manager.

Right???

After all, your team ranks sky high on every company survey on employee happiness, manager trust, and autonomy and sense of purpose. Your team fucking LOVES YOU. You’re pretty sure they would follow you to your next job, if you left. So maybe you ARE the world’s greatest manager.

Or maybe…you are heavily optimizing for one aspect of the management role, the part where you interface with your direct reports as an ally and coach. You might even be optimizing to the extent that you are neglecting or outright harming other aspects of the job.

Rookie Mistake #1: Only Managing Down

But management means coaching and supporting the people on your team, right? What else is there?

Well.. a lot, actually. Like, the business needs to succeed, for starters. ☺️ And there are a bunch of other relationships that matter besides your own direct reports. A good, strong manager needs to care about:

  • Goals and planning. Managers are generally responsible for crafting a team roadmap out of the impossible mess of company strategy requirements, requests from other teams, product roadmap commitments, and KTLO (keep the lights on) work. Some companies also use OKRs.
  • Right-sizing workloads. There is always at least 10x as much work to be done as cycles to do work, which means estimating how much your team can deliver, planning that work, and dealing with the inevitable surprises that come up during execution. How do you balance urgency vs importance? It is YOUR job to make sure your team isn’t overcommitted.
  • Stakeholder management. Does your team have a reputation for delivering quality work when they say they will, more or less on schedule? Are you a good neighbor to other teams, or do they feel like anything they ask for goes into a black hole? This is largely determined by you.
  • Managing up. Your manager relies on you to provide enough visibility into your team that they can (at minimum) make good decisions where your team is involved, and help head off any problems or conflicts before they escalate.
  • Managing up (another sort) is the relationships you build and impressions you leave with your skip-level and other adjacent leaders. You are your team’s representative and ambassador. Leaders form a view of the org based on scraps of data. For the sake of your team: give good scraps.
  • Managing out horizontally. Building great relationships and a web of mutual support with your peers. Sharing context with each other. Managers are like the nervous system, carrying signal from point to point.
  • Contributing to the organization your team sits in, and its standards, policies, and structural integrity. This is the one most likely to suffer if a manager is laser focused on their own team. This means things like…applying the job ladder fairly and consistently, without playing favorites. Engaging in a dialogue with the ladder rather than bending the rules or making an exception.

As a manager, you have been granted certain formal powers by the org, to be used for the benefit of the org. This means you have a responsibility to care for the organization, and your team within that context.

You shouldn’t be advocating for the benefit of your team members, you have a greater responsibility to the rules and categories of the system, which you collectively maintain and agree upon. The system can’t survive if every manager is gaming the rules on behalf of their team. The system only works if every manager is playing fair.

As a line manager, the work you do interfacing with your team will likely be 50-75% of your time and energy … and impact. But this ratio changes as you go up the org chart. As a VP? Maybe 10-20% of your energy and time can go to your direct reports.

The higher up the ladder you go, the less important your bedside manner becomes and the more important your strategic direction becomes. You are first and foremost responsible for the company’s success, not for your reports’ feelings and career development.

Rookie mistake #2: Helicopter management

If rookie manager mistake number one is thinking that management consists of coaching and interfacing with your team, mistake number two is closely related. Mistake number two is … overmanaging the team, coddling people, and basically never allowing anyone to fail. I think of it as “helicopter managing”.

Helicopter management consists of overly identifying with your team and their needs and wants, instead of taking a step back and considering them in the full context of the organization, or letting them take risks and stand on their own two feet. You’re their manager, not their babysitter.

I have a personal story to illustrate this.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I had a team member who was energetic, highly talented, and a little high strung. I ended up spending a lot of time managing their relationships with other team members, keeping them on track with their projects, and helping them manage their emotional state in general. They nearly left in a dudgeon one time, and I think most managers would have let them go, but I saved the day and they stayed. I was actually really proud of the fact that I had retained them and kept them high-functioning for years. If you asked me, I would have shelved this under my successes, maybe even “proudest manager moments”.

Years later, though, I look back on this situation through very different eyes. Yes, I retained them at the company / on the team, with decent relationships, and they did a lot of good work! But should I have?

At what cost?

Most weeks, I probably spent 50-75% of my total emotional bandwidth on this one person’s needs. For years. Is this the best thing I could have done for the company with all that time and energy? Probably not!

Was this the best thing I could have done for them? I don’t even think it was that either! All that my coddling ultimately did was teach them the wrong lessons, and prevent them from learning the right ones. It delayed those lessons by a few years, and made learning them all the more painful when they finally came.

There are no clear bright lines here. But it’s worth checking in with yourself from time to time, and asking hard questions.

  • You spent all that time coaching and doing a diving save to retain that person …. but should you have? Is this really the best place for them to be at this point in their career?
  • Or let’s say you managed to turn around someone’s performance from failing to succeeding. Great!! But are you confident they are set up to excel, or are they always going to be hovering on the lower bound of acceptable performance? Are you going to be having this same discussion again next quarter?
  • Consider all that time you spent intimately entwined with every detail of every technical project your entire team was working on, reading every PR and design doc. Should you have? Or did you unintentionally deprive them of some agency, while cheating yourself out of time you should have spent becoming a better leader, strengthening your org, or understanding next year’s challenges?
  • Are you giving people only positive feedback? This is a common rookie manager mistake, and it often comes from a place of kindness, or overcompensating for overly negative environments. But you are not only cheating your people of opportunities for growth, you are teaching them that growth is something to be feared and avoided.
  • Or are you cheerleading people so intensely that they come away with a lopsided view of how valuable or advanced their skills are? Are you promoting fast and loose, so they grow to equate promotions with career development? Have you been spoon feeding them growth, or are they developing autonomy over time?

This can be especially unfortunate at higher levels, where autonomy is part of the definition of being a senior+ engineer. You might be stifling them and not allowing them to exercise that agency, or even develop that skill. For senior contributors, autonomy is what they bring. You gotta let them do it.

This shit is challenging. There are no simple answers. The “right” answer is often only obvious in retrospect, months or years later. Everyone needs help sometime, some of us more than others, and that’s okay.

But is it sustainable? What price will you pay?

What I do know is that if you haul someone over the finish line, that is not a success. If you’re going to be having the same hard conversations with them again in one month, three months, six months…that is not success. If they are going to have a rough landing the next time they change teams, that is not success, nor is it in their best interest. And if your team is overly dependent on you, you aren’t actually doing your job.

And honestly? People really WANT to be challenged. They crave it! Or at least the people you want to work with do.

Rookie Mistake #3: Your view of the system is incomplete

I’m only going to touch on this one very briefly; it’s long and complicated, and probably deserves a post of its own.

Systems thinking is a core skill for both managers and engineers. It’s not a skill we are born with; it takes a lot of practice and failure to develop good instincts for debugging complex systems. As an engineering manager, you may have spent 10+ years writing software and learning how computers work, but you have hardly begun to understand how business and organizational systems work.

This explains a lot when it comes to the empathy gap between engineers and management, I believe. 🙃

We spend a lot of time talking about empathy these days — empathy between teams, people, neurotypes; holding space for the fact that nobody is always at their best, etc. Yet engineers can still be incredibly dismissive and judgey towards management actions and organizational decisions.

We see a decision that doesn’t make sense to us, or that we wouldn’t have made, and we write it off as being selfish, uninformed, incompetent, stupid, money-grubbing, bureaucratic, untrustworthy, craven, selling out. Or — maybe worst of all — we shrug and say something cynical about how this kind of thing always happens in business. Or they’re out to get us, or they never listen to us, or it shows how much they don’t give a shit about us..

Far be it to me to excuse corporate venality, or to try and blow smoke up your ass about your leaders’ motives. But in many, many of these situations, this actually represents a failure of systems thinking when it comes to imagining the complex business, corporate, and people systems your leaders are operating in.

When you find yourself thinking things like:

  • “Why am I hearing this feedback so late, in such a roundabout way? Why didn’t they just come to me right away and tell me directly, and I could have fixed it so much sooner!”
  • “Why would they hire someone external to fill that role, instead of promoting the person who has been doing the work just fine in the meantime? Typical exec move; they never see the potential in the people they have, they always want to get someone who has already done the job before.”
  • “Why is our roadmap changing yet again? Why is this getting dropped in our lap? Our director doesn’t seem to know anything about building good software.”
  • “Why didn’t I get invited to that meeting, when it was about MY budget and MY workload? You can’t even get a seat at the table around here unless you have a director title or report to the CEO.”
  • “Why is that person being given ANOTHER chance? If they weren’t a straight white guy, they would have been fired a year ago.”

… or anything else that boils down to “other managers are stupid, hypocritical, or bad at their jobs”, stop yourself, and first try to understand “under what circumstances might their action be a reasonable one, or even the right one?”

Approaching people systems problems with curiosity, empathy, and the full awareness that you may never know the entire story (and there may be good reasons for this!) will make you a better coworker and a much more effective leader.

And if you are working as a manager at a company where you have enough evidence to prove that you cannot, should not take such a generous view of your peers, then maybe don’t. Like, if you have a professional responsibility to represent an organization you can not ethically represent… I would suggest not doing that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you can.

Your View of Your Manager Is Incomplete

One of the most challenging things to deal with, in my (limited) experience as an exec, is when you have a manager who is well-liked by their team but fundamentally ineffective in the role, so you have to replace them. Then you are left with a team left feeling bereft and confused, and you can’t just give them a list of all the ways their manager was actually dropping the ball and not doing their job well, because people deserve some privacy and dignity. You pretty much just have to suck it up, and hope that you have enough trust banked for them not to quit.

It’s entirely possible for a manager to be beloved by their entire team, while having a corrosive effect on the system around them. Sometimes it’s their very willingness to bend the system for their people’s benefit that generates that loyalty.

An unwary manager may create a sort of island within the company, where the team does not feel part of — may even feel separate from, superior to, or suspicious of — the broader org or the company. Team members may feel like “this is the only team I would ever want to belong to at this company”, or “my manager is great, they protect us from all the big company bullshit”, or “it’s us against the world”, or “nobody understands us, except our manager”. These are seductive dynamics to slip into because tribalism is so powerful. The more apart you feel from the company, the more tightly you may bond with each other.

I’m not judging you. I was that manager at Parse, to some extent, after the Facebook acquisition. I did not give a shit about the org, I only cared about my team. So…I get it. I still wouldn’t want me as a manager in my org.

What would you do?

The system is what the system does.

Put yourself in your senior leadership’s shoes. What would YOU do if you had to choose between a good, reliable manager who gets the job done for the org and isn’t particularly beloved by their reports (she’s not awful, the team thinks she’s “fine”), vs a manager who is beloved by their reports and cares about their career growth deeply, but is weak at everything else? What will manager #2 cost the rest of the org, and who will bear those costs?

Don’t make your leadership make that choice. Be a manager who is good to your team, and good to the organization too.

Honestly, it is healthy for a manager to not identify too closely with their team. You should stand with them, but a step or two apart. After all, your job is to be pushing or pulling them in a direction, not just standing still and … marinating.

If you identify with them too closely, it can get very hard to tell your reports hard things. You may empathize with them so much that you put their feelings above the need to get shit done. You can be friends with your team, just like parents can be friends with their children, but the friendship doesn’t come first. Your formal role comes first.

On being a new manager who cares a lot

There’s something really beautiful about the energy and dedication that brand new managers bring to the role. Some of the most spectacular results I’ve ever seen for individual team members have come from teams with first time managers, who are determined and idealistic and pouring their whole heart and soul into the people reporting to them. They haven’t yet learned to pace themselves or to be more well-rounded with their time and energy, and sometimes a person can soak up that attention and turn a failing situation around into a thriving one.

I would never tell a manager that they should care less. Caring for people is the beating heart of this job. It doesn’t matter how efficient and effective you are at delivering feedback, managing people out, and planning roadmaps if you don’t truly give a shit about the people you serve. Even as you rise in the ranks and people-interfacing becomes a smaller % of what makes you good at your job, caring is still absolutely essential.

So I hope the message of this post doesn’t come across as “you think you’re a good manager, but here’s why you actually suck”. ☺️ You got into this role because you cared, and this is valuable. Never lose touch with it.

The message is simply that it took me years and years to learn that there is more to being a great manager than caring about my team. I hope you can learn it faster than I did.

 

Helicopter Management and Other Mistakes

Choose Boring Technology Culture

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Honeycomb recently announced our $50M Series D funding round. We aren’t the type to hype this a lot; Emily summed it up crisply as, “Living another day on someone else’s money isn’t business success, even though it is a lovely vote of confidence.”

Agreed. The vote of confidence does mean more than usual, given the dire state of VC funding these days, but…raising money is not success. Building a viable, sustainable company is success.

Whenever we are talking to investors, something that inevitably comes up is what a bomb ass team 🌈 we have. They have always been impressed by our ability to recruit and retain marquee names, people we “shouldn’t have been able to get” at our stage; honestly it’s even better than they realize, because we have heavy hitters all up and down the company, most of whom simply aren’t as well known. 😉 (Fame, and this may shock you, is not a function of talent.)

People join Honeycomb for many reasons, but “culture” is one of the most commonly cited. We have never been shy about talking about the ways we think tech culture sucks, or the experiments we are running. But this has given rise to the occasional impression that we are primarily cultural innovators who occasionally write software. We really aren’t.

In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. We try to choose boring culture.

What The Fuck Does “Culture” Even Mean?

Ok, so this is where the problem starts. This is why it grates on my nerves any time someone starts making pronouncements about how “your culture is bad”, “culture is the problem”, “fix your broken culture”… AUUGGGHHH. Those sentences are MEANINGLESS.

What does “culture” even mean?? Let’s consult the interwebs:

  • Culture: “An umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions and norms for a group; knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of those individuals”
  • Culture: “The shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterize an organization; working environment, company policies and employee behavior”
  • Culture: “Maintain tissue cells, bacteria, etc in conditions suitable for growth”

Well, at least that last one makes sense. 😛 But if culture means everything, then culture means nothing. That’s just not helpful!

Instead, let’s disambiguate company culture into two categories. There is the formal culture of the organization (meetings, mission/vision, management, job ladders, hiring practices, strategy, organizational structure, team dynamics, and so on), and there is the informal culture of the people, the ways that humor, playfulness, and practices manifest in groups and individuals.

Organizational culture is professional, formal, structural, institutional. Managerial responsibilities, promotions, compensation plans, and fiduciary duties are just a few of the .many aspects of organizational culture.

Informal culture is chaotic, joyful, free-spirited, and fun, individualized, inherently anarchic and bottoms-up. It’s things like writing release notes in limerick form, bringing banana bread to work after an outage, long pun threads, slack channels dedicated to pets, competing on the number of employees named “Jess”* vs “Chris”*.

Organizational culture is the cake; informal culture is the frosting. Organizational culture is what leaders are hired to build, informal culture is what bubbles up irrepressibly in the gaps. (I wish I had better names for these!) And when it comes to formal, organizational culture, you don’t want to be in the business of innovating.

Culture Serves The Business

As a leader, you should absolutely care about your culture, but your primary responsibility is the health of the business. The purpose of your culture is to make your business succeed. It does not serve you, and it does not serve the people you care about, to be unclear on this front.

I don’t mean to make it sound like this is simple or easy. It is not. You are dealing with people’s lives and livelihoods, and it is all about tradeoffs. What might be best for an individual in the long run (for example, leaving your company to pursue another opportunity) might harm your business in the near term. Yet you might decide to celebrate them in leaving and not pressure them to stay, because you believe that what’s best for your business in the longer term is for employees to be able to trust their managers when they say, “I believe that working here is the best thing you can do for your career right now.”

The transactional nature of work relationships is how they differ from e.g. family relationships. You can form intense bonds and deep friendships with the people you work with — you may even form bonds that transcend your work relationship — but your relationship at work comes with terms and conditions.

Your company culture can’t be everything to everyone. Nor should you try.

You HAVE to care more about the health of the business than about culture for culture’s own sake. Even if — especially if — you have lots of strong opinions about culture, and there are lots of ways you want to deviate from common wisdom. Doing well at business is what earns you more innovation tokens to invest.

“Choose Boring Technology Culture”

Dan McKinley coined the phrase “choose boring technology” and the concept of innovation tokens nearly a decade ago.

“Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad [2]. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough….The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. — @mcfunley

The moral of the story is that innovation is costly, so you should choose standard, well-understood, rock-solid technologies insofar as you possibly can. You only get a few innovation tokens to spend, so you should spend them on technologies that can give you a true competitive advantage — not on, like, reinventing memcache for the hell of it.

The same goes for running a business, and the same goes for organizational culture. We have collectively inherited a set of default practices that work pretty well, like the 40 hour work week and having 1x1s with your manager. You CAN choose to do something different, but you should probably have a good reason. To the extent that you can learn from other people’s experience, you probably should, whether in business or in tech; innovation is expensive, and you only get so many tokens. Do you really want to spend one on a radical reinvention of your PTO policy? How does that serve you?

Innovation gets all the headlines, but I would posit that what most companies need is actually much simpler: organizational health.

Great Culture begins with Organizational Health

There’s this book by Patrick Lencione called “The Advantage: How Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.” (He is best known for writing “Five Dysfunctions of a Team“.) This guy is to organizational health what James Madison was to constitutional government: a very specific kind of genius.

I picked up “The Advantage” in 2020, around the time Honeycomb stopped teetering on the brink of failure, once it became clear we were likely to be around for a while. It made a huge impression on me. He makes the case that most businesses spend a ton of energy on trying to be “smart”, and relatively little on being “healthy”.

Healthy orgs are characterized by minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover. Health begets — and trumps — intelligence.

As Lencione says, an organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. People in a healthy organization will learn from each other, identify problems, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusion, they will cycle through problems and rally much faster than dysfunctional rivals will. And they create an environment in which everyone else can do the same, which creates a multiplier effect.

The healthier an org is, the more of its collective intelligence it is able to tap into and use. Most orgs exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital available to them, but the healthy ones can tap into almost all of it.

Organizational Health Is Too Boring

No one would disagree with any of this, in principle. ☺️ EVERYBODY wants to work at a place where the mission, vision, and values are clear, meaningful and inspiring; where everyone is rallied around the same winning strategy; and where it’s crystal clear how your role specifically will contribute to that success. Everybody agrees that a healthy organizational culture leads to better outcomes.

So why isn’t every company like that?

Well, it is much easier said than done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is unglamorous work, difficult to measure, and at the end of the day we are always making risky decisions between conflicting tradeoffs based on partial information. We are imperfect meat sacks who lack self awareness, struggle to understand each other, and get hangry and snap. And the job is never done. You never “get there”, any more than you are ever perfectly healthy with perfect relationships.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We don’t have to be perfect to be a meaningfully better presence in people’s lives. We just have to be healthy enough to achieve our goals.

Nobody Wants An “Exciting” Company Culture

When you tell your partner you had an exciting day at work, do they respond with “uh oh 😬🔥🧯”?

All too often, excitement at work comes from strategic swerves, projects getting canceled, lack of focus, missteps or conflicts, anxiety and passive aggression, outages or downtime, outrageous demands coming from out of left field, or getting information at the last minute that you should have had ages ago. Living on the edge of your seat can be very stimulating! Firefighting is a huge rush, and if you’re part of the essential glue holding this creaky vessel together, you can get hooked on feeling desperately needed.

But this isn’t good for your cortisol levels, and it doesn’t move the company forward. When so much of your energy goes to bailing water and staying afloat, you don’t have much left over for rowing the oars. You want energy going to the oars.

Should work be exciting? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s not the adjective I would reach for. Emotional rollercoaster rides don’t provide the kind of circumstances that tend to unlock great design or engineering, or collaboration or focus. I would rather reach for words like achievement, fulfillment, pride, comradeship, or the joy of being part of something greater than yourself, not “exciting” or “fun”.

Leaders Worry Too Much About Making Work Fun

As a leader, your job is not to “make work fun”. You are not here to entertain your employees. Your responsibility is to build a formal culture that works, that supports the success of the business.

So what, am I dooming you to a life of bureaucratic beige and meetings without puns? Fuck no.

If formal organizational culture is like the architecture, then informal culture is furnishings, light displays, murals and banners — whatever you do on the inside. You don’t want someone getting overly creative with the load-bearing beams. Save that for when it’s time to paint “Frozen” murals on the walls and hang the matching icicle curtains.

You want formal culture to be boring, stable, reliable, load-bearing…because this creates a safe structure for people to bring the humor, the fun, the joy, the delight, without any fear of building collapse. The company doesn’t have to bring the fun; people bring the fun. Have you met people? People are fucking weirdos. 🥰 If you create an emotionally safe zone and the conditions for success, informal culture will thrive. 🪅People bring the fun🪅 — they always do.

The best informal culture is almost always bottoms up. But managers, execs, HR/People teams, etc can encourage informal culture. One of the most powerful things you can do is just participate. Show up for drinks, play the board games, keep the puns rolling, get silly with your team! Your participation gives people permission and shows that you value their creative cultural labor at work.

Of course there are no bright lines — companies can throw great parties! — but that’s not the job; building a healthy org is the job. Doing that right frees people up to have joy at work. It makes the celebrations that much bigger, the fun that much funnier.

Success Is Rocket Fuel For Fun

Think back to the most corporate fun you’ve ever had at work — the biggest parties, celebrations, blowouts, etc. Were they holiday parties and random occasions, or were they actually linked to great achievements? I bet they were the latter.

You don’t gather at work for the fun of it, you come together to do great things. It stands to reason the peak moments of joy and bonding are fueled by a sense of accomplishment.

Even on a smaller scale, levity and joy are inextricably linked to doing great work and making customers happy. For example, ops/SRE teams are notorious for their gallows humor around outages (ops is ALWAYS the funniest engineering team, in my experience ☺️). But dark humor is only funny when you are also taking your work seriously. Joking about the inevitability of data loss stops being funny real fast if you are actually playing fast and loose with customer backups.

In the absence of success, progress, and high performance, the kind of “frosting” behaviors that bring so much hilarity to work — joking and teasing, puns and stories — actually stop being fun and start making people feel distracted, irritated and on edge. You don’t want to hear a steady stream of jokes from somebody who keeps letting you down.

Side note: unhealthy orgs may have pockets of humor, but it often comes at the expense of other, less prestigious teams. Lots of people may feel too anxious, powerless or threatened to participate. Your experience of whether those companies are “fun” or not is likely to depend heavily on where you sit in the hierarchy. But a healthy org creates the level conditions for humor, playfulness and creativity throughout the org.

Investing Your Innovation Tokens

So yeah. Despite our reputation for cultural innovation, I’d say we’re actually pretty conservative when it comes to operating a company.

Not only are we not revolutionaries, we are actually trying to do as little differently as possible, because innovation is costly!! Instead, we (as a leadership team) are more focused on trying to execute well and improve upon our organizational health. For the past year, we have been laboring especially hard over strategy — the diagnosis, guiding policy, and set of coherent actions we need to win. Our first responsibility is to make the business succeed, after all.

Which brings us back to the topic of innovation tokens.

I started writing down some of the innovation tokens I feel like we’ve spent. But it dawned on me that when I look at most of the cultural experiments we run, and the things we talk about and write about publicly — stuff like the dangers of hierarchy, hiring, interviewing, high-leverage teams, engineering levels, rituals for engineering teams, etc — it doesn’t feel like innovation at all. It’s all just about trying to have a healthier organization. Hierarchy sucks because visible hierarchy has been shown to dampen people’s creativity, motivation and problem-solving skills. Engineering levels are important because they bring clarity. And so on.

What makes something rise to the level of an innovation token is the amount of time we end up asking other people to invest lots of their time into.

  • Like, we are 1.5 years into a 4 year experiment having an employee on our board of directors. We are about to spin up an internal Advisory Panel to more broadly distribute the impact of our employee board member around the company.
  • In the past, we have experimented with regular ethics discussion groups.
  • Last year we did a deep dive into company values with small breakout groups.
  • Some internal decisions around things like values are handled, not by estaff, but by a group of six people; one employee representative of each org, nominated by their VP; who do a deep dive into the material together and come back with a decision or recommendation.
  • We are about to start the process of developing our own leadership curriculum. We know that we need to equip our managers with better tools, and culturally indoctrinate new employees, so I am excited to build something with our cultural fingerprints all over it.

We run a lot of experiments around transparency, like, the agenda for exec staff meetings can be viewed by the whole company. After every board meeting, we present the same thing we showed to the board to the whole company during all-hands. We are transparent on salary bands. Stuff like that.

We are far from perfect; we have a long ways to go, and when I look around the org it’s hard not to only see all the work left to be done. But we are a lot healthier and better off than we were a year ago, which was better off than we were two years ago, let alone three.

The Experience Of Making This Will Be With Us Forever

A few months ago I was reading this lengthy profile of Sarah Polley in the New Yorker, as she was doing a bunch of press for her new movie, “Women Talking”. (The movie itself sounds incredibly intense; I am still trying to find time and emotional energy to watch it. Someday!)

One thing she said got lodged in my brain, and I’ve been unable to forget it ever since. She’s talking about the experience of having been a child actor, and how intensely it informs the experience she strives to create for everybody working on the set of one of her movies; where parents get to go home and have dinner with their kids, etc.

[He] told her, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect a few people for a little while, in a way that is out of our control. The only thing that’s certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us—it will become part of us—forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience.”

Making a movie that lots of people want to see, one that was a good financial return on investment, buys you the ability to make even more movies, employ more people, take even bigger creative risks. If all you want to do is be a niche indie player, working on a shoestring budget, more power to you. But if you really believe in your ideas, and you want to see them go mainstream … you need mainstream success.

Sarah Polley makes movies. We make developer tools. ☺️ But the same thing is true of working at Honeycomb.

If we are very lucky, and work very hard, our work may help teams build better software and spend fewer, more meaningful hours at work, for a long time to come. I love our mission. But the only certain thing is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, become part of us, forever.

So we should try our best to make it a good experience. ☺️

charity.

Footnotes

(1) Inherited Defaults

How to access these inherited defaults can be a bit more complicated than I make it sound. Working as a manager at Facebook for two years taught me more about these defaults than anything else I’ve ever done in my career. Big companies have had to figure a lot of shit out in order to function at scale, which is why I often advise anyone who plans on starting a company or being a director/VP to do a stint at one. Will Larson’s book “An Elegant Puzzle” does a great job of laying out defaults and best practices for engineering orgs, and his blog has even more useful bits.. Otherwise, you might wanna get yourself an advisor or two with a lot of operator experience, and get used to asking questions like “how does this normally get done?”

(2) Corporate Fun

There’s plenty of stuff in the grey area between formal, organizational culture and informal, individual culture. Companies often stray into fun-like adjacencies like holiday parties, offsites, etc. Fostering a sense of “play” and informality is actually really important for making teams click with each other, and obviously the company should foot the bill if it’s a work function. Just be mindful of what you’re doing and what your goals are when you veer into the rocky shoals of Forced Corporate Fun. 😆

Choose Boring Technology Culture

Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”

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I recently got a plaintive text message from my magnificent friend Abby Bangser, asking about a conversation we had several years ago:

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you. A long time ago I remember you talking about what an adjustment it was becoming a vendor, how all of a sudden people would just discard your opinion and your expertise without even listening. And that it was SUPER ANNOYING.

I’m now experiencing something similar. Did you ever find any good reading/listening/watching to help you adjust to being on the vendor side without being either a terrible human or constantly disregarded?”

Oh my.. This brings back memories. ☺️🙈

Like Abby, I’ve spent most of my career as an engineer in the trenches. I have also spent a lot of time cheerfully talking smack about software. I’ve never really had anyone question my experience[1] or my authority as an expert, hardened as I was in the flames of a thousand tire fires.

Then I started a software company. And all of a sudden this bullshit starts popping up. Someone brushing me off because I was “selling something”, or dismissing my work like I was fatally compromised. I shrugged it off, but if I stopped to think, it really bothered me. Sometimes I felt like yelling “HEY FUCKERS, I am one of your kind! I’m trying to HELP YOU. Stop making this so hard!” 😡 (And sometimes I actually did yell, lol.)

That’s what I remember complaining to Abby about, five or six years ago. It was all very fresh and raw at the time.

We’ll get to that. First let’s dial the clock back a few more years, so you can fully appreciate the rich irony of my situation. (Or skip the story and jump straight to “Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to“.)

The first time I encountered “software for sale”

My earliest interaction with software vendors was at Linden Lab. Like most infrastructure teams, most of the software we used was open source. But somewhere around 2009? 2010? Linden’s data engineering team began auditioning vendors like Splunk, Greenplum, Vertica[2], etc for our data warehouse solution, and I tagged along as the sysinfra/ops delegate.

For two full days we sat around this enormous table as vendor after vendor came by to demo and plump their wares, then opened the floor for questions.

One of the very first sales guys did something that pissed me off me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — maybe he was ignoring my questions or talking down to me. (I’m certain I didn’t come across like a seasoned engineering professional; in my mid twenties, face buried in my laptop, probably wearing pajamas and/or pigtails.) But I do remember becoming very irritated, then settling in to a stance of, shall we say, oppositional defiance.

I peppered every sales team aggressively with questions about the operational burden of running their software, their architectural decisions, and how canned or cherry-picked their demos were. Any time they let slip a sign of weakness or betrayed uncertainty, I bore down harder and twisted the knife. I was a ✨royal asshole✨. My coworkers on the data team found this extremely entertaining, which only egged me on.

What the fuck?? 🫢😧🫠 I’m not usually an asshole to strangers.. where did that come from?

What open source culture taught me about sales

I came from open source, where contempt for software vendors was apparently de rigueur. (is it still this way?? seems like it might have gotten better? 😦) It is fascinating now to look back and realize how much attitude I soaked up before coming face to face with my first software vendor. According to my worldview at the time,

  1. Vendors are liars
  2. They will say anything to get you to buy
  3. Open source software is always the safest and best code
  4. Software written for profit is inherently inferior, and will ultimately be replaced by the inevitable rise of better, faster, more democratic open source solutions
  5. Sales exists to create needs that ought never to have existed, then take you to the cleaners
  6. Engineers who go work for software vendors have either sold out, or they aren’t good enough to hack it writing real (consumer facing) software.

I’m remembering Richard Stallman trailing around behind me, up and down the rows of vendor booths at USENIX in his St IGNUcious robes, silver disk platter halo atop his head, offering (begging?) to lay his hands on my laptop and bless it, to “free it from the demons of proprietary software.” Huh. (Remember THIS song? 🎶 😱)

Given all that, it’s not hugely surprising that my first encounter with software vendors devolved into hostile questioning.

(It’s fun to speculate on the origin of some of these beliefs. Like, I bet 3) and 4) came from working on databases, particularly Oracle and MySQL/Postgres. As for 5) that sounds an awful lot like the beauty industry and other products sold to women. 🤭)

Behind every software vendor lies a recovering open source zealot(???)

I’ve had many, many experiences since then that slowly helped me dismantle this worldview, brick by brick. Working at Facebook made me realize that open source successes like Apache, Haproxy, Nginx etc are exceptions, not the norm; that this model is only viable for certain types of general-purpose infrastructure software; that governance and roadmaps are a huge issue for open source projects too; and that if steady progress is being made, at the end of the day, somewhere somebody is probably paying those developers.

I learned that the overwhelming majority of production-caliber code is written by somebody who was paid to write it — not by volunteers. I learned about coordination costs and overhead, how expensive it is to organize an army of volunteers, and the pains of decentralized quality control. I learned that you really really want the person who wrote the code to stick around and own it for a long time, and not just on alternate weekends when they don’t have the kids (and/or they happen to feel like it).

I learned about game theory, and I learned that sales is about relationships. Yes, there are unscrupulous sellers out there, just like there are shady developers, but good sales people don’t want you to walk away feeling tricked or disappointed any more than you want to be tricked or disappointed. They want to exceed your expectations and deliver more value than expected, so you’ll keep coming back. In game theory terms, it’s a “repeated game”.

I learned SO MUCH from interviewing sales candidates at Honeycomb.[3] Early on, when nobody knew who we were, I began to notice how much our sales candidates were obsessed with value. They were constantly trying to puzzle out out how much value Honeycomb actually brought to the companies we were selling to. I was not used to talking or thinking about software in terms of “value”, and initially I found this incredibly offputting (can you believe it?? 😳).

Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you

Ultimately, this was the biggest (if dumbest) lesson of all: I learned that good software has tremendous value. It unlocks value and creates value, it pays enormous ongoing dividends in dollars and productivity, and the people who build it, support it, and bring it to market fully deserve to recoup a slice of the value they created for others.

There was a time when I would have bristled indignantly and said, “we didn’t start honeycomb to make money!” I would have said that the reason we built honeycomb because we knew as engineers what a radical shift it had wrought in how we built and understood software, and we didn’t want to live without it, ever again.

But that’s not quite true. Right from the start, Christine and I were intent on building not just great software, but a great software business. It wasn’t personal wealth we were chasing, it was independence and autonomy — the freedom to build and run a company the way we thought it should be run, building software to radically empower other engineers like ourselves.

Guess what you have to do if you care about freedom and autonomy?

Make money. 🙄☺️

I also realized, belatedly, that most people who start software companies do so for the same damn reasons Christine and I did… to solve hard problems, share solutions, and help other engineers like ourselves. If all you want to do is get rich, this is actually a pretty stupid way to do that. Over 90% of startups fail, and even the so-called “success stories” aren’t as predictably lucrative as RSUs. And then there’s the wear and tear on relationships, the loss of social life, the vicissitudes of the financial system, the ever-looming spectre of failure … 👻☠️🪦 Startups are brutal, my friend.

Karma is a bitch

None of these are particularly novel insights, but there was a time when they were definitely news to me. ☺️ It was a pretty big shock to my system when I first became a software vendor and found myself sitting on the other side of the table, the freshly minted target of hostile questioning.

These days I am far less likely to be cited as an objective expert than I used to be. I see people on Hacker News dismissing me with the same scornful wave of the hand as I used to dismiss other vendors. Karma’s a bitch, as they say. What goes around comes around. 🥰

I used to get very bent out of shape by this. “You act like I only care because I’m trying to sell you something,” I would hotly protest, “but it’s exactly the opposite. I built something because I cared.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that vested interests can create blind spots, ones I might not even be aware of.

And that’s ok! My arguments/my solutions should be sturdy enough to withstand any disclosure of personal interest. ☺️

Some people are jerks; I can’t control that. But there are a few things I can do to acknowledge my biases up front, play fair, and just generally be the kind of vendor that I personally would be happy to work with.

Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to

So I gave Abby a short list of a few things I do to try and signal that I am a trustworthy voice, a vendor worth listening to. (What do you think, did I miss anything?)

🌸 Lead with your bias.🌸
I always try to disclose my own vested interest up front, and sometimes I exaggerate for effect: “As a vendor, I’m contractually obligated to say this”, or “Take it for what you will, obviously I have religious convictions here”. Everyone has biases; I prefer to talk to people who are aware of theirs.

🌸 Avoid cheap shots.🌸
Try to engage with the most powerful arguments for your competitors’ solutions. Don’t waste your time against straw men or slam dunks; go up against whatever ideal scenarios or “steel man” arguments they would muster in their own favor. Comparing your strengths vs  their strengths results in a way more interesting, relevant and USEFUL discussion for all involved.

🌸 Be your own biggest critic.🌸
Be forthcoming about the flaws of your own solution. People love it when you are unafraid to list your own product’s shortcomings or where the competition shines, or describe the scenarios where other tools are genuinely superior or more cost-effective. It makes you look strong and confident, not weak.

What would you say about your own product as an engineer, or a customer? Say that.

🌸 You can still talk shit about software, just not your competitors‘ software. 🌸
I try not to gratuitously snipe at our competitors. It’s fine to speak at length about technical problems, differentiation and tradeoffs, and to address how specifically your product compares with theirs. But confine your shit talking to categories of software where you don’t have a personal conflict of interest.

Like, I’m not going to get on twitter and take a swipe at a monitoring vendor (anymore 😇), but I might say rude things about a language, a framework, or a database I have no stake in, if I’m feeling punchy. ☺️ (This particular gem of advice comes by way of Adam Jacob.)

🌸 Be generous with your expertise.🌸
If you have spent years going deep on one gnarly problem, you might very well know that problem and its solution space more thoroughly than almost anyone else in the world. Do you know how many people you can help with that kind of mastery?! A few minutes from you could potentially spare someone days or weeks of floundering. This is a gift few can give.

It feels good, and it’s a nice break from battering your head against unsolvable problems. Don’t restrict your help to paying customers, and, obviously, don’t give self-serving advice. Maybe they can’t buy/don’t need your solution today, but maybe someday they will.

In conclusion

There’s a time and place for being oppositional. Sometimes a vendor gets all high on their own supply, or starts making claims that aren’t just an “optimistic” spin on the facts but are provably untrue. If any vendor is operating in poor faith they deserve to to be corrected.

But it’s a shitty, self-limiting stance to take as a default. We are all here to build things, not tear things down. No one builds software alone. The code you write that defines your business is just the wee tippy top of a colossal iceberg of code written by other people — device drivers, libraries, databases, graphics cards, routers, emacs. All of this value was created by other people, yet we collectively benefit.

Think of how many gazillion lines of code are required for you to run just one AWS Lambda function! Think of how much cooperation and trust that represents. And think of all the deals that brokered that trust and established that value, compensating the makers and allowing them to keep building and improving the software we all rely on.

We build software together. Vendors exist to help you. We do what we do best, so you can spend your engineering cycles doing what you do best, working on your core product. Good sales deals don’t leave anyone feeling robbed or cheated, they leave both sides feeling happy and excited to collaborate.[4]

🐝💜Charity.

[1] Yes, I know this experience is far from universal; LOTS of people in tech have not felt like their voices are heard or their expertise acknowledged. This happens disproportionately to women and other under-represented groups, but it also happens to plenty of members of the dominant groups. It’s just a really common thing! However that has not really been my experience — or if it has, I haven’t noticed — nor Abby’s, as far as I’m aware.

[2] My first brush with columnar storage systems! Which is what makes Honeycomb possible today.

[3] I have learned SO MUCH from watching the world class sales professionals we have at Honeycomb. Sales is a tough gig, and doing it well involves many disciplines — empathy, creativity, business acumen, technical expertise, and so much more. Selling to software engineers in particular means you are often dealing with cocky little shits who think they could do your job with a few lines of code. On behalf of my fellow little shits engineers, I am sorry. 🙈

[4] Like our sales team says: “Never do a deal unless you’d do both sides of the deal.” I fucking love that.

Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”

Every Achievement Has A Denominator

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One of the classic failure modes of management is the empire-builder — the managers who measure their own status, rank or value by the number of teams and people “under” them.

Everyone knows you aren’t supposed to do this, but most of us secretly, sheepishly do it anyway to some extent. After all, it’s not untrue — the more teams and people that roll up to you, the wider your influence and the more impact you have on more people, by definition.

The other reason is, well, it’s what we’ve got. How else are we supposed to gauge our influence and impact, or our skill as a leader? We don’t really have any other language, metrics or metaphors readily available to us. 😖

Well… Here’s one:

✨Every achievement has a denominator✨

Organization size can be a liability

Let’s say you have 1,000 people in your org and you collectively achieve something remarkable. Good for you!

What if you achieved the same thing with 10,000 people, instead? What would that say about your leadership?

What if you achieved the same thing with 100 people?

Or even 10 people?

Lots of people take pride in their ability to manage large organizations. And with thousands of people in your org, you kinda better do something fucking great. But what if you instead took pride in your ability to deliver outsize results with a small denominator?

What if comp didn’t automatically bloat with the size of your org, but rather the impact of your work divided by the number of contributors — rewarding leaders for leaner teams, not larger ones?

Bigness itself is costly. There’s the cost of the engineers, managers, product and designers etc, of course. But the bigger it gets, the more coordination costs are incurred, which are the worst costs of all because they do not accrue to any user benefit — and often lead to lack of focus and product surface sprawl.

Constraints fuel creativity. Having “enough” engineers for a project is usually a terrible idea; you want to be constrained, you want to have to make hard decisions about where to spend your time and where to invest development cycles.

More often than not, scope is the enemy

As Ben Darfler wrote earlier this year about our approach to engineering levels at Honeycomb:

There are times when broad scope may be unavoidable, but at Honeycomb, we try to cultivate a healthy skepticism toward scope. More often than not, scope is the enemy. We would rather reward engineers who find clever ways to limit scope by decomposing problems in both time and size. We also want to reward engineers who work on the most important problems for the business, regardless of the size of the project. We don’t want to reward people for gaming out their work based on what will get them promoted.

The same is true for engineering managers, directors and VPs. We would rather reward them for getting things done with small, nimble teams, not for empire building and team sprawl. We want to reward them for working on the most important problems for the business, regardless of what size their teams are.

What was the denominator of the last big project you landed? Could you have done it with fewer people? How will you apply those learnings to the next big initiative?

Can we find more language and ways to talk about, or take pride in how efficiently we do big things? At the very least, perhaps we can start paying attention to the denominator of our achievements, and factor that into how we level and reward our leaders.

charity.

P.S. I did not invent this phrase, but I am unfortunately unable to credit the person I heard it from (a senior Googler). I simply think it’s brilliant, and so helpful.

Every Achievement Has A Denominator

The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering

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First published on 2022-09-30 at https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/future-ops-platform-engineering.

Two years ago I wrote a piece in The New Stack about the Future of Ops Careers. Towards the end, I wrote:

The reality is that jack-of-all-trades systems infrastructure jobs are slowly vanishing: the world doesn’t need thousands of people who can expertly tune postfix, SpamAssassin, and ClamAV—the world has Gmail. (…)

Building infrastructure and operational expertise used to be bundled together into a single role. But the industry is now bifurcating along an infrastructure fault line, and the overlap between infrastructure-oriented engineers and operationally-minded engineers is swiftly eroding. Engineers who love this work increasingly have a choice to make. Either you can 1) go deep on infrastructure by joining a company that does infrastructure as a service, or 2) go broad on operability by joining a company to help them do as little infrastructure as possible.

I described the second category as “operations engineering minus the infrastructure,” dedicated to evaluating and assembling a production stack of third-party platform providers, enabling software engineers to self-serve their services and own their own code in production. I said:

  • Your job will be to aggressively minimize the cycles your org devotes to infrastructure by finding effective ways to outsource or minimize infra labor. Your job is to NOT go deep if there is any workable alternative.
  • Your job will be to work cross-functionally with all the other software engineering teams, looking for ways to speed up their time to value and helping them own their own code in production.
  • Your job will be to move past the kludgey old models of “outsourcing” to sophisticated understandings of how and where to leverage abstractions that can radically accelerate development.

That second category I was describing now has a name. We call those teams “platform engineering.”

The fifty-year arc of software careers

In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different professions, but that turned out to be a ginormous mistake, so along came DevOps to reunify them. Nowadays, ops as an independent profession is in the process of fading out. Companies are spinning down their ops teams left and right. Engineers who formerly identified as sysadmins or operations have turned into DevOps engineers, and soon there will just be “software people” again. This is the way of things.

Please note that this is NOT the same thing as saying “ops is dead,” or “ops skills are no longer valuable or needed1.” Our systems are only getting more complex, more difficult to operate, and simultaneously more critical to life on earth, which means that operational excellence has never been more desperately needed (and if you don’t respect that, 🌈 you deserve to suffer 🌈).

The industry story of the past three to five years has been us trying to figure out how to help software engineers own their own code in production2, phasing out dedicated ops teams, and aggressively outsourcing as much infrastructure as possible.

As we should. Developer cycles are the scarcest resource in your company, and you want to spend as many of those as possible on your core product: the crown jewel, the code that makes you a business. Money is cheaper than engineering cycles, and teams that are focused on their core business will always outperform teams whose focus is spread across dozens of non-revenue-generating projects. Let someone else build and run all the dependencies and adjacencies.

Before: some engineers wrote code, and some engineers ran code.

Now: all engineers write code, and all engineers run the code they write.

Platform engineering is what stands between you and darkness

When you start talking about putting software engineers on call for their own code, and generally being more involved in production, some percentage of the time you will hear back a guttural wail of despair: “You can’t expect me to know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING!”

Quite right; we can’t. Platform engineering teams are part of the answer to this perfectly reasonable complaint. It’s not that you’re being asked to do or understand more in toto, but the distribution of labor and responsibility is shifting:

Before: some engineers wrote code, and some engineers ran code.

Now: all engineers write code, and all engineers run the code they write—but we divide the areas of responsibility by layer or function.

The emergence of a minimum viable self-serve tier

In the earliest days of a company, your first few engineers end up bootstrapping an infrastructure by reading AWS docs or blog posts, or asking a friend for recommendations to get started. They might start by setting up a managed container service, or configuring Terraform, and for a while everybody deploys and owns their own code, just as god intended.

But cognitive limits kick in pretty quickly. The maze of APIs and SDKs and components out there is simply bewildering, even for an experienced ops hand. Before long, it becomes someone’s job to make good decisions, pick a suite of compute and storage options that serve the team’s needs, and write some tooling that pulls everything into a coherent whole—which, at a minimum, lets you:

  1. Run tests and generate new artifacts
  2. Deploy artifacts, version them, and roll back
  3. Instrument, monitor, and debug
  4. Store data somewhere, manage schemas and migrations
  5. Adjust capacity as needed
  6. Define and commit all components (and their relationships) as code

Once these are built, it should be trivial for an engineer to come along and spin up a new service using templates and components from existing services. It should be much simpler and easier to use the blessed paths than anything else, and there should be friction if you go off the beaten path.

Congratulations! You’ve just been platformed 🎉. One of the key principles of any developer platform is that it should be easy to do the right things, and hard to do the wrong things.

The differences between platform engineering and traditional ops

Platform teams are typically staffed by engineers who are comfortable writing software. Not just scripting and automation, but writing tests and doing code reviews. Platform teams also operate much more like product development teams do, with product managers (and occasionally, designers, developer advocates, or UX researchers).

This doesn’t mean that everybody on a platform team has to have originally been a software engineer; in fact, a super common failure condition for platform teams is simply thinking all they need to do is hire software engineers to build developer tools. A strong platform team has an equally deep grounding in operations experience and software development. Individuals who are experts in both areas are fairly rare, but you can pull together a strong, well-rounded team by assembling a mix of SWEs (with some ops experience) and ops or DevOps engineers (with some software experience) and having them learn and grow from each other.

Platform teams are decidedly cloud-native; they actually mostly involve platforms built atop the cloud itself—PaaS, IaaS, everything-aaS, serverless, and so forth.

Ops/DevOps teams are oriented around managing infrastructure, often several generations of infrastructure. Their turf is everything from data centers and bare metal up through virtualization, containers, and the cloud (they aren’t so much cloud-native as cloud-enabled). They measure themselves on things like SLOs and the DORA metrics. You know they’re doing a good job if the system is up/available and users are happy.

Platform teams are oriented around providing a good experience for developers to self-serve and self-manage their code. The more swiftly and easily developers can move, the better your platform team. Operational excellence, in the platform model, is actually more the responsibility of the other engineering teams (and/or an adjacent SRE team) than that of the platform team.

Platform teams typically work higher up the stack than operations, DevOps, or SRE teams do, and they involve a great deal less infrastructure. On the contrary, platform teams are bent on paying other people to run as much shit as possible, preserving their own scarce development cycles for their core product.

Here is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek table of the similarities and differences between the archetypes.

Platform engineers vs. DevOps engineers

Platform Engineer Ops (or DevOps) Engineer
% of job spent writing code > 50% < 50%
Rest of time spent Gathering product requirements, doing user research, architecture discussions, optimizing internal workflows, researching new tools and developer productivity ideas, reviewing other teams’ diffs for impact, performance tuning, helping other engineers own & scale their code, fixing CI/CD pipelines. Fixing cron jobs, automating old setup docs, converting PXE/rsync to Chef/Puppet, converting Chef/Puppet to Terraform, converting VMs to containers, deploying software, debugging broken deploys, writing monitoring checks, doing retros, building out new services, pairing with software engineers to understand and debug their code, investigating weird shit, documentation, etc.
Responsible for Enabling internal teams to self-serve their ability to run and own their code in production. Creating standard, reusable components and processes. Defining golden paths. Infrastructure capacity planning, scaling, performance tuning, upgrading. Reliability and resiliency, SLOs and monitoring/alerting. Delivering quality experience to customers.
Builds for Internal developer teams Customers
Development style Infrastructure as a product Infrastructure as code
Works with product managers Yes No
Works with UX researchers or designers Sometimes No
Dashboards & graphs Uses APM, observability, tracing. Cares a lot about instrumentation and OpenTelemetry. Uses metrics, logs, dashboards; monitoring, alerting, and agent/sidecar/blackbox telemetry.
What ‘coding’ means to them Developing new features & services, writing tests. These are (primarily) software people who do systems. Automation, configuration, DSLs, extending and debugging existing code. These are systems people who do software.
Preferred language Go, Rust Python, Ruby
Time spent in Linux Hardly any A lot
Succeeds when Developers can easily choose good defaults, self-serve their infra, and own their own code in production. Infrastructure is scalable, secure, cost-effective, reliable, and customers are happy.
Native terrain Serverless, *aaS, APIs for everything (cloud-native and above). Instances, VMs, containers, regions, multi-cloud (everything “below,” but up to and including the cloud).
Databases Uses hosted DBs Runs their own, blending automation & DBA expertise
SSH No Yes
Shell REPL bash/zsh
Mantra “Run Less Software” “Cattle, Not Pets”

What about DevOps vs. SRE?

Countless words have been spilled on the difference between DevOps and SRE3, which I won’t rehash.

Here’s what I’ll say: DevOps, to me, feels like a relevant concept for companies that have a lot of infrastructure to wrangle. Companies that do in fact have dev teams and ops teams, or dev teams and DevOps teams (🙄), tend to have a lot of operational shit to automate, test, and run. They use config management, virtualization, and containers, often managing several generations worth of technology, possibly even down to data centers and bare metal. DevOps is for companies that have some combination of bare metal, VMs, regions, AZs, multi-cloud, networking devices, self-managed databases, etc.

DevOps is capacious. It contains multitudes. DevOps writes code, and DevOps has a fuckload of code to manage.

It is also on its way to becoming irrelevant. We are swiftly entering a post-DevOps world.

SRE, to me, feels different. I associate SRE with very large companies, where they mostly have software engineers owning their own code in production, but maybe still struggle with it a bit. SREs are often embedded within software engineering teams or product groups, and they focus a lot on, well, reliability, as the name suggests.

This means they do less infrastructure jockeying or automating (although they still do some coding). They typically have a lot to say about instrumentation, monitoring and observability, and cross-functional coordination. They run incident response and do blameless retros, and they tend to be experts at scaling.

If a company has both a DevOps team and SRE, typically I expect to see the SRE team more on the frontlines, involved with incidents, telemetry, etc., and DevOps teams more on the backburner, slinging pipes and plumbing.

Observability engineering as a case study

In the same piece I referenced earlier, I also wrote about the role of observability teams. I said they should largely no longer be running their own monitoring and graphing software in-house. Yet there is still a place for observability teams to exist: they remain a critical link between outsourced solutions and internal developer needs.

That team should write libraries, generate examples, and drive standardization; ushering in consistency, predictability, and usability. They should partner with internal teams to evaluate use cases. They should partner with your vendors as roadmap stakeholders. They might also write glue code and helper modules to connect disparate data sources and create cohesive visualizations. Basically, that team becomes an integration point between your organization and the outsourced work.

I originally wrote this about observability, but it could just as easily be used to describe platform engineering as a whole. This is the role—being the bridge between other vendors and your own core software. It’s a very high-leverage place to sit.

Ops is dead, long live ops

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this because we’ve had such a hard time nailing down exactly who the Honeycomb customer is. Sometimes our buyer is an ops team buying it for their SWEs, sometimes it’s SREs in the midst of an outage, sometimes it’s a VP or director of engineering, or an architect, or a CTO, or a “full stack” engineering team, or even a product manager. It is hard to form a snappy answer out of that list.

The first couple questions every new go-to-market candidate asks us are “who is your buyer?” and “how do we help them?” To which I respond with a five minute ramble where I list every above persona and each of their pain points. Hardly the concrete answer they would like to receive.

As it goes, sociotechnical trends come and go. A year ago, Christine and I were speculating that platform engineering might be on the verge of consolidating the necessary ingredients that makes up our ideal buyer:

  1. Writing and shipping code, and needing to understand their own code
  2. Positioned to help other teams with their instrumentation patterns and tooling
  3. Firmly cloud-native+ and untethered to hardware or traditional infrastructure

To my delight, since that conversation, these trends have only accelerated—and I, for one, welcome our new platform engineering overlords to the observability table. ☺️

If you’d like to learn more about platform engineering, we’ll be running a Twitter space on ✨ October 20th ✨ at 12:00 p.m. PT. Come join us! I’ll be there along with two colleagues and we’ll be answering your questions and shedding more light on the topic.

1  I do hear people saying that, and it used to make me fucking furious, but now I just smugly remind myself how much self-inflicted suffering they are in for. Disrespecting operational expertise is the shortest path to never again sleeping through the night.

2 It is rather incredible how rapidly this idea has taken off. When we started talking about putting developers on call for their code in 2016, people got seriously angry with us. Before that, the only twitter mention I could find of putting devs on call was one by (of course) Adrian Cockcroft, but by 2019-2020 it had stopped being controversial and soon became common wisdom.

3 I actually wrote one of those myself: DevOps vs SRE: Delayed Coverage of the Dumbest War). LMAO. I think Liz had the final word on this back in … 2017? 2018? … when she said something like class SRE implements DevOps. And yes, DevOps is a philosophy or a methodology and not a job title, etc.

The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering

The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)

mipsytipsy, , 15 Comments

My friend Molly has had an impressive career. She got a job as a software engineer after graduating from college, and after kicking ass for a year or so she was offered a promotion to management, which she accepted with relish. Molly was smart, driven, and fiercely ambitious, so she swiftly clambered up the ranks to hold director, VP, and other shiny leadership roles. It took two decades, an IPO and a vicious case of burnout before she allowed herself to admit how much she hated her work, and how desperately she envied (guess who??) the software engineers she worked alongside. Turns out, all she ever really wanted to do was write code every day. And now, to her dismay, it felt too late.

Why did it take Molly so long to realize what made her happy? I personally blame the fucking hierarchy.

The Hierarchy Lie

The “Big Lie” of hierarchy is that your organizational structure is a vertical tree from the CEO on down, where higher up is always better.

Of course any new grad is going to feel that way, on the heels of 15-20 years spent going through school year by year, grade by grade, measuring success via good grades and teacher approval. The early years of professional life are a similar blend of hard work, leveling up and basic skills acquisition. (They got Molly hopped on the leveling treadmill before she even had a chance to become a real adult, in other words. 😍)

But by the time you are fully baked as a senior contributor, maybe 7-8 years in, your relationship to levels and ladders should undergo a dramatic shift. At some point you have to learn to tune in to your own inner compass. What draws you in to your work? What fuels your growth and success?

Being an adult means not measuring yourself entirely on other people’s definition of success. Personal growth might come in the guise of a big promotion, but it also might look like a new job, a different role, a swing to management or back, becoming well-known as a subject matter expert, mentoring others, running an affinity group, picking up new skill sets, starting a company, trying your hand at consulting, speaking at conferences, taking a sabbatical, having a family, working part time, etc. No one gets to define that but you.

You have a thirty- or forty-year adult life and career in front of you. What the hell are you going to do with all that time and space??

Your career is not one mad sprint to the finish line

Literally nobody’s career looks like a straight line, going up, up up and to the right, from intern to CEO (to a coffin).

One of the most exhausting things about working at Facebook was the way engineering levels feltLiterally no one's career, ever. like a hamster wheel, where every single quarter you were expected to go go go go go, do more do more, scrape up ever more of your mortal soul to pour in more than you could last quarter — and the quarter before that, and before that, in ever-escalating intensity.

It was fucking exhausting, yo. Life does not work that way. Shit gets hilly.

The strategy for a fulfilling, lifelong career in tech is not to up the ante every interval. Nor is it to amass more and more power over others until you explode. Instead:

  1. Train yourself to love the feeling of constantly learning and pushing your boundaries. Feeling comfortable is the system blinking orange, and it should make you uneasy.
  2. Follow your nose into work that lights you up in the morning, work you can’t stop thinking about. If you’re bored, do something else.
  3. Say yes to opportunities!! Intensity is nothing to be afraid of. Instead of trying to cap your speed or your growth, learn to alternate it with recovery periods.
  4. If you aren’t sure what to do, make the choice that preserves or expands future optionality. Remember: Most startups fail. Will you be okay with your choices if (& when) this one does too?

Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other animating goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.

But if you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..

The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have never been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least. Or when I felt the least needed.📈📉💔

A disturbing number of companies would rather feel in control than unclench and perform better

But hey! Lack of inner drive isn’t the ONLY thing that drives people to climb the ladder. Plenty of companies fuck this up too, all on their lonesome. Let’s talk about more of the ways that companies mess up the workplace! Like by disempowering the people doing the work and giving all the power to managers, thereby forcing anyone who wants a say in their own job become one.

The way we talk about work is riddled with hierarchical, authoritarian phrases: “She was my superior”, “My boss made me do it”, “I got promoted into management”, and so on.

There are plenty of industries where line workers are still disempowered cogs and power structures are hierarchical and absolute (like flipping burgers at McDonalds, or factory line work). There are even software companies still trying to make it work in command-and-control mode, to whom engineers are interchangeable monkeys that ship story points and close JIRA tasks.

But if there’s one thing we know, it’s that for industries that are fueled by creativity and innovation, command-and-control leadership is poison. It stifles innovation, it saps initiative, it siphons away creativity and motivation and caring.

Studies also show that the more visible someone’s power is, the less likely anyone is to give them honest feedback.[2]

Companies that don’t learn this lesson are unlikely to win over the long run. Engineering is a deeply creative occupation, and authoritarian environments are toxic for creativity and people’s willingness to share information.

Hierarchy is just a data structure

The basic function of a hierarchy is to help us make sense of the world, simplify information, and make decisions. Hierarchy lets us break down enormous projects — like “let’s build a rocket!”, or “let’s invade the moon!” — into millions of bite size decisions and tasks, and this is how progress gets made.

A certain amount of authority is invested into the hierarchy model. If you are responsible for delivering a unit of work, the company needs to make sure you have enough resources and decision-making ability to do so. This is what we think of as the formal power structure [1], and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s what makes the system work.

The problem starts when we stop thinking of hierarchy as a neutral data structure — a utilitarian device for organizing groups and making decisions — and start projecting all kinds of social status and dominance onto it.

A sensitivity to social dominance is wired deep, deep into our little monkey brains. It’s what tells us we deserve more power, leverage, pride, influence, and autonomy — and simply have more value — than those below us. It’s what tells us those above us are better, stronger and more deserving than we are, and that we owe them our respect and deference.

It also tells us “if you lose status, YOU MIGHT DIE” 😱😱😱 which is why we may react to a perceived loss of status with a sting that seems astonishingly extreme and overwrought, even to ourselves, yet somehow impossible to shrug off.

hierarchies tend to get mixed up with social dominance

In general, it is better to pursue roles and growth based on the affirmative (what it is you want to learn, grow or do more of) than the negative (what you want to avoid, evade or stop doing). Your motivation systems don’t kick in to gear when you are feeling “lack of pain” — the system doesn’t work that way. They kick in when you get interested.

And if you are sick of doing something or being treated a certain way, chances are everyone else will hate it, too. Who wants to work at a company where all the shit rolls downhill?

Hierarchies have stuck around for one very good reason: because they work. Hierarchies are simple, intuitive, and allow large numbers to collaborate with low cognitive overhead. Unfortunately, most hierarchies become entwined with status and dominance markers, which can bring enormous downsides. At their worst, they can suck the literal life out of work, reducing us all to glum little cogs obeying orders.

We aren’t getting rid of hierarchy anytime soon. But we can use culture and ritual to gently untangle them from dominance, and we can choose to interpret formal power as a service function instead of a dictatorship. This frees people up to choose their work based on what makes them feel fulfilled, instead of their perceived status. (Also helpful? Flatter pay bands. 😛)

Good managers do not dictate and demand, they nurture, develop, and inspire. The most important roles in the company aren’t held by managers; they are all the little leaf nodes  busily building the product, supporting users, identifying markets, writing copy, etc. The people doing the work are why we exist as a company; all the rest is, with considerable due respect, overhead.

How to drain your hierarchy of social dominance

When it comes to hierarchy and team structure, there are the functional, organizational aspects (mostly good) and the social dominance parts (mostly bad). With that in mind, there are plenty of smaller things we can do as a team to remind people that we are equal colleagues, simply with different roles.

  • Be conscious of the language you use. Does it reinforce dominance and hierarchy? (Step one: stop calling management “a promotion”🥰)
  • De-emphasize trappings of power. The more you refer to someone’s formal power, the less likely anyone is to give them critical feedback or question them.
  • Push back against common but unhelpful practices, like “a manager should always make more money than the people who report to them.” Really? Why??
  • Are there opportunities for career advancement as an IC, or only as a manager? Everyone should have the ability to advance in their career.
  • Do your own dishes, everyone.
  • Practice visualizing the org chart upside down, where managers and execs support their teams from below rather than topping them from above. (I was going to write a whole post about this, then discovered other people have been doing that for the past decade. 🤣)

And then there is the big(ger) thing we can (and must!) do, in order to 1) make people go into management for the right reasons, 2) help senior IC roles remain attractive to highly skilled creative and technical contributors, and 3) encourage everybody to make career decisions based on curiosity, growth, and what’s best for the business, instead of turf and power grabs. Which is:

Practice transparency, from top to bottom

Share authority, decision-making and power

Technical contributors own technical decisions

Most people who go in to management don’t do it out of a burning desire to write performance reviews. They do it because they are fed the fuck up with being out of the loop, or not having a say in decisions over their own work. All they want is to be in the room where it happens, and management tends to be the only way you get an invite.

EVERY company says they believe in transparency, but hardly any of them are, by my count. Transparency doesn’t mean flooding people with every trivial detail, or freaking them out with constant fire drills. It does mean being actively forthcoming about important questions and matters which are happening or on the horizon…often before you are fully comfortable with it. Honestly, if you never feel any discomfort about your level of transparency, you probably aren’t transparent enough.

People do better work with more context! You’re equipping them with information to better understand the business problems and technical objectives, and thereby unleashing them and their creativity to help solve them. You’re also opening yourself up to questioning and sanity checks — which may feel uncomfortable, but 🌞sunlight is sanitizing🌞 — it is worth it.

Some practical tips for transparency

At Honeycomb, we present the full board deck after every board meeting in our all hands, and take questions. When we’re facing financial uncertainty, we say so, along with our working plan for dealing with it. We also do org-level updates in all hands, once per quarter per org. Each org presents a snapshot to the company of how they are doing, but we ask that no more than 2/3 of the presentation be about their successes and triumphs, and 1/3 of their material be about their failures and misses. Normalize talking about failure.

Being transparent isn’t about putting everyone on blast; it’s about cultivating a habit of awareness about what might be relevant to other people. It’s about building systems of feedback, updates and open questioning into your culture. This can be scary, so it’s also about training yourselves as a team to handle hard news without overreacting or shooting the messenger. If you always tell people what they want to hear, they’ll never trust you. You can’t trust someone’s ‘yes’ until you hear their ‘no’.

Transparency is always a balance between information and distraction, but I think these are healthy internal rules of thumb for management:

  1. If anyone has further questions or wants to know more details than what was shared, they are free to ask any manager or exec, who will willingly answer more fully, up to the boundaries of privacy or legal reasons. As employees, they have a right to know about the business they are part of. A right — not a privilege, which can be revoked on a whim.
  2. When making internal decisions about e.g. salary bands, individual exceptions to formal policy, etc, ask each other … if this decision were to leak, could we justify our reasoning with head held high? If you would feel ashamed, or if you really don’t want people to find out about it, it’s probably the wrong decision.

Some practical tips for distributing power

Power flows to managers by default, just like water flows downhill. Managers have to actively push back on this tendency by explicitly allocating powers and responsibilities to tech leads and engineers. Don’t hoard information, share context generously, and make sure you know when they would want to tap in to a discussion. Your job is not to “shield” them from the rest of the org; your job is to help them determine where they can add outsize value, and include them. Only if they trust you to loop them in will they feel free to go heads down and focus.

Wrap your senior ICs into planning and other leadership activities. Decisions about sociotechnical processes (code reviews, escalation points, SLI/SLOs, ownership etc) are usually better owned by staff+ engineers than anyone on the management track. Invite a couple of your seniormost engineers to join calibrations — they bring a valuable perspective to performance discussions that managers lack.

Demystify management. Blur the lines between people managers and engineers; delegate ownership and accountability for some important projects to ICs. Ask every engineer about their career interests, and if management is on the list, find opportunities for them to practice and improve at managerial skills — mentoring, interviewing, onboarding, etc.

Adults don’t like being told what to do

People do phenomenal work when they want to do it, when they are creatively and emotionally engaged at the level of optimum challenge, and when they know their work matters. That’s where you’ll find your state of flow. That is where you’ll do your best work, which is also the best way to get promoted and make durable advances in your career.

Not, ironically, by chasing levels and titles for their own sake. ☺️

People want to be challenged. They want you to ask them to step up and take responsibility for something hard. They want to be needed, and they want to have agency in the doing of it. Just like you do.

Oh yeah, back to Molly …

Molly, who I mentioned at the beginning, joined Honeycomb five years ago as a customer success exec. After realizing she wanted to go back to engineering, she switched to working our support desk to build up her technical chops while she practiced writing code on the side. She has now been working as a software engineer on the product team for over two years, and she is ✨rocking it.✨ It is NEVER too late. 🙌

<3 charity

p.s. Molly also says, “don’t waste time at bad companies, whether you’re climbing the ladder or not!” 🥂

 

[1] Formal power is only one kind of power, and in some ways it is the weakest, because it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the company and is only loaned out for you to wield on its behalf. (You don’t carry the innate ability to fire people along with you after you stop being an engineering manager, for example.) Formal powers are limited, enumerated, and functional. You don’t get to use them for any reason other than furthering the goals of the org, or else it is literally an abuse of power.

Formal power is fascinating in another way, too: which is that your formal power is seen as legitimate only if you ~basically always wield it in the ways everyone already expects you to. You can make a surprising call only so often; you can straight up overrule the wishes of your constituents extremely rarely. If you use your formal power to do things that people disagree with or don’t support, without taking the time to persuade them or create real consensus, you will squander your credibility and good faith unbelievably fast.

[2] I am not going to bother rustling up lots of links and citations, because I expect most of this falls into the voluminous category of “shit you already knew”. But if any of it sounds surprising to you, here are some classic reference works:

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Drive, by Dan Pink
The Culture Code: Secrets of Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle
A Lapsed Anarchist’s Guide to Being a Better Leader, by Ari Weinzweig

[3] The scientific literature suggests that dominating instincts tend to emerge in more overtly hostile environments. Make of that what you will, I guess.

 

Some other writing I have done on this topic, or topics adjacent …

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
The Pendulum or the Ladder
If Management Isn’t a Promotion, then Engineering isn’t a Demotion
Twin Anxieties of the Engineer Manager Pendulum
Things to Know About Engineering Levels
Advice for Engineering Managers who want to Climb the Ladder
On Engineers and Influence
Is There a Path Back from CTO to Engineer?

The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)

Rituals for Engineering Teams

mipsytipsy, , , , , 13 Comments

Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.

It got me thinking about the many rituals I have initiated and/or participated in over the course of my career. Of course, I never thought of them as such — I thought of them as “having fun at work” 🙃 — but now I realize these rituals disproportionately contribute to my favorite moments and the most precious memories of my career.

Rituals (a definition): Actions that a person or group does repeatedly, following a similar pattern or script, in which they’ve imbued symbolism and meaning.

I think it is extremely worth reading the first 27 pages of the book — the Introduction and Part One. To briefly sum up the first couple chapters: the power of creative rituals comes from their ability to link the physical with the psychological and emotional, all with the benefit of “regulation” and intentionality. Physically going through the process of a ritual helps people feel satisfied and in control, with better emotional regulation and the ability to act in a steadier and more focused way. Rituals also powerfully increase people’s sense of belonging, giving them a stable feeling of social connection. (p. 5-6)

The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging. You show that you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. You feel like you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. This is powerful shit!

It seems especially relevant these days when so many of us are atomized and physically separated from our teammates. That ineffable sense of belonging can make all the difference between a job that you do and a role that feeds your soul. Rituals are a way to create that sense of belonging. Hot damn.

So I thought I’d write up some of the rituals for engineering teams I remember from jobs past. I would love to hear about your favorite rituals, or your experience with them (good or bad). Tell me your stories at @mipsytipsy. 🙃

Rituals at Linden Lab

Feature Fish Freeze

At Linden Lab, in the ancient era of SVN, we had something called the “Feature Fish”. It was a rubber fish that we kept in the freezer, frozen in a block of ice. We would periodically cut a branch for testing and deployment and call a feature freeze. Merging code into the branch was painful and time consuming, so If you wanted to get a feature in after the code freeze, you had to first take the fish out of the freezer and unfreeze it.

This took a while, so you would have to sit there and consider your sins as it slowly thawed. Subtext: Do you really need to break code freeze?

Stuffy the Code Reviewer

You were supposed to pair with another engineer for code review. In your commit message, you had to include the name of your reviewer or your merge would be rejected. But the template would also accept the name “Stuffy”, to confess that your only reviewer had been…Stuffy, the stuffed animal.

However if your review partner was Stuffy, you would have to narrate the full explanation of Stuffy’s code review (i.e., what questions Stuffy asked, what changes he suggested and what he thought of your code) at the next engineering meeting. Out loud.

Shrek Ears

We had a matted green felt headband with ogre ears on it, called the Shrek Ears. The first time an engineer broke production, they would put on the Ears for a day. This might sound unpleasant, like a dunce cap, but no — it was a rite of passage. It was a badge of honor! Everyone breaks production eventually, if they’re working on something meaningful.

If you were wearing the Shrek Ears, people would stop you throughout the day and excitedly ask what happened, and reminisce about the first time they broke production. It became a way for 1) new engineers to meet lots of their teammates, 2) to socialize lots of production wisdom and risk factors, and 3) to normalize the fact that yes, things break sometimes, and it’s okay — nobody is going to yell at you. ☺️

This is probably the number one ritual that everybody remembers about Linden Lab. “Congratulations on breaking production — you’re really one of us now!”

Vorpal Bunny

vorpal bunny

We had a stuffed Vorpal Bunny, duct taped to a 3″ high speaker stand, and the operations engineer on call would put the bunny on their desk so people knew who it was safe to interrupt with questions or problems.

At some point we lost the bunny (and added more offices), but it lingered on in company lore since the engineers kept on changing their IRC nick to “$name-bunny” when they went on call.

There was also a monstrous, 4-foot-long stuffed rainbow trout that was the source of endless IRC bot humor… I am just now noticing what a large number of Linden memories involve stuffed animals. Perhaps not surprising, given how many furries were on our platform ☺️

Rituals at Parse

The Tiara of Technical Debt

Whenever an engineer really took one for the team and dove headfirst into a spaghetti mess of tech debt, we would award them the “Tiara of Technical Debt” at the weekly all hands. (It was a very sparkly rhinestone wedding tiara, and every engineer looked simply gorgeous in it.)

Examples included refactoring our golang rewrite code to support injection, converting our entire jenkins fleet from AWS instances to containers, and writing a new log parser for the gnarliest logs anyone had ever seen (for the MongoDB pluggable storage engine update).

Bonfire of the Unicorns

We spent nearly 2.5 years rewriting our entire ruby/rails API codebase to golang. Then there was an extremely long tail of getting rid of everything that used the ruby unicorn HTTP server, endpoint by endpoint, site by site, service by service.

When we finally spun down the last unicorn workers, I brought in a bunch of rainbow unicorn paper sculptures and a jug of lighter fluid, and we ceremonially set fire to them in the Facebook courtyard, while many of the engineers in attendance gave their own (short but profane) eulogies.

Mission Accomplished

This one requires a bit of backstory.

For two solid years after the acquisiton, Facebook leadership kept pressuring us to move off of AWS and on to FB infra. We kept saying “no, this is a bad idea; you have a flat network, and we allow developers all over the world to upload and execute random snippets of javascript,” and “no, this isn’t cost effective, because we run large multi-terabyte MongoDB replica sets by RAIDing together multiple EBS volumes, and you only have 2.5TB FusionIO (for extremely high-perf mysql/RocksDB) and 40 TB spinning rust volumes (for Hadoop), and also it’s impossible to shrink or slice up replsets”, and so forth. But they were adamant. “You don’t understand. We’re Facebook. We can do anything.” (Literal quote)

Finally we caved and got on board. We were excited! I announced the migration and started providing biweekly updates to the infra leadership groups. Four months later, when the  migration was half done, I get a ping from the same exact members of Facebook leadership:

“What are you doing?!?”
“Migrating!”
“You can’t do that, there are security issues!”
“No it’s fine, we have a fix for it.”
“There are hardware issues!”
“No it’s cool, we got it.”
“You can’t do this!!!”

ANYWAY. To make an EXTREMELY long and infuriating story short, they pulled the plug and canned the whole project. So I printed up a ten foot long “Mission Accomplished” banner (courtesy of George W Bush on the aircraft carrier), used Zuck’s credit card to buy $800 of top-shelf whiskey delivered straight to my desk (and cupcakes), and we threw an angry, ranty party until we all got it out of our systems.

Blue Hair

I honestly don’t remember what this one was about, but I have extensive photographic evidence to prove that I shaved the heads of and/or dyed the hair blue of at least seven members of engineering. I wish I could remember why! but all I remember is that it was fucking hilarious.

In Conclusion

Coincidentally (or not), I have no memories of participating in any rituals at the jobs I didn’t like, only the jobs I loved. Huh.

One thing that stands out in my mind is that all the fun rituals tend to come bottoms-up. A ritual that comes from your VP can run the risk of feeling like forced fun, in a way it doesn’t if it’s coming from your peer or even your manager. I actually had the MOST fun with this shit as a line manager, because 1) I had budget and 2) it was my job to care about teaminess.

There are other rituals that it does make sense for executives to create, but they are less about hilarious fun and more about reinforcing values. Like Amazon’s infamous door desks are basically just a ritual to remind people to be frugal.

Rituals tend to accrue mutations and layers of meaning as time goes on. Great rituals often make no sense to anybody who isn’t in the know — that’s part of the magic of belonging. 🥰

Now, go tell me about yours!

charity

Rituals for Engineering Teams

Giving Good Feedback: Consider the Ratio

mipsytipsy, , , , 2 Comments

Consider the ratio.

You work with someone great. If someone asked, you’d say they are brilliant, inspired and dedicated. They care deeply about their work, they are timely and reliable (for the most part), and their emojis and dry sense of humor brighten your day. Your work depends on theirs, and you are working together on a neat project which is generating lots of excitement at demo days. You would miss them terribly if they left.

But today you are annoyed. They either didn’t hear or forgot your feedback from the last design review, which means you have to redo some components you thought were finished. It’s a considerable amount of work, and this isn’t the first (or second) time, either. You want to tell them so and try to debug this so it doesn’t keep happening.

So far, so good. Giving feedback like this can be hard, especially if they are senior to you. But do they understand the totality of how you see them? Or was the last time they heard from you the last time they fucked up? Out of the last ten times you gave them feedback, how many were complaining or asking for changes? Does that feedback ratio accurately represent your perception of their value?

This doesn’t mean you have to run around saying “you’re amazing!” all the time, but do be mindful of how other people think you perceive them. I can pretty much guarantee that none of the people you love working with realize just how much you value them, but they are acutely aware of all the ways they fall short or fail you. Here are some ways to correct that imbalance a bit

  • Don’t be vague. Do be specific. If you just run around saying “You’re awesome!” to people, they will tune you out. Do try to notice and reflect some of the things that making working with them a joy. Like, “I learned so much about mysql indexes pairing with you today, thank you”, or “Last week in our practice session you suggested approaching it this way, and it was so helpful in my situation”, or “I really admire the way you can talk extemporaneously about $topic, and I LOVE knowing I can rely on you with zero prep”. This is harder, and it absolutely takes more work on your part, but it lands. And sticks.
  • Use the Situation, Behavior, Impact framework…but for praise. The SBI framework is designed for delivering hard feedback, but it works just as well for delivering kudos. Use it to give great praise that isn’t generic and does let people know what they’re doing right/what they mean to you. “In the last team meeting, your overview of the messaging framework was super eye-opening for me. I learned more than ever before about not just our pyramid, but how messaging frameworks in general are used. I understand its impact on my role better now than I have in seven years of product marketing!”
  • Ground critique in your overall reaction. Let’s say someone just presented an idea that you think is super interesting and potentially very high value, but you have questions about its impact on marginalized groups. Do they know you think it is interesting and high value, when you launch into your critique? No they do not. If all they hear is several rounds of criticism, they may very well give up and cancel altogether, thinking everyone hated it. Something as simple as starting with “I LOVE this idea. Have you thought about —”, or “This is really interesting, but I’m curious…” can be enough to convey a less discouraging, more accurate sense of your perspective.
  • Don’t hold out for the “wow” moments. Sometimes even sharing what you see as a neutral description of someone’s work can be mind-blowing and affirming. Most people don’t realize how much they are just noticed, full stop. It is flattering to be noticed or have the things you said remembered. Being seen can be enough. (h/t @eanakashima)
  • Don’t contribute to a pile-on. Feedback is asymmetric — you can only give feedback as one person at a time (you!), but the recipient might be grappling with negative feedback from many, many people. In that context, anything critical you say is likely to feel like one more rock in a public stoning. Or (somewhat less dramatically), if someone asks for feedback and receives a wave of criticism, they may feel deflated and defeated and drop the entire idea. If that isn’t the outcome you want, try to bring some positive balance to the discussion instead of piling on.
  • Give feedback to grow on. Pure positivity can sound cloying and be easy to discount. If you’re just praising me, I’m learning nothing from it. We’re not talking about a shit sandwich here, but the best compliments are the ones you learn something from. “That was GREAT. It might be even better if…” Relatedly, some people find it hard to believe purely positive feedback, but if you give feedback that shows you understand their work and what they did less well, you gain credibility and they will believe the praise. (h/t @inert_wall).

Hard conversations and corrective feedback are absolutely necessary at times. But even poorly-delivered critiques can be dealt with in the context of a good relationship, when the person knows how much you value them, and even the most delicately delivered criticism can be hard to hear from someone when all you ever seem to hear from them is how much you suck.

Engineers can be the worst at this, because we tend to show our interest by eagerly engaging with an idea or piece of work … by picking it apart, and chattering about all the ways it could be better. 🙃 I generally think this is an awesome way to show love, but we could stand to be clearer about the affection part, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So please consider the ratio of critique vs affirmation when giving feedback.

And there’s no reason to save all the nice words and praise and gratitude for someone’s funeral (or when they leave the company ☺️).

Giving Good Feedback: Consider the Ratio

Advice for Engineering Managers Who Want to Climb the Ladder

mipsytipsy, , , 11 Comments

We have been interviewing and hiring a pile of engineering directors at Honeycomb lately. In so doing, I’ve had some fascinating conversations with engineering managers who have been trying unsuccessfully to make the leap to director.

Here is a roundup of some of the ideas and advice I shared with them, and the original twitter thread that spawned this post.

What is an engineering director?

Given all the title inflation and general inconsistency out there, it seems worth describing what I have in mind when I say or hear “Engineering Director.”

In a traditional org chart, an engineering manager usually manages about 5-8 engineers, an engineering director manages 2-5 engineering managers, and a VP of engineering manages the directors. (At big companies, you may see managers and directors reporting to other managers and directors, and/or you may find a bunch of ‘title padding’ roles like Senior Manager, Senior Director etc.)

In smaller companies, it’s common to have a “Head of Engineering” (this is an appropriately weaselly title that commands just the right amount of respect while leaving plenty of space to hire additional people below or above them). Or all of engineering might roll up to a director or VP or CTO. It varies a lot.

When it comes to the work a director is expected to do, though, there’s a fair bit of consistency: we expect managers to manage ICs, and directors to manage managers.  Directors sit between the line managers and the strategic leadership roles. (More on this later.)

So if you’re an engineering manager, and you want to try being a director, the first thing you’ll want to understand is this: it is generally better to get there by being promoted than by getting offered a director title at a different company.

How to level up

Lots of engineers get tapped by their management to become managers, but not many become directors without a conversation and some intentional growth first. This means that for many of you, trying to become a director may be the first time you have ever consciously solicited a role outside the interview process. This can bring up feelings of awkwardness, even shamefulness or inappropriateness. You’ll just have to push through those.

If you ever want a job in upper leadership, you are going to have to learn how to shamelessly state your career goals. We want people in senior leadership who want to be there and are honing their skills in anticipation of an opportunity. Not “oops, I accidentally a VP.”

It is better to get promoted than hired up a level

There are a few reasons for this. It’s usually easier to get promoted than to get hired straight into a job you’ve never held before (at a org with high standards), and it also tends to be more sustainable/more likely to succeed if you get promoted in as well. Being a director is NOT just being a super-duper manager, it’s a different role and function entirely.

A lot of your ability to be successful as a director (or any kind of manager) comes from knowing the landscape, the product and the people, and having good relationships internally. When you are internally promoted, you already know the company and the people, so you get a leg up towards being successful. Whereas if you’ve just joined the company and are trying to learn the tech, the people, the relationships, and how the company works all at once, on top of trying to perform a new role for the first time.. well, that is a lot to take on at once.

There are exceptions, sure! Oodles of them[1]. But I would frankly look sideways at a place that wanted to hire me as a director if I haven’t been one, or hadn’t at least managed managers before. It’s at least a yellow flag. It tells me they are probably either a) very desperate or b) very sloppy with handing out titles.

If you want a promotion…

The obvious first step involves asking your manager, “what is the skill gap for me between the job I am doing right now and a director role?” Unlike in the movies, promotions don’t usually get surprise-dropped on people’s heads; people are usually cultivated for them. Registering your interest makes it more likely they will consider you, or help you develop skills in that direction as time moves on.

If you have a good manager who believes in you, and the opportunities exist at your company, that might even be all you have to do.(!)

And if so, lucky you. But as for the remaining ~80-90% of us (ha!) … well, we’ll need a bit more hustle.

Take inventory of your opportunities

Lots of companies aren’t large enough to need directors, or growing fast enough to create new opportunities. This can actually be the most challenging part of the equation, because there are generally a lot more managers who want to be directors than there are available openings.

If you do need to find a new job to reach your career goals, I would target fast-growing companies with at least 100 engineers. If you’re evaluating prospective employers based on your chance of advancement, consider the following::

  • Ask about their policies on internal vs external hires. Do they give preference to existing employees? How do they decide when to recruit vs grow from within?
  • Ask about the last time that someone was promoted into a similar role.
  • Tell the recruiter and hiring manager about your career goals. Don’t be shy. “My next career goal is to gain some experience managing managers” is fine. (That shouldn’t be the only reason you’re interested, of course.)
  • Size up the playing field. Is there oxygen at that level? Or are there a dozen other managers senior to you lined up for the same shot?

There are no sure bets. But you can do a lot to put yourself in the right place at the right time, signal your interest, and be prepared for the opportunity when it strikes.

a director is not a ‘super-senior manager’

A director is not just a manager on steroids: it is an entirely different job. It helps to have been a good manager before becoming a director, because many management skills will translate, but others will be entirely new to you. Expect this.

How being a good director is different from being a good manager

Let’s look at some of the ways that being a good engineering manager is different than being a good director.

  1. You can be a great EM, beloved by your team, without giving much thought to managing out or up. Directors cannot. If anything, it’s the opposite. You may get away with not coddling your EMs, but you must pull your weight for your peers and upper management.
  2. You can have a bit of a reputation for being stubborn or difficult as an EM, and that can be just fine. But having such a rep will probably sabotage your attempt at being promoted to director.
  3. You can be a powerful technical EM who sometimes jumps in to train engineers, be on call, or course correct technical and architectural decisions. This can even burnish your value and reputation as an EM. But this would all be a solid knock against you as a director.

Managers can get away with being opinionated and attached to technology, to some extent, while directors absolutely must balance lots of different stakeholders to achieve healthy business outcomes.

This difference of perspective is why managers will sometimes sniff about directors having sold out, or being “all about politics.”

(Blaming something on “politics” is usually a way of accidentally confessing that you don’t actually understand the constraints someone is operating under, IMO.)

A director’s job is running the business

Here’s the key fact: ✨directors run the business✨.

Managers should be focused on high-performing engineering teams. VPs should be focused on strategy and the longer term. Directors are the execution machines that knit technology with business objectives. (I like this piece, although the lede is a little buried. Key graf:)

managers, directors, VPs

Directors run the business. They are accountable for results. You can’t be bopping in and writing or reviewing code, or tossing off technical opinions. That’s not your job anymore.

Managing managers is a whole new skill set

The distance between managing engineers and managing managers is nearly as vast as the gulf between being an engineer and being a manager.

But it’s sneakier, because you don’t feel out of your depth as much as you did when you became a manager. 😁

As a manager, each of us instinctively draws on our own unique blend of strength and charisma — whatever it is that makes people look up to you and willing to accept your influence. Most of us can’t explain how we do it, because we run on instinct.

But as a director, you have to figure it out. Because you need to be able to debug it when the magic breaks down. You need to help your managers influence and lead using *their* unique strengths. What works for you won’t work for them. You have to learn how to unpack different leadership styles and support them in the way they need.

If you’re working towards a director role:

There are lots of areas where you can improve your director skills and increase your chances of being viewed as director material without any help whatsoever from your manager.

You ✨can not✨ be a blocker

Directors run the business … so you CANNOT be seen as a blocker. People must come to you of their own accord to get shit done and break through the blockers.

If they are going to other people for advice on how to break through YOU, you are not a good candidate for director. Figure out how to fix this before you do anything else.

Demonstrate impact beyond your team(s)

Another way to make yourself an attractive prospect for director is to work on systemic problems, driving impact at the org or company level. You could:

  • work to substantially increase the diversity of your teams or your candidate pipeline, and offer to work with recruiting and other managers to help them do the same (becoming BFFs with recruiting is often a canny move)
  • drive some cross-platform initiative to consolidate dozens of snowflake deploy processes and significantly reduce CI/CD build/deploy times, set an internal SLO for artifact build times, or successfully champion auto-deployment
  • champion an internal tools team with a mandate to increase developer productivity, and quantify the hell out of it
  • lead a revamp of the new hire onboarding process. Or add training and structure to the interview process and set an SLO of responding to every candidate within one week

I dunno — it all depends on what’s broken at your company. 🙃 Identify something causing widespread pain and frustration at the organizational level and fix it. 

Managing ‘up’ is not a ‘nice-to-have’…

If there’s a problem, make sure you are the one to bring it to your manager (and swiftly), along with “Here is the context, here’s where I went wrong, and this is what I’m planning to do about it.” No surprises.

At this point in your career, you should have mastered the art of not being a giant pain in the ass to your manager. Nobody wants a high-maintenance director. Do you reliably make problems go away, or do they boomerang back five times worse after you “fix” them?

…Neither is managing ‘out’

Managing “out” is important too. (Not “managing out”, which means terminating people from the company, but managing “out” as in horizontally, meaning your relationship with your peers.)

What do your peers think of you? Do you invest in those relationships? Do they see you as an ally and a source of wise counsel, or a source of chaos, gossip and instability, or a competitor with turf to protect? If you’re the manager that other managers seek out for a peer check, you might be a good candidate for director.

psst.. People are watching you

One of the most uncomfortable things to internalize if you climb the ladder is how much people will make snap judgments about you based on the tiniest fragments of information about you, and how those judgments may forever color the way they think of you or interact with you.

First impressions might be made by ten minutes together on the same zoom call…a few overheard fragments of people talking about you…even the expressions on your face as they pass you in the hallway. People will extrapolate a lot from a very little, and changing their impression of you later is hard work.

(Yes it’s frustrating, but you can’t really get upset about it, because you and I do it too. It’s part of being human. )

Because of that, you really do have to guard against being too cranky, too tired, or out of spoons. People WILL take it personally. It WILL come back to hurt you.

Remember, you don’t hear most feedback. If you visibly disagree with someone, assume 10x as many silently agree with them. If one person gives you a piece of hard feedback, assume 10x as many will never tell you. Be grateful. The more power you are perceived to have, the less feedback you will ever hear.

Pro tip

You can infer a surprising amount about how good a director candidate may be at their job, simply by listening closely to how they talk about their colleagues. Do they complain about being misunderstood or mistreated, do they minimize the difficulty or quality of others’ work, do they humblebrag, or do they take full responsibility for outcomes? And does their empathy fully extend to their peers in other departments, like sales and marketing?

Does it sound like they enjoy their work, and look forward to beginning it every day? Does it sound like they are all in the same little tugboat, all pulling in the same direction, or is there a baseline disconnect and lack of trust?

In conclusion…

Be approachable, be a drama dampener, project warmth. Control your calendar and carve out regular focus time. Guard your energy — never run your engine under 30%, and always leave something in the tank.

There are a lot more great responses and advice in the replies to my thread, btw. Go check them out if you’re interested.. and if you have something to say, contribute!.☺️

charity

Footnotes:

[1] Occasionally, it may work out to your benefit to jump into a new, higher title at a new company. This can happen when someone is already well qualified for the higher role, but is finding it difficult to get promoted (possibly due to insufficient opportunity or systemic biases). Just be aware that the job you were hired into is likely to be one where the titles are meaningless and/or the roles are chaotic. You may want to stay just long enough to get the title, then bounce to a healthier org.

Advice for Engineering Managers Who Want to Climb the Ladder

Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum

mipsytipsy, , , , , 7 Comments

I have written a lot about the pendulum swing between engineering and management, so I often hear from people who are angsting about the transition.

A quick recap of the relevant posts:

There are two anxieties I hear people express above all the rest.

The first one is something I hear over and over again, particularly from first-time managers as they contemplate the possibility of leaving management and returning to IC (individual contributor) work as an engineer:

“What if I never get another shot at people management?”
“Maybe this is the only chance I’ll ever get … and I’m about to give it up??”
“Am I going to regret this?”

“Will I ever get another shot at management?”

People decide to go back to engineering for lots of reasons. Maybe they’re burned out, or they work someplace with a poisonous management culture, or they’re having a kid and want to return to a role that feels more comfortable for a while. Or maybe they’ve been managing teams for a few years now, and have decided it’s time to go back to the well and refresh their technical skills in the interest of their long-term employability.

Regardless, these are not typically people who disliked being a manager. Rather they tend to be engineers who really enjoyed people management, and find it bittersweet to give up. Maybe they will miss the strategic elements and roadmap work, but they’re excited to clear their calendar and spend time in flow again, or they will miss having 1x1s but can’t wait to have time to mentor people. Whatever. They want to manage teams again someday, and worry they won’t get another chance.

Their anxiety is understandable! Lots of people feel like they waited a long time to be tapped for management, or like they were passed over again and again. Our cultural scripts about management definitely contribute to this sense of scarcity and diminution of agency (i.e. that management is a promotion, it is bestowed on you by your “superiors” as a reward for your performance, and it is pushy or improper to openly seek the role for yourself).

This anxiety is also, in my experience, ridiculously misplaced. ☺️

Once a manager, marked for life as a manager

You may have struggled to get your first opportunity to manage a team. But it’s a whole different story once you’ve done the job. Now you have the skills and the experience, and people can smell it on you.

I’m not joking. If you’re a good manager it’s actually nearly impossible to hide that you have the skills, because of the way it infuses your work and everything that you do as an IC. You get better at prioritization, more attuned to the needs of the business, and restless about work that doesn’t materially move the business forward. You get better at asking questions about why things need to be done and at communicating with stakeholders. You get better at motivating the people you work with, understanding their motivations and your own, and mediating conflicts or putting a damper on drama between peers. People come to you for advice and may seem to just do what you say, or go where you point.

Senior engineers with management experience are worth their weight in gold. They are valuable contributors and influential teammates. It’s a palpable shift! And every experienced manager in their vicinity will sense it.

So yes, you will be tapped for management again. And again and again and again. You are more likely to spend the rest of your career fending off management “opportunities” with a baseball bat than you are to wither away, pining for another shot.

There is a chronic shortage of good engineering managers, just like there is a chronic shortage of good, empathetic managers in every line of work. The challenge you will face from now on will not be about getting the chance to manage a team, but about being intentional and firm in carving out the time you need to recover and recharge your skills as an engineer.

“Am I too rusty to go back to engineering?”

The second anxiety is in some ways a mirror of the first:

“Can I still perform as an engineer?”
“Will anyone hire me for an engineering role?”
“Has it been too long, am I too rusty, will I be able to pull my weight?”

This is a more materially valid concern than the first one, in my opinion. Your engineering skills do wither and erode as time goes on. It will take longer and longer to refresh your skills the longer you go without using them. Management skills don’t decay in the same way that technical ones do, nor do they go out of date every few years as languages, frameworks and technologies tend to do.

If you aren’t interested in climbing the ladder and becoming a director or VP — or rather, if you aren’t actively, successfully climbing the ladder — you should have a strategy for keeping your hands-on skills sharp, because your ability to be a strong line manager is grounded in your own engineering skills.

Never, ever accept a managerial role until you are already solidly senior as an engineer. To me this means at least seven years or more writing and shipping code; definitely, absolutely no less than five. It may feel like a compliment when someone offers you the job of manager — hell, take the compliment 🙃 — but they are not doing you any favors when it comes to your career or your ability to be effective.

When you accept your first manager job, I think you should make a commitment to yourself to stick it out for two years. That’s how long it takes to rewire your instincts and synapses, to learn enough that you can tell whether you’re doing a good job or not.

After two or three years of management, it’s still pretty easy to go back to engineering. After five years, it gets progressively harder. But it can be done. And it should be worth it to your employer to invest in keeping you while you refresh your skills over the six months or whatever it may take. Insist on it, if you must. It’s better to refresh your skills while employed, on a system and codebase you’re familiar with, than to find yourself struggling to brush up enough to pass a coding interview.

Engineering fluency == job security

There is one more reason to refresh your engineering skills from time to time, one I don’t often see mentioned, and that is job security and optionality.

The higher you go up the ladder, the more money you will get paid…but the fewer jobs there be, and the fewer still that match your profile.

As a senior software engineer, there are fifteen bajillion job openings for you. Everyone wants to hire you. You can get a new job in a matter of days, no matter how picky you want to be about location, flexibility, technologies, product types, whatever. You’ve reached Peak Hire.

If you are looking for management roles, there will be an order of magnitude fewer opportunities (and more idiosyncratic hiring criteria), but still plenty for the most part. But for every step up the ladder you go, the opportunities drop by another order of magnitude, and the scrutiny becomes much more intense and particular. If you’re looking for VP roles, it may take months to find a place you want to work at, and then they might not choose you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maintaining your technical chops is a stellar way to hedge against uncertainties and maintain your optionality.

 

Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum