Burndown Charts; Managing Value Vs Output; Meta's Coding Machine; Interview Red Flags
Issue #35 Bytes
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📖 Guide to Managing Burndown Charts
Imagine you are on a solo road trip with a set destination. You constantly check your map and fuel gauge to check whether you are on a track. Now, replace the road trip with an agile project and the map with a burndown chart.
Check out this comprehensive guide by Typo on burndown charts and keep your project deliveries on track.
How do you manage your burndown charts? Share in the comments! 💬
Article of the Week ⭐
“When it comes down to it, managers are responsible for getting their team to complete work. Engineering managers need their teams to engineer things. Design managers need their teams to create designs.”
Managers Make Teams Deliver More Value, Not Deliver More Output
Let’s face it you got into engineering because you love the flow state of building things. We all did, and article of the week author Dave Anderson agrees with us. He shares his insights from decades of experience at Amazon and Meta (then Facebook).
But as you progress on the managerial career ladder, this flow state derived from coding becomes more elusive and worse: a waste of your time as your scope and influence increases.
Your goal now is to enable this flow state for your reports while making sure they flow in the general sense of the business’ strategic interests.
What you can’t do
The one thing that won’t come as a surprise to anyone with experience in our industry: you cannot make engineers work faster. The emphasis—and often obsession—over speed is a counter productive rabbit hole. It’s clear to engineers, but has to be experiences, not just discussed.
The bottleneck for value is always the thinking and learning speed, along with collaboration and efficiency of tolling. Rarely is it typing code through the keyboard. Managers can remove distractions and impediments, but that’s where it stops. Once the race towards a goal with a deadline begins your productivity is essentially locked.
But that still leaves plenty of things to improve.
What you can do
Fix motivation and accountability. The most basic instinct to measure, track and review is to figure out who’s not pulling their weight in order to reward or punish. This stems from a lack of trust: within and outside. But with a good structure of accountability this is unnecessary. Not just measured accountability, but helping your team help themselves to be more accountable and motivating them to do so.
Insist on open progress. Working in out in the open is the modern-day credo for continuous delivery.
No one is allowed to say, “I’m still working on that code” or “I’m iterating on the doc”, without everyone being able to see their work. [quote]
Progress, WIP, unfinished tasks are handled on the mainline, visible to everyone on the team and up. Code submitted, branches kept short, documents in collaborative online tools.Standard agile processes. Unblock people actively and have collaborative communication in place that allows anyone on the team to detect lack of progress. Whether that’s standups, progress through commits or async status updates. Anyone not posting or posting the same thing two days in a row needs support and will stand out to be helped.
Shared ownership of delivery. Plenty of teams aren’t true teams to the letter. They may be pulling from the same backlog or reporting to the same stakeholders. Teams are about team-work. And team work on software projects means sharing deliverables. Help your team engage in mutual productivity for the team’s benefit rather than focusing on their own.
Editorial Note: the original article is partially paywalled. This post is not sponsored. In the spirit of fairness this teaser only includes content that was above the paywall jump at the time of writing.
Other highlights 👇
“The Coding Machine” at Meta
Gergely Orosz from The Pragmatic Engineer brought you a delightful interview with Michael Novati, the first person to hold Meta’s title of “coding machine”. We bring you interesting insights from their conversation.
The Coding Machine rank at Meta is oft-held by Staff-level and beyond engineers who challenge the notion of having Director-level impact and scope for ICs.
Michael noted the importance of having a fair dual-track or IC-track system that allowed engineers to contribute to a far greater scope and influence compared to being promoted out of the track into managerial roles.
Efficiency through refactoring
Initially at Meta, Michael worked on internal tools and product tools. In a typical day he spent more than half of his time going around codebase clean ups and refactoring key areas to unblock others quickly and help them deliver.
Strategically, two things were crucial in making sure this doesn’t get out of hand:
Candid, full transparency with his manager. A trusting, supportive relationship with the manager where both parties can be blunt each other.
A notepad to keep a work log of wins. Your career is ultimately your own responsibility. As an aside, Gergely helped thousands of engineers improve their software career paths and having a “brag document” or work log of this kind is reportedly the single-best point of action for any engineer pursuing career growth.
Red Flags to Watch Out During Interviews
Dünya is an EM at Booking.com and shares with LeadDev his insights on what to watch out for in interviews. Red flags happen on both sides of the table and can disrupt and waste time for everyone involved. Let’s get right into it.
Employer Red Flags
Over-processed vs chaotic. The interview process will tell you a lot about the company. Keep an open mind and be wary of any hooplas during the process, as they are indicative of future issues with your employer.
Alignment. It should be easy to ask your employer and/or recruiter what their priorities are and how to excel in the interview process. If they don’t know, it’s a sign they’re winging it which exposes you to high-friction and hard to predict outcomes.
Feedback. Ask for feedback at the end of the interview. A company embedded in a culture of feedback will show that during the hiring process as well. Don’t be afraid to ask questions on how to succeed, and take note when the opposing side doesn’t know either.
Focus on strengths. An interviewer can be led astray by treating the conversation too much like a “test”: looking for problems and digging holes. Be wary of this and speak up if matters have to be brought back to the main point: what is the purpose of this stage, how do your strengths relate to the job requirements.
Transparency. Tit for tat, ask about the company’s strengths and weaknesses as well and focus on having a balanced understanding of their unique opportunities but also problem areas and challenges. Be extremely wary if you sense you are being deceived or if information is being kept from you in order to force you to a lower compensation.
Candidate Red Flags
True believers. “It depends” is a phrase you will hear often in our industry. Be wary of parties that hold strong, even religious beliefs about how things should be done as they can be a point of friction and frustration for teamwork.
Self-awareness. You are there to interview the candidate as they are, not to fix them, chastise them or hire them in hopes of who they may become in 10 years. Be mindful of candidates that struggle staying grounded in facts and reality, often veering off to hypotheticals, anxieties or untruths.
Growth mindset. The best candidates are receptive to feedback, who are open minded enough to separate listening from feeling judged or having to render agreement or disagreement immediately.
Motivation. Validate how easy it is to motivate the candidate. A candidate that can only be motivated by one thing, often at an extreme degree will be a constant source of attention-seeking and haggling.
Curiosity. Questions are the root of all learning. Seek to understand how and what questions candidates raise regarding the Why of the company. Without curiosity, your future engineer can only act as a cog in a feature factory.
Protagonist mindset. An obvious red flag is when candidates obsess about externalising all struggles in life to their previous employer’s manager, codebase or team circumstances. Someone with a protagonist mindset, in contrast, will emphasise growing and learning from past mistakes, seeking new opportunities and challenges.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors -
, Michael Novati, Dünya KırkalıSponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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