🥾 Learning Culture, Listening, Engineering Supremacy, 1:1:1s, Better Writing, Bitrot: TMW #250 by CTO Craft

CTO of The Software House, Marek Gajda takes the hotseat to talk about the achievements and failures that helped shape his path to leadership

Nic Goodall and Sarah Wells will share their insights on the do’s and don'ts of learning in engineering. They will also share some of their successes and failures from learning initiatives to frameworks and personal development plans.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” This famous quote by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard really hits the nail on its head.

When it comes to annual resolutions and personal development goals, listening usually isn’t very high up on the list. User research leader and author Ximena Vengoechea makes the case for why you should put more intention and effort into sharpening this skill, offering advice tailored to different levels and roles across the startup org chart.

Adeva is a global tech talent network that helps companies scale engineering teams fast by working with highly skilled distributed tech talent across the world. Schedule a call and get started! 

This is a guest post from Olly Headey, a tech entrepreneur based in Edinburgh. Olly co-founded FreeAgent — the cloud accounting product of choice for savvy freelancers — and helped scale the business to over 120,000 customers and 260 staff.

Honeycomb has a reputation for being a very engineering-driven company. No surprise there, since it was founded by two engineers and our mission involves building an engineering product for other engineers.

It’s always been hard to hire engineers, but it’s only gotten harder in recent months. Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage.

Leadership development is likely one of the biggest, most visible priorities for professional development in your organization. But we’d guess it isn’t achieving the results you’d like it to — effective, strategic, and selfless leadership — despite significant investment.

1-1s are core to management. Ad-hoc feedback delivery, bi-weekly check-ins with your directs, monthly meetings with your skip-levels, annual performance reviews. Their use cases are well-defined and well-understood. 1-1-1s, on the other hand, can be much more interesting.

Writing is an increasingly important skill for engineering leaders. Indeed, poor writing can hamper career progression, above a certain level. Tactics for more clear, more frequent and more confident.

Pressure is inevitable, and necessary, in the life of a leader. Stress, on the other hand, can cause tremendous damage. Every leader knows that pressure is an energy that generates actions and results.

We can understand great leadership as a set of qualities or characteristics. The more we embody these qualities, the greater the depth and quality of our leadership.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different. Strategic planning is a necessary process but, ultimately, distributed teams need to make decisions with limited time and information.

Engineering deals in lifetimes, both human and otherwise. If not fatigue or fracture, than corrosion or erosion; if not war or vandalism, then taste or fashion claim not only the body but the very souls of once-new machines…

How many automated tests should you write? Just Enough. Just Enough Testing balances the need to ship with the quality your customers deserve.

When I first discovered “agile software development” in 2005, and experienced working in an “agile way”, the impact on me changed my career. People say you gravitate towards what you’re good at or enjoy, and agile helped reveal how much I value working together on a goal.