Monday Links 6

Camille Fournier: Structural Lessons in Engineering Management

When you see the world in systems, interactions, and efficiencies, you can trick yourself into believing that the humans inside of these systems will be happier if the system is well-organized. While I agree that there is value to organizing your teams effectively, the marginal value that the teams might experience is likely to be offset by the unintentional friction that happens for the people who don’t fit perfectly into your structure. If you don’t work to stay ahead of what the people in your team want and need, if you don’t create growth opportunities or appropriate technical challenges even though it’s not the most optimal thing for the system as it currently exists, you will find yourself losing good engineers and managers.

Lorin Hochstein: Incident response is a team sport

When a group of people respond to an incident, it’s never the responsibility of a single individual to remediate. It can’t be, because we each know our own corners of the system better than our teammates. Instead, it is the responsibility of the group of incident responders as a whole to resolve the incident.