Every Friday I post a video related to one of the themes of this site. This week it’s a talk by Daniel Na about pushing through organisational friction to get important work done.

What is organisational friction? Daniel’s description says it best:

As a senior-level engineering leader, experience tells you things could be better. You see the gaps. If only the company adopted policy A or dumped technology B, everyone would benefit. But there’s so much inertia. The company has always used B. You are frustrated. Can you actually make a difference? Yes. You are encountering organizational friction, and learning to identify, accept and push through friction is a key skill of engineering leaders.

The slides for the talk are on Daniel Na’s website.

This collection of books has helped me understand how to be a software engineering manager. They cover the complexity and nuance of middle management in the software development space. There are technical books, people management books, books on planning and strategy. I have found value in all of them and recommend them to anyone who is or wants to be an engineering manager.

Continue reading →

Every Friday I post a video related to one of the themes of this site. This week it’s a dive into the how the first edition of the legendary Civilization series of games was made.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley talk about how they made Civilization, including design decisions, technical trade-offs, and why the game’s version of Ghandi had such a bad temper.

Scott Hanselman’s guest on episode 847 of the Hanselminutes podcast was Roberta Arcoverde, the Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow.

Their discussion covered a lot topics, and, to my mind, was a perfect illustration of the complexity and nuances of the engineering manager role. At one point Roberta summed up her role like this:

“So now I manage the people, right? I manage their careers, I help them grow. And I also have a strategic vision of where we need to be. So it’s more of a position it’s very similar to what engineering managers and other companies do. But it’s a little bit more technical than that too, because I do need to keep my eyes on where the software architecture is, is moving towards what are our strategy in terms of scale and where we want to be and not in the next PR, but in the next three years.”

Every company does engineering management differently, but that mix of technical detail and strategic focus is common, especially when you get a the manager of managers position.

Anyone curious about the management side swing of the engineering/management pendlum would get a lot out of the things Roberta talked about.

Continue reading →

Please standby, reader, as I fix up the site and dust off the regular posting muscles.