Skippers — Number two

Skippers are a curated set of articles I found interesting. I originally shared a similar set of articles with some commentary among the leaders in our R&D team (aka “The Skippers”). To goal was to help us become better leaders and managers, or at a minimum be thought provoking.

Technical Debt

Forget Technical Debt — Here’s how we focus on building technical wealth, caught my eye as. It discusses how to approach technical debt.

Andrea Goulet argues that startups need to shift their mindset away from paying down debt toward building technical wealth, and away from tearing down old code toward deliberately remodeling it.

It is interesting to read that dealing with legacy code is not merely a technical problem. Conway’s law:

“It’s the law that says your codebase will mirror the communication structures across your organization,” Goulet says. “If you want to fix your legacy code, you can’t do it without also addressing operations, too. That’s the missing link that so many people miss.”

Paying down technical debt should have two key goals: 1. improve the customer experience either in quality or usability, and 2. improve the productivity of our team.

“I talk to so many startups that are killing themselves to acquire talent — they’re hiring so many high-paid engineers just to get more work done,” she says. “Instead, they should have looked at how to make each of their existing engineers more productive. What debt could you have paid off to get that extra productivity?”

Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management

Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management is a two-part write up by Julie Zhou. She has quite a few interesting management related Medium posts. Here’s the top 8.

1. You must like dealing with people to be great at management. Not everybody is great at being a manager. Sometimes we equate becoming a manager with a promotion. That is the wrong way to look at it. And there is the viewpoint that managers don’t really do anything. Larry Page once held the belief there should not be any managers or project managers. Being a manager is as many of you know by now that easy. It requires people skills, and a continued curiosity in how teams work.
2. Having all the answers is not the goal. Motivating the team to find the answers is the goal.
3. To evaluate the strength of a manager, look at the strength of their team.
4. The most significant advantage a senior manager has over a junior manager is an expanded perspective.
5. Aligning on why is more important than aligning on how.
6. Sometimes, a great person will not work out on a great team, and that is okay.
7. You never regret moving a struggling person too soon. You only regret doing it too late.
8. Your team should respect you. But you don’t need them to agree with everything you say or do.

Hiring

Screen engineers better with a debugging role play talks about a fun way to screen engineers.

We already have a few such tests in our arsenal. I like to screen new grads with a debugging problem about [PROBLEM NOT PUBLISHED]. I look for a logical debugging approach and knowledge of some networking tools. The candidate shouldn’t give up easily. Whether or not they get to the conclusion that [ANSWER NOT PUBLISHED] is less relevant.