Leadership

I spent years of my career getting paid well to patch applications at companies that had refused to invest in their engineering teams. The pattern was always the same, and I am watching it play out again with AI. All of this stemmed from the company’s unwillingness to invest in the skills of their team and in some cases force engineers to learn new technologies. It is often the case that the company itself, especially at the senior executive level does not care what tech stack is used as long as the application runs well and the company can sell its products and services. There might be some directive like using a certain vendor for ecommerce but that rarely prevents day-to-day operations shifting with industry trends. Instead the cause of these issues would be engineers and managers of those teams finding some reason to dislike SPAs and newer web technologies, often irrationally, then once that happens for a couple of years it becomes very hard to jump back onto the train. Eventually it becomes harder to hire, your most excited forward-thinking team members leave and you are stuck with a decaying application hiring contractors to patch holes. ...

I recently read a post titled “Operate at all levels” by Pedro Franceschi who is the co-CEO at Brex. The post is an internal communication that he has shared to his team about the requirement he has, particularly for managers, to operate at all levels. Pedro provides the example of a director at his company that both leads the AI team and writes tooling for engineering dashboards. Firstly, I agree with Pedro’s assertions that a leader who can operate at all levels earns respect from their team and if you want to be a successful leader in any business you should have the skills of the organisation you are managing e.g. if you are a director of engineering you should have a software engineering background, if you are leading a sales organisation you should have experience with sales and partnerships. I am consistently surprised when I meet people in my work either as a consultant or engineering manager that have not worked in the field they are managing. In amalgamated organisations it makes sense that you may have a person skilled in marketing also managing an ecommerce engineering team if that team does not require a senior leader but it should be a requirement that at some point in that person’s career they were a senior individual contributor (IC). ...

In jiu jitsu there’s a training method called positional sparring, sometimes called specific training. These two names refer to a training format where two people will start in a set position with defined parameters on where they start and when they stop. The power of this training is that it gives you repeated practice for something you’re trying to learn that focuses specifically on that technique, this is very different to open sparring where you may only find yourself in a position you’re trying to learn once or twice in a round. ...