Engineering Management

An interesting topic arose over the holiday period which is people using AI tools for the first time or at least first time in a while and realizing how far they have come since last year. Claude code in particular had new users seemingly everywhere. The strange thing about this for the AI maxi crowd is that we have been using these tools all year. Some of the reviews have been panicked as people realize just how far some of this tooling has come in the last 12 months. ...

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. ...

I’ve been going through a pretty big hiring process at work lately, it’s not the first time I’ve had to scale a team up to handle changing business requirements and take more ownership of the company’s platform. When I look at building this sort of team I need to build a mental model in my head of the upcoming work for the team and the realistic complexity of the work. There’s no point in hiring high-end senior engineers if they are going to be working on simple, small fixes, inversely there’s no point in hiring mid-career engineers who won’t have the experience to deal with complex and difficult problems. ...