Uber’s best known corporate value is probably Super Pumped, which, in addition to being a one-time company value, is also the title of Mike Isaac’s account of Uber and the subsequent television show. However, for me personally, the value I remember most is Let Builders Build. Working in Uber’s infrastructure engineering organization, I once chatted with a product engineering manager who wanted to continue rolling out a new feature that was hammering the production database. I was concer...| lethain.com
Most growth companies are starved for experienced leadership. As they expand, continued growth builds up pressure on their existing leadership. This gets quite stressful! The rare executive manages to build an effective organization solely by investing in their existing team, but most supplement their organization with some external hires to maintain a balance of folks who’ve seen it before and folks who’re actively learning their role.| lethain.com
In management we often find ourselves balancing the freedoms of the few against the freedoms of the many. This is, as you might imagine, a tricky business.| lethain.com
Along with slow technical migrations, I believe reorganizations are the second largest activity which cause quickly growing companies to slow down. Here is a framework for running an engineering reorg effectively.| lethain.com
One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I’ve written about one of the styles that I’ve found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call it Model, Document, and Share.| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why migrations are so important, and also how to run them effectively.| lethain.com
Example survey, Example analysis While you should rely on your organizational metrics to measure developer productivity, quantitative measurement will sometimes miss important context. For example, you might be proud of how the backend developers are having a great time with their CI/CD, only to realize that the iOS engineers hate their release process that isn’t instrumented in any of your dashboards. A Developer Productivity Survey is an effective tool to bring qualitative feedback into y...| Infrastructure Engineering
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data Driven Products Now! if Kellan had not been there to so thoroughly stick the landing on technology choices.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports