For a long time, the path to engineering manager began with a prolonged stint of technical leadership. Then you’d transition into an initial management role that balanced people and technical responsibilities. Some companies call this a tech lead manager role. Folks entering those sorts of managerial roles were often the senior-most technical contributor on their team. If they struggled with the transition, many of them would fall back into the familiar habit of technical leadership instead...| lethain.com
Folks are sometimes surprised to learn that I started out working as a frontend engineer. I’d like to imagine it’s because I’m so terribly knowledgeable about infrastructure, but I suspect it’s mostly grounded in my unconscionably poor design aesthetic. Something that has stuck with me from that experience was feeling treated as a second-tier engineer: folks were unwilling to do any frontend work, but were careful to categorize it as trivial.| lethain.com
I’ve come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams| lethain.com
I’m speaking at Velocity on June 12th on ‘How Stripe invests in technical infrastructure’, and this is the rough outline of the content the talk will cover. I hope to see y’all there.| lethain.com
In my early career roles, I worked at companies that never worried about their infrastructure costs at all. They were simply too low a cost and growing too slowly for the Finance team to pay much attention to it. This “ignore it until it’s too large to ignore” approach served me well. Until it didn’t. Working at Uber, I was caught me off guard when a new Director joined and overnight infrastructure costs were recategorized from insignificant to requiring urgent, detailed review every ...| infraeng.dev
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
TODO: Find better vocabulary to distinguish between “leadership team” in your org (that you manage) and “leadership team” that you’re a member of or report to I once walked into an annual headcount planning session to learn that the other engineering managers in the room had already decided together how they would reallocate the senior members from the infrastructure organization that I supported to the teams that they ran. This was, they assured me, optimal for their roadmaps.| Infrastructure Engineering