Career Journey 3: Assembling & Nurturing Engineering Teams w/ Code Story's Noah Labhart
Discover more from Dev Interrupted
Career Journey 3: Assembling & Nurturing Engineering Teams w/ Code Story's Noah Labhart
Plus, meet us at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, more dev-productivity hot takes, how Instagram scaled with only three engineers, and more.
Career Journey 3: Assembling & Nurturing Engineering Teams w/ Code Story's Noah Labhart
With great power comes great responsibility. Now that you've been promoted to a people manager, how do you build a healthy and successful engineering team?
Extending our series on the career journey of engineering leader, co-host
is joined by , co-founder & CTO at Veryable, and host of the popular podcast Code Story.Conor and Noah shift the series' focus to the intricacies of building effective engineering teams. Beyond team building, the episode delves into the subtleties of offering and accepting feedback, the importance of hiring developers vs. programmers, and fostering an environment where each individual can flourish.
If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes of our leadership series featuring NuBank's Thiago Ghisi, you can find them on Dev Interrupted's new website.
“On CodeStory, I get to talk to engineering leaders and founders galore, and one of the most common things I hear when I ask about a mistake is: ‘I let someone stay on the team too long when they weren't a fit.’ I hear that often and I have done that myself.”
Episode Highlights:
(3:00) Hiring "career-changing" engineers
(10:30) Fostering healthy team dynamics
(15:00) How to know when to let someone go
(21:00) "We hire developers, not programmers"
(24:30) Squad based teams
(31:00) Squad best practices
(40:30) Giving & receiving constructive feedback
(45:30) Noah's best advice for engineering leaders
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. Meet The Dev Interrupted Team At The DevOps Enterprise Summit
Last year, we unveiled the Dev Interrupted Dome at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and we’re excited to be bringing it back this year! 🎙️
We had the pleasure of recording episodes with industry leaders like Gene Kim and
, and this year should be a great follow-up with top-notch guests. Make sure you visit booth #203 to see the Dome, catch some live recordings, and meet some of our team 🤝Stop in and say hello! Who knows, you may even get a chance to appear on the podcast 😉
2. Get Your McKinsey Dev-Productivity Fix
It’s not just CEOs weighing in on the McKinsey dev-productivity debate. Dev Interrupted’s co-host, Conor Bronsdon, was asked to join Gradle’s Build Propulsion Lab and give his take.
Conor highlighted that while McKinsey’s framework may have some merits, it overlooked significant aspects of the developer experience and the intricacies of engineering team dynamics. Rather than delving deep into the nuances of how engineering teams operate, it seemed to cater to leaders who favored simple, immediate metrics.
This Download Is Sponsored By “The 2023 Engineering Benchmarks Report Release Webinar”
After analyzing 3,600,000+ branches from 2,000+ dev teams across 32 countries, the data science team at LinearB is launching its 2023 Engineering Benchmarks Report.
Join LinearB CTO Yishai Beeri and Product Manager Gal Rubin as they present fascinating new insights into how elite engineering teams work, set goals, and achieve success.
**All registrants will receive a pre-release copy of the report.
In this 30-minute webinar we’ll dive into:
The all-new Engineering Investment Benchmarks
Data insights by organization/team/size/geo/industry
How elite teams are performing against the four DORA metrics
New metrics that have been added to this year’s report (e.g. capacity accuracy)
3. Learn How Instagram Scaled to 14 Million Users With Only 3 Engineers
Instagram impressively scaled to 14 million users in just over a year with a mere trio of engineers by adhering to three principles: simplicity, utilizing existing solutions, and leveraging tried-and-tested technologies.
This piece from
outlines how their technical infrastructure was built on AWS, with their application server using Django written in Python, data storage in PostgreSQL, photo storage in Amazon S3 served by Amazon CloudFront, and caching achieved through Redis and Memcached. For engineering managers, this is a testament to the power of combining clear guiding principles with a robust, efficiently designed tech stack.4. Will AI Solve Your Testing Woes?
Still wondering about the best use of AI for your team? Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is gradually proving its efficacy in software testing; current experiments indicate that it can reliably handle 30-50% of test writing, primarily focusing on simpler tests.
However, with rapid advancements in generative AI and tech giants like Google and Microsoft likely building their own internal models, there's potential for AI to handle a significant portion of software tests in the near future. Engineering managers should note: While the trajectory points towards full automation in testing, trust remains a hurdle, suggesting a continued role for human oversight, especially in critical code paths.
5. What Happens When 10,000 Software Engineers Work On The Same Code?
Curious how tech behemoths like Google and Microsoft handle massive repositories? 📊 This video sheds light on the advanced strategies and tools that ensure smooth collaboration and swift delivery, even with billions of lines of code.
From virtual file systems to trunk-based development, delve into the processes that streamline massive projects. Understand the potential of tools like Graphite and Bazel in supercharging development cycles, which is essential knowledge for any engineering manager.
Whether you're overseeing a small team or a sprawling department, this comprehensive look into the best practices of industry leaders equips you to lead more efficiently and ensure reliability in all deployments. Elevate your managerial perspective with insights from the pinnacle of tech development! 🌟
6. Tap Into The ROI Of Continuous Merge
There’s only one thing better than seeing an idea you came up with gain traction: Having data that shows it’s a good idea. DevOps Digest asked LinearB’s Ori Keren to break down recent numbers around the implementation of continuous merge.
If you’re still new to the idea, continuous merge is the practice of solving inefficiencies in the pull-request process, such as lengthy idle times, improving cycle time, and accelerating software release. Implementing continuous merge, through techniques like automating low-risk changes and setting code review goals, has been shown to dramatically reduce PR size, shorten cycle times, improve PR review times, and reduce pickup time, offering a competitive advantage to engineering organizations.