Have Engineering Leaders Become Too Hands-Off?
Plus, reset your mentor mindset, reignite your spark for engineering, inside Uber's move to the cloud, and the dangers of shipping at all costs.
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host
welcomes Francisco Trindade, Director of Engineering at Braze, to discuss strategies to improve collaboration and effectiveness within engineering teams.Francisco notes a shift in the tech industry over the past decade from focusing on rapid hiring and individual growth to a need for more effective team dynamics. Criticizing the tech industry's aversion to micromanagement, he argues that it has inadvertently resulted in a lack of focus on team effectiveness and proposes a renewed emphasis on fostering productive environments for engineers to fully realize their potential.
“There's a quote [that] says ‘You can’t be a change agent of a system that you are in,’ right? That’s the thing we don't realize. If you're an engineer and you’re picking up a ticket and writing code, your focus is that, right?
As a manager, your focus should be, ‘I need to make this effective.’”
Episode Highlights:
(2:20) Managers can't be micromanagers
(4:40) Francisco's three key aspects to improving team effectiveness
(11:15) Creating the right incentives for your team
(14:00) How to work with teams around the world
(21:15) Increasing engineering team efficiency
(27:30) What is Braze?
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. Re-up Your Mentorship Mindset
Want an easy career tip? When an experienced engineering leader gives you good advice, you take it.
Dev Interrupted has spoken to some of the most influential mentors in the engineering space - like AMEX’s Sarvenaz Myslicki - but it’s been rare to come across a solid wiki of mentorship resource like the one put together below. From building trust to providing hard feedback, this mentorship guide is a true, detailed look at nailing every step of the mentorship process.
Read: Being A Good Mentor – A Developer’s Guide
2. Reignite your romance with engineering
Full disclosure: Listening to LinearB’s co-founder Dan Lines makes us romantic about the craft of coding. Building cool shit. Solving cool problems. Learning cool tech. These themes are the base of how Dan got to where he is and why he built LinearB.
asked to hear Dan’s story for themselves, and the interview is a solid dose of earnest optimism in an industry that could always use it.3. Inside Uber’s Move to the Cloud
With the same excitement that non-engineers have for the next episode of their favorite TV show, Dev Interrupted looks forward to the monthly deep-dive The Pragmatic Engineer has into tech's most influential companies. This month,
(the brains behind the blog) takes a look at what it took to move the monolith that is Uber up into the cloud.This Week’s Download is sponsored by “What Metrics Make Engineering Teams Elite: A Free Look Inside The Top 10% Of Engineering Orgs”
LinearB analyzed over 2,000 dev teams to create an exclusive report tracking what engineering metrics make teams elite. The report goes into detail on:
How elite engineering teams measure their performance beyond DORA metrics.
What makes engineering teams elite in terms of the development lifecycle, developer workflow, and business alignment?
Explore how your team stacks up in terms of metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, and planning accuracy.
Learn what tools elite software teams use to hit these industry-leading benchmarks.
4. The Danger of Shipping At All Costs
Sometimes a subject touches a nerve. Our conversation with Drew McManus, CEO and co-founder of 33 Teams, about the dangers of shipping at all costs did just that. His insights went viral on Reddit this year and have been making the rounds in developer circles again. Here’s your quick summation to get caught up.