How Promotions Ruin Dev Careers w/ Shopify's Dir. of Engineering James Stanier
Discover more from Dev Interrupted
How Promotions Ruin Dev Careers w/ Shopify's Dir. of Engineering James Stanier
From the archives: As we progress through Season 3, we thought it would be nice to look back at some of our best episodes that haven’t been posted to our Substack page. This episode was originally published on April 11, 2022. Enjoy!
In so many professions, the reward for exceptional work is a promotion to management. Unfortunately, for developers whose programming gets them singled out for promotion, the skills to manage a team have nothing to do with the work that got them recognized in the first place.
James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify, understands the pitfalls of being promoted from an IC to an engineering manager, and began writing as a way to think through the mistakes he himself was making.
Today, James is an accomplished author; his first book Become An Effective Software Engineering Manager debuted in 2020, and his second book Effective Remote Work was published in early 2022.
On this episode of Dev Interrupted, James talks about how developers can prepare themselves for a role in management, or alternatively, why they should avoid a career in management altogether. He also discusses why Shopify loves remote pair programming, how to find your voice as a developer and why writing a book can be a spiritual experience.
Episode Highlights Include:
(4:06) Why so many devs are afraid of becoming managers
(16:51) The 90 day management test
(22:46) Remote work has increased dev productivity by default
(27:47) Why Shopify loves remote pair programming
(33:01) Finding your voice as a developer
(41:17) Writing a book can be a spiritual experience
While you’re here, check out this video from our YouTube channel, and be sure to like and subscribe when you do!
Want to cut code-review time by up to 40%? Add estimated review time to pull requests automatically!
gitStream is the free dev tool from LinearB that eliminates the No. 1 bottleneck in your team’s workflow: pull requests and code reviews. After reviewing the work of 2,000 dev teams, LinearB’s engineers and data scientists found that pickup times and code review were lasting 4 to 5 days longer than they should be.
The good news is that they found these delays could be eliminated largely by adding estimated review time to pull requests!
Learn more about how gitStream is making coding better HERE.
