Is Internal Tooling Holding Your Team Back?
Plus, managing your mental energy, see what a senior manager at Amazon does, advice on moving down the ladder, and more.
The wrong internal tools can hold your team back. So how do you find the right ones, and how the heck do you get engineers to adopt them once you do?
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon welcomes Debo Ray, co-founder & CEO of DevZero, to discuss the challenges developers face due to inadequate tools. With a keen sense of developers' needs, Debo explains why many companies fail in this domain, squandering precious dev time.
Debo also offers a peek into the future of cloud development, the work he's doing at DevZero, and the nuances of marketing tools to developers.
“An engineer is never wrong, even when they are. So if you ever ask an engineer to use a tool they don't like, they won't do it. If you ask them to turn left, they'll turn right. So at that point in time, it's very important to first explain what value propositions the tool will bring to the engineering team.”
Episode Highlights:
(2:25) Why are engineers held back by internal tooling?
(5:00) Where are companies wasting dev time?
(9:05) Developer experience has to come from leadership
(16:00) Debo's work at DevZero
(17:00) Moving development to the cloud
(21:15) Combining local tools with remote compute
(23:00) Getting devs interested in a new tool
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. The Art Of Managing Your Mental Energy As An Engineering Leader
As a leader of engineers, navigating choices that increase your team’s efficiency while consistently delivering results for the business is complex. This insightful piece on frameworks for effective decision-making from Will Larson offers a clear path.
Read: Manage Your Priorities and Energy
2. Step Into The Shoes Of A Senior Manager At Amazon
In a followup to last week’s look at what senior software engineers do at Amazon, Dave Anderson takes to
newsletter and turns his investigative eye to what senior managers do at Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut. The number of emails they receive is pure gold.
This week’s Download is sponsored by “The Continuous Merge Guide to Merge Standards: A Free Guide To The Merge Standards That Empower Policy-As-Code In Elite Orgs.”
The Continuous Merge Guide to Merge Standards covers where CI/CD falls short, the importance of establishing merge standards on your team, and how LinearB workflow automation can help.
Inside you'll find:
A breakdown of Continuous Merge philosophy and its many benefits
13 of our favorite merge standards that enforce quality and boost efficiency
Tactical advice on how to implement merge standards on your team
3. How To Go Down The Ladder Successfully
Exits don’t just happen for companies. Exits from leadership roles happen for all engineering managers at some point. This smart blog argues the right path is to relinquish direct responsibilities and empower team members to take ownership. By delegating effectively when the moment arrives, leaders can create a more productive team even when their footprint decreases.
Read: How To Scale Yourself Down
4. A Beautiful Argument For Metrics
To so many of us, there are no sweeter three words than “data-driven insights.” DevZero.io's fresh blog post offers a robust perspective on how data-driven insights around productivity empower all levels of engineering orgs to optimize processes, workflows, and outcomes.
Read: Measuring Developer Productivity to Maximizing Software Engineering Success
5. Remind Yourself What Engineering Team You DON’T Want To Build
We focus a lot on what engineering leaders should be doing, and not on what they shouldn’t be doing. In this smart, funny but surprisingly functional piece by
, the author outlines the most common causes and characteristics of toxic dev teams.
This was a great listen! Is there a transcript of the interview available anywhere?