category
Culture
- #60 6 min
Pain-Driven Development: Why Greedy Algorithms Are Bad for Engineering Orgs
I recently wrote about the importance of understanding decision impact and why it’s important for building an empathetic engineering culture. I presented the distinction between pain displacement and pain deferral, and this was something I wanted to expand on a bit. When you distill it down, I think what’s at the heart of a lot of engineering orgs is this idea of “pain-driven development.” When a company grows to a certain size, it develops limbs, and each of these limbs has its own pain receptors. This is when empathy becomes important because it becomes harder and less natural. These limbs of course are teams or, more generally speaking, silos. Teams have a natural tendency to operate in a way that minimizes the amount of pain they feel.
- #59 2 min
Decision Impact
I think a critical part of building an empathetic engineering culture is understanding decision impact. This is a blindspot that I see happening a lot: a deliberate effort to understand the effects caused by a decision. How does adopting X affect operations? Does our dev tooling support this? Is this architecture supported by our current infrastructure? What are the compliance or security implications of this? Will this scale in production? A particular decision might save you time, but does it create work or slow others down? Are we just displacing pain somewhere else?
- #55 4 min
You Are Not Paid to Write Code
“Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a different configuration of roughly eight ingredients. Many people grumble or reject the notion of using proven tools or techniques. It’s boring. It requires investing time to learn at the expense of shipping code. It doesn’t do this one thing that we need it to do. It won’t work for us. For some reason—and I continue to be completely baffled by this—everyone sees their situation as a unique snowflake despite the fact that a million other people have probably done the same thing. It’s a weird form of tunnel vision, and I see it at every level in the organization. I catch myself doing it on occasion too. I think it’s just human nature.
- #54 9 min
Shit Rolls Downhill
Building software of significant complexity is tough because a lot of pieces have to come together and a lot of teams have to work in concert to be successful. It can be extraordinarily difficult to get everyone on the same page and moving in tandem toward a common goal. Product development is largely an exercise in trust (or perhaps more accurately, hiring), but even if you have the “right” people—people you can trust and depend on to get things done—you’re only halfway there.
- #33 4 min
On Hireability and Recruiting
Developers deal with recruiter emails on a daily basis. It’s frustrating because it’s almost always a shotgun approach, but occasionally you get something that strays from the path and, delightfully, it stands out. It’s refreshing to have someone who has actually taken the time to determine your skill set, technology background, and how you spend your free time with respect to software. You feel like they at least have an inkling of who you are. On the other hand, it’s irritating to be bombarded by contract-to-hire offers which aren’t even remotely tailored to you. What’s worse is when it’s ten different emails from ten different people working for the same recruiting agency.