Jobs - 2. page

A famous person once said “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”. That is, treat others like you’d like to be treated.

As a manager, heck as someone who wants to get things done in an organization, that’s the baseline. If you can’t treat other people with respect and empathy, you’re going to have a hard time getting anything done. You might be able to get some stuff done by yourself, or via transactional behavior, or via fear. (By the way, if this is common in your organization, I’d look for new work because this type of motivation is symptomatic of a toxic workplace.) To really build a strong team, you need to, at a minimum, treat others as you’d treat yourself.

However, to be effective as a manager, this isn’t enough. Rather than treating others as you’d like to be treated, you need to learn how others would like to be treated. And then treat them that way.

What does that mean? Well, within the context of a software development team (where I have had direct management experience) you need to figure out what motivates each member of your team and, within the limits of your organizational capacity, give that to them. “Jane” may be motivated by the opportunity to work on the front end, whereas “Biyu” may want to focus on her algorithms. Some team members may want to start new projects, others may want to refine processes and make existing applications work really well.

This motivation changes over time, of course. This introduces additional complexity. When “Bob” joined the team, he might have been motivated by the opportunity to work with new technologies, but a few years in he may be more motivated by really impacting user experience.

The best way to figure out what motivates someone is to ask them. Hence the emphasis on 1:1s in the software business, where the employee controls the agenda. Another good way to decipher motivation is observation. Does “Olaf” spend extra time working on project A but is dragging his feet on project B? If so, why? Is one more UX focused, and the other more algorithmic? Such observations can also be starting points during the 1:1: “you seem to really be enjoying project A. What do you like most about that work?”

If your team or company can’t offer what someone wants, then it may be time for them to move on. The best managers I know were excited when I moved on because I judged it’d make me happier. This isn’t easy for the organization, but if you are playing the long game, the former employee will be an ambassador for you. Whether that is referring business or other employees, the goodwill can benefit the company. Contrast that with a company that holds on to a valuable employee even if they are unhappy (with golden handcuffs or other less savory mechanisms). When the employee finally leaves, there will be no reservoir of goodwill. Even before linkedin and glassdoor, this was no good. Now that folks can look up where people previously worked (and possible employees should do their research), the way you treat folks will be shared.

Overall, the key is to realize that what may excite you, or would excite you if you were an individual team member, or what might have excited you at a particular stage of your career, may not excite a team member. So, rather than put them in your shoes, put yourself in theirs.

Saw a great post by Kathy Keating, on a slack of which I am a member. This is how she suggests thinking about whether to stay or go at a given position:

1) Are there ethical issues? Leave.
 

2) Are there leadership issues?

 

2a) Can I have transparent/open dialog and is there hope that the leadership issue can be addressed? Timebox length of stay.

2b) No dialog. No hope of addressing issues. Leave.

 

3) Are there systemic company process issues?

 

3a) Company knows and is addressing the issue. Timebox length of stay.

3b) Company is fine being a mess. Leave.

 

4) Do I have career growth?

 

4a) No. Leave.

4b) Yes. Stay if no other blockers.

This is a lightweight framework to consider when you have a bad day or week at work. It’s important to acknowledge that:

1. I (and most other software developers) are very privileged when it comes to job expectations. (My SO worked in healthcare and the stories, oh the stories.)
2. The grass is not always greener and if you stay you might have credibility to effect change.

I think there are other factors that might play in here like type of work, location of work, and compensation, but in general I love this flow chart of how to decide whether or not to stay in a job. If there are other items that are important to you, add them into the decision tree, but having something like this will make it easier to make a hard decision like leaving a company.

PS No post about deciding to leave a job would be complete without referencing Shields Down and Bored People Quit.

The technology industry has been overloading the term ‘senior engineer’. A senior engineer is not a senior engineer is not a senior engineer.

What “senior” really means depends on what your organization needs and how it operates. Much of my experience has been in small organizations, so this list may be tilted more toward jack of all trades, but I’ve seen some of these patterns at larger companies as well. Here are a number of attributes that all seem to get wrapped up in the word “senior”.

Domain knowledge: sometimes getting up to speed on a domain can take too long. If you are operating in a highly regulated or intricate problem domain (real estate, finance, health care, government contracts), senior may mean “this is not their first rodeo”. In other words, someone who can jump in and understand complicated entity relationships and acronyms quickly.

Deep technical skill in the problem space: someone who has been there before. ‘There’ is a technical area where screwing up is going to be very bad for the company, for example, scaling an application, running a database or securing an environment.

Deep technical skill in the exact technology: someone who has used your exact technology stack before. The idioms, the libraries, the warts, all of these vary enough and if you want someone senior in technology, a close substitute won’t do. If your app is in Django, you need a senior Django person, you don’t need or want someone with Rails or Laravel experience. Same for someone with PostgreSQL experience (as opposed to MySQL). I see lots of job applications where this was a belief, but fewer organizations where this is a reality. This is often just a simple way to filter applicants.

Broad technical skill in a related area: someone who has used something similar and can come up to speed quickly by making analogies between similar situations. Maybe you can’t find that exact match. In that case, you can broaden your search. At a hight level, MySQL and PostgreSQL have a lot of similar characteristics, and mapping knowledge of PostgreSQL into MySQL (or vice versa) can be effective. This senior developer works best when paired with a someone with “deep technical skill in the exact technology” person because then they can pick up idioms and libraries.

Utility player: this type of senior developer can fill gaps in your team. They notice what isn’t being done, whether that is setting up a build system, documentation, project management, user testing, design or something else, and either do it or advocate for it. Or both. Probably more important in smaller organizations.

Leadership: this is the ability of a senior developer to lead a team toward a business goal. This includes understanding why the goal is important, caring about the goal, communicating the goal to the team, and rallying the team when the goal seems unattainable.

Mentoring: this is the ability to develop other talent in your organization. Whether or not there is a formal mentorship program, skills transfer and teachable moments happen every day (and are not always performed by the more experienced party!). Doing this requires empathy. If your organization has a lot of less experienced developers, a more formal program may be useful.

Humility: senior developers are senior because they’ve made mistakes. This is the ability to acknowledge mistakes, learn from them, and try to figure out how to make only new mistakes.

Continuous learner: this type of senior developer is looking at new technologies and developments and seeing how they map into the current problem space. Often they are just “playing” with technologies on their own time. If they’re really good, they’ll acknowledge their “shiny object” syndrome and advocate for ways to explore new technology that don’t impact long term maintainability (spikes, hackathons).

Cross department communication: the ability to build a mental model of who knows/owns what in your organization. When hiring a new developer, they won’t have this map, but they may have built one for previous organizations. Someone with this knowledge knows who to ask to get something done, or who needs to be notified when changes are coming. This can prevent the significant pain of building the right solution to the wrong problem. Leveraging someone with this skillset cuts down on formal process, but eventually these communication channels may need to be formalized as the organization grows. Probably more important in smaller organizations.

Project management: depending on the size of your team or organization, a senior developer may need to be the adhoc project manager. They probably won’t enjoy this much, but someone has to do it. They’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t (see “Humility” above).

Development support/operations/devops: this is the glue around your application that helps your application function. These tasks can range from developer focused tasks like a coding style guide or maintaining the developer docker image to operations tasks like setting up the monitoring system to devops tasks like debugging the failing jenkins job.

Deep knowledge of current application: this obviously isn’t a senior position you can hire for, but is one that a developer can grow into. This is the senior person that knows all the answers about the growth and path of the application code. If they’re really good, they document and share the knowledge.

When you are posting a job description for a “senior” engineer, think about what dimensions listed above matter. You can’t find someone who is good at everything, so what do you really need? What does your organization need?

I am on a mailing list of engineering leaders and someone mentioned that they have found Github to be a very good indicator of whether a candidate is a good choice for them.

Of course, every company will emphasize different aspects of software development–for some technical expertise is more important than communication, while others have that ranking flipped. Some may emphasize ability to work in large teams, while others may prefer folks who are self driven.

But I see a fair bit of emphasis on Github profiles, which makes sense–you can actually look at the code someone has written, and how they developed it.

But here are some reasons why someone might not have a stellar Github profile.  They might:

• prefer to use bitbucket so their code is private
• have a restrictive employment contract
• not want to program when they go home
• want to learn about software by experimenting on their local computer
• learn about other aspects of software development by reading rather than doing
• focus on answering questions on Stackoverflow
• not have time to have anything on their profile due to other commitments

If someone has a great GH profile, that’s probably an indicator they are a good developer. But if they don’t (full disclosure, mine is kinda weak), that’s no indicator of anything other than that they haven’t made it a priority.