As a leader, you may have grown accustomed to a variety of conveniences when it comes to communication. You rarely get interrupted during meetings, your ad hoc Slack messages receive prompt responses, and your under-researched opinions influence people more than they really should. Unsurprisingly, not everyone enjoys these conveniences.
As a leader, you must be generous with your communication. Here are some ideas.
“The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers” is a wonderful article highlighting wisdom from various managers across various industries. The article also reinforces an important universal idea—the details always matter. I subscribe to this idea and believe it can be easily re-applied to individual contribution.
At any given company, the criteria for promotion can be bland and frustratingly opaque—consistently deliver value turns into create impact for your team, which quickly evolves into create impact for multiple teams, and somehow leads to create impact for the entire company and drive its future. These large expectations are difficult to break down. It’s easier to start with the details (“micro-habits” if you will) and see where that takes you.
Before continuing, I highly recommend reading, “On Being A Senior Engineer“, which provides a holistic set of expectations on what it means to be “senior.” With these expectations in mind, the following is an opinionated list of micro-habits exhibited by high-impact software engineers. I’ve broken them down into 4 themes, each with 5 habits.
Software engineering decision-making is a stressful and time-consuming process. When the stakes are high, you will be met with opinionated programmers, insurmountable organizational constraints, and unfortunate baggage from old projects. Consensus is difficult.
In a previous post, “Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities“, I mention that the act of “Transforming Competing Opinions Into Decisions” as one of a Staff Engineer’s primary responsibilities. I note that prolonged technical debates are a risk for organizations and that Staff Engineers must “push through friction” in order to arrive at decisions. However, once you feel the friction, it’s never clear how you’re supposed to push through it.
This article presents a generalizable 6-step outline to help engineers drive consensus. This is a set of heuristics, not an algorithm.
Company culture. Extremely important, impossible to define.
Impossible to define doesn’t mean impossible to understand. A surface-level understanding of culture is available via Glassdoor and company onboarding documents. However, a deep understanding of culture is only available via experience.
This article focuses on a set of values often associated with software engineering culture. Instead of the discussing the values themselves, I discuss the activities which measure them.
The path of the Staff Software Engineer represents the career progression of a technologist. Senior Engineer leads to Staff Engineer which leads to Principal Engineer which hopefully leads to a comfortable retirement. Unfortunately, Staff Software Engineer responsibilities are often poorly defined by management. The goal of this article is to give clarity to these responsibilities so aspiring Staff Engineers—and their managers—can perform their jobs more effectively.
Debugging is a critical skill. More important than the skill is the mindset. The debugger’s mindset is the attitude that you must always understand the why behind a problem; any ambiguities or unknowns are unacceptable. This mindset has the potential to carry you from debugging small functions to solving difficult organizational issues.
Creating a technical plan is a sign of professionalism and maturity as a software developer. No matter what you’re working on, whether it be a straightforward feature extension or a massive data migration, a technical plan must be written.
As you write your technical plan, here are some ways to ensure the process is as effective as possible.