Management

Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities – Align With Authority

by dxiang 2021-10-10

Check out my original post on Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities!

As a Staff Software Engineer, one of your hardest challenges is to influence without authority. If your position doesn’t hold authority by default, then your best bet is to align with it.

This topic was inspired by an insightful quote from Will Larson’s Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track.

Stayed aligned with authority to remain an effective leader over time. Technical leadership roles rely on proxied authority from another (usually, managerial) leader, and continued access to that authority depends on staying aligned, trustworthy, and predictable.
Will Larson

Alignment is essential. As a Staff Engineer, internalized alignment re-orients your approach when persuading people to follow your ideas. This will manifest in subtle—but significant—differences.

I’m proposing we do a large migration. I’ve seen this architecture play out before and it’s better we do this sooner rather than later.

I’m proposing we do a large migration. This will benefit the team by making their local development significantly easier and should increase our group’s velocity in the long-term.

In this post, I’ll share a few ideas on how to achieve the two core components behind Will’s idea: staying aligned and building trust.

Life Management

Communication For Leaders — Be Generous

by dxiang 2021-09-20

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.

Management Software

20 Micro-Habits Of High-Impact Software Engineers

by dxiang 2021-07-18

“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.

Leadership & Culture
Execution
Scope & Complexity
Communication

Management Software

6-Step Guide For Software Engineering Decision-Making

by dxiang 2021-06-16

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.

Management Software

Software Engineering Culture Metrics

by dxiang 2021-02-10

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.

Management Software

Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities

by dxiang 2021-01-19

[October 10, 2021] If you enjoy this article, check out my new post on this topic: Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities — Align With Authority.

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.

Management Software

The Debugger’s Mindset

by dxiang 2020-08-18

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.

Management Software

The Importance Of Technical Planning

by dxiang 2020-08-10

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.

Why Should I Write A Technical Plan?

A written plan forces you to think deeply about your work.
A written plan facilitates communication. Review it, talk about it, reference it.
A written plan serves as documentation. What did we set out to do and how did we do it?
A written plan organizes your execution.
A written plan invites collaboration, which begets technical thoroughness and stakeholder alignment.
A written plan signals professionalism.

As you write your technical plan, here are some ways to ensure the process is as effective as possible.