Management

Monolith To Microservices Vs. Your Organization

by dxiang 2022-01-24

Microservices are nothing new. After being deployed successfully by mega-companies like Netflix, many growing engineering organizations gravitate towards this architecture as an aspirational symbol of success. This journey is known to many as the “monolith to microservices” migration.

A few companies (Spotify) have the clairvoyance to adopt microservices from the get-go and may never have to endure such arduous re-architecting. Other companies (Etsy) double down with their monoliths (a.k.a founding architecture) and scale into multi-billion dollar organizations. Many others opt for the long journey from monolith to microservices with roughly the following scenario:

We’ve seen immense success with our monolithic application and we are ready turn up the dial on growth. We need to explore new product lines, hire more developers, and increase velocity. To enable all of these wonderful things, we’ll start transitioning our monolith to microservices. This architecture will enable autonomous workstreams, failure isolation, flexible scaling, and {insert other microservices benefits}.”

I am not a fan of the term “microservice architecture” because it has become increasingly difficult to define. In regards to software, your system is either distributed—or not distributed. With many of us working in the context of distributed computing, I would venture to guess that you’ll find it impossible to use a textbook definition (microservices vs. service-based vs. event-based) to describe your architecture. You may describe your system as a “hybrid” or “ball of something.”

While microservices are wonderful in principle, many software engineers are intimately aware of their challenges in practice. Parodies like this are a little too close to reality.

When pursuing grand endeavors, engineering leaders often forget to explicitly address organizational concerns. These constraints have the potential to block progress more so than any other technical issue.

Management Software

Use More 1-1-1s

by dxiang 2021-12-30

1-1s are core to management. Ad-hoc feedback delivery, bi-weekly check-ins with your directs, monthly meetings with your skip-levels, annual performance reviews. Their use cases are well-defined and well-understood.

1-1-1s, on the other hand, can be much more interesting. Significant progress can be made if you’re able to get the three right people in a room together. 1-1-1s are versatile and streamline communications for a variety of situations.

While managers are usually responsible for 1-1s, any leader can call for a 1-1-1.

So, when should you host one?

Your intuition will serve you best. Here are a few questions that will help you exercise these muscles:

A new role is being integrated into team—how’s it going?
A new project has caused something to change—are expectations clear?
A team is visibly disengaged—is there conflict?

In this post, we’ll review 5 effective 1-1-1 formats that deserve a spot in your leadership toolbox.

Management Software

4 Questions To Ask Yourself

by dxiang 2021-12-17

As a Junior IC

How comfortable am I developing code and debugging issues?
Could I give a presentation about my team?
Do I know who to contact if I’m not sure how to solve a problem (besides my mentor)?
Did I release a project end-to-end that required me to do more than coding?

As a Senior IC

Has another team around the company changed what they’re working on based on my actions?
How strong is my opinion regarding my team’s product goals and technical investments?
Do I have context around the challenges of my peers (even though it’s not my responsibility)?
Has another engineer on the team surprised me by taking care of a tricky incident without my involvement?

As a Manager

Did my reports demonstrate an expanded scope of impact? Is it easy to justify their promotions?
Did my level of ownership and responsibilities increase in the last year? If so, was it situational or did I seek out those opportunities?
Is there a clear choice for an individual who could take over my responsibilities?
My group drove a lot of impact these past two quarters—is it because my teams have grown or is it because I’ve driven innovations to make my teams more effective?

Life Management

5 Mistakes That Damage Your Personal Brand As A Young Professional

by dxiang 2021-10-27

As you progress in your career, your success largely depends on your personal brand as a professional.

Everything you do contributes to this brand.

Early on, you are focused on learning, adding value, and developing as a professional. During this time, it’s essential that you avoid behaviors that have the potential to become brand-damaging habits. Curating these behaviors is difficult for a few reasons:

These behaviors are subtle and are easily overlooked. Nevertheless, it’s better you notice them before your manager does.
It’s impossible to fully control how you’re perceived. A well-intentioned gesture always has the chance to be taken the wrong way. In life, this is inevitable.
While your personal brand is mostly in your control, its effectiveness depends heavily on your environment. The same you may be a great fit at a large corporation, but may fall flat at a start-up.

In this post, I share 5 mistakes that damage your personal brand as a young professional. Recognizing and avoiding these behaviors may save you a lot of time in your career.

Management Software

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.