Keeping pace with innovation and tech adoption

New products, services, and methodologies clamor for our attention. All of them promise to make our lives easier.

Author

Jakub Chodounsky
August 07, 2023

New products, services, and methodologies clamor for our attention. All of them promise to make our lives easier, to help our teams become more productive, and to give our companies more opportunity to make money. Some might even be telling the truth.

1. Set up your repo, slice your codebase, and assign tickets, 2. fully dedicated devs code, 3. get back PRs, only pay when you merge. See it in action on the public repos of Cal.com, Supabase, and SourceGraph. For junior devs, ◯˚GitStart is a paid bootcamp to grow on production code, with alumni joining Amazon, Meta, and Google. 5+ people eng teams can claim $500 of free credits by emailing [email protected].

All this talk about managing information at scale makes me think of challenges faced by engineering managers and directors as they have to deal with both information overload and scarcity simultaneously.

Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third.

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There’s a belief in tech that execution is all that matters, that strategy is for wimpy MBAs. That belief is wrong, and I have the scars to prove it.

A major challenge that I see many people hit right around the time they become senior engineers is that they want to progress farther in their career, but they expect that the way they can do that is that they will be given a hard problem to solve that can only be solved by the level of technical skill they’ve gained so far.

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