Greg Babiars

Sr. Software Engineer. Fan of sports teams that continually disappoint.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Since time immemorial, when a CEO asks a PM at Product Review, “what do you need to 10X users/revenue?”, “what will make you go faster?”, etc

The PM steadfastly responds “We need [N] more engineers”. The Eng Mgr nods approvingly

A story thread, with some hard truths to swallow:

[Victor Savkin @victorsavkin]

1/11 Code Ownership

Why strong code ownership is better than shared ownership

[David Fowler @davidfowl]

An important skill to learn as a technical leader is learning to let other engineers grow by leaving enough space for them to make mistakes and learn from them. Sucking all of the air out of the room (even unintentionally) is usually a bad thing.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

Even worse, it puts the junior devs in over their head, or in a situation where they are given boring work that has no impact. Either way, it creates a recipe for frustration.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

It is really not a surprise that so many software orgs struggle to onboard junior devs when they also try to break up work into Jira tasks that can be divvied up and assigned to individuals.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

Asking more senior devs to take on juniors without adjusting their workload puts a burden on them to decide between deliverables and the junior they are expected to grow. Since most of the time the perf is tied to deliverables, it is easy to see why they fail mentoring.

[Amy Chantasirivisal @AmyChanta]

When symptoms are confused for problems. 😫 Companies typically don't know how to onboard and train, period. The pandemic forced remote work, but remote work didn't cause the problems entry-level folks experience—it only shone light on and magnified them. 🧵

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

@bradwestfall My favorite is fixed height on content that is localized or user generated and breaks when it needs to wrap. Everything works great until it gets translated to German. 😬

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

For software, Technical vs. Management tracks is much better terminology than Individual Contributor vs. Leadership tracks. Most Senior ICs are be expected to be a leader (without reports), a force multiplier and responsible for their team's success.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

Imagine scenarios where most of the team is in an office and a discussion comes up. Will they move that conversation online or have it in person excluding others? If leaders are not vigilant, it will start to unravel.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

Just because employees have been working remote for the last year+ does not mean that companies have actually adopted remote first policies. It is not surprising that more companies are trying to make employees come back into the office.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

For companies doing hybrid, it will be interesting as teams, and especially leaders, come back into the office to see if they revert to old practices and exclude those who are remote.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

There is a balance to all this though. Feature teams still need to have freedom to explore and innovate, while the platform teams must be careful to avoid unnecessary churn.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

At a certain size, software development organizations need to divide work between feature teams who focus on application features and platform teams who focus on shared needs.

[Greg Babiars @gbabiars]

As platform teams focus on building common solutions for common problems, feature teams can focus on delivering value to customers. This allows the feature teams to deliver value fast while maintaining quality.