The Ledger, every show

“The impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it'l…”

“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”

“Trying to say, we're going to just go away, we're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new, and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works.”

“Some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Where the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company …”

“I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset. And frankly, you need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product mana…”

“What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things because engineers Are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? Like I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creat…”

“Like I just, my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job. That they would need to be successful.”

“So I do think it's probably a like somewhere in the 10 year range of like really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and, you know, really understanding how to be a technical expert.”

“Often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager, which is actually also the worst, you know, worst sort of path to real leadership, in my opinion.”

“Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're happy or unhappy with things, Your unhappy stakeholders kind of aren't hearing that.”

“Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.”

“First of all, I really am a very strong believer that like platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team, and you only have like, you know, more like operation systems engineers, DevOps…”

“A lot of the best platform type offerings and companies start in individual like application teams, like an application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves. And it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem.…”

“The thing that I'm observing is that actually like management is pretty important, that good management is actually a pretty important part of making engineering teams effective, making companies effective. It just simply isn't true that management is overhead…”

“Help them understand that it's kind of a hard and a special discipline, but it's also a technical discipline and not just something that, you know, any random people manager can do.”

“When you have a lot of people who have seen success at these very small stages and they're, they believe incorrectly that the thing that made them successful was just like, well, we just got these smart people together and let them do what they thought was rig…”

“There are sometimes when you shouldn't pip someone. You should just say, you know what, this is just not working out, and we just need to part ways. And I think that people who clearly are just unhappy, that they clearly don't want to be there they're super ne…”

“The impact, the positive impact on the team when you get rid of that negative energy is always shocking to me. Because it's always more than you think it's gonna be. Like, the team is always so much happier and healthier and therefore more productive once they…”

“Knowing a little bit of like Go or like having like spun up Kubernetes on my, you know, on a test, test cluster at home is not nearly enough to have an informed good opinion about A new language or like a new system. Like you have to run those systems in produ…”

“I think trial periods are a very nice idea. I think in the current competitiveness for staffing, you would be very lucky to get away with trying to do that.”

“If you, if all you're doing is playing management telephone, your manager is adding very little value to the team. And so that's why, like, I think management is not just about people management because people management is just not all of the job.”

“Engineering done successfully really is all about the details. And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details, but when you act like they don't matter, and you don't care about them, and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when y…”

“So if you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know, right? Because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have that you just don't have. And you're, you put yourself in this in-bet…”

“Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system, and that causes a lot of problems.”

“One piece of advice I give everybody is don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones. You feel like you've got mastery that you could, if you know a second language fluently, or if you like played an instrument, like really, rea…”

“The actual details and focus of the product work is just, you can't write a bunch of code or, and, or manage like a big soft software engineering team and be a product manager at the same time. That's actually just asking, I think too much of people to do that…”

“So much of the work in a platform team is not a Is not exactly product work. Like a lot of it's like, you know, scaling or really like deep kind of technical, like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing, or I've got to, you know, do this p…”

“So first of all, I think it tends to be like, you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are, you know, 10 engineers, right?”

“At some point you get enough people that you need to really coordinate work Amongst people who are not just like joined at the hip talking to each other all the time, completely on the same wavelength. And that's when structure and hierarchy and some kind of m…”

“The reason that you have one-on-ones, the reason that you try very hard to honor whatever frequency is the right frequency for your team, Even if you don't have anything planned to talk about is that like, you need to make it comfortable for them to feel like …”

“I think that a lot of engineering sometimes feels like parallel play, where it's, like, People, they aren't really working together exactly. They're kind of each working on their own project separately, and maybe they give each other code reviews, but making y…”

“New managers tend to default to writing code to solve their problems. So new managers who used to be ICs, they look at a team, and they look at a team that's struggling, and the thing that they want to do is be like, I can just take some of these tickets, I ca…”

“A big mistake that I see rookie managers make is like just not dealing with interpersonal issues on their team proactively. If two people are not getting along, And you just let that sit and fester. It's just gonna cause you problems. There's, you can't just b…”

“Most companies that I see that I would consider to be quality companies. They have separate tracks that do not require like you managing A lot of people or any people at all to become a very senior person, a very well, you have a career.”

“Speaking for myself as a manager of managers, it's much harder to manage someone who never asks you for help and doesn't, Doesn't know, doesn't think that they're, they should, you know, lean on you occasionally than someone who knows when to come to you and a…”

“I also think that like, if your company is big enough you should be trying, if you hire someone and you think they're great, but they don't work out on the job you put them in, as long as you think they're a general cultural fit for the company, you should try…”

“Being able to ask good questions is what makes you legit to engineers, right? If they feel like you actually understand what they're telling you that they're working on and can ask them like an insightful question about that system, like you get a lot of cred …”

“PMs, because they're, they tend to be the front facing person for initiatives, they're Talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM sort of takes a…”

“Every time we do an all hands, we do at the very end, we say like, you know, who's done something awesome. And I ask people to just stand up and thank their coworkers for doing great things. And that's something that we started at rent the runway and I've carr…”