Empathy The Engineering Director Paradox I love to code. Like all passionate engineers; if left alone, I can think of nothing better than to build new things. To create wonderful, elegant, simple solutions. I spent many man-years on
Empathy Should happiness be a goal at work? Your job is what you make it. Go into it with a bad attitude, and that will be reflected back to you. Be positive, help others and solve problems together and you'
Culture The Golden Rule of "Managing up" I admit to saying "I can easily fix problems below me, but the hardest problems are above me". I still believe this, but I think many people misinterpret the statement. If
Culture Should you really encourage playing games at work? Think back to the companies that you've worked for; that you loved. Those that made you happy. Those jobs that you couldn't wait to get to after waking up.
Team Where/When should you make your team work? In the software industry it seems very common nowadays to assume you'll allow your team to work flexible hours and perhaps work-from-home. Or is that a myth? On the other side
About Which kind of Engineering Director are you? And why you need help. Many titles are given to our role. I've been called Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, Senior Director of Engineering and Vice President of Engineering - and when I interviewed at Amazon,
Culture Programming interview questions - it's not about the answers As Director of Engineering you'll be interviewing a lot of Engineers - my average is more than 2 interviews per week for the last few years. Filter candidates early The interview
Team Why it's critical you take new hires to lunch - a checklist Do you remember your first day at your company? Even the most confident of us were wondering what to do and who to meet. Hopefully there is a wonderful onboarding process to walk
Team It's ok to admit you're wrong As I was writing Programmers really need open floor plans [https://www.tellthemeverything.com/programmers-really-need-open-floor-plans/] I found myself thinking about a story that I had been confidently telling for years as an example
Environment Programmers really need open floor plans As soon as Joel Spolsky talked at GeekWire Summit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1V8OUOb-Hw] recently, Twitter lit up with articles like Programmers really hate open floor plans [http://qz.com/806583/
Communication Helping Engineering teams work together Although the Engineering department is our domain, we do not sit in isolation. We simply can't do our job without many interactions with other teams or departments. Encourage communication I'
Culture Publish an Engineering weekly newsletter As soon as you can, start sending a weekly newsletter to the Engineering team. And by 'as soon as you can', I mean start this week. > The aim is to
Team Identifying personalities on your Engineering team One of the first tasks for you to do as Director of Engineering is to quickly identify the personality types of your team members. One-on-ones [https://www.tellthemeverything.com/one-on-ones/] is a perfect
Culture Team too big for one-on-ones? I received some great feedback about One-on-Ones with your team [https://www.tellthemeverything.com/one-on-ones/] today. In that article I said that: > At some number of people - probably between 20 and
Culture One-on-Ones with your team After your team introduction, one-on-one's are the next item on your agenda. They are the most important part of your job. Through one-on-ones you will find the true story behind the