Developer Tea

Accountability can be complex. When something goes wrong, fingers start flying: *someone* needs to be held responsible. But true accountability starts before anything goes wrong. In this episode, we discuss the Accountability Triangle, a mental model for ensuring that your accountability structures are valid and actually usable.

Improving your clarity is the beginning of your journey in engineering leadership. This takes courage and patience, but the investment will benefit everyone you influence, including yourself.

If you've used the term Tech Debt, you probably know that the metaphor is loose at best. Taking on tech debt sometimes becomes a permanent choice, and the repayment isn't always a clear-cut investment. Most importantly, the concept of "debt" doesn't as easily take into account the human factors involved. Tech lag (taking inspiration from jet lag) is about the thrash involved in changing the standard of quality. In this episode, we talk about how this metaphor applies where you normally might think of tech debt.

Negotiation is not about getting more of what you want out of another person. Real artful negotiation is about finding alignment, and solving the problems presented at a level of divergence.

Layoffs happen whether we want them to or not. Being prepared with a principled approach can help relieve anxiety and produce better outcomes for when layoffs occur. In this episode, I give you two principled mental tools to help you deal with layoff anxieties no matter where you are in the picture.

Everything around us is primarily governed by some kind of system. The question is, are you designing your systems intentionally, or just letting them emerge? In today's episode, I give you one piece of advice when designing your systems: limit the responsibility of a given actor in the system.

If you don't have agency over your goals, how can they help you to begin with?

Good feedback isn't about getting something off of your chest. It's not about sharing your feelings (though that doesn't mean your feelings aren't important). It's about finding a problem that you and the person you are sharing feedback with both care about, and working towards a solution.

Planning will give you the illusion of certainty. What you really need to execute on your plans is clarity. The reality is that the future is impossible to predict, and the further away from now that you get, the more difficult it becomes to predict at an exponential rate. Focus on creating the best pathways for present decision-making.

You may hate hearing the word "process." You aren't alone if you do. But, what feels like a slog today is really in place for when the most critical things happen in your career. Have a process, even if it feels useless on a standard day.

The psychological phenomenon of hedonic adaptation can seem like the enemy of your happiness, but once you understand how it works, you can use it to create lasting habit change and focus on what matters most.

Today we look at a mental model from the field of psychophysics called Weber's Law. This concept is a great analogy for a lot of problems we face as engineers and people leaders, and can help us understand just how deeply humans depend on context to understand the world.

A senior developer understands that they have to be very selective about how they apply knowledge. Know matter how vast your knowledge may be, you are limited in how you can practically use it in a given circumstance.

Your intuition says that control is the ladder you climb to improve your career. But most great leaders tend to do one thing: the opposite of increasing control.

In today's episode we explore the duality between confronting difficult realities while maintaining optimism. Specifically, we discuss a critical question: what does it mean to be optimistic?

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer.In today's episode, we'll add more detail to the commonly recommended skill of "work breakdown." Sometimes this extremely valuable skill is the opposite of what you really need to practice.Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the fact that difficulty does not equate to value, and hazard a guess as to why we can easily confuse this, especially as we begin to grow from junior to senior roles. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer.In this episode, we'll discuss the importance of systematically communicating value to various audiences.Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer.Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

We play the short game so we get the chance to play the long game.Early in our careers, we imagine the best way to play is always focus on the long game. But in reality, we need both.Be aware of leaning too far the opposite direction, and accidentally abandoning the long game entirely.##