The Manager's Guide – #70

Jan 16, 2024

How to Get Your Work Recognized — 6 Strategies

🚀 Recognition in software engineering is vital for career acceleration and visibility in the tech community.
👤 Personal branding is crucial, encompassing unique skills and professional identity.
🌐 Networking involves building genuine connections and contributing to the tech community, both online and offline.
🖼️ Showcasing achievements through a professional portfolio and public speaking enhances visibility.
✍️ Keeping an 'Impact Record' or 'Brag Document' is essential for highlighting contributions and achievements.
🧠 Continuous learning and staying updated in the field are foundational for building technical expertise.
🤝 Internal workplace strategies, like effective communication and initiative, are key for recognition in your job.
🌟 Consistency in online presence and engagement is important for maintaining a strong personal brand.
📚 Sharing expertise and experiences through blogs or webinars can boost professional visibility.
🎯 Aligning work with company goals and understanding decision-makers is crucial for career advancement.

📈 Companies with under 1,000 engineers typically allocate 18.9% of their headcount to centralized productivity teams, with a range between 8% and 37%.
🔍 Larger companies often allocate a smaller percentage of headcount to these teams, but the absolute number is higher compared to smaller companies.
🚀 There are diminishing returns in increasing centralized team headcount due to leverage, e.g., a team for CI/CD tooling doesn't need to be much larger for 5,000 developers than for 500.
🌍 Centralized efforts may become less effective as organizations grow, with localized efforts gaining importance.
📊 Defining “centralized productivity team” varies across companies, with different names and scopes for these teams.
📝 No two companies are exactly alike in their approach to developer productivity, making benchmarking challenging.
💡 Executives play a crucial role in defining the company's engineering strategy and in concentrating investments.
🔄 Effective allocation of internal-facing teams can be achieved through specific goals and feedback loops, like qualitative surveys and ROI metrics.
🎯 At Atlassian, 10-20% of the total investment is considered optimal for developer productivity, with an emphasis on empowering local teams.
📈 Gartner reported that 78% of surveyed organizations have or plan to have a formal DevEx initiative, indicating a likely increase in resource allocation towards productivity teams in the future.

🧹 Clean Code focuses on code quality and involves continuous code inspection, security, and ownership.
🎯 Sonar's internal initiative refined their focus exclusively on code, emphasizing the cause of issues over their consequences, and named their approach “Clean Code.”
🏛️ The Clean Code Taxonomy is built on four properties: consistency, intentionality, adaptability, and responsibility.
🔄 Consistent code should follow a common style and patterns, maintaining a similar appearance across different contributors and codebases.
💡 Intentional code is clear, logical, and self-explanatory, aiming to avoid ambiguity and inefficiency.
🔧 Adaptable code is well-structured, minimizing duplication, and designed for easy evolution and management.
🌐 Responsible code is ethically aware, respecting data privacy, inclusivity, and legal norms.

💡 Prioritizing Hard Problems: Focus on the most important sub-problems due to limited time and resources, constantly reassess priorities every planning cycle.
🕵️‍♂️ Dealing with Hidden Work: Expect unexpected work; go to production soon to reveal workflow and reliability gaps.
🔄 Managing Attrition: Prepare for team changes by ensuring redundancy in critical areas and adjusting goals as needed.
🏆 Staging the Value: Set intermediate milestones for early ROI and team morale, balancing short-term and long-term goals.
🔄 Adapting to Changing Constraints: Document assumptions, plan for market changes, and be ready to pivot project goals.
🚀 Maintaining Confidence and Perception: Keep stakeholders engaged with frequent updates and celebrate milestones to maintain project support.
📆 Having a Concrete Timeline: Avoid overcommitting, articulate a realistic timeline, and highlight the value of each milestone.

🧭 Engineering management experience can significantly enhance life skills and interpersonal relationships.
📚 The emergence of staff+ engineering roles and a parallel technical leadership track has changed the career progression landscape in engineering.
💡 Good engineering managers act as force multipliers, improving team velocity, quality, and productivity.
🎓 Becoming an engineering manager is akin to entering a "life school," teaching valuable skills like self-regulation, self-awareness, understanding others, setting boundaries, and managing power dynamics.
🗣️ Effective management involves mastering the art of difficult conversations and nurturing a supportive, feedback-oriented environment.
🚀 The skills gained in engineering management are transferable and enduring, enhancing both personal and professional life.
⚠️ It's crucial for managers to align with their company's leadership and goals, as conflicts can undermine effectiveness and satisfaction in the role.

Predictions are fun! Let’s see how many they’ll have got right.

📉 The U.S. economy narrowly avoided a recession in 2023, supported by strong labor markets and consumer spending.
🛠️ The workplace is normalizing post-pandemic, with a shift from rapid hiring to a focus on prudence and productivity.
🌍 Global economic risks persist, including conflicts, volatile commodity prices, and inflation.
🤝 Companies face increasing stakeholder demands, potentially leading to cultural divides in the workplace.
🌟 Trend 1: Gen Z will outnumber Boomers in the full-time workforce in early 2024.
💰 Trend 2: Salaries likely to rise, but non-cash benefits may decrease.
📉 Trend 3: Equity compensation to decline for the second year in a row.
😔 Trend 4: Layoffs in 2023 will continue to affect employee morale in 2024.
🤹 Trend 5: Middle managers in large companies will face challenges from both higher and lower levels.
🏢 Trend 6: Companies will balance incentives and rules to manage return-to-office policies.
🏡 Trend 7: Smaller companies will attract talent with more flexible remote work policies.
🤖 Trend 8: Generative AI will boost long-term productivity, but also value human interaction.