It shouldn’t be a surprise that the outlook for many tech companies in 2023 is not rosy. With layoffs across the industry, we’re all going through a challenging time - whether you’re a dev or not.
The last 14 years have been an unprecedented boom time - but economic conditions will eventually challenge all companies. How do we, as leaders, handle these challenges?
I sat down with Michael Stahkne, VP of platform at Circle CI; Lewis Tuff, VP of engineering at Blockchain.com; Carolyn Vo, partner & head of engineering at Oliver Wyman, for a panel at Dev Interrupted's conference to answer that exact question. Here’s how these leaders described what effective leadership looks like in uncertain times.
1. Increase the quality and frequency of communication
Some people will see this as counterintuitive. If times are tough, don’t you need more time to get work done? However, stellar communication is one critical way to lead effectively in both prosperous times and times of crisis.
Michael had a strong viewpoint on this: in an async remote world, he will communicate when he needs to, and he expects his colleagues to share when they need time back. They have tools with settings to mute communications and get notifications as they see fit, and they can choose when to respond.
Why meeting communication matters
It’s important to acknowledge that part of communicating well involves meetings (gasp!). It’s common to hear engineers complain about meetings. Yes, it’s good to streamline meeting schedules to reduce synchronous status updates that force context-switching. There are, however, ways to have effective meetings—and some are essential. Many meetings are crucial working sessions where you can collaborate with your colleagues.
Yet not all communication is formal. Informal signaling is also key. For example, Carolyn shared how she jokingly refers to herself as “Jr. Probationary Intern” to break down the artificial separation between you and your teammates as you become more senior. You can’t get rid of the power dynamic completely, but you don’t want your new people to be scared of you, and you need to have their trust to understand people’s motivations. Carolyn chooses to try to lower that separation through humor and direct acknowledgment.
You can't let this happen:
2. Connect motivation to business results
Understanding your team’s motivation is also essential. When things are uncertain, you must determine what motivates each team member. They’ll have questions like “Will I get to write the code I like?” And you have to answer immediately, “Yes, you will,” or “Yes, but you’re going to be reallocated to this new group.”
Michael also noted an often underrated motivating factor: How is your company oriented?
If your company is customer-oriented, if you’re focused on what they’re trying to achieve and are helping them do that—it softens the blows that land on your own company in tough times. Cutting back on your bets and focusing on your high-impact projects can also help with this and is sometimes necessary; sadly, this is often seen in layoffs or “reductions in workforce”.
Instill excitement through experimentation
Once you understand people’s motivations, you can help bring joy by providing space for teams to have fun.
When valuations are going up and to the right, it’s a lot easier to have work feel fun - so in an uncertain period, it’s imperative to get teams excited when you can. It lets people stop focusing on the downturn and instead on things that excite them.
Everyone can define “fun” differently, but knowing your team’s motivation can help you find the right ways to provide some levity and keep everyone aligned. You can bring fun in simple ways, like sharing something interesting you learned at the start of a meeting or, in Michael’s case, by throwing in emojis on Slack and shooting memes at a high rate per day.
For Lewis, teammates can find fun by having space to experiment and try new things with little pressure. Even if you disagree with your direct report’s decisions, part of providing space to experiment is still advocating for them and letting their choices play out—even if what they’re making feels like something you’ve seen before. Even then, the variables can be different, and it could turn out entirely differently. Whatever you do, don’t tell everyone you disagree with your team member’s idea.
3. Have the tough conversations
One way to understand how much fun a team can have is to understand your tolerance for failure, which can get stricter as things get uncertain. But being transparent about this tolerance will continue to give team members the space to enjoy their work.
There is a myth that you must filter lousy news and hard decisions as a leader. But being transparent helps people understand the context behind why things are happening and helps ensure people aren’t being shocked. If you end up filtering news, you breed rumors and speculations, which can produce resentment.
Blame is a communication killer
Another pitfall to avoid with tough communication is blame. One example of blameful leadership is when a team member asks for a raise, and the leader says, “I want to give you one, but my boss won’t let me.” This type of blaming irks leaders like Michael, partly because it comes off as inauthentic. Authenticity is an integral part of being transparent and conducting successful challenging communication. There are a lot of discussions you can have during tough conversations beyond finding someone else to blame. Plus, people who own messaging are more likely to get promoted.
What to avoid when providing critical feedback
Providing harsh feedback can be challenging, particularly across cultural boundaries where how tough feedback is communicated can vary wildly. Like Carolyn, this is an area of improvement I see for myself as a leader, and somewhere, I’ve made mistakes. One example: I had to communicate critical feedback to a team member and thought I was writing a thorough and fair review by simply writing extensive feedback and including positives and negatives.
However, I didn’t spend enough time thinking about how to communicate that critical feedback: I started by addressing an area of concern and initially shared the feedback in writing vs. having a conversation with them. In some cultures, such as the Netherlands, this might have been perfectly acceptable--but in working with a US-based team member who was seeing layoffs at other companies, it backfired. Instead of helping provide feedback to initiate improvement, I’d caused them to worry that their job was at risk.
In the end, I had to assuage this team member's worries--and acknowledge my own failure in how I communicated the criticism; I lacked context and empathy in my communication. When sharing critical feedback, I needed to remember the old US business adage of two positives to one negative.
4. Remove team roadblocks but track team progress
While communication is crucial for leadership, particularly in tough times, it isn’t the only thing. It’s also important to buckle down and ask yourself, “How can we as leaders remove roadblocks?”
If we want our team members to direct how they want to progress, we need to figure out how to support that and track it. By tracking this for your reports, you can align how you feel they progressed with how they feel while tailoring things to the individual. For engineering leaders, understanding the health of your team - without being a data-driven tyrant - is a crucial first step.
A helpful next step is to find the individuals who are driving the company's principles and have them mentor teammates. Leadership can come from every seat but often requires effort to foster culturally and enable team members' progression.
Leading teams in uncertain times
Leading in uncertain times hinges on communication, transparency, and understanding motivation. You can’t treat everyone the same, as everyone has different goals and ideas for fun. The more you tailor to your individuals, the more you can help your team thrive in uncertainty.
Watch my whole conversation with Carolyn, Michael, and Lewis on our YouTube 👇
“Treating devs like human beings” may sound like it should be an obvious idea. Yet we see the opposite happening on a regular basis - developers measured on lines of code, managers who expect engineers to act like automatons, and too many practices that sacrifice developer happiness and decay teams for short-term delivery.
To discuss how to fix these negative practices that too often damage our industry, I was joined by 3 experts in making the transition from churn and burn software development to more successful, human-centric development.
Here are the 6 major takeaways from my conversation with Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI; engineering leadership coach Lena Reinhard and VP of Engineering at Range, Jean Hsu.
1. Humanize Interviews
Sometimes, we must remind each other that developers are knowledge workers, not robots. During our conversation, Kelly shared her view on one of the roots of this problem: the belief that engineers shouldn’t be required to code as part of the interview process.
Her reason? Such tests don’t reflect actual working conditions. After all, when was the last time anyone stood over your shoulder at work and watched you code? Instead, she advocates for more problem-oriented system-design interviews that showcase how candidates think.
Jean aligned with this, saying interviews should focus more on what it’s like to work with a person instead of how technically strong they are. However, humanizing interviews starts before the interview itself - it means thinking about what your job descriptions and interviews cater to: Do they support people who have kids? People who already have a second job? Or do they hone in on “super passionate” developers who often have more free time?
2. API for Humans
Beyond interviews, Jean thinks that treating your working developers as humans is one of the industry’s biggest gaps. People moving into leadership and management roles are not trained to communicate and figure out, “Hey, what’s important to this other human?” She recalls one communication workshop where a person shared the takeaway “I feel like I just learned an API for humans.”
Kelly Vaughn brings a unique perspective to this discussion - that of a trained therapist. She leverages this training to monitor behavior and patterns of speech to see when interventions are needed and to understand the needs of her developers. It’s interesting to compare this approach to other managers who don’t get the same in-depth training in communication and in improving their emotional intelligence. So many times we promote developers to managers and actually set them up for failure. As a leader, it’s crucial to view developers not just as resources but as complex humans so that you can help them understand what they really want and how to create mutual value as part of the team. If we solely focus on the value to the business - and not the developer experience in building that business value - we sacrifice for short-term productivity bursts and decrease retention rates, causing major issues and costing the business money in the longterm.
One of my favorite examples of how to approach this dichotomy comes from Jean - one of her engineers told her they were having challenges balancing full-time work with other goals. This engineer was talented and a valuable member of the team, so Jean worked with them to transition them into a part-time role that let them have more time back for personal projects and more closely fit what they were looking for. This kind of relationship is challenging to develop, but when done right can both deliver for the business's needs and recognize each human's unique challenges.
3. Can a Dev Manager Be Non-Technical?
With this focus on communication and humanization vs. technical skills, the natural next question is whether or not developers need to be led by managers with technical skills. From Lena’s experience, many great engineering managers are people who haven’t been developers and likely never will. It doesn’t take someone from a technical background to enjoy working in tech and understand the motivations of their developers. Yet we continue to see companies where leaders seem to think that the way to fill gaps is pattern matching their engineers. They’re making people leaders who have similar skills or behaviors to their subordinates or who excelled as an individual contributor without necessarily having leadership skills. This contributes to engineers who struggle or burn out in poorly-fitting roles.
Part of the joy of engineering leadership is seeing your engineers grow. Part of letting them grow is to stop fixing for them and start coaching them to do the solving themselves. And when you come from a non-technical background, that temptation is less, which is part of why many great managers are not from a technical background.
4. Bringing Your Full Self to Work
Our panelists views one-on-ones not as a place to give performance advice, but as a place for engineers to share their dreams, personal endeavors, and concerns. Kelly, Lena and Jean all felt that one-on-ones were a powerful tool for leaders to break through the dehumanizing barriers of software development as production line. In fact, because of Kelly’s background as a trained therapist, she views a successfull one-on-one as something close to the therapy, though she cautions this approach doesn’t fit everyone.
However, just like a therapy session, a good one-on-one should be individualized, confidential, difficult to cancel and devoid of surprises. A leader also needs to bring their whole self to the meeting, or the employee won’t bring their whole self.
Lena resonated deeply with this. It can be tricky for people to bring their whole selves due to culture, and a leader should figure out what their employees’ boundaries are between personal and work life. It’s also important to recognizes that it’s not just regional or company culture, but also generational culture that affects those boundaries. At Range, Jean’s team report their mood for the day as well as what they’re working on during check-ins. She shared a story where she was explaining this process to another older engineering leader and that that person laughed in surprise that people would want to share something like mood in the workplace.
Jean feels strongly that the way a company talks is really representative of how they view their employees. For example, consider when companies call it “resource allocation” instead of “how employees spend their time.” In a higher-level position, you need to watch the way you talk and how you’re feeling about the people who work for you.
5. Metrics
Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience
You can get a feel for how humanizing - or dehumanizing - a company is by what metrics they use when measuring their devs. For example, lines of code is a dehumanizing metric because it’s meaningless to the actual value a developer can bring. One key to humanizing metrics is making sure the metric is something that a developer is aware of and has direct influence over. Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team.
As we talk about ad naseum at LinearB, metrics should focus more on team performance than individual performance. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience
6. Burnout
Another crucial challenge that stops people from doing their best work is burnout. Jean shared about a time when her company shut down for a short break and people were hoping everyone would come back from the break refreshed. But the break was amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and instead of returning refreshed, she came back tired. During a morning check-in, she shared how tired she still felt and how the short break didn’t make up for months of pandemic stress. One of her direct reports told her later how relieved they were that Jean shared, because they felt the same way! Acknowledging the elephants in the room is crucial as a leader; everything can’t always be rosy and your team wants to feel seen in the challenges you share.
Another important thing to understand about burnout is that it’s not just something you need to accept: Kelly pointed out that burnout is recognized as a mental health syndrome. Knowing that, leaders must be aware that cultural influences impact people’s willingness to talk about mental health, including regional and national cultural considerations. Your team members may not want to talk about it, so you have to look for signs before the burnout hits full force. Address these signs as soon as you can, and give the employee the time and the space they need to heal from it.
You’ve also got to manage upwards around burnout: When the pandemic hit, many companies said, “We care about you,” but didn’t take action. Instead of reducing capacity to 80% and telling people they could be less productive during that time, they tightened goals. They worried more about their performance than their employees’ humanity. As a leader within your organization, you need to raise your voice in leadership discussions and challenge the organization's negative actions by showing that there is a better way to lead.
Humanizing Means Performance
Humanizing developers is critical and isn’t divorced from performance. As Jean says, it’s not like you can say, “Let’s just get the team running; then we can focus on caring about them.” Caring about your team allows them to perform with great results!
Watch my whole conversation with Jean, Kelly, and Lena on our YouTube 👇
A 3-part Summer Workshop Series for Engineering Executives
Engineering executives, register now for LinearB's 3-part workshop series designed to improve your team's business outcomes. Learn the three essential steps used by elite software engineering organizations to decrease cycle time by 47% on average and deliver better results: Benchmark, Automate, and Improve.
Don't miss this opportunity to take your team to the next level - save your seat today.
As an engineer, you might have learned the basics from textbooks or watching a series of tutorials.
Managing engineers is different and isn’t something that can be mastered from simply reading a book.
In my experience, the only proven way to learn is by plugging into the collective wisdom of smart people who have done the hard work of actually managing engineering teams.
That’s why I was so happy to speak with Ian Nowland of Datadog.
With 20 years of engineering industry experience — 10 of which have been in management positions — Ian developed a unique approach toward engineering management, encapsulated in seven categories.
These seven categories of engineering management are based on his own software-engineering experience, which includes 10 years at Amazon and are designed to help managers successfully direct, satisfy and retain employees, as well as maintain a healthy company culture.
Some of the central components of Ian’s framework include taking the ego out of mistakes, developing a learning mindset towards management, and building social capital between teams.
We’ll dig into this more below.
Using the 7 Categories of Engineering Management
People often refer to the three P’s when it comes to management: 1) People; 2) Process; and 3) Product.
But Ian believes that’s limiting when you’re thinking about management in engineering and doesn’t account for the full range of engineering activity.
Instead, Ian believes it’s more helpful to consider the following:
- People: Are people happy and growing in what is being built?
- Engineering: How are things being built? This is about focusing on how your engineers get stuff done and how well those processes work — like the efficacy of a team’s code-review process.
- Product: Are customers satisfied by what’s being built? Ian also refers to this category as “portfolio management.” It’s about communicating with an engineering team about their roadmap, what milestones they plan to explore in that year or quarter, and what story they want to tell through their work.
- Partners: Do your partners understand and agree with all of the above? It’s important to foster healthy relationships between teams and any affiliated groups across the company.
- Execution: How are things getting built? Managers have to think about what has to be done and how they should organize teams to meet annual milestones.
- Operations: Once your product/org is built, is it going to keep running? Operational processes, like scrums or sprints, are crucial to the success of a software engineering project, so it’s important that managers ensure these processes are effective and efficient.
- Company: Does the company align with all these answers? It’s every engineering manager’s responsibility to reflect their company’s culture. A manager’s actions (or inactions) will set a precedent for their teams and direct reports.
The “Miss” Approach For Managing Engineers
Ian believes that when you’re managing engineers, there’s a lot to oversee. There are tons of opportunities for mistakes along the way — they can and will happen. But Ian’s found that it’s through making mistakes — or “misses” — that everyone gets to improve.
A “miss” occurs whenever something goes wrong that could’ve been prevented. But here’s the key: Don’t think of a miss as a mistake — it’s a teaching moment.
It’s a subtle mindset shift. Instead of focusing on the mistake (which can be damaging to a person’s ego), view it as an opportunity for growth.
When you start thinking in terms of misses, it becomes easier to digest. It’s like: That’s okay, I’ll get it next time. Ian found this especially effective for people with perfectionist tendencies (and I’m the first to admit I definitely fall into that category).
Using a Miss To Build Social Capital (aka Get What You Want)
Ian provided a beautiful example to illustrate what he was talking about.
Let’s get specific. Looking at the categories, here’s a miss I experienced in a previous job when dealing with partners at the company.
At the time, I was managing a software team that was in charge of a network device. A previous manager had made the decision to use a different vendor, and the network team basically said: we’re out. As you can probably tell, there was some friction between the two teams. By the time I started working with this group of software engineers, it was clear they were in over their heads.
I went to the woman who was the head of the network device team to ask if we could turn this over to her team — after all, software engineers have no business running networking devices. Since we were using our own vendor and her team was busy, she didn’t agree.
At an earlier point in my career, I would have felt frustrated and left it at that. But past misses (and the seven categories!) have taught me to look at the bigger picture. In this case, she’s well-intentioned and doing the best she can.
Considering the importance of building good relationships between teams, I focused on that. At one point, I even volunteered one of my engineers to help her with a software project to build goodwill.
About a year later, I approached her again to ask about taking over this particular network device. This time the answer was yes.
What changed? We’d built up some trust. We’d taken opportunities to show her that we were trying to do the right thing for the company (by helping her out), and so we’d established the social capital to get a positive response when we made an ask.
Want to hear what Ian learned from other misses? Listen in at 11:50 to hear about a miss in execution and how he came back from a project that went off the rails.
Does It Work? Measuring Success
When it comes to measuring impact, Ian doesn’t believe there’s a universal measure of success — it’ll change according to the situation.
Engineering leader Michael Lopp has written about management in terms of “organics and mechanics.” Ian tends to sway toward being an “organic,” which is essentially intuition-driven.
In his current role, Ian oversees a lot of managers. One of the main things he looks at is whether the managers are surfacing misses early — before they feel like a surprise.
When you manage a lot of different people, your job is to delegate well. The number of surprises is a good indicator of whether everyone is on top of what they’re responsible for — if there are few surprises, you don’t need to get too involved and that things are going well.
When measuring operations and delivery goals, these are areas where it makes sense to apply different standards. For example, objectives and key results (OKRs) are helpful the higher up you go on the organizational chart. When evaluating managers, Ian wants to know: Did they accomplish what they set out to do? If not, why didn’t it work out as expected?
Ian says you wouldn’t expect a team lead to care about OKRs; a team lead should be more concerned with measuring scrum.
Engagement surveys can be helpful for surfacing sentiment. But Ian doesn’t find them helpful for differentiating between a teams’ level of happiness versus its level of impact.
One-On-One Meetings Should Be Fluid and Unique
There’s much written about one-on-one meetings between managers and their employees, and rightfully so. It’s an important interaction for any coaching relationship. But a by-the-book approach to one-on-one meetings isn’t always a recipe for success.
The thing to keep in mind is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to these meetings. One-on-ones should be about helping engineers find unique solutions to their unique problems, rather than trying to present a milquetoast solution. At times, you might need to play the role of advisor, listener or coach. A fluid approach that is authentically yours is best.
Ian also recommends managers use open-ended questions to guide these conversations. For example, he’ll start a one-on-one meeting with something like, “Hey, someone else has this opinion about something that you are or aren’t doing, what do you think?”
This opens up the conversation so that they don’t think that you’re attacking or trapping them. Instead, it helps them gain different perspectives on their career path or a work-related problem.
How To Avoid Burnout Among Engineers and Managers
Lots of engineers tend to burn out in their twenties. But for Ian, it took a lot longer. It wasn’t until Ian was mid-career when he realized that his workload was no longer sustainable.
He was taking on too much work, and was such a perfectionist that he couldn’t and wouldn’t delegate that work to other people. He had been working way too hard for too long. He felt a sense of powerlessness: Ian went from eager and motivated to unmotivated and uninspired.
Eventually Ian realized that he had to slow down and find a solution to being overworked because he was, in fact, burned out.
For managers, the best advice for avoiding burnout is to first focus on delegating as much as you can. This will free up more time for you to focus on avoiding misses.
People grow through delegation — so you want to enable your direct reports to make the mistakes for themselves so that they can anticipate and avoid them next time (and hopefully not burn out in the process of learning this all). This article is based on an episode of Dev Interrupted, featuring expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery.
Hear the full talk
This advice only scratches the surface of how organizations can make their business more efficient and productive. You can find out much more about the team-of-teams model and how it applies to business by listening to our podcast.
The typical model of business needs rethinking. Traditionally, businesses run in a rather industrial structure, almost militaristic. There are layers upon layers of management, with large gaps between the people who do the work and those who control the strategy. While this can work well in certain sectors, like manufacturing, it’s not ideal for a more innovative company.
So we talked to Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, about an alternative way to structure business: the team-of-teams model. In this model, the leadership of the company creates smaller teams that manage themselves. And instead of presenting specific targets, the leadership gives each team a problem to solve. That can range from managing our customer service to making a new product.
“A top heavy and top-down micro-management ecosystem is just not what resonates today with knowledge work and thought work that an art form like software development is,” Bob says. “So the team of teams model presents a different concept. Instead of having this hierarchical command and control, the leadership strategy pivots to creating an environment where there’s a shared vision and a shared mission.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:10
With more autonomy, teams are happier, more productive and work much more efficiently. But what do companies need to do to switch to this model?
Give autonomy through a shared vision
The first step is to make sure that the leadership team has a clear vision. What are you trying to achieve? This needs to be simple and summarize the ultimate aim of the company. Once you have that vision, everything else can begin to fall into place. You can allow teams to find their own way to an answer, which might be a solution you never would’ve dreamt of. Just make sure to give each team a set budget.
“Teams are granted a level of autonomy that then lets them define and discover their own purpose in where they fit in that vision,” Bob says. “Oftentimes it then provides invaluable feedback on how that vision needs to be altered based on what they’re seeing as opposed to that historical: I’m-just-being-told model.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:47
This autonomy is key to the team-of-teams model. When you give creative and innovative people freedom to explore a problem, they’re much more likely to find a novel approach.
Give problems, not tasks
When you’ve brought together bright minds and talent, there’s no need to set specific tasks. You simply give the team a goal: a problem to solve. With small teams, they can easily organize themselves and make sure that they’re working productively. They might not solve it how you originally intended, but it’ll get solved.
“The Team of Teams model gives you that flexibility and I’m not telling you what to do, I’m giving you a problem to solve,” Bob says. “When it comes to execution in a dynamic landscape, Team of Teams is almost always better.”
Sure, in some situations like the medical world, there’s a definite correct answer. Things must happen in a set way. But Bob adds:
“In the software world, I can’t think of a case where anyone knows the right answer … To say definitively: Build me exactly this in exactly this time and this will be your guaranteed result.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 19:18
Keep only four levels of hierarchy
But if you’re only going to give people objectives, and not set tasks, you need to make sure that individual employees are never more than four steps away from the CEO. Too many layers in between the worker and the CEO causes problems. So if you start to get too many levels, it’s time to start breaking your teams down into smaller groups.
“There has to be that cohesion of vision and purpose, and as you add layers between the individual contributors on the team to that CEO’s vision, you start to dilute the messaging,” Bob says. “So when I say: ‘there’s a problem, go solve it.’ They have a frame of mind and you know what our organization is striving towards … It really prevents that communication breakdown.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 15:39
Invest in your teams
Once you have your teams set up and can trust them to get on with a task, it’s time to start investing in them. Train them up. Help them grow as individuals and workers. Do that, and the whole team will improve.
“The foundational responsibility of leaders is to create an environment where your teams can thrive,” Bob says. “So I think continual learning is such an important dimension … If I don’t have the opportunity at work to find some level of mastery in a craft, I’m going to seek an opportunity where I can go get that.”
This is another reason why the old model doesn’t work. It makes people cogs in the machine, who don’t get those opportunities to master their craft and feel fulfilled.
“If you’re not, as a leader, investing in those teams to stay as sharp as possible, you’re doing a disservice to your teams. Eventually, your team skill sets are going to erode,” Bob says. “Carve out time for your folks to not only have access to content, but actually immerse in it.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 20:50
Let teams self-police
When teams are set up correctly, and have a good mix of skills, they’ll choose their own leaders. Perhaps through a vote. They’ll also often decide among themselves whether someone needs more training or needs to leave the team for good.
“The team self-polices to some degree. So if something gets escalated, it’s only in the cases where the team hasn’t been able to self-adjudicate,” Bob explains on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 8:44.
They’ll often elect their team leader, too. Which is good if someone wants to step back from that leadership role for a time or give someone else a chance to prove themselves. All these things are easier in the team-of-teams model.
Stop looking for the perfect person
Another advantage of this model is that you don’t need to be looking for someone with all the skills. It’s often much easier to find an individual that slots neatly into a team, or five people that form a new team, than to find that one perfect person.
“Maybe it’s not the perfect person, but it’s a perfect fit on this team because of personalities and principles and values,” Bob says. “Even if they don’t become that perfect person that I was looking for, they’re still going to be a valuable contributor to that team.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 32:31
It also makes it much easier to look for people who might need a little training, but you can always develop into a much stronger candidate. This opens up the pool of talent you have available to you.
Hear the full talk
This advice only scratches the surface of how organizations can make their business more efficient and productive. You can find out much more about the team-of-teams model and how it applies to business by listening to our podcast.
Learning to code doesn’t mean you have to become a programmer. Coding is one of those professions with a lot of transferable skills: logic, clear thinking, problem solving, and attention to detail, to name just a few. So learning a programming language can open up a whole range of opportunities, even if you decide to veer away from becoming a developer.
We spoke with Peter Bell, founder and CTO at CTO connection, on our podcast to see what avenues are open to those that learn how to program. Here’s what he said.
Be an individual contributor
If you enjoy programming, but don’t enjoy the management side of the role, then you’ll want to look into becoming an individual contributor (IC). An IC is someone who focuses on the actual programming, without any of the management responsibilities. In the past, this wasn’t a viable career path. But things have changed.
“It always used to be like: Hey, if you want to make more money and, you know, make your parents proud, then you've got to go become a manager and stop doing the thing you're actually good at. Which is writing code,” Peter explains. “So it's good that we've got the dual-track career path, now.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 04:43
Now, if you want to focus solely on being a programmer, that’s a viable option.
Get into management
The fact that we now have a dual-track career path means that if you’re particularly extroverted or enjoy training others up, you can choose to head in that direction. Sure, you won’t be coding as much. But your coding knowledge will help make sure that you can train up your team, and understand what they need to work on.
On a similar vein, it’s worth considering overseeing an entire product. This is where you can take that extra step away and really think about the user experience. What makes the best sense for them? How should this piece of software work? How do all these pieces fit together? A product manager needs the skills of any manager, but also needs to be able to think about the actual experience.
“Somebody who has a solid technical background who moves into product, it's another way of scaling your impact, because now you can think about the user experience and the flows without having to be like: Dammit, I got the semi-colon in the wrong place,” Peter explains. “So you get what the geeks are talking about, but you can actually focus on the impact for the users... You can still talk thoughtfully about, you know, how are we going to run this in a Kubernetes cluster and how are we going to think about, you know, real time stream queries against the data source?”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 05:06
Being able to take a step back away from the day-to-day coding can be great for those that enjoy reviewing code and looking for errors. When developing products, you won’t spend as much time writing new code, but you’ll get to think through the problems at a more abstract level.
Train or consults others
Another role, which can suit those that prefer the freelance life, is to move into training or consultancy. Companies are always looking to teach their staff about new techniques and languages. So if you have a knack for passing on your skills, you’ll be in high demand. In fact, Peter described on the podcast how he started off by writing blogs about ColdFusion.
“I started presenting a technical conference around the US and around the world, and then I realized, once I got to a certain point, that people would pay me to do this,” Peter says. “I've been on the other side where I'm paying someone to come in and talk about Redis or whatever. And I'm always saying to myself: This is really expensive, but we're still paying for it.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 06:36
Being able to pick up a new language or technology quickly is a skill that not many have. So if you can do it, you can easily go into consultancy or training and earn a substantial salary. For example, Peter explains that large companies will often pay between $10,000 and $15,000 for a single day training 30 engineers. If you can pull it off, and leave those engineers with the right skills, you only need a few jobs to make a good living.
Try being a sales engineer
If you’re someone who enjoys working with people and thinking about the overall architecture of a project, rather than the fiddly details, then you might have more impact if you become a sales engineer. This role is all about understanding a product inside and out, giving demos and presenting the facts. The best sales engineers are the knowledgeable ones.
“It’s this intersection between understanding computers and being able to speak to a human. And it’s a relatively rare trait,” Peter says. “It seems engineering is awesome because what you do is you get to go and hang out with other geeks, and understand their problems.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:20
So rather than focusing on coding, then coming back in six months with a finished product, you get to have those high-level talks. What are your big pain points? What are the issues with your engineering flows? How might this tool or product reduce cycle time? Which can often be a lot more rewarding and enjoyable.
Check out the podcast
These are just some of the jobs that are available to you, once you know how to code. But if you’d like to hear more about what Peter talked about, listen to our podcast.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
Flow can mean many things but when it comes to workflow it usually refers to that feeling, discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, when you enter a state of intense focus and lose yourself in an activity.
Video games are a great example. They take advantage of this feeling to keep you immersed, which is why it’s so easy for gamers to “lose time” and just get wrapped up. The same feeling usually drives your most productive and best work.
When you manage developers, their workflow should be treasured and valued. That’s why, to improve developer focus, it’s vital to avoid weighing them down with minor interruptions or non-urgent pings.
“Flow is characterized as this experience where the task that you're doing is perfectly matched to the skills that you have.”
-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 7:51
1. Acknowledge that it take 23 minutes for devs just to get into flow
Did you know that it takes 23 minutes to get into a flow state? For some people it takes even longer. That means that for every question, disruption, email, and interruption that you or your coworkers are subjected to, it could be half an hour of productivity down the drain. We talked to Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, about how she manages workflow
“Say you got a Slack ping, and you're like, “oh, I'll just ask a question.” How long does it take you to find the thread again? What's that total interrupt time? It's 23 minutes…that's been measured.”
-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:11
2. Defrag dev calendars
Some interruptions are unavoidable but many of them aren’t. Planning your calendar in a way that works around the needs and workflows of your team is necessary to maximize everyone's productivity.
For instance, scheduling meetings on days when weekly meetings already occur can help preserve focus time by not disrupting other working days.
Devs need to communicate with their managers on what times they have available away from normal workflow and then it’s up to engineering leaders to plan around those schedules. As a dev leader, you have to look at your devs’ calendars, not your own, and react accordingly.
“If you're a manager, when you're scheduling, don't look at your calendar, and then find a time and then see where you can slot the engineer in…look at the engineer's calendar and see, where can you tack the meeting on that it is after another meeting, or it is maybe at the start of the day, the end of the day… and ask them!”
-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 12:31
3. Suck it up - schedule your work around focus time
When managing large numbers of devs, it can seem like a chore to work around many different schedules or attempting to get meetings done only on specific days. We asked Katie what her trick to juggling so many different calendars and meetings was, and she had one thing to say: “Suck it up.”
Devs are the backbone of software production and it’s important to prioritize their productivity whenever possible. To help them stay on task and be able to really focus on their work, they need to have meetings planned around their day - not yours.
Providing consistency for your devs - meeting them when they are ready, available, and focused - helps them maintain a flow state and maximize productivity. But more than that, it’s the right thing to do. Devs want to build cool stuff, not have their days ruined by their own calendars.
Katie says it best:
“That might mean that, as the manager, you have a little bit weirder hours. I hate to say this, but kind of suck it up… There's no way to get around that.”
-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:23
Watch the full interview-
If you would like to hear more about how managers can work around a developers schedule and other great insight from Katie Wilde, check out the full podcast on your favorite podcasting application, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
At Netflix, we don’t just think about productivity - we engineer it. There’s an entire team within Netflix dedicated to productivity. I lead the Develop Domain along with my Delivery and Observability Domain peers, and together, we make up Productivity Engineering.
I recently sat down with the Dev Interrupted podcast to discuss all things productivity, how I run my team, and how other managers should view employee success. Here’s how we think about it at Netflix:
Can productivity be engineered?
In short, yes! Productivity is not a generic term for team performance or a perfunctory buzzword used during team meetings. The productivity team is an actual organization. The work we do is foundational to Netflix’s development teams. Productivity Engineering lives within the broader, central Platform organization.
The role of the Productivity Engineering team is simple: we exist to make the lives of Netflix developers easier. Abstracting away the various “Netflix-isms” around development, delivery, and observability, productivity allows devs more time to focus on their domain of expertise.
“We are sort of like the nerds’ nerds, if you will, enabling them to use our platforms and tools so that the work that they're doing is focused on studio and streaming, without thinking about everything that's under the hood.” - On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 2:31
With the recent addition of Gaming to the list of Netflix’s pursuits, the resulting focus becomes even more important.
Practically speaking, it’s the role of Productivity Engineering to help with things like coding, testing, debugging, dependency management, deployment, alerting, monitoring, performance, incident response, to name a bunch. Netflix utilizes the concept of a “paved road,” the frameworks, platforms, apps, and tools we build and support to keep our devs rolling. The idea is to keep workflows streamlined and enable developers to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. If the road ahead is cleared of obstacles, you’re going to get to where you need to go faster and with support along the way.
It’s also about helping developers enjoy the ride. To abuse another metaphor, a sound engineering experience should be like dining at a fine restaurant. If done right, you rarely remember the waitstaff, have a hard time finding something you like, or worry about how they prepared the food; you simply enjoy the experience. If Productivity Engineering is doing their job, they act as the restaurant and waitstaff with developers as the customer, providing nothing short of a beautiful end-to-end experience.
Measuring Outcomes vs. Output
Measuring all of that productivity can be hard, and there’s no one unicorn measurement to rule them all. Hence, developer productivity teams should focus on impact and outcomes. Above all, Netflix focuses on customer satisfaction. Our philosophy is that while how something is delivered is important, the impact of what’s delivered is ultimately of greater importance.
"If you're running around a track super-fast, but you're on the wrong track, does it matter? So really, what are you delivering? How you're delivering is important. But if that thing that you're delivering is ultimately doing what you want it to do, that's the most important thing."
- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:05
In this model, the outcome always wins over output or activity. For instance, standard productivity deployment metrics (DORA) as applied to our customers become an important proxy for measuring our success. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for productivity are viewed as a reflection of a team’s performance as it relates to customer satisfaction.
I’m a big fan of the SPACE framework, developed by Nicole Forsgren, for precisely this reason. How are our customers doing in terms of Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency? The answer to those questions reflects how we’re doing as a Productivity organization.
"This is our strategy, these are our hypotheses around, how we're going to improve our customers' productivity. Are those things paying off? And if you can't measure them in some way, who knows? Right? So yeah, we're getting a little more hardcore about this."
- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 24:17
Key metrics provide productivity teams with a holistic view of performance by establishing benchmarks. Understanding that everything needs to be viewed within the proper context, it’s difficult to improve as an organization if nothing is measured or tracked.
Comparing Productivity
Comparing developers’ productivity across teams is a thorny subject at best and downright dangerous for team morale at worst. As the old saying goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy” or what I typically say, “comparisons lead to unhappiness”, or with my kids “eyes on your own paper!”.
The productivity teams at Netflix take a contextualized view of dev teams rather than relying solely on raw data. Every project is different, the customer base is different, the use case is different, personas are different, and where a team is within the software development life cycle is different.
It’s a basic understanding that comparing apples to oranges is not good math. A team that is just starting out and building something new, is going to look very different than a team with a mature product. By recognizing this, it becomes almost impossible to rank teams against each other because very rarely, if ever, will teams be doing the same thing, in the same space, the same way, with the same people.
Even a measurement of an outcome pertaining to customer satisfaction (CSAT) is not straightforward. At Netflix and across the industry, we’ve found that satisfaction for internal teams skews lower than satisfaction for customer-facing teams.
The reason? Teams within Netflix are their own harshest critics. When attempting to gauge the performance of an internal team vs a customer-facing team, it’s understood that the internal team is almost always going to score lower on satisfaction, even if both teams are equally effective.
Context is everything. Measuring productivity means being mindful of context.
Pushing Productivity
Any company that wants to be successful must understand how to measure its success. Productivity doesn’t count for much if an organization is not moving towards desired outcomes.
By viewing productivity as more than just a concept or a raw set of data, the hard-working teams at Netflix have turned productivity into an actual apparatus. It is a living, breathing team of human beings whose devotion to empathetic efficiency improves customer satisfaction and dev team quality of life. I am incredibly proud to lead these teams, and I sincerely hope the work we do inspires other organizations to improve their developers’ experience.
And if you want to be as productive as Netflix, remember that metrics are only as good as their context!
A good SRE engineer will tell you your service is never down. A great SRE engineer will tell you that’s not what you should be measuring. In fact, they’ll tell you their job is customer service.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has grown immensely popular with many of the world’s largest tech companies, like Netflix, LinkedIn and Airbnb employing SRE teams to keep their systems reliable and scalable.
Along the way, SRE engineers have become one of the most sought after engineering roles in tech.
The role is traditionally understood as ensuring that services are reliable and unbroken, but reliability and uptime aren’t perfect metrics. Perhaps what organizations should be asking themselves is what their customers think of their service.
Wandering down to your engineering department and asking your SRE team about customer satisfaction is a good place to start.
Their answer just might surprise you.
History of SRE
In practice, Site Reliability Engineering has been around for a while. In the past its functions were covered by roles that had names like production ops, disaster recovery, testing or monitoring. The rise of cloud computing facilitated a need for more engineers in production. The complexity only grew as more organizations transitioned from monolithic infrastructures to distributed microservices.
Modern Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google in 2003 with the work of Benjamin Treynor, who is seen as the “father” of what we now simply call SRE. Treynor, who coined the term, was a software engineer placed in charge of running a production team. With the goal of making Google’s website as reliable and serviceable as possible, he asked that his team spend half their time on operations tasks so they could better understand software in production. This team would become the first-ever SRE team.
“Ben Treynor said, I'm paraphrasing, ‘[SRE] is essentially like throwing a software engineer at an operations problem’, right? Because you come from that developer mindset, that design and, you know, you think about all of these things. So think about it as a developer but apply it to an operational type of problem.”
- Brian Murphy on the Dev Interrupted podcast at 4:26
Why not uptime?
So why shouldn't you be too concerned about your uptime metrics? In reality SRE can mean different things to different teams but at its core, it’s about making sure your service is reliable. After all, it’s right there in the name.
Because of this many people assume that uptime is the most valuable metric for SRE teams. That is flawed logic.
For instance, an app can be “up” but if it’s incredibly slow or its users don’t find it to be practically useful, then the app might as well be down. Simply keeping the lights on isn’t good enough and uptime alone doesn’t take into account things like degradation or if your site’s pages aren’t loading.
It may sound counterintuitive, but SRE teams are in the customer service business. Customer happiness is the most important metric to pay attention to. If your service is running well and your customers are happy, then your SRE team is doing a good job. If your service is up and your customers aren’t happy, then your SRE team needs to reevaluate.
A more holistic approach is to view your service in terms of health.
The Four Golden Signals
As defined by Google, these are the four golden signals of SRE. If these can be managed effectively, then you probably have a healthy system.
- Latency: Involves response time and the time it takes to service a request.
- Traffic: Is a measure of the demand that is being placed on your system. E.g. how many messages are you getting; can you handle them?
- Errors: The rate of requests that fail. E.g. running an HTTP server that is returning a lot 500s is bad.
- Saturation: Is a way of thinking about the capacity of your system. E.g. is your service being overwhelmed?
Establishing system health
“The best way to get started is just measuring stuff, you know, just getting the baseline of what's healthy, what's not healthy, what looks like health, and then you can start working from there.”
- Brian Murphy on the Dev Interrupted podcast at 10:49
It can be difficult to know whether or not your organization should consider forming an SRE team, or what your next steps are if you’ve already made the decision.
Again, think of your decision in terms of a holistic approach, not just your uptime. If you have high uptime, that’s fantastic, but what you should be establishing is a benchmark.
Using the four golden signals to guide you, establish what you think a healthy system should look like and set your benchmark. Keep measuring over time and you will begin to see the areas that are good or require more work.
These measures will help inform all of your future decisions. Perhaps your organization is ready to roll out new features or make choices around expanding your service.
Critically, the health you establish provides insights into customer happiness. If things look good you probably have happy customers.
Internal customers
When done right SREs aren’t just making customers happy, they’re making the lives of developers easier too. Nothing is worse than having to stop because there’s a problem in production. Good SRE teams can shield dev teams by focusing on major hotspots.
If the fires are being managed before they are out of control, it allows developers to keep pushing out features. It even gives them the freedom to keep breaking things, if necessary!
When things do break, or require a slowdown, a dialogue can occur. A good SRE understands that the developer who wrote a piece of code understands it better than anyone. The model for good internal customer service is an SRE who brings in a developer, gives them ownership of the code they created, and offers to help them fix it.
Happy customers are the best customers
Whether you already have an SRE team or are thinking about forming one, remember to think beyond the engineering - think about the customer.
Ask yourself if your customers are happy and if you would describe your service as healthy. Remember to think about your own teams as well, your developers will thank you for it.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
Continuous Delivery isn’t about how fast you can deliver, it’s about the outcome your delivery achieves. Bryan Finster, author of the 5-minute DevOps series and founder of the DevOps Dojo, joined our Dev Interrupted Discord community to answer your questions about outcome-based development, continuous delivery, and why failing small is better than failing fast.
Bryan is currently a Distinguished Engineer at Defense Unicorns but has also worked for Walmart as a systems analyst and eventually became a staff software engineer for Walmart Labs. He had previously appeared on the Dev Interrupted Podcast to further talk about these subjects as well as the most common pitfalls dev teams find when trying to optimize their delivery process. Listen to the episode here:
This Community AMA took place on January 8, 2021 on the Dev Interrupted Discord.
Necco-LB: 📢📢 Community AMA📢📢 @everyone
Topic: Outcome-based Development with @BryanF (Bryan Finster)
Bryan, thanks for joining us today!
Bryan Finster: Thanks for having me!
col: Bryan... great quote. "A developer is a business expert who solves problems with code." Thank you. Tremendous concept.
Bryan Finster: Thanks. That's who we are. We aren't Java spewing legos. If we don't understand the business, the code won't.
Rocco Seyboth: YES!! @col Love it. @oriker says "a business decision is made with every line of code"
Bryan: Exactly. How does this change improve the bottom line. Even more, how does it improve the lives of our customers?
Necco-LB: We really enjoyed having you on the podcast to talk about Outcome-based development and what continuous delivery should be trying to achieve. I was hoping you could explain to use what Outcome-based development means?
Bryan: It's just focusing on the outcomes. It's pointless to focus on how we do things if the outcomes are poor. It's also about Hypothesis Driven Development. The act of defining the expected value before we attempt to deliver it and then measuring for that value. Instrumenting the application to see how close we get so we can adjust. I frequently see people just being feature factories, pounding out changes that no one needs. That just costs money and increases support. We should be deliberate about what we do and say "no" when the value isn't obvious.
Cocco: When it comes to delivering value to the customer sooner, what things do you commonly see teams worrying about that they perhaps shouldn't (or not worry about, when they should?)
Bryan: "I can't release this! It's not feature complete!" No, get the incomplete change out there and make sure it doesn't break anything.
Necco-LB: You mentioned during the podcast that Pride is the best metric ever. Can you explain that a little bit?
Bryan: If I own the business problem, own the solution, own how to make it better, own the outcomes and see people getting value from my work, then I have pride in what I do. I want it to be good. I want it to be secure and stable and I want to continuously improve it.
Necco-LB: When you talk about outcome-based development you often talk about the things that need to happen before hands touch the keyboard. What are some of those things?
Bryan: We need to understand the value we are trying to deliver and we need to define how we expect to deliver that value at the detail level. It's not enough to write a vague user story. We need testable outcomes that we agree should deliver that value. Behavior Driven Development is the most effective tool I've found for that. We also need to make sure we aren't trying to deliver ALL of the value at once. What if we are wrong? We usually are, statistically. So, what is the smallest, highest value thing we can deliver to find out? Sometimes the right answer is to stop at that point. Invest in the outcomes, not the plan or the work.
Read the unedited AMA and join in the discussion in the Dev Interrupted Discord here! With over 2000 members, the Dev Interrupted Discord Community is the best place for Engineering Leaders to engage in daily conversation. Join the community >>
Cocco: What patterns/trends do you see in teams who can deliver the outcomes they want? (Are there common factors in teams you've seen that move from struggling -> successful?)
Bryan: Yes. Actual continuous delivery and product ownership. They can deliver small changes daily and they have ownership of what those changes are. They have the safety to challenge things without fear and they are not pushed so hard that there is no time to think of better ideas. Software development is a mental activity, not typing.
Necco-LB: You work with a lot of different teams at the DevOps Dojo. What are some of the most common pitfalls preventing a team from optimizing their delivery process?
Bryan: They are given the wrong problems to solve. They are asked to solve stupid problems like "how many changes did you make today?", "How many stories did you complete this sprint?", They don't know how to work as teams because they are incentivized to work in silos. So, requirements are poorly defined, testing suffers, speed suffers. They need to be solving the business problem. What is measured will change. Be careful what and how you measure.
Necco-LB: What are some first steps a team can take if they want to become more outcome focused?
Bryan: Focus on the business problem and get close to the user. Empathize with them and what value they need. This really applies to anything. If you don't respect your customer, you won't need to worry about them for very long.
Necco-LB: What is the role/responsibility of the developer in this outcome-based development model?
Bryan: On a good development team you have engineers and product ownership. Engineers ship working solutions. They know they are working because they tested them, delivered, them and observed that their tests were accurate.
Rocco Seyboth: In 5 Minute DevOps you talk about observing what high performing teams do then modeling other teams to the same process and behavior... how do you reconcile that with the belief that every team is different and should have the flexibility to do things their own way?
Bryan: Actually, I advocate against cookie cutter templating of teams in that post. We should standardize on improving outcomes.
Necco-LB: Friends, that's just about the top of the hour. Bryan has a real job that needs to get done, but feel free to keep the questions coming asynchronously throughout the day - he'll be popping in and out to answer them. Bryan - thank you so much for joining our community today and answering our questions!
Bryan: Just some contact links to leave and I want to thank everyone for the conversation. I love talking about these topics.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-finster/
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
Dan is the founder of Tellspin, an on-call scheduler in Slack for DevOps and developers (https://tellspin.app). Helping workspaces reduce their contact footprint, resolve incidents faster, and regain deep focus.
Code smell is a way to describe code that hasn’t aged well and has the potential for a lot of issues.
It usually is the source of a lot of hot fixes or workarounds keeping it functional. My most common reflex is to rewrite it. However, if I’m not careful, I’ll waste an entire day and not improve anything.
After a decade of programming, here are my 7 steps to reduce code smell gradually.
Step 0: Admit there is a problem
I start to recognize my code is smelly when I start saying things like “that time only took an hour.”
I’m usually doing something simple, like adding another field to a form or another schedule for a customer. I quickly add in code because it feels like the easiest thing to do and ship the feature. There are so many other things on my plate, I don’t have time for this, I’ll say to myself.
By the 5th or 6th hour I’ve hacked the same spot, I realize, had I rewritten it sooner, I would have actually saved time.
Step 1: Identify spots to clean
Smelly code is so disorganized.
Is it really smelly or do I just not understand it? It’s very tempting to always default to a rewrite. If I write all the code, I’ll understand it. But who is to say the next person who looks at it will?
Similar to profiling code to identify the slowest spot, I work to identify the place that smells the most. Are there sections of the code that new devs are always struggling with? Are there frequent small changes that require touching lots of different files or methods?
Creating a list of smelly code helps identify which sections of code need the most attention.
Step 2: Pick the worst spot
Smelly code is like dirty dishes.
With a stack of dishes, I’ll plug my nose until I dispose of the rotting food that’s causing the stink. It was easy to blame the whole pile, but for the most part, all of the other dishes are fairly clean. They don’t need immediate attention. The rotting smell came from something I forgot to clean off when I was in a hurry.
When there is a piece of code that’s really rotten, it’s often hidden somewhere in the pile. Maybe an abstraction went too far, spreading a hundred lines of code across dozens of files.
I keep in mind that I need to fix the worst smell; most of the other code is good enough and doesn’t need my immediate attention.
Step 3: Resist the urge to do everything
Smelly code is never-ending.
Perhaps the hardest part of improving a code base is scoping it to one thing. It’s so liberating to finally get a chance to clean up, that I can easily take it too far. I’ll think, “While I’m at it, I might as well clean up this… oh! and that other thing needs fixing too.”
Resist! Do not do everything.
If I try to tackle everything, I’m not going to finish. Even more likely, it’s not going to pass code review. It’s better to do one piece at a time - ya know, like eating an elephant.
Step 4: Make sure it’s better
Smelly code has edge cases.
Inevitably, in the process of rewriting, I discover why the code was written that way in the first place. I might even stumble across a can of worms. At that point, I realize my not-so-dimwitted co-worker wasn’t as dumb as I thought (or even more likely, I discover I was the one who wrote the code originally 🤦♂️).
After learning all the edge cases, I’ll be tempted to walk away.
Step 5: Don’t immediately give up
Smelly code is messy to work with.
I’m frustrated imagining how far away the current code is from a better solution. I’ve got the code in my head, I know the edge cases, and I’ve got the context. It’s important not to give up as the solution may be right around the corner.
I keep thinking about it while I go for a walk. Maybe even take a break. Solutions often come to me while I’m on walks or in the shower.
Step 6: Use the co-worker bobblehead
Smelly code needs attention.
I steal my co-worker’s bobblehead and explain aloud what I’m doing. In the process, I figure out what I've missed or overlooked.
If a bobble head isn’t available, I resort to using my actual co-workers. (I’m checking my assumptions by walking them through what I’m thinking step by step.)
Step 7: Publish or throw in the towel
Smelly code can improve.
At the end of my steps I have a complete solution or I’m banging my head on the keyboard. If it’s the first, I push the change and take a breath of fresh air. If it’s the second, I commit it to a branch and plan to revisit another day. Sometimes we can’t have nice things.
Rinse and repeat
The depth I go into each step changes based on complexity or how critical the code is. Sometimes I can run through each of the steps in a few minutes, other times it’s spread out over a few weeks. It really depends on what I’m working on.
Running through these steps helps me gradually improve my code. There’s nothing better than finally getting a fix for some smelly code merged and into production. Sometimes we can have nice things.
Dan Willoughby is the founder of Tellspin, an on-call scheduler in Slack for DevOps and developers (https://tellspin.app). Helping workspaces reduce their contact footprint, resolve incidents faster, and regain deep focus.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.