Unsung Heroes
Summary: Reflects on the unsung heroes of the tech industry, those who work diligently without seeking public recognition, and highlights their importance in saving companies.
Book Review: Managing Humans
Second, and for now last, book regarding people/team management that I've finished recently. The perfect companion to read alongside Peopleware, full of interesting advices, at least for noobs in management like me. Now, for other topics as the best way to improve is to practice.
Review
Title: Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
Author: Michael Lopp
Managing Humans talks about a 20 years of experience manager and his advices, lessons, tips, experiences lived, mistakes done... But written full of humour, jokes and funny scenarios and comments, up to the point that even the glossary at the end is really and worth reading for some geeky jokes. It touches many topics, from pure people management to handling meetings, stressful scenarios, problematic employees, inter-team communications, recruiting, avoiding churn/burnouts, productivity...
I won't get too deep because it covers a specific area, but there it nails it (from my humble opinion), so if you want to improve your team lead skills I think can be really useful. also, you can check my notes below to see some fragments of the content.
Notes
A manager's job is to take what skills his people have, the ones that got them promoted/hired, and figure out how to make them scale.
Manager must haves:
- "speak the language"
- Language of the lazy: Avoid managementese language, use tech language to communicate with your team
- When talking to individuals, talk to them using the familiar language of a friend
- Talk to your team/people often
- Action per decision: Don't just say, do
- Good position in the political food chain
- Able to control when they lose their shit
- Do you have a one-on-one?
- Do you have a team meeting?
- Do you have status reports?
- Can you say no to your boss?
- Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger?
- Can you explain the current state of business?
- Does the guy in charge regulary tell you/in public what he's thinking? Are you buying it?
- Do you know what you want to do next? Does your boss?
- Do you have time to be streategic?
- Are you actively killing the grapevine?
- The Update (all clear)
- The Vent (something's up...)
- The Disaster (oh dear...)
- Have three prepared points: To break the ice or have some thread to talk in the first 10-15 mins
- Mini-performance reviews: Change a status 1on1 to a small review
- My current disaster: Chat about a problem you have
- Assume they have something to teach you
- When communications are down, listen hard, repeat everything, assume nothing
- Don't redirect
- Listen, but if doesn't seems to finish (is a rant), close it
- Shut up, listen, wait for the end
- Is not about the issue anymore, it's an employee emotional explosion
- Is the end result of poor management (employee thinks is the only option left to make change)
- Product
- Process
- People
- Pitch
An early organizational chart is a great stagnation warning sign if happens during your version 1.0 lifecycle.
Don't cheat the learning process
Sleep on changes & discussions (let them root)
Reinvent communication and ourselves each time company doubles size
"The curse of success is that we have to move slower"
A flat org is one where power, accountability and responsibility are distributed evenly
If you want to be a good manager, stay flexible, remember what it means to be an engineer, and don't stop developing
When people and teams work together perception of importance changes: There's no shit work when the work is all yours; there's just work you like to do and work you have to do.
Thinking and having ideas:
- In order to create, you need time to think. when you're busy, you're not thinking, you're reacting.
- An offsite day to kickoff is a good start, but you really need to create a thinking-conductive environment in the workplace (where most work happens).
- If stuck on ideas/thinking, write it down, throw it away and write down again.
- People who talk fast, without thinking, might be moving quickly to cover up the gaps in their knowledge.
- An individual tends to be very bad at work estimates until they've begun the work
- Initial step for incidents is information adquisition, not action
- Do always two sweeps to try to avoid mistaks/missing bits. vet the model with at least 3 other people qualified
- Managers don't create product, create process
- A product needs balance between creating predictability (to avoid chaos) and disruption/hacking (to avoid stagnation)
- Maintaining a healthy team: bored people quit. team is full of people who aren't you
- A team lead's job is not only building product, but also building people
- Aspects to search for in an interview: technical (strong tech skills/knowledge), cultural (fit, both team and company), vision (likes to change the world)
- Obsessibly protect your people's space and time (let them focus)
- A reorg always happens because of a company change of strategy
Book Review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Using my commute time I've just finished reading another book, this time about people and team management. And after a nice example on the web of a review including side-notes, I've decided to copy the idea and also provide some notes when worth it. I just take screenshots from the tablet or mini-notes if is a Kindle e-book, so don't expect anything fancy or detailed.
Review
Title: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Author: Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister
The review is based on the 3rd edition, which about a book that was first written at 1987 is significant.
I was recommended this book and given that I now have to manage a small development team and interact more actively with the full organization of the company I gave it high priority on my reading list. Ther results are quite satisfying, I can't but agree on so many points about how things should be done.
Issues with traditional rules, with policies, with the furniture and office disposition, with noise, with methodologies, with people... Along the 39 chapters this book is a journey about the most common things that are handled wrongly, but also about solutions, good alternatives to those problems. Combined with quite a few real world examples (sadly usually about bad scenarios), this reading feels like almost radical because of how sincerely and plainly puts some problems.
Both the good advices and the listings of things to be wary or directly fight off are pure gold, and if I had to choose something as bad, it would be really hard... maybe that the authors' humour a few times is not of my taste (but usually it is). A more than recommended read!
Notes
Elements of a healthy organization:
- Make a cult of quality
- Provide lots of satisfying closure
- Build a sense of eliteness
- Allow and encourage heterogeneity
- Preserve and protect successful teams
- Provide strategic but not tactical direction
Quick cheklist of things to fight against:
- Furniture Police
- corporate entropy
- teamcidal tendencies
- no time to add quality to the product
- Parkinson's Law
- formal Methodologies
- low E-Factor ( E-Factor = Uninterrupted hours / Body-present hours )
Management basics:
- Get the right people
- Make them happy so they don't want to leave
- Turn them loose
The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
Top teamicide techniques:
- Defensive management
- Bureaucracy
- Physical separation
- Fragmentation of people's time
- Quality reduction of the product
- Phony deadlines
- Clique control
- Annual salary or merit reviews
- Management by objectives
- Praise of certain workers for extraordinary/fast accomplishment
- Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
- Performance measurement in almost any form
Work to rule: Form of strike in which workers follow exactly to the rule every procedure, norm and step required for every task.
Open organization: Pushing all information to everybody instead of letting people pull for information they actually care about.
"Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you're not going to get much done."
Unwritten (and bad) rule at work: Silence gives consent. If you don't object to things it is implied that you give your consent. This causes extra work having to make clear when you don't. Repeal this passive consent.
Need-to-know email test: Before sending any email, think about what you need for that person if really needs to know the information, or how to make him/her self-coordinate instead of depend on your emails.
Introducing changes: The introducer has all those who benefit from the old [...] as enemies, and has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new. [...] The equation is unbalanced against change. People hate change. When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed.
Naive model of how change happens:
Old status quo --better idea--> New status quo
Stair change model:
Old status quo --Foreign element--> Chaos --Transforming idea--> Practice & integration --> New status quo
Foreign element can be an outside force or the world changing.
Brainstorming facilitator ideas to restart participants' thinking:
- Analogy thinking: How does nature solve this or a similar problem?
- Inversion: How might we achieve the opposite of our goal?
- Immersion: How might you project yourself into the problem?
Hiding your Linkedin connections list
Receiving Linkedin invitations to connect is the most common action you do on the work-oriented social network. So frequent, that I know quite some people that simply pile up dozens, then hundreds of invitations, not wanting to accept them. The reason is usually the same: It's a recruiter that either didn't even sent a private message to introduce himself/herself, or that if they did... it smells like a template filled just with your name and as much as your current company name.
This is sad, because I really believe in the power of Linkedin as a source of good talent, but so much noise and flood of low (or no) effort recruiting attempts, sometimes even blind shooting (or worse, receiving similar messages from multiple people of the same company's HR department) just creates an ugly picture of the recruitment job. And while I also suffer them from time to time, I've also had pleasant experiences, both regarding job changes and just having good chats explaining my situation and reasoning to not wanting to switch job.
But there's also a part of me that is a bit paranoid regarding privacy, so since long ago I found what I think is the single most interesting privacy option at linkedin: Changing your connections list privacy to private. Or more especifically, changing it so your contacts will only see those of your connections that are shared, that they also have on their contact list. This is not only a good defense line to keep your contact lists private, but also a bit of a trolling mechanism for those lazy recruiters who don't do their homework: "sure, you want us to connect so you can try stealing or spamming my contact list? No problem, but there's a surprise waiting for you". It also is interesting if at your job you have some referal prizes, which can sound selfish but I've seen HR departments prey every employee Linkedin hunting for fresh meat, and then annoy some people from multiple sources almost at once.
This handy option can be found under Privacy & Settings:
As I said, it is not always the case and there are good recruiters too (I've met a few), but the market is saturated with unprofessional people and this helps to keep them at bay, or at least frustrate their attempts of grabbing your connections.
A documentary about privacy that you should watch
They say "privacy is dead", and if not fully, it is indeed dying. With this boom of search engines, social networks, services and in general digital services, it has become so easy to track us.
Terms and Conditions may apply discovers some nasty facts about this and other related topics.
I don't usually post about movies/documentaries here, but I am becoming increasingly concerned about privacy and I think everyone should watch this doc.
How Facebook, Google and others fight against privacy aware laws, how american and english governments spy social sites and even dispatch SWAT teams to people houses for a comment/tweet or preemptively dismantles small protests... Really disturbing, and even if you don't live in those countrys this affects you as long as you use any service, and probably your government is taking similar steps.
As technology advances our rights and privacy seem to shrink, and in many ways, George Orwell was a visionary.
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