Tactics for Tech Leadership (TTL)

What has Andy been reading recently? Where is Mon-Chaio? In this quick vacationcast you'll find out the answer to both of those questions.

Andy studied kendo for several years at the University of Washington and at the Highline Kendo Kai in Seattle under Marsten Sensei. He hasn't practiced for many years, but hopes to get his life setup so that he can get back to kendo at some point and is always happy to talk to people about it.

If you have questions about these books, kendo, or anything, send an email to [email protected].

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You are a hiring manager and your organization has given you the green light to hire more people. What do you do next? Many people might feel the answer is obvious but for a surprisingly large number of companies, their hiring processes actively impede them from building great teams. Andy and Mon-Chaio pull apart conventional hiring practices to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide tactics to help guide the creation of a truly impactful hiring process.

 Opening quote from Job interviews are a nightmare — and only getting worse.

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What is the right way to have dev and ops work together? Is that different for data science? We look into ways these different specialities can be organised to foster collaboration. Development and operations has a lot of literature from the DevOps movement that gives us guidance for how to structure teams but data science has less written about it. Still, we have found some articles that shed light on things, and those articles appear to be based on reality, which we discover as we talk about our experience of working with data science and operations.

Opening quote from "The Uncanny Valley of a Functional Organization" by Ben Thompson.

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A new project comes down the pike and Engineering asks for more heads to ship said project. Is this a reasonable request or are there other tactics we can use to "do more with less"? Mon-Chaio and Andy explore this common situation from both sides and offer specific diagnostic techniques to move the business forward, whether that's with additional headcount or without.

Opening music from Flight of the Conchords - Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

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Can you measure developer productivity? Prompted by an article by McKinsey and already reacted to by many, we ask if McKinsey is telling us to measure something that is at all useful, how to think about the problem McKinsey raises, and what you, as a technical leader, can do to address that problem better than what McKinsey suggests.

Opening quote from The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg.

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Mon-Chaio gives a rundown of leadership books he's read in the past few months and pulls out interesting nuggets from each selection.

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From stodgy corporate boardrooms to glacial civil-service offices, fast-moving technical organizations have long thumbed their noses at bureaucracies in their quest for speed and innovation. In this episode, Mon-Chaio and Andy unearth the forgotten power of bureaucracies and discover how they are still surprisingly relevant and impactful for software companies today.

Opening quote from "Structure and Learning in Self-Managed Teams: Why “Bureaucratic” Teams Can Be Better Learners".

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Is your feedback counterproductive? Mon-Chaio and Andy discuss a thought provoking article that says we've been giving feedback wrong. They tease out some truths, some tactics, and some insights into what it means to give useful feedback.

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Andy introduces you to a paper on socio technical systems and muses about how it connects to the early days of software development. This is our first try at a quick format for when one of us is away on vacation. Please, tell us what you think!

A Socio-Technical Critique of Scientific Management: http://moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol2/37TRASOC.pdf

In the final part of this three-part series on Culture, Mon-Chaio and Andy delve into the forces that promote as well as resist cultural change. They share one of their own failed cultural change initiatives and uncover what Egyptian pharaohs and Spanish fire walkers can teach us about creating long-lasting cultural change.

Opening quote from "Rituals are important to human life — even when they seem meaningless".

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