Engineering management (for the rest of us) (Interview)

This week Sarah Drasner joins us to talk about her book Engineering Management for the Rest of Us and her experience leading engineering at Zillow, Microsoft, Netlify, and now Google.

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Sponsors:

• DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
• Sentry – See the untested code causing errors - or whether it’s partially or fully covered - directly in your stack trace, so you can avoid similar errors from happening in the future. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Rocky Linux – Enterprise Linux, the open source community way.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

• Sarah Drasner – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• sarahdrasnerdesign.com
• Sarah Drasner on CSS Tricks
• Book: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
• The Peter principle
• Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
• Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:09) - Sponsor: DevCycle
(03:59) - Start the show!
(07:22) - The OG post on CSS Tricks
(11:55) - Sarah's straight ine to here
(14:09) - The nerd part, lol
(20:13) - Challenging parts of writing this book
(24:28) - Trust is built in drops
(26:07) - Sponsor: Sentry
(30:16) - Values exercise
(32:07) - How do you give trust?
(34:22) - We have ways less data now
(40:52) - How do you IRL?
(42:54) - What about bottom up change?
(49:44) - Differeent tools for different scenarios
(54:43) - Sponsor: Rocky Linux
(57:16) - Doing 1:1s
(59:57) - Can't not and rules to follow
(1:01:21) - Solving techincal problems
(1:02:45) - Hands on in the weeds?
(1:04:16) - Things to avoid. Don't do this.
(1:07:22) - Dealing with self
(1:10:59) - When to say "no"
(1:16:29) - Sarah makes us blush!
(1:19:43) - Up next!