My director just started recruiting an engineering manager for my team. Luckily, my teammates and I will be on the panel for the interview. I call it lucky because it is rare to get a chance to pick their manager, who will determine a large portion of their experience at the company and future career trajectory.
But since it’s rare, I don’t have any prior experiences to rely on. I “picked” my managers by choosing to accept an offer based on the limited information from the interviews. After some mulling, I came up with three focus areas: performance management, IC growth, and autonomy (context, not control in Netflix jargon). I will see if these are in line with the rest of the team this week.
Software Engineering 🌐
web-vitals: Essential metrics for a healthy site – Google Chrome Developers
Google announced a small lib to track website performance, along with a useful Chrome extension. Since some tracked metrics are not standard (Largest Contentful Paint, for example), some wonder if this is Internet Explorer all over again. They may be right, but all my users are on Chrome 🤷🏻♂️
Facebook iOS SDK causing Crashlyics outage – Crashlytics
Over the last week, a bad Facebook iOS SDK crashed all popular apps (Tiktok, Spotify, Tinder, and A LOT more) integrated with Facebook. From the sideline, I find it amusing that a P0 incident by Facebook caused outages across the entire iOS ecosystem. No doubt, this incident sucked for Apple too. I wonder if we will see some changes from Apple.
DevTool Layers Panel – Supercharged – Google Chrome Developers
Have you wondered how to see how your divs are stacked? Layers panel is the answer!
People ❤
Micromanager, Absentee Manager or Thought Partner — Which One Are You? – Kim Scott
A micromanager is a well-known failure mode of a manager. But the lesser-known end of the spectrum, an absentee manager is just as harmful. Read about how to tell if you are one or the other and how to find the balance.
How to Prep for Speaking at a Virtual Conference – Ivan Burazin
Tech workers are likely to stay home at least for the next six months, and more conferences are now virtual. Ivan Burazin gives several logistics tips on how to set up your environment.
Business 💸
Startup Offense and Defense in the Recession – Elad Gil
I didn’t think about how long the recession will last after the economy starts to reopen. The timeframe Elad Gil suggests, 2-3 years, looks like a reasonable estimate assuming we find an effective treatment or a vaccine in a year or so. A better way to plan is to assume 1-2 year recovery after the medical breakthrough. We are running a marathon.
Bye, Amazon – Tim Bray
Amid this crisis, Amazon is winning a larger share in the market and more power over its workforce. Tim Bray quit his job as a VP of AWS over “Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.” There are contradicting accounts about how this went down, but I believe we will hear more stories like this on Amazon considering its size.
The ELIZA Effect – 99% Invisible
A short story on how people have interacted with bots with natural language interfaces starting from ELIZA in 1966 and how we interact with Siri or Google Duplex now. People’s expectations change over time. I now expect all chatting interfaces to be powered by bots. Similarly, the next generations will expect all voice interfaces to be powered by bots.
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