In my random donut chat with another engineering manager, I shared my team’s challenges that surprised me when I joined. When I was done, they said I shouldn’t have been surprised. I asked why and they told me there are only three scenarios where manager positions open up:

the team is growing too fast for the internal promotions to fill the needs
the predecessor left because the team is in a tough spot
the predecessor left because the work is boring

And as the first case is rare, I should have expected the second or the third case when I joined as a manager. While surprising, this suggestion made a lot of sense to me. I will keep this in mind when I find my next role.

Software Engineering ⚙️

Why do we use Story Points for Estimating?

I am learning how to run sprints properly (I realize I never learned how each ceremony should be done). Key lessons in this article are that 1. humans are bad at estimating absolute terms so sprint uses relative story points. 2. we find representative stories for each story points to standardize estimates across sprints. Story points are the building blocks of well-planned sprints.

Okta hack puts thousands of businesses on high alert

As we build software, we need to consider potential vulnerabilities even in third-party software.

People ❤️

The Impact of Fair Pay Perception on Employee Retention

Since we employees don’t have enough data to understand our personal markets, we fill the information void with subjective narratives. Employers can provide more compensation information to reduce unnecessary stress on employees.

#TalkPay

I laud the bravery to share their personal information in a personally identifiable way. While I agree that pay transparency is important, I don’t want the Internet to know what I am getting paid.

Disney had a tight-lipped employee culture. Then Florida happened

Company leaders, as the influence of the private sector, grows and the society becomes more complex, need to be able to understand the societal issues and eloquate their position. That has not been the norm, but the norm is changing.

How to develop product sense

The ability to find great product thinkers to work with is important not only because the team will achieve greater results faster but also because you will learn from them every day.

Business 💰

TV, merchant media and the unbundling of advertising

New privacy-related regulations and platform rules are changing the advertising landscape by making 1st-party publishers such as Instacart more viable, and the advertisers now need to work with many more than Facebook and Google. How will the advertisers coordinate their campaigns across all these disjointed ad platforms?