I heard through the grapevine that Netflix plans to introduce engineering levels like those found at levels.fyi. Netflix has not had levels for its engineers for more than a decade. The lack of leveling system has helped the best ideas, not HiPPO, to win but made it frustrating for managers and engineers to discuss performance, growth, and compensation. Managers sometimes end up opting for another company’s engineering levels, which is less than ideal.
As the industry move to the more explicit leveling system and engineers’ expectations change, Netflix has to change. I only hope my former stunning colleagues won’t get too distracted and disappointed when their new levels don’t meet their expectations.
Software Engineering ⚙️
Update on the Atlassian outage affecting some customers
Incidents happen all the time, and some are more difficult than others. But as Viktor Frankl said, we can “choose how [we] will respond to the situation.” Atlassian, unfortunately, failed this test. Their lack of clear communication to their customers during a week-long outage (now two-week-long) damaged their credibility enormously.
Announcing Rome Formatter
Prettier has been one of my must-have tools when I develop JS apps. It speeds up my development and my team’s by removing the shallow discussions around cosmetics. Rome, the full-stack Rust-based JS toolchain project, came up with a Rust-based JS formatter, which they claim to be 9-12x faster.
Experimental Client-Controlled Nullability in Apollo iOS
Client Controlled Nullability, the GraphQL proposal I collaborated on when I was at Netflix, was finally shipped as an experimental feature in a client library. Kudos to Alex Reilly, who drove the proposal to this state despite the frustratingly slow decision-making at the GraphQL working group.
Decoding small QR codes by hand
QR codes became universal in the US after the pandemic started. So I got curious about how to decode QR codes and found this excellent guide.
People ❤️
Managing Yourself: Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want
I tend to treat my role as static and given. So I found another job when I wasn’t happy with my current one. This article made me realize that I have more agency than I thought before. It never hurts to try.
Motivating Developers to Care About Documentation
This article is a valuable guide to driving cultural changes. How can we make people care about new things? We can start by asking why they matter, making the new desired behaviors easy, and coaching and reinforcing them continuously.
Business 💰
Twitter board adopts ‘poison pill’ after Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy company
Last week, the biggest tech news was Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter. The Twitter board is refusing to sell for now.
youngk.im 