Hey!

Welcome to another week. I hope you had a great weekend. I spent my weekend planning some vacation time with my wife and family.

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Hello!

Welcome to another week. I hope you had a great time resting. Last Saturday we went with my wife to watch Ed Sheeran live! It was a fantastic show and one of the previous dates of his US tour.

As usual, these are my incomplete thoughts. Later, I'll come around to further delve deeper into this topic. I find it very interesting, and I constantly see it at play.

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Hello!

Hope you had a great weekend! I could rest a bit more than usual, which is always a good thing.

The question for this week was put on my mind amidst several conversations I've been having over the last few weeks.

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Hello!

Hope you had a great weekend! In the US, we have a long weekend due to Labor Day. For all you know, I might be having brunch somewhere instead of sitting in front of my computer.

This is a short issue, as I'm still processing my thoughts, but better to release now than wait for perfect.

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Hello there!

I hope you had a great weekend. I had a pretty chill one. We had some visits, and we played board games for a few hours.

This week's topic has been on my mind for several weeks now, and I've been trying to listen to people to understand better other points of view and think about them against my point of view.

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Hello,

Hope you had a great weekend! I'm writing this on a plane and didn't have the time to write this week's issue entirely.

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Hello!

I hope you had a wonderful past week. Last Thursday, we celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary by going to dinner, and we had a wonderful time! We've also watched the Barbenheimer movies.

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Hey everyone! I hope you had a great weekend. I've had this topic in draft and keep trying to write about it but never fully finished my thoughts. I thought, well, better now than never.

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I've always been a "no" person, sometimes making me the bad cop of teams or projects.

Hello!

Welcome to another week! I'm writing this before leaving for a concert in a few hours. I plan to write what I want and ask myself why I plan my posts in less time.

Time management was one of the main points of my week, thinking about how to help teams better and the work I need to tackle by myself.

Reflecting on my schedule, a few weeks ago, I needed to tackle more variety across my organization. Feeling a lack of a "theme" per week or some North Star.

Welcome to another week!

I hope you had a good weekend and got some rest. Writing practice is always good, and in general, it has helped me understand what I'm thinking and better sell my ideas to other teammates.

I've been reading the book Smart Business(affiliate link*) for the past few weeks. It talks about what makes Alibaba a "smart business" and several examples of how this concept allowed them to scale to the behemoth they're now. In general, it's a good reading, but I become interested if there's something that I could apply rapidly at work.

That idea got me thinking about the idea of "proof of concept" and experimentation in general.

Ownership

Hello!

Welcome to another week of this newsletter. For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking of challenging myself by doing a daily newsletter. Doing daily newsletters seems like a lot, but also I've been reading "Show your work" by Austin Kleon, which I felt made a very compelling case for doing something daily that records the process of your work.

The book lowered the bar from the perspective of the daily issues are more around the process or behind the scenes of what it takes to write a weekly one. And my learnings and failures during the week led me to write about a topic. Like this week's topic!

Hello!

Welcome to a new week and the second week of July. It's odd because we are past the year's first half, but it never sinks in on the first week. Time is a weird construct.

Over the past few weeks, I've had conversations with managers and engineers regarding getting their direct reports more "exposed" to the larger organization or how to share their work more widely. Often, we feel alone when pursuing ideas we consider interesting. Other times, we would like to bounce ideas with other folks, but it might be that your team shares different interests.

Oddly enough, I've been reading books about content creation and came across this book called "Show your work" by Austin Kleon, which I feel provides some exciting ideas that can be applied in this context.

Hello there!

Welcome to another week of this newsletter. This week, we got July 4th Holiday in the US, and I took time off today to be with my family. I hope you're able to rest and recover during the weekend.

As a staff engineer, building relationships is one of the central skills you need to carry the job and succeed.

In many cases (or all), you're going to need to enlist the help of others to achieve the expected outcomes. Other scenarios where these relationships come into play are when people think about who can solve a problem for them or who can answer their questions.

Hello!

I hope you had a great week! This past week was a short week for me in the US. We had Juneteenth Holiday. Anyhow, let's get with today's issue!

Lately, I've been focusing more on setting people up for success.

In the past, I’ve talked with managers and directors about networking for their reports because they generally want to help their teammates improve their chances to have “public” work to present in promotion panels.

While that is a good sentiment for managers to help their direct reports, people need help finding where to start building their network.

Growing your network has been one activity with the highest leverage for me, allowing me to access more considerable opportunities and have a pulse on how the organization works outside our team.

Finding common topics

During the week, I talked with people who wanted to start as mentors but needed help finding mentees.

I’ve also found that it takes work for people to find mentors. So “discoverability” on both ends is problematic. I started asking what other teams or organizations were doing with this mentorship. The options ranged from ad-hoc to more formal programs.

That round of asking people and learning from them got me thinking that this probably needs to be solved by a dedicated “Learn & Development” organization for the whole company.

This issue got me through different tangents. In some cases, when talking about this, I realized that some people expected help from their managers, either to help them find a mentor or be a mentor.

What Is Liminal Space? Liminal space refers to the place a person is in during a transitional period.

This past week was an odd one for me from multiple angles. I’ve started to improve my calendar management, so I set larger timeframes to focus on a single topic.

From time to time, it felt odd that I had what felt like free time; I felt guilty. I caught myself jumping to Slack or doing some random task different from the purpose of my allocated time.

Whenever I caught myself doing this, I forced myself to return to what I had designated the time for.

This week is short, as it is Memorial Day today in the US. Since I’ve only lived a short time in the US, I still get pleasant surprises from the US holidays, a welcome day to rest and recover.

Last week, I took the week to nudge people around specific topics that needed follow-up.

Those activities during the week made me think about how much we have to repeat ourselves as Staff Engineers. In most cases, people do their day-to-day activities and are hyper-focused on short-term ones. From my perspective, nudging people is more about bringing a long-term topic back to their attention that we had discussed in the past via a meeting.

Repeating ourselves is part of the leadership journey and how we can charge organizations.

Last week was a jumble of thoughts where you feel you’re not being productive enough and stop and wonder why you feel that way.

As I left the “hard skills,” like programming new features or doing tests, etc., it became easy to feel like you’re not being productive, especially as I could not measure my progress like before. One thing I return to whenever these sorts of feelings come up is the Peter Principle. Which states “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” As staff engineers, we tend to move inside-out the organization, first working with a direct team, then multiple teams, and then with an organization. As we have less direct contact with the day-to-day activities of teams, the need for soft skills becomes more prominent.

Don’t fall back

One of the first things I needed to learn with these moments when I felt unproductive was to avoid falling back into doing things that I did in my previous role.

Second-order thinking, which relies on thinking of long-term consequences of decisions, becomes a critical skill to learn as we grow our scope or ownership of a problem space.

This past week, I had to review past decisions from people no longer at the company, which after further research, only partially dwelled in the long-term consequences. What this meant in the present was that I needed to uncover the past context and unwind the decision because otherwise, it would happen again. After documenting the various options, I need to talk with leadership and explain why we need to change strategy; even if we have short-term pains, we won't have to think about the risk similarly.

As I've grown in the staff engineer path, explaining long-term improvement plans has become an important aspect to call out when talking with leadership about possible solutions to be implemented.

What is second-order thinking?

If you've ever read, watched, or googled something from Brené Brown, you may have come across this quote she references often.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt

I remember coming across the "man in the arena" quote when reading a book by Brené Brown. But I come back at it from time to time because "the arena" is a messy place, and while I'm often "in there" by my current role and scope, it's always filled with uncertainty, fear, and failure.

I'm in the arena whenever there's a first time for something. I also return to the quote whenever I feel like I failed in some way, to someone or myself.

Hello!

The past week I had a set of multiple competing priorities that had to get dealt with. I came to several points during the week where I needed to pick my battles.

At several points in my career, where my scope has grown or when more project ownership was required, I've had to take a step back and re-think my battles.

As scope grows, picking your battles becomes more critical. The sentiment of "not all battles are worth fighting even if you're sure to win it" is a good thing to remember as you navigate the priorities you're responsible for. I fail, but I keep trying to restrict the number of battles I pick.

Hello!

Have you ever sat down and thought about your team culture? Your manager's manager culture? The larger organization culture?

What gets rewarded? What gets punished? What is non-negotiable? Who is promoted? What is discussed openly? Etc.

Starting out

I’ve spent the past few weeks struggling with things I can’t control. What makes it harder for me to deal with them is that it has that tiny glimpse of hope that they could be under my control.

This small glimpse had me going in circles during the week, and then I realized that it would never be under my control and had this huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

It happened when I paused, wrote all my feelings around what was happening, realized how much was in my control, and started focusing on that.

Control and Influence

For the past few weeks, and as we wrapped up the first quarter of the year, I was doing a retrospective if I was being effective enough in my role.

The scope of my work has been growing over time and has given me multiple managers over the last couple of years. With each new manager, I always wonder not only if I’m being efficient but also if I’m working on the right things from their perspective.

One thing that comes into play here is not only that scope grows but also the level of ownership, and in this level, ownership is where I’ve been wondering how my effectiveness has been.

Effective vs. Efficient

This past week has been one of those weeks where work takes you across a journey of multiple roles to play with the different teams I work with, both in the immediate and extended organizations I belong to.

In the extended organization, I’m working towards helping with initiatives that tackle all or most of the teams. In some cases, this might involve reviewing APIs or gathering and writing down the architecture principles or strategies currently at play.

Helping the teams that belong to my immediate organization looks different across projects or timeframes. Right now, my time seems to have been focused on making sense of the “messy middle”. This is an interesting problem in itself. People tend to agree on long-term visions and kind of what we’re working on in the present.

what is the messy middle?

Hey everyone!

Long time no see, the past few weeks, I've been very focused on several topics that took a lot of my time, and I couldn't find inner peace to sit down and write a piece that I felt happy with.

I've focused on managing processes and programs for the past few weeks. Both were trying to scale engineering practices across organizations of different sizes.

In general, we're looking into having the teams retain their autonomy but adding a thin layer of governance on top such that we keep the teams from slowing down or getting into fighting the nitty-gritty details of each project or decision they're trying to take.

One piece of advice my mentor gave me when I wanted a promotion is to tell a story that you’re consistently executing at the next level. Generally, in tech, you must demonstrate that you’re performing at the next level to get promoted.

But I sometimes thought that accruing “wins” was enough or that the management chain would magically recognize the projects I delivered successfully.

The reality is that sharing an itemized list of projects delivered, or tickets closed, is not enough when these packets go into the review groups for promotions.

Most of the time we would like for the promotion “ladders” to be checklists where we go item by item and make sure we “did that”.

Hello!

Long time no see. I hadn’t been writing for a few weeks, something like not feeling right. Probably from all the layoffs within the company I work for.

At this point, all tech companies have gone through their round of layoffs, some multiple times in the past 18 months.

I hope you’re doing well! And now to the topic at hand.

This past week was hectic for me, with lots of running around wrapping up roadmaps and goals for the year and helping managers understand the scope and dependencies with external teams. Or even figuring out if there are other ways to solve a goal or if some other group has already built a solution we could improve upon.

When we talk about reaching the next level of the engineering ladder, it generally comes from doing high "leverage" activities. I understood the idea, but from time to time, I failed to choose only high-leverage tasks. That isn't good in itself. I learn from my mistakes and try again.

Recently, with losing teammates due to different circumstances, I have had to think about short-term goals with fewer people. But also about long-term sustainability and the impending fear of losing 75% of staff overnight. 
 Even in the face of fewer people helping with all the work we have to do, I'm always amazed by the resiliency of the people in my organization and how much it plays a part in building great products.

High-leverage activities look different as you climb the ladder, and more work requires influencing others. The activities look more like 1:1s, advice, feedback, or can you run a program from start to finish, manage uncertainty or risk in your programs, or even identify new areas of opportunity for the product or the business?

During the weekend, my mom returned home after spending three weeks with us. Yesterday I wasn’t feeling in a writing “mood,” but I wanted to keep to my promise of weekly writing practice, so here we’re!

I hope this writing doesn’t sound too uninspired, but I still think that’s life, especially if you’re trying to record thoughts week over week. I don’t know. Let me know how you feel about pushing through this sort of “rut” we find ourselves in from time to time.

As we start this new year, the team has been working on the year goals, alignment of OKRs, and all that jazz. Interestingly, it always makes me go into these introspection moments, but also, I’m not too fond of the whole rush to deliver the goals, feels like a juxtaposition.

During these reflective moments, I was thinking about how to avoid these “headless chicken” situations. Stumbling to work through all the documentation required to present, be reviewed, and approved.

Meetings

With a recent post about Shopify canceling all meetings of more than two people, the discourse came around the topic of meetings, and how they’re seeing as the problem or time sucker for doing our work.

The Pandemic shift

With the pandemic, we had to all go home and figure out how to cope with all this communication we used to have in person, in hallways, walking to someone’s desk, etc.

I’ve been thinking about how to write this year in review as the year has ended. Things like do X lessons learned this year, but I couldn’t settle on a number that made sense for me, 12,36, 52, 1 thousand. What are the lessons learned? Right, start from there. Did I learn anything? I want to think I did.

I’ve learned or experienced during ‘22, and they were meaningful to me. Without any order, just the stream of thoughts.

1. The value of a mentor
2. Learning to learn
3. Proactively try to grow others
4. executive presence
5. learning to execute at the next level
6. choosing the right tasks and projects to grow
7. Ask more, listen more
8. Radiate intent; see it through
9. work with others to delegate more effectively
10. learn to work with other people to help with their personal growth
10. make a writing habit
    1. stick to it
11. Share more openly, learn in public
12. manage relationships up/down/left/right

Failing constantly

Growing Others

introduction, past week’s recollection

This past week I was part of an incident analysis for most of the week, as well as identifying remediation actions to take. During the conversation, I realized that the same group of people participated in these incident conversations.

This has the unintended side-effect that tribal knowledge doesn’t spread across the org. While it gets documented, not everyone goes back to read what happened, but that’s a topic for a different time.

This week I chatted with my manager, who told me she generally sees me working on things where “filling the gap” is needed. So I found it apt to finish this issue and send it.

I’ve been thinking more intentionally about what I bring to the proverbial (or remote?) room or table when I’m working or taking on some new work.

I’ve started to take a step back and look at what my peer coworkers take as their tasks and which gaps need filling.

This assessment of a program is my initial way of helping or acting as a multiplier to work rather than adding more of the same tasks that are already getting done. Primarily if I can coach or work with other people so they can take over the role eventually.

I’m visiting San Diego for GraphQL Summit. So I’m writing this from a hotel room. I think I panicked on the first day of the conference; perhaps I’ve been away from people for far too long. Being a shy extrovert is always an exciting experience, not one dull day.

But I’ve been thinking about this topic as I tackle more and more problems. Or become assigned as “lead” of something. I’m still learning the ropes of what it means to choose impact as a priority or having leverage.

As I’m included in more “rooms,” as we like, I’ve felt pressure, on my admission, to keep doing what I was doing and more. That meant stretching myself very thin, and I’ve regretted it for the most part. There’s only so much work to be allocated in the working hours, and moving into rooms with more senior leadership, the expectation of what I bring in and out of the room is less about “closing tickets” or pushing code.

What got you here won’t get you there

I’ve had this topic a few times in the past week, around how I handled it and if I had any tips. I think there are several ways I’ve tried to handle this over time, and I’ve been partially successful or failed, but I’ve learned a few things about myself.

I’ve noticed that I need to switch but mostly on noncoding work, and also because of urgency on my mind. So what I need to do is to funnel my energy throughout my day proactively. Either by leaving my tasks for the next day ready at the end of the day or setting time for focus during the week.

With my public calendar, it’s hard sometimes to schedule time for myself, so I try to delegate tasks whenever possible, but since I’m not a manager. I need to work with managers to find an appropriate person and to help them tackle the job.

I would not want to dump work on people. I like to set them up for success. Whenever I’m involved in multiple programs, I prioritize for myself or use the Eisenhower Matrix to better work with the programs. Otherwise, for each of them, they’re priority number one.

Change is always hard, but more recently, lack of clarity has been giving me headaches! It creates such a deep “fog of war” that nobody is able to give a step in a tangible direction or take a holistic approach towards a solution.

I’ve been thinking about problem discovery, and how much is “enough” to go forward. Do we need to define all? Might be too much. Do we need no definition at all? Might be too little, and repeat the errors of the past.

For the past few weeks I’ve been researching for a specific program, but rather than start and try to come up with a solution, I took the first step toward understanding what is the current state, and what has been attempted in the past. Why past attempts didn’t work? What even triggered past attempts?

During my journeys, I’ve noticed that while several groups discussed “the problem”, everyone tried to solve it through the tools available to them at the time, but also not having clarity around the overall issue that was affecting everyone. They solved their localized version of the problem.

It’s Labor Day here in the US. My wife made a quick trip, and I’m alone this long weekend. So I’m writing this new issue next to my dog while he sleeps on the bed.

This past week I came across the idea of radiating intent from this post Don’t ask for forgiveness, radiate intent by Elizabeth Ayer. I liked the idea because I’ve fallen into the scenario she describes “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”.

As I thought back on these past cases in my life, I felt that there was inaction on the organization to do something, so I stealthily did it, whatever it was, building a new service, setting up infrastructure configuration, or creating a shared library, etc. These are the things a single person can pull off without openly communicating it.

But in the last week, I wanted to drive larger-scale projects, and for those, I couldn’t do them without radiating the intent. Otherwise, it would be hard to reach specific teams of broader scope. Since I had never done that before, it was a scary thing to do for me. But it was an exciting moment to reflect on why I was scared. Why do I find it hard to send that email? Send that slack message?

Per the usual night’s restlessness, I’m lost for words. I’m looking, not for inspiration, but for motivation. motivation to start and carry on my goal of writing weekly.

not because of some influencer or even lofty goal, but rather because I wanted this newsletter to be a sort of cathartic exercise for myself, as well as letting me practice writing down my thoughts and thinking about all the failures of my week.

I hope you’re drinking enough water, this weekend I got myself one of those 1/2 gallon water bottles, hopefully, I can achieve my random goal of drinking enough water.

this past week, I kept getting myself again and again into this topic of strategy and wondering how to “sell it” correctly

As I was trying to write this newsletter and going through what I had done during the week.

Writing is always tricky in front of the proverbial "blank canvas." And this week had been a bit over the everyday stress. So I was still finding the ground while writing this.

This week I've been rethinking what I work on first because I let myself be swayed by the urgent things instead of correctly prioritizing or delegating.

While working through some programs that have problems and require both escalations and doing a bit of convincing and storytelling, I thought this week's issue might be a good outlet for my thoughts around managing up.

For the past few months, I’ve been part of a few programs where another organization within the company wanted and needed to change our system to create a new expected output.

Generally aimed at growth or reducing churn meant tight timelines and expectations were high. The first time through this exercise, the different engineering folks discovered multiple things.

Not every team was ready to start receiving a new stream of work from a different team, from things like documentation, PR standards, unit tests to training the folks in the tech stack, and sharing context for design choices, as well as taking time to do code reviews or pairing sessions.

Lastly, the code this team wrote was still supported and maintained by the receiving teams, meaning that this group of people was never on-call for the code they added.

During the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I work away from my manager for long period of times, where I’m still required to provide a proxy to her org, or guidelines as she would provide them.

Under these scenarios, I’ve come to start communicating with her asynchronously, but also I’m looking for alignment with her. I could/should not provide with incorrect guidelines, or opinions that would eventually contradict her in some manner.

Alignment becomes more important, the more autonomy that is given to you. Because having autonomy doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want, at the end of the day, you and your manager are accountable for where you’re spending your time, and effort.

I try to constantly share what I’m working on during the week, and what I have in my “back-burner” after immediate tasks are done. I also try to specific questions, like things she or her peers in the org are caring about, that might impact any of the initiatives I’m looking into.

Mind the spec

The first month of the year has gone by. I still feel like the year hasn’t started. For some reason, everything has been very slow-moving lately at work. Or so it feels, perhaps I’m no longer in the right rooms?

For the past few months, between the end of last year and this year, I’ve been deep into the weeds of gathering all the existing API specifications available in my organization. Having a heterogeneous set of APIs altogether puts a lot of the organization’s “personality” into perspective.

Collecting these API specifications has been a journey and showed me the lack of guidance and standardization over the years. By reading the auto-generated specifications, you start noticing the personalities of the different teams that built the APIs.

This week I had my “mid-year” conversation with my new manager. As we were having this conversation, we talked about being aligned on vision, as I’m now a direct report of her, discussed managing up to avoid creating “drag” and instead help within the org's success.

Every time I have this conversation, I understand the next level and keep growing in the “Individual Contributor” ladder. Seniority keeps getting redefined as I know more of what I need to do and what the organization expects and needs from me.

These past few weeks have been very tiring, and I had to work a few more hours than expected. But I also took the time to research tools like Foam or Obsidian. These tools allow to build and manage knowledge via markdown files and links.

This year, like every year for the last six years, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts and generate something out of them—either this newsletter, or my blog, or even documents that can be shared at work.

But this time, I think I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. Given the rise of note-taking apps supporting backlinks (or wiki-links), like Roam, or even iA Writer, Bear notes, or Obsidian. I decided to try out if this manner of using notes was better suited for my style. My style is having many markdown files scattered around, but this time I can link between them more effectively. Allowing me to “view” and understand the relationships and how I’m coming back to specific topics, especially if you connect from your “daily note” and weekly notes, etc.

Now to “actually” produce something, I’ve been investing in lowering the bar from a random markdown file in a repository to a shareable URL. For now, that looks like this:

I recently saw this tweet getting on my feed

It’s a really interesting sharing, because I’ve been on the other end of that tweet. Chasing people down, declaring being blocked by code reviews, and even seeing managers take it up a notch by adding “code review” as a state in the Jira tickets so they could track how long are tickets “stuck” in that state. Declaring, “Monday’s” are for code reviews and such other things.