Latest in the “moving into tech leadership and/or management” subtheme here today at #LeadDevSanFrancisco is “Becoming a Manager Somewhere Else” from @mybluewristband “Not all the advice provided in this talk will definitely work for you, as it’s my own story”

@mybluewristband #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Making code review a more inclusive & productive collaboration

1) Why it’s important
2) How to promote inclusive code reviews
3) Best practices”

Shifalika Kanwar #LeadDevSanFrancisco Review Speed vs Feedback Value

Shifalika Kanwar #LeadDevSanFrancisco

Transitions into management

“With a flavour of failures, with a flavour of mistakes, with a flavour of exceptions”

@JCardenete #LeadDevSanFrancisco “We’re going to look at two different angles:

1) Person (right person for this transition to manager)

2) Environment (set them up to succeed)

Success = high performing team + “happy” manager + for a long time (2+ years)”

@JCardenete #LeadDevSanFrancisco

1) What is inclusive hiring?

“Inclusion is a foundation for setting and creating a level playing field for people to be given opportunities to succeed. Inclusion has to presume competence.”

@sushmars #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Inclusive hiring is not just hiring underrepresented minorities and checking a box.

Diverse, motivated employees push the company forward so much more than companies that lack that”

@sushmars #LeadDevSanFrancisco

I love the @TheLeadDev crowd so much. They just gave @carlaprvieira applause and whooping for explaining it’s her first time in the US and her first international conference talk here at #LeadDevSanFrancisco 🥰🥰🥰💖💖💖 “Bias is like a virus that travels and is replicated by machine learning models.”

@carlaprvieira #LeadDevSanFrancisco

So @v_hue_g starts by recommending her 4th of July watchathon:

National Treasure
Hamilton
National Treasure 2

🤔
@v_hue_g #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Learning from incidents allows you to get value out of them.

We can use an incident as a catalyst for helping you understand how you think your org works versus how it actually works”

@v_hue_g #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Effective Engineering Teams:

- Enable (define effectiveness, strategy, metrics, outcomes > outputs)
- Empower (scale team effectiveness w culture)
- Expand (optimise leadership)”

Efficient = doing things right
Effective = doing the right thing

@addyosmani #LeadDevSanFrancisco Project Oxygen determined Google’s great managers’ traits

@addyosmani #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Having an Impact Beyond Your Team (without hurting your day job)

- successful action requires a foundation of understanding & influence
- miscommunication is incredibly common
- find who to talk to
- demonstrate kindness & open-minded curiosity”

@mnewkirk #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Increasing safety in first communication:
- make a good first impression: thank them
- be kind & specific in your question
- expect complexity & ambiguity
- be patient
- let yourself change your mind”

@mnewkirk #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Trends in Cloud-Native Performance & Efficiency”

Starts by explaining cloud-native and what she means by performance & efficiency

@MelanieCebula #LeadDevSanFrancisco “We’re seeing the golden age of the custom cloud processor

Trends:
- rise of ARM
- cloud processors target efficiency (custom chips optimised for microservices, schedulers, containers; efficiency > performance)
- more CPU choices”

@MelanieCebula #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Navigating Parental Leave as a Senior Engineering Leader”

@IcchaSethi tells us at #LeadDevSanFrancisco she has taken parental leave as a Principal Engineer and then 3 years later as a Director of Engineering “Take stock of how you are feeling… many folks don’t have role models for taking long periods of leave.

Focus on your mental mindset.

Then make a plan!”

@IcchaSethi #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“No More Heroes: User experience design for incident response

In startups the superhero model is the default de facto model — everyone wears capes & spandex

As you scale this becomes a problem, as they are humans not heroes”

@plumertzi #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Criteria for good incident response:
- observability
- distributed ownership (neighbourhood watch model)
- teamwork
- planning for complexity
- psychological safety

Needs monitoring, training (training wheels build confidence) & documentation”

@plumertzi #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Practical additive hiring

Additive qualities eg
- educator background (knew how to learn & ramp up)
- product thinking (drove ambiguous project to clarity & completion)”

Daniel Johnson #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Improving tech screens:
1) Focus on details to quickly gauge technical skills
2) This is not a PR review
3) Find examples of success and try to uncover why
4) Their questions matter and are part of the interview
5) Train the interviewers”

Dan Johnson #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“Three essential aspects of leadership:
- team management (social cohesion matters)
- execution management (assigning work, providing feedback, keeping a team on schedule, communicating progress)
- people management (career & personal dev)”

Joshua Leners #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Senior ICs may manage to escape people management but you can’t escape team and execution management”

Joshua Leners #LeadDevSanFrancisco

Next up @spencernorman on Effective Delegation #LeadDevSanFrancisco, starting with a story about a personal failure of his to delegate in the past. “Delegation is not a silver bullet.

Sometimes it will feel like more work than doing it yourself. But if you do it deliberately, carefully and intentionally it can really help you and your team”

@spencernorman #LeadDevSanFrancisco

Now we have @cjcenizal speaking about how to scale up your engineering team WITHOUT hiring #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Meet people where they are — match people to work that plays to their strengths and opportunities to grow that match their interests.”

@cjcenizal #LeadDevSanFrancisco

Now we have @smrutirp teaching us about how to debug engineering velocity at #LeadDevSanFrancisco “Motivational Theory:

Competence + Relatedness + Autonomy”

@smrutirp #LeadDevSanFrancisco

“We create a curated developer experience that allows for the streaming member experience on Netflix. We support 100+ engineers who build netflix.com with 4.5 engineers (EM = half)”

@JemYoung #LeadDevSanFrancisco “What is a platform?

A system or set of tools on which applications and services are developed.

A good platform is a base, a consistent foundation, it obscures underlying complexity. It’s an abstraction.”

@JemYoung #LeadDevSanFrancisco

Next up @allie_p at #LeadDevSanFrancisco talking about workplace fun … acknowledging the bad rep that icebreakers have, and that we have an epidemic of loneliness in the modern world

“The average person spends 81,936 hours at work. We’re most likely to make friends at work” 1) Get to know each other questions (set the tone & example as a leader)

2) Weekly watercooler chats (weekly synchronous informal, scheduled)

3) Person of the week (“navigator of the week”)

4) Geekbot with style (eg personal highlights)

@allie_p #LeadDevSanFrancisco

First up, @lrnrd teaching us about strategic leadership:
1) have a strategy,
2) execute it,
3) profit!

#LeadDevSanFrancisco “Strategic leadership is not spending all your time in meetings, emails, Slack.

Strategic leadership is leading daily from an idea of the future.

Having a big picture of what you are trying to get to and taking daily actions to get you there.”

@lrnrd #LeadDevSanFrancisco

@editingemily It’s so a certain kind of leader can get rid of folks unlike them by creating a hostile environment.

The sad thing is there are some folks who won’t realise that’s what they’re doing, even some really well-intended ones, until the damage is irreversible. @editingemily I do appreciate that distributed working is challenging & difficult for some. There are indeed some things that one gets “for free” in an in-person environment. Distributed-by-default also has advantages, things you get for free. Both require investment to get full productivity

@type__error Honestly? So many things. Asking questions where anyone else would be able to make a statement and it not be seen as “aggressive”. Explaining why work is being assigned to folks, even though if a dude did the assigning no explanation or justification would be necessary. @type__error Choosing battles very very carefully, having to let important things keep smouldering/burning because trying to address them all would make me “difficult”. Accepting I’ll be perceived as talking too much even when I time it and am taking up less than proportional time.