📋 Underperformance Checklist

I believe 80% of performance is systemic, rather than individual. So, with underperformers, it is useful to ask yourself questions about the *context* they are working in.

Here is a 15-items checklist I built for this over time 👇 🌟 Culture

1. Are they aware of the company values?
2. Are they aware of the company vision and purpose?

How to Prioritize Bugs 🐛

Bug fixing is not exactly everyone's favorite engineering activity.

It's a tricky process that requires coordination between several stakeholders — PMs, Customer Support, QA, and Engineers.

Let's figure out how to make it work 👇 Every team has a slightly different process, but it always involves some version of these steps:

1) ✍️ Report — bugs are entered in some kind of backlog.
2) 🚥 Prioritize — bugs are triaged and a priority is assigned.
3) 🔨 Fix — bugs are addressed and fixed by Engineers.

Should you put side-projects in your CV? 🕹️

The goal of your CV is to get you to the first interview call. Then it’s on you — but a good CV can easily bring you 3x the interviews than a bad one.

So, there is debate about what activities to put in there besides your work ones 👇 To me, the rule of thumb is that you should include anything that proves either *good impact* or *good skills*.

Both is better, of course, but it’s ok to display projects that mostly demonstrate one of them.

Some of the best-performing engineering teams DON'T use a Staging environment to test things before release.

They just push to production.

1) Why?
2) How do they pull this off?
3) Should you use Staging yourself?

I talked with tens of teams and are the lessons I learned 👇 Staging envs have two main issues:

1) They are often not reliable — cos it's hard to keep them at parity with prod.

2) They make releases many times slower — because of the additional release level and batching changes together.

Let’s see why these are serious problems 👇

I used to schedule things to do based on my available *time*.

Over time, though, I found that time just *loosely* correlates to how much work I can do.

For two reasons: 1) ⚡ Time ≠ energy — there is a limited amount of energy I can spend over 1 day.

2) ⚖️ Not all tasks are created equal — some are more cognitively intense, others are lighter.

So, two hours of design work can easily knock me out for the day. Two hours of email feels lighter.

✨ Product Engineers ✨

The rise of Product Engineers fits a broader trend of making product/tech roles *wider* and giving people more ownership and autonomy.

To me, the Engineers vs Product Engineers feud resembles the one between Product Owners and Product Managers 👇 🔴 Product Owners have mostly tactical responsibilities.

They groom the backlog, write user stories, prioritize what to do next, and attend all the Agile meetings.

Their focus is short to mid-term.

🏅 Introducing the Refactoring Talent Club 🏅

After testing it within the community for a few weeks, today I am launching a new @refactoringclub product to help people in tech find high-quality gigs, with zero effort!

How does it work? It is a two-sided product 👇 1) 🙋‍♂️ For members

Members apply to join a vetted pool of people who are open to receiving job offers.

They enter info about themselves and the type of opportunities they would be interested in (role, location, expected salary, etc.).

🔍 Stacked diffs 🔍

Many big companies like Facebook and Google have a code review workflow that is not based on PRs, but rather on *stacked diffs*.

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1407803004183531527

Stacked diffs are a way to have your code reviewed *without* firing up a PR.

You take a portion of your local changes and make it available for review. You can stack these changes into multiple requests for review, so you never get stuck waiting.

https://twitter.com/alexandracoding/status/1278001790907285508

Some call them buddies.

Wework calls them "Onboarding Champions", while Robinhood calls them "Onboarding Mentors".

The point is simple: have someone accountable for the onboarding process of a new hire.

🧵👇 This is opposed to the common strategy of having the training done by multiple people, each about their own domain.

A dedicated person to run everything, instead, has several advantages 👇

How I Grow My Newsletter 🌀

Refatoring.club went from 0 to 12K subscribers in less than one year, without any previous audience to leverage (I had 100 twitter followers).

Here is what I did (and still do) to make it grow.

🧵👇 I have been doing the same things for the past 9 months.

Also, I write about Engineering but I believe you can grow any business newsletter this way.

My process is based on four parts:

📑 Notes
🐦 Twitter
💼 Linkedin
🤗 Communities

Let's see the one by one 👇

🍀 The Four Types of Work

As a CTO, for years I struggled with planning the work at my startup.

I was young, and I eventually figured there are different types of work, and these should follow different processes.

So I ended up writing a small framework about it.

A thread 👇 I believe it is useful to evaluate work based on two axes:

💼 Business vs Maintenance
⏱️ Planned vs Unplanned

This leads in turn to four quadrants:

🗺️ Company Roadmap
💡 Opportunities
🔨 Small Changes & Bugs
🔥 Incidents