If a corporate event asks you to give a speech, here's a thread of how to figure out how much you're worth for this sort of thing.1. Figure out what your hourly rate is. $25 per hour? $100?2. Double it. You're undervaluing yourself.3. Make a guess about how long it will take you to write and practice the speech.4. Double it. Because you're wrong.5. Double it again, because you forgot to account for the time it took to acquire your expertise.6. Multiply those two numbers together.7. Double it again.

How much to charge for an event speech

8. That's what you ask for even if it feels weird and like no one would pay that much. You can give them a caveat of "but let me know what your budget is" if you really want to do it.9. If they just pay it, then the next time a corporate event asks you to do a speech...double it again. You were still undervaluing yourself.**Women, non-binary folks, LGBTQ+, &amp; BIPOC I guarantee some straight white dude's getting double whatever number you come up with.

Giving a quote for the speech

If a corporate event asks you to give a speech, here's a thread of how to figure out how much you're worth for this sort of thing. 1. Figure out what your hourly rate is. $25 per hour? $100? 2. Double it. You're undervaluing yourself.

Money

A thread written by @MaryRobinette

"I generally say developers want to do three things... They want to solve hard problems at scale. They want to see that hard problem when they solve it... get put to use! The third thing that I think, honestly, is they just don't want to work with jerks.﻿I think if you master those three things then you end up with a very happy and productive development team.”

So I think that some of the important metrics that we look at to get to the right answer are again, things along the lines of how quickly can a developer get an environment? How quickly can they get tests written? How quickly can they get a build deployed? How quickly can they get that code merged? How quickly can they get things out the door?

Engineering metric examples

Metrics aren't about measuring productivity or grading someone.What has to happen is you have to ask yourself "If this team is not as productive, Team A is not as productive as team B... what's in Team A's way? What can we do to help them? Are they having trouble writing tests? Are they not getting the regression paths that they pass as they need to through the test suite? Are they having an ID that they're using that doesn't integrate well with our backend systems? Is there something else there that's slowing them as they go through this cycle time to being productive?"

Don't use metrics for the wrong reason

If you're measuring and managing engineering teams by metrics, I think you're missing the point. Metrics can give you information about the car you're driving, but they don't drive the car.

I'll give, I'll give you an example. Here at Slack, we had a... pattern over the past year where people were not having enough time to sort of spend time to actually doing coding. And when we actually went back and surveyed our developers, they were saying they didn't have enough time to do "deep thinking."So we actually devised something we call "Maker Time" here at Slack. This is an example of what we did. And we said I think it's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for three hours in the morning for all individual contributors, no meetings. Full stop. Like schedule time around that.

Maker Time

Jerry Li: Are the managers accountable for improving metrics to create a better environment for developers to be productive?Allan Leinwand: They're not responsible for improving their metrics. There's no judging of managers based upon the metrics. There's judging a manager at based upon the product they produce or the infrastructure they're rolling out or in the developer productivity team, the tools that are produced to help that.

Team metrics don't grade the manager

Allan Leinwand, SVP of Engineering @ Slack shares his core philosophy & approach to creating developer productivity AND happiness! You’ll learn how Allan combines what developers want most + metrics & analysis of the dev pipeline to optimize productivity. Allan covers how to translate those principles to remote/hybrid work and how to tell (and what to do) if your dev teams are unhappy.

Engineering Leadership

ELC Podcast - Unlock Developer Productivity AND Happiness

With growing pains, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_entropy">software entropy </a>kicked in and product developers had to manage several cross-cutting concerns along with their feature work and timelines. We need to solve problems holistically to handle multiple teams and applications instead of just the projects at hand

Origin of a Platform team

But what does improving the platform really mean?It is too broad of an avenue to chase after and what we need here is direction and focus. To help answer this, start with these three simple questions

Team formation questions

What are our key focus areas?With this, we list down key goals that help achieve our overarching mission. These goals help provide much needed focus, that in turn translates to identifying the right avenues to tackle.

Platform Goals

“The secret to becoming a 10x eng﻿ineer is to help 10 engineers around you to become twice as productive .”

Define best practices and architectural guidelines . Advocate and enforce them via tooling, reviews, documentation. Provide coaching, participate in slack discussions and help engineers deliver high quality code.

Code Governance

“No idea is true just because someone says so. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it’s wrong!”

Whenever we identify promising approaches to any problem, it’s encouraged to try them out through POCs, review results afterwards and make choices accordingly. Key features should always be AB tested and analyzed before complete rollout.

Controlled Experimentation

“How do we operate?”We now define our core values and operating principles that help set the right culture and mindset in our team.

How? — Platform principles (values)

We should know why we are doing what we are doing and the impact it brings to our developers. Now ruthlessly prioritize our short-term goals and activities so that they support our long-term vision.Always be asking “Is this absolutely necessary to do?”

Align with vision and goals

The platform we build is our product and teams we support are our users. We collaborate like an Internal Open Source (aka Inner source) Team. We do not want any one person or team making decisions on how we solve problems for all teams. The key is to share your plan with teammates and encourage open feedback and suggestions through design reviews or other communication channels.

Collaborate Openly

The "Why", "What" & "How" of building a Platform team.

Building a Platform Team — Laying the Foundations

TLDR; Scaling teams are hard. A platform team done right can help ease the hardships.At Conde Nast International we grew from a team of 20 engineers to less than 100 in less than a year. We found out that building out a system that will be used in many markets has a lot of moving parts and repetition. For example rebuilding the infrastructure and application configuration. Adding third party add-on software. Building the application using CDN redirects. DNS registration and configuration.

Platform level problems

The authority of the platform team lies not in the enforcement of standards. But in the subtle steering of the development team into one decision or the other.

Platform Authority

Accountability as a team is important to make sure that whenever the team is making a breaking change the rest of the teams are informed.Blameless post mortem is a requirement to make each of the member feel safe to make changes. Building a better system at the same time taking ownership of the system.

Platform Accountability

<ul><li>vendor management</li><li>pipeline management</li><li>git and scm</li><li>observability (logging monitoring tracing)</li><li>soft skill and people management</li><li>collaboration with other teams and negotiation with the management</li><li>common workflow and architecture management</li><li>security</li><li>developer training and teaching</li><li>documentation development</li></ul>

Platform Member Skills

Having a semi flat structure with multiple senior and principal engineer that could make agile<a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/agile"> </a>decision is recommended. Also having a big team like this with many moving parts would mean that a technical lead role is unsuitable rather having a engineering manager for platform and solution architect is essential.

Platform Leadership

At Conde Nast International we grew from a team of 20 engineers to less than 100 in less than a year. We found out that building out a system that will be used in many markets has a lot of moving…

How to build a platform team now! the secrets to successful engineering

Once we were ready to test the new database, we simply flipped the toggle for a particular repository. On occasion, we needed to rollback due to performance issues. Because we were always writing to both databases, this rollback had very low risk.

Feature Flagging Data

The combination of trunk based development and feature flags provide several benefits over Gitflow and other branching strategies. With Gitflow, a feature is not merged in until it is ready for releas﻿e. In addition, you are only able to rollback at the release level, not the feature level. Feature flags allow us to concurrently develop, continuously integrate, and incrementally deliver.

Flags and Trunk Development

Feature flags are a current best practice to <a href="https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/decoupling-deployment-from-release">decouple deployment </a>from exposure. A single release artifact can have features conditionally enabled without requiring a new deployment. These flags can be used to implement a variety of features, such as user-based opt-in, <a href="https://willowtreeapps.com/ideas/how-feature-toggles-can-enable-ab-testing-in-mobile-apps">A/B testing </a>, incremental rollback, and the graceful sunsetting of features.

What is a feature flag?

The union of feature flags and the facade pattern transformed a live database migration from a Herculean task into very manageable work.

Software Architecture

Live Database Migration

In the process of building our apps I received a private Slack message:Why was the data dashboard built using React if our front-end stack is based on Ember? — a not very happy front-end engineer <ul><li>💀 I didn’t know we had added a new tool to our stack. 😳</li><li>💀 Other team members who should’ve known about it, didn’t know either.</li><li>💀 Someone made an important decision on behalf of our entire team, but the team wasn’t included in it.</li><li>💀 No one, including myself, appreciated the surprise.</li></ul>

Making decisions in a bubble = 🤬

We needed a way to make decisions as a team that would allow us to:<ul><li>enable individual contributors to make decisions for systems they’re responsible for</li><li>allow domain experts to have input in decisions when they’re not directly involved in building a particular system</li><li>manage the risk of decisions made</li><li>include team members without it becoming design by committee</li><li>have a snapshot of context for the future</li><li>be asynchronous</li><li>work on multiple projects in parallel</li></ul>

Goals of an internal RFC

You should write an RFC if you:<ul><li>are building something from scratch. New endpoint, component, system, library, application, etc.</li><li>the need rewrite has crossed your mind</li><li>will impact more than one system or other team members.</li><li>would like to define a contract or interface between clients or systems.</li><li>are adding a new dependency.</li><li>are adding or replacing languages or tools to the stack</li><li>are in doubt of whether you should write one</li></ul>

Deciding when to RFC is difficult

If you see a low participation rate, you team members may be dealing with the following challenges:<ul><li>😵 They have too much going on.</li><li>😱 They are not interested.</li><li>🔨 Tools used for process management are not providing them great UX.</li><li>🕰 They may need better personal time management.</li></ul>

Participation in RFCs

As a team, we agreed that any comment or proposal tagged with [newbie] indicated that its author was coming from a vulnerable place. Whether motivated by lack of expertise, context or confidence, this tag allowed for us to make mistakes while knowing we were in an environment of <a href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-to-foster-psychological-safety/">psychological safety </a>, that was supportive of learning for both senior and junior members.

The newbie tag enables psychological safety

We’ve found RFCs increase visibility into who is making decisions in a system and has helped managers identify situations where trust issues are preventing ICs from making decisions.

Trust issues become more evident

As an engineering leader, I value trust and believe that individual contributors should be involved in architectural and high level technical decision making. I consider every line of code to be a…

6 Lessons I learned while implementing technical RFCs as a decision making tool

The earliest version of DoorDash didn't begin with a full two-sided marketplace for consumers and dashers. They needed to prove the thesis that consumers wanted food delivered from restaurants that hasn't offered it before.To do this, the founders only built the software for dashers and the restaurants. All orders were placed over the phone and answered by the early DoorDash team. They focused on providing a fast delivery experience instead of the best ordering experience.This choice helped them narrow their initial scope and find their market fit.

Building a Marketplace at DoorDash

<ol><li>They can go high-low, and they can really go to the lowest level of detail.</li><li>They have a very strong bias for action, they have that get-going movement indoctrinated inside their bones.</li><li>They're great recruiters because they recognize that it takes a team to win.</li><li>They try to intentionally get 1% better every day. There's this humility that no matter what standard or benchmarks they've set for themselves are cleared, that there's always something that we can do better. </li><li>They have great followership. That's actually my definition of leadership. It's not how many people report into you or how many people listen to you, it's how many people want to follow you.</li></ol>

Attributes of Excellence

Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. Tony started DoorDash 7.5 years ago, and today it is one of the largest food delivery and logistics platforms globally, with operations in the US, Canada, Australia. In our conversation, we discuss the initial problem that DoorDash set out to solve, DoorDash’s counterintuitive approach to building their product, and the surprising benefits of capital constraints in DoorDash’s early days. DoorDash’s business model is an equal parts logistics nightmare and a human coordination problem, or as Tony puts it, a human and math problem.

Tony Xu - A Human and Math Problem

The SYPartners Superpower framework is a deck of cards, or an app to help you and your team learn about your team superpowers. Something that is like innate to you as a person, not who you want to be in the future.It'll tell you about your leadership trait and also provide an aid to others on how to work with you.

Which leadership traits come to you naturally?

The Drama Triangle was created by Stephen Karpman in the 1960s<ul><li>Hero/Rescuer: "If that person did what, what I said, they'd be happy"</li><li>Villain/Persecutor: "That person will get what's coming to them"</li><li>Victim: "This always happens to me" or "Why can't I just get a break?</li></ul>

Mentalities of The Drama Triangle

When somebody comes to me with a problem, I let them first say like, here's what they're going to talk about. And I'll ask explicitly "Do you want my opinion on X? or is this just a vent session?".When they're in venting mode, is this something that I need to just sit there and listen, or is it something where they want to brainstorm a solution?

One on ones: listen vs coach

Creator focuses on the vision and desired outcomes. They take full responsibility for initiating the action to achieve the desired outcome.So once you realize somebody's in Victim mode or like, and they're venting... how to get them to shift their focus into Creation, usually drives the conversation in the right direction.

Turn the Victim into a Creator

You want them to spark learning by challenging assumptions and the status quo. Focus them on improvement and development by holding people accountable for taking action.

Turn the Villain into a Challenger

“You don't need to have this manager game face. I think there's this perception that when you're a manager, you're supposed to be the person who knows the answers to everything… And while a part of the execution piece is really necessary with being an effective manager, I think the other part is relationship building.You need to invest the time in understanding how people work. Because people will be more open and honest with you, it'll help out with retention for your team and overall happiness. But if you don't… it's not going to go well because you'll be treating people as resources and not humans."

To make sure that we're having a lot of authentic and real conversations, the first thing I do is I use this framework that was created by Lara Hogan.I'll ask questions like "What makes you grumpy? How will I know? How can I help?"

One on ones: the first one

Tia Caldwell, former Director of Engineering @ Slack, shares different frameworks she’s used to motivate teams and unlock their superpowers! We cover methods to identify, maximize, & balance strengths on your team, how to shift your team’s mindset from drama to EMPOWERED so they can better confront adversity & challenges. Plus we share the explicit conversations you should be having in your first 1:1s to create greater psychological safety!

ELC Podcast - Superpowers, Psychological Safety & Empowering Your Team 

The best tech leads in the world are always the ones who have done time in management. A tech lead is a manager  … but <ul><li>Their first priority is achieving the task at hand</li><li>They know how to communicate and manage other people</li><li>They know how to get shit done</li><li>They connect the dots between business objectives and technical objectives, and break down big objectives</li></ul>

Managers as tech leads

Being an IC is like reverse-engineering how a company works with very little information. A lot of things seem ridiculous, or pointless or inefficient from the perspective of a leaf node.

Individual Contributors get limited perspective

Management is not a promotion, management is a change of profession . And you will be bad at it for a long time after you start doing it. If you don’t think you’re bad at it, you aren’t doing your job.Managing because it feeds your ego is a terrific way to be sure that your engineers get to report to someone miserable and resentful, someone who should really be writing code.

The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.And the best technical leaders in the world are often the ones who do both. Back and forth. Like a pendulum.

Frontline Managers

Lately I've been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story). The central drama for many people goes something like this: “I'm a senior engineer, but I'm thinking about being a manager. I really like engineering, but I feel like I'm just solving the same problems over and over and it seems like the real…

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Use Chrome’s new “link to highlight” feature to share with a friend or colleague. Highlight the text you want to share, right-click, and choose “Copy link to highlight” and then send the link.

Link to your highlighted text

When presenting or sharing Chrome windows, Chrome <a href="https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/01/better-privacy-when-screen-sharing-chrome.html#:~:text=Better%20privacy%20when%20screen%20sharing%20with%20muted%20web%20notifications">mutes all notifications </a>, so there’ll be less distraction. When done, they unmute.

Mute notifications when presenting

Right-click on an empty spot in the tab strip and name each of your windows. With custom windows names, when you press alt+tab to switch windows or right-click on a tab and select “Move to another window” it’s easier to distinguish between open windows.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Devin Turner
@datsquire

A thread written by @MaryRobinette

ELC Podcast - Unlock Developer Productivity AND Happiness

Building a Platform Team — Laying the Foundations

How to build a platform team now! the secrets to successful engineering

Live Database Migration

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Devin Turner@datsquire

A thread written by @MaryRobinette

ELC Podcast - Unlock Developer Productivity AND Happiness

Building a Platform Team — Laying the Foundations

How to build a platform team now! the secrets to successful engineering

Live Database Migration

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Devin Turner
@datsquire