SWLW #468: MTTR is a misleading metric — now what?, How Product Engineering teams avoid dependencies, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week -
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway.
4 minutes read.

"If you always avoid estimation and don’t learn how to give a timeline when it’s required, that might become a limiter on your career. Being able to tell your bosses and peers what to expect by when – and then hitting those marks – builds trust in a major way. This is true of individual contributors and engineering managers: you can pretty easily become a Senior Engineer or Engineering Manager without needing to be good at estimates, but to go much farther than that you’ll likely need to learn this skill." -- Read the entire series by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on how to improve your skills around software estimation. The 2nd post on the series provides helpful tools to experiment with.

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Culture

Me When I Deploy to Production Without Testing
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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MTTR Is a Misleading Metric—Now What?
6 minutes read.

Eye-opening post by Courtney Nash that I highly recommend sharing in your company. "If quantitative metrics are inescapable, we suggest focusing on Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and cost of coordination data. [...] consider tracking how many people were involved in each incident, across how many teams, and at what levels of the organization—these factors are what Dr. Laura Maguire deemed hidden costs of coordination that can add to the cognitive demands of people responding to incidents."

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How Product Engineering Teams Avoid Dependencies -- The Independent Executor Model
5 minutes read.

Jade Rubick shares interesting framing for dealing with dependencies between teams. Worth checking out the link to the coordination models at the end of the post. It always feels that there is some better solution if only we can get the org structure or APIs/data-structures better. Maybe there is. I'd keep trying to make changes and experiments to improve that, and collect feedback from others on what works for the team.

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A Method for Measuring Analytical Work
5 minutes read.

"Analysts should judge their work by how quickly people make decisions with it" -- Benn Stancil made me think about how to apply a consultant mindset effectively. It can be as an analyst or as an advisor or mentor to someone else. As long as there are many iterations to build trust, the right behavior will most likely pay off while the speed of making a decision is an effective measurement.

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Peopleware

Finding Your Swagger
5 minutes read.

Kevin Yien wrote one of my favorite posts this week. It is a powerful move to figure out the type of person you want to be, writing it down, and holding yourself accountable for that. This should be an exercise all of the leaders in the company should perform, even if never shared with others, as a reminder of their swagger (that brought them in) and north star.

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One of the Most Important Career Decisions You Make Is Prioritizing Status or Substance. Substance Compounds and Status Decays. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Sam Altman is spot on, assuming you're working in a mature company that cares about impact and style (how you deliver that impact). I enjoyed the responses to this thread and how people provide more ways to frame the concept that impact > perception of impact.

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Don’t Be Spooky
3 minutes read.

"We humans are better at convincing ourselves to fear something (survival instinct) than the other way around." -- important read for everyone. Not only managers. "Do you have a few minutes to talk?" always gets my heart racing. Always share the topic and the ask.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@floydophone: 90% of my job as a senior engineer is giving others the confidence to go with the less-impressive-but-simpler approach.

@johncutlefish: As an individual, sometimes you get so reactive that you don't have the energy/bandwidth to hold yourself accountable to *anything* that isn't last minute or "critical" teams/orgs are the same way. A "low accountability environment" is often a "overwhelmed environment"



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.