SWLW #477: Cost of employee attrition, The gift of it's your problem now, and more.

Heya and happy Friday,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Cost of (Employee) Attrition
4 minutes read.

Benji Weber captures the cost of employee attrition: "Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. If you have a hiring rate matching attrition rate it might look like the team health is maintained. It’s probably not. Tracking tenure by team and average tenure in team can be interesting proxy indicators. Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure."

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Culture

Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution (Video)
10 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time. Do we develop software the same way?

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The Gift of It's Your Problem Now
12 minutes read.

I love how Avery Pennarun puts it: "I won't always get the exact gift I want. Sometimes I didn't even want a gift. Sometimes the gift interprets JNDI strings in my log messages and executes random code from my LDAP server. This is the nature of gifts. [...] The best part of free software is it sometimes produces stuff you never would have been willing to pay to develop (Linux), and sometimes at quality levels too high to be rational for the market to provide (sqlite)."

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Struggling to Connect on Your Remote Team? We’ve Built a 68 Person Remote Team That’s Driving $29 Million in Annual Revenue. Here Are 10 Ideas for Building Great Culture in a Distributed Team (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Nathan Barry (CEO of ConvertKit) shares many gems we can use now, even if we work in Hybrid mode or with distributed teams. Idea number 6 - "Host unsolicited feedback sessions" - is super interesting to explore and try out.

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Don’t Make Data Scientists Do Scrum
7 minutes read.

I think that the overall critique by Sophia Yang is spot on. Scrum has a lot of disadvantages and shouldn't be used in every situation. Where do you think it will work best? Where should it be avoided? What are the other options a team has to leverage some of the principles the Agile Manifesto covers? Start with the pains and requirements you seek to solve, and then look for ways to achieve that. Stitching together a process is not only more effective but also the right thing to do. This will allow you to continue to iterate over the years, as the company and needs change.

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Peopleware

Managing Managers: Words of Wisdom From Experienced Engineering Executives
7 minutes read.

Daniel Korn transitioned into a new role, moving from leading a team of ICs to leading a team of managers. He asked some savvy executives about their advice for him and summarized it into a very helpful post. What would you share with Daniel on his questions? Add a comment there so everyone can learn.

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I’m Often Asked How Best to Interview VP Engineering or Other Engineering Leadership Candidates. It’s a Hard Problem. One of My Standard Answers Seems to Work for a Lot of People, So Here It Is. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"A leader who is reactive or fatalistic will have a hard time being great at their role. I have been that way at times; maybe we all have. I look for proof they both can and want to rise above those faults." -- Marc Hedlund with a thread you have to read if you're hiring engineering managers.

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On the Joy of Seeing People Succeed
4 minutes read.

"When you see other people succeed, use it as inspiration. Just like Seneca, extract energy from other people who do well." -- Darius Foroux with a mindset worth adopting as you want to increase your impact in the organization, and build a long and sustainable career across multiple companies and roles.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@copyconstruct: Microservices or not, one of the best things you can do to improve your own productivity is to have a fast, local development environment setup with minimum dependencies and ways to introspect isolated parts of your codebase.

@wiseconnector: Turn your pain into purpose. Turn your desire into discipline.



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If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.