#126 – February 12, 2023
The answers here depend on the type of staff engineer you want to be; refer to the archetypes.
When do you code as a staff engineer?
A coworker asked me this question and I thought my answer could be helpful to others struggling with the same ambiguity. When you’re leading multi-team projects as more of an architect, is the only way to code to do “snacking” (i.e., low-impact, low-effort work that could be done by less experienced engineers)?
[Free On-Demand Course] Terraforming Kubernetes | sponsor (sponsor)
In this 1-hour course, you’ll learn how to spin up a Kubernetes cluster using Terraform. Hosted by best-selling Udemy instructor and author, Justin Mitchel, the course also covers the requirements for Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) to deploy a pre-built public container from DockerHub on our cluster.
Improve your feedback game: Choose kindness over niceness
The common trope that feedback is a gift is a misnomer: we love giving and receiving gifts but recoil from delivering and accepting feedback. Some truths are hard to hear and discuss, so the gift-giving metaphor falls short.
Why backlogs are useless, why they never shrink, and what to do instead
Do you remember your backlog ever shrinking? Of course you don’t. Backlogs never shrink.
One of my great sins as a leader is falling too deeply into the systems thinking trap, which I’ve spent years digging out from, but whenever folks talk about failed cultural change, I believe they’re stuck in one of two common traps.
Playing Long Games: Focus on Companies with Moats and Relevant Products
Todd Wenning discusses how companies with economic moats and relevant products can extend the innings of their competitive lifecycles.