#144 – June 18, 2023
Too often people do the best they can
Hi 👋,
When I started this newsletter a while back I wasn't sure which direction it's gonna go. But after a few years I've started enjoying sharing articles about building amazing teams and even organisations, effective people management, tech architecture, and other leadership topics relevant to mostly engineering managers, staff engineers, directors, and CTOs.
Tech Lead Digest isn't the most fortunate name for these topics as it implies a particular role in the team. I've been a tech lead in the past and most of them were not my day to day, really.
So last week, I've decided to bite the bullet and bought leadershipintech.com. I'll be, slowly, migrating the content and the email list over there.
Email deliverability is complicated so it'll take at least a few months to get it done. I'll be running both lists at the same time and you shouldn't miss anything if you decide to stay put. But if you'd like to be one of the first subscribers in the new system you can sign up today. And let me know if something's broken. 🙏
Now, let's move to the top picks from the last week. 📚
Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done.
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How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout
Ensuring that Intercom has great uptime requires a rapid response when things go wrong. This is how we developed an effective, sustainable on-call engineering process.
The work is never just “the work”
A deep dive on why projects always overrun and a framework to improve future estimation
To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort
An outdated way of thinking about peak performance is: “maximum effort = maximum results.” But research shows that it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. Here’s what actually works: The 85% rule, which counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving maximum effort.
Observations collected over 20 years in the tech industry.
10 Ideas From the Best Book on Engineering Management
Learnings from “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” by Will Larson.
I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don't properly understand financial debt.
Lots of mistakes, some uptime too.
And we'll wrap up with some interesting news from big tech: