The Effective Engineer

The Simple Secret to Effective One-on-Ones

“What do you want to get out of our time working together?” Whenever I start a new one-on-one work relationship — whether it’s with a new person on my team, a new mentee, a new manager, a new project partner, or a new coaching client — I’ll inevitably begin the conversation with some version of that question. Something new always surfaces. I might have intuitions and assumptions about what’s important... (more)

How to Create Time and Space for What You Want to Do

I laid on the couch. My body alternated uncomfortably through waves of heat and sweat. My lower back ached constantly. I swallowed my sixth Advil for the day, hoping that my pounding headache would stop. I had caught some bug that was going around. With little energy to do anything, I ended up watching the entire season of Westworld — all 10 hours of it — in a single day.... (more)

The Myth that Technical Skills Alone Will Make You Great

Recently, The New York Times featured The Effective Engineer in a piece about how skills like empathy, collaboration, and communication play critical roles in software engineering. These interpersonal skills often get overlooked — in favor of technical skills — and it’s not difficult to see why. The emphasis on the “hard” technical skills over the “soft” interpersonal skills in engineering starts as early as in school. Nearly all of my... (more)

How to Make Your Engineering Team More Effective

As a leader, how you spend your time is critical. You have an incredible opportunity for impact because your decisions directly affect the output of your entire team. That makes investments in the team’s effectiveness particularly valuable and high-leverage. The good news is that you can get really far by spreading the same best practices that make people effective engineers. Beyond that, you also have many tools available to help... (more)

Valuable Lessons Learned and Missed from My Time Working at Google

I joined Google’s Search Quality team right out of college. During my two years there — from 2006 to 2008 — I learned many things about how to become the best software engineer I could be. I learned programming best practices from industry veterans who had distilled decades (probably even centuries) of collective experience into treasured documents of do’s and don’ts and the rationale behind them. I learned how to... (more)

Facebook Tech Talk: How to Effectively Transform Your Engineering Effort into Impact

Facebook recently hit 2 billion monthly active users. It’s a completely mind-blowing milestone, and I credit a large part of their ability to grow so quickly – they had hit the 1 billion-user mark less than five years ago – to the strong engineering culture they’ve built. One part of their engineering culture that I really appreciate is their relentless focus on impact. Focusing on impact is so important there... (more)

How to Build an Engineering Culture that Focuses on Impact

Many years ago, during my time at Quora, the entire product and engineering team experimented with reviewing together how each project affected the business’s top-line growth metric. Which projects contributed the highest returns on investment toward growth? Which projects had we expected to drive growth, but had fallen short? That monthly practice conveyed a crystal-clear message: what mattered most for any project was its impact on business growth. Individual teams... (more)

What Makes an Engineer Successful Here?

Whenever you’re starting a new role, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. You’re bombarded by an influx of new knowledge. You’re worried about ramping up as quickly as possible. You’re feeling anxious about proving yourself. It’s tempting to just put your head down and power through, believing that it’s the most direct path to success. Take a deep breath. One of the most valuable things you can do as you start... (more)

How to Unlock More Productive Conversations with Two Key Skills

I blinked away the tears. Team morale was crumbling. Co-workers, many I considered friends, were leaving the company. I was at a meeting with senior leaders, and I had just expressed concern that the way the company ran projects might be hurting the team — a team that I cared so much about and where I had invested years of my life. I had expected the leadership team to support... (more)

The 3 Keys to a Remarkable Career

For the past few years, I’ve been coaching an engineering leader at Google on how to think about growing her career. She had been with the company for many years and was ready to play a bigger role. She didn’t just want to be another engineer who could deliver quality code in a timely manner. Google already had an abundance of those. Instead, she longed to make her own unmistakable... (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Read a sample chapter

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Get the book now

Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
Study in-depth interviews with leaders from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instagram — double down on their highest-leverage investments, and avoid their most costly mistakes.
Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

Get the bundle now

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Read a sample chapter

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Get the book now

Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
Study in-depth interviews with leaders from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instagram — double down on their highest-leverage investments, and avoid their most costly mistakes.
Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

Get the bundle now