The Effective Engineer

What’s Possible Here?

This story captures for me what’s possible in 2017. A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region in Africa to explore opportunities for business expansion. One reports back, “Situation hopeless. No one wears shoes.” The other writes back enthusiastically, “Glorious business opportunity! They have no shoes.” The exact same observation. Two very different interpretations. This story, related by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility, illustrates... (more)

Stanford Tech Talk on The Power of Leverage: How Quip’s Small Engineering Team Built a Product on 8 Different Platforms

What investments have engineering leaders made at top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Instagram that provided the highest returns for their teams? What enabled the engineering team at Quip to ship its productivity tools to 8 different platforms with only 13 engineers? How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful? Recently, I had the opportunity to share some... (more)

Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that our perception of control greatly shapes our choices and behavior. In an oft-cited study, he subjected two groups of dogs to electrical shocks. In the first group, the dogs could press a lever to end the shock. In the second, the lever did nothing; the shocks appeared to continue for random durations, and the dogs in this group could do nothing to... (more)

How to Transition from Average Engineer to 10x Engineer

Can an average engineer develop technical skills that surpass 10x the abilities of his or her peers? Unlikely. Can an engineer of average technical ability develop into an individual contributor who produces 10x the impact of his or her peers? With the right mindset and skill development, absolutely. The key to making that transformation is understanding the distinction between those two questions. (more)

The Trouble with Trying to Win at Everything

I like to argue. In fact, I liked it so much that during my high school and college days, I competed on the debate team for over five years. On weekends, we’d travel to tournaments at nearby school campuses and debate other students on important social issues. Is human genetic engineering morally justified? Is it moral for the United States to use economic sanctions to achieve foreign policy goals? Do... (more)

When Pride Gets in the Way of Your Best Work

Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder and CEO, wanted to bet on an idea called the “Bot Team” to solve one of the company’s most pressing product challenges. A year and a half after the company’s beta launch, over 500,000 people were using its team messaging product every day. But to maintain that rapid growth, Slack needed to expand to new audiences and reach beyond early adopters in the technology sector. But... (more)

The One Key Question to Ask When Measuring Your Own Productivity

In his book The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams re-shares a cautionary tale from one of his comic strip readers on measuring productivity. An engineering manager wanted to incentivize his team to find and fix software bugs and instituted a program to reward strong performers. To encourage the quality assurance team to find bugs, he rewarded $20 for every bug uncovered. To encourage engineers to fix more bugs, he rewarded $20... (more)

The Five Key Mindsets to Master If You Want to Be a Successful Programmer

Dave Cutler, at age 74, still goes to his office at Microsoft every day to write code. I first heard of Cutler when he was honored as a Computer History Museum Fellow for his five decades (!) of work in the computer industry. Based on his lifelong dedication to engineering alone, many would consider him a “hardcore” programmer. What’s even more awe-inspiring than his long tenure, however, is that his... (more)

Why I Stopped Working Crazy Hours and Now Strategically Procrastinate to Get Better Results

In his 2016 book Originals, Adam Grant shares a new counterintuitive study on the science of procrastination. A convenience store had just closed down on a university campus, and Grant and his graduate student tasked participants with writing business proposals on how to best use the newly vacated spot. In one group, the participants started the task immediately, and ended up proposing fairly traditional ideas — for example, opening up... (more)

How a Small Team Iterated Rapidly by Running Up to 12 User Tests Per Week

“Movie time!” My team and I huddled on the couches to watch the latest batch of movies — videos really — of users testing out our product. For several weeks during the most recent product redesign at Quip, we ran tests on UserTesting — a virtual user testing lab that lets you get videos of real people sharing their thoughts as they test out your product. Watching these user videos... (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