The Effective Engineer

Don’t Be the Bottleneck

Is there an engineer on your team who people always consult for certain classes of problems? Perhaps he’s a senior engineer on the team who wrote large swaths of the codebase. Or maybe she’s the tech lead or the manager who’s participated in most design discussions and knows the historical rationale for many projects. Or perhaps he’s the sole engineer responsible for particular systems and has years of experience operating... (more)

How a Scientifically Proven Technique Can Improve How Well You Learn and Remember

In 2006, psychology professors Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel uncovered some surprising insights in the science of learning. They conducted a year-and-a-half long study on 6th graders in a social studies class and split the subject material into three groups. For one-third of the material, students took a multiple choice quiz for a few minutes at the beginning of class (based on the assigned reading), at the end of class... (more)

The One Important Thing to Consider When Deciding Where to Work

A young engineer recently reached out and asked for advice on a few job offers he was considering. Should he accept a software engineering position at a more established tech company like Google or Facebook? Or at a rapidly growing mid-sized company? Or perhaps even at a small but promising startup? More generally — what should someone consider when choosing between job offers? While money and location can and often... (more)

The Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore

“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another engineer, or helping answer a question from customer support about how it works. The total investment of time to maintain the feature far exceeds the initial few hours of development. One of the hardest lessons... (more)

Build and Deploy Code in Small Chunks to Reduce Risk

In late 2011, soon after the company had IPO’ed, LinkedIn paused feature development for two entire months. The motivation? The engineering team needed to restructure its entire code deployment process to streamline development. Up until that point, engineers would develop a new feature by forking a branch off of trunk (the main branch), building and testing the feature over the course of days or weeks, and then merging large batches... (more)

Avoid a Disastrous Mistake that Interview Candidates Make

“What questions can I answer for you?” I asked the interview candidate. We had finished working through some technical problems, and I was ready to gauge his curiosity and passion toward the product, the team, and the mission. “I don’t really have any,” he replied. Apparently, he already knew all there was to know about the company after a couple of interviews, and there was nothing more I could add.... (more)

How a Small Change Can Boost Your Motivation and Performance

In 2009, Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson made a surprising discovery in the science of motivation. She conducted a series of studies where she asked participants to solve a set of puzzles and problems. In one group — the “be-good” group — participants were told that their score reflected their “conceptual and analytical abilities.” They should try to solve as many problems as possible and aim for a high score to... (more)

How to Avoid One of the Costliest Mistakes in Software Engineering

A few weeks ago, a young startup engineer reached out to me for advice. Her CEO had given her team 4 weeks to rewrite the web product from scratch. That was over 3 months ago. The project was now 2 months behind, the team was working overtime at 80+ hours per week, and a laundry list of bugs remained. Stress levels were high, and each passing day of not shipping... (more)

How to Know When It’s Time to Quit Your Job

A number of red flags should cause you to reconsider your position at your current company, including: being compensated unfairly. being mistreated, undervalued, or disrespected. disagreeing with the fundamental strategy or practices of the company and not being in a position to change them. failing to get along with your manager and your teammates. failing to fit in with the company culture. These types of reasons aren’t too hard to... (more)

What Qualities Make a Good Startup Engineer?

Not every good engineer makes a good startup engineer. Some of the most promising candidates that I’ve interviewed in the past six years across three startups (Ooyala, Quora, and now Quip) would bring 5+ years of experience from a top engineering company like Google, only to do poorly during our interview processes. Usually, the candidate wasn’t a bad engineer; in fact, he might have even excelled at his current job.... (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