The Effective Engineer

How a Strong Tribal Identity Can Bind Your Team Together

The other day, I had a conversation with a friend about how to keep great people excited about staying on a team. The issue isn’t just an important one for managers. Even as individual contributors, most of us would also like to create the type of environment where we’re excited to come to work every day. Many teams know to focus on hiring great people, and they spend large amounts... (more)

How Modeling the Value of Your Time with a Single Number Can Simplify Decisions

My friend carried a box of her used cans and bottles into the Safeway and waited at the customer service counter. Minutes later, a customer rep tallied up the 5- and 10-cent containers, double checked the math, and rewarded my friend with a dollar and change for her 10 minutes of patience. My friend’s frugality and thriftiness – no doubt passed down from her Asian immigrant parents who had painstakingly... (more)

What Google Taught Me About Scaling Engineering Teams

Every week, a group of Googlers would plaster the walls of bathroom stalls worldwide with one-page sheets that shared the week’s testing tip. One week, the one-pager might discuss dependency injection and provide a simple example of how to use it in various languages; another week, it might share how to set up a tool for measuring test coverage of your team’s codebase. The “Testing on the Toilet” initiative was... (more)

Beware the One-Person Team

“Software development is a team sport,” write Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman in their book Team Geek. The two Googlers, who together started the company’s Chicago engineering offices, capture a valuable but often overlooked insight in their tagline: working effectively as part of a team instead of working alone can significantly improve output quality and morale. Many engineers and managers are familiar with the risks of large teams, a problem... (more)

The Single, Most Valuable Lesson I’ve Learned in My Professional Life

I worked long hours at Ooyala, the first startup that I joined after leaving Google. There were weeks where my team and I would work 70-80 hours and hardly any weeks where we worked fewer than 60. Like many teammates, I’d work in the office during the day and then continue to work from home after dinner. Even over holidays or vacations, I’d still be chugging away on my laptop... (more)

Shape the Culture You Want through the Stories You Tell

When I was 15, my mother told me a story about her teenage life in Communist China. Government officials stormed through her house and seized anything valuable from the family’s possessions. They overturned furniture and rifled through drawers in the name of equality, but in reality, the corrupt officials planned to just keep any valuables for themselves. They didn’t stop at just curtailing her family’s financial freedom. Until the Cultural... (more)

Compile Flight Rules for Your Software Engineering Team

In his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield shares the insights he learned from his seemingly impossible journey to become the first Canadian to walk in space. He tells stories about the realistic simulations he worked through to prepare for space, about his daily life on his 6-month mission in the International Space Station, and even about the mechanics of how astronauts brush their teeth in... (more)

10 Ways to Leverage Resources at Your Company to Improve Your Programming Skills

An engineer who works at a well-known tech company asked me anonymously on Quora for some advice on how he or she could improve his or her programming skills. If you’ve ever wondered something similar and are looking for some new ways to become a more effective software engineer, you might find the ten suggestions in this blog post helpful. Start by carving out 20% of your time to devote... (more)

What Research on Happiness and Motivation Can Tell Us About Finding Meaning in Our Work

In The Upside of Irrationality, behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes an experiment he conducted to measure how the meaning of work impacts the motivation for work. In the experiment, he recruited Harvard students who loved Legos to build Lego Bionicle robots and paid them decreasing amounts for each additional robot built; the first completed robot earned $2, the next $0.11 less ($1.89), the third another $0.11 less ($1.78), and so... (more)

Five Books Every Effective Engineer Should Read and The Lessons They Teach

I love reading and read about 1-2 books a week. It’s nowhere near the volume that some of the world’s fastest readers have been able to soak up books – President Theodore Roosevelt was said to have read a book a day before breakfast during his two terms in the White House – but it’s a healthy rate that I work on maintaining and hopefully increasing over time. More than... (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