The Effective Engineer

What Makes A Good Engineering Culture

One of my favorite interview questions that I ask engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. I’ve interviewed over 500 people – many of them from top tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Palantir, and Dropbox – and over time, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look... (more)

How to Build a Good Onboarding Process for New Hires at a Startup

This blog post is based on a recent answer I wrote on Quora. “Sink or swim.” They weren’t the most encouraging words that Sean, Ooyala’s CTO and ex-Google co-founder, could have said to me as I was ramping up, but they did set the tone for my onboarding experience at the company and for my first foray into the startup world. No life preserver was coming – the expectation was... (more)

Make If-Then Plans to Get More Things Done

In the 1990s, Psychology Professor Peter Gollwitzer conducted a study into the science of motivation. At the University of Konstanz in Germany, he asked students who were on their way to final exams if they would volunteer to participate in a study to write a Christmas essay of how people spend their holidays. Students who agreed were told that they had to mail in their essays within two days of... (more)

How Do I Tell My Team to Work More Hours to Hit a Launch Date?

This blog post is based on an answer I wrote on Quora. Before telling your team to work more hours, make sure that you have a realistic plan for actually hitting the launch date. Otherwise, your best strategy in the long run is probably either to redefine the launch to what your team can deliver by that date based on the current pace or to reset the deadline to something... (more)

Script for Success – What a Football Coach Can Teach Us About Engineering

It’s 3AM, and the phone rings. Generally, it’s never good news when someone calls you in the middle of the night. I reach for my phone and see an automated alert that quora.com is down. As inviting as the bed seems, every minute of delay means another minute that Quora users over the world are having problems reaching the website. I roll out of bed and head to my computer.... (more)

Don’t Let Indecision Make Choices for You

No reasonable person would have envied General Dwight Eisenhower’s position on the evening of June 4th, 1944. 160,000 troops awaited his command to mobilize onto the beaches of Normandy in what would be the largest amphibious assault in history. Military strategists had determined, after months of meticulous planning, a 3-day window that would maximize the chances of success for D-Day, but they had not planned for the evening’s stormy weather... (more)

Do More With Less Time – The Compounding Power of Time-Saving Tools

On May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford (founder of Stanford University) hammered a ceremonial, golden spike to complete the First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, connecting together the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east. Each hammer stroke was transmitted around the nation by telegraph operators as a real-time click, in what might have been the world’s first mass-media event. When the final... (more)

Pick the Right Metric to Incentivize the Behavior You Want

In Good to Great, Jim Collins recounts the story of how Walgreens CEO Cork Walgreen grew the company to be the largest drug retailing chain in America. $1 invested in Walgreens in 1975 would skyrocket to $562 by 2000 under his leadership, easily beating the stock market index by over fifteen times. During this time, Walgreens executed on a key concept: to build the best, most convenient drugstore in America.... (more)

There’s More to Learn and Grow Than You Might Think

Are we all born with a fixed amount of intelligence? Or is our intelligence a malleable quantity that can be improved upon through experience and hard work? It turns out that our belief systems about intelligence impact the types of goals that we set for ourselves and our attitudes toward learning. In one social science experiment, psychologist Carol Dweck divided New York City 7th graders in several public schools into... (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