Found’s Post

I've seen many teams relentlessly chase after top-tier engineers, believing their job is done once they've made the hire. However, they quickly learn a crucial lesson: no matter how exceptional your engineering team is, their true potential can only be realised if they're given a worthwhile and meaningful product to build. #product #vision

When I'm at a dinner party or in a chit chat, and the topic changes to "what do you do". I always get the question: What the heck is a Business Engineer? I've written this article and hopefully it will help people understand more about this career path and show other types of Engineering roles out there. Since 2021, I've been on this role. So, I'll probably write more about it in the future. Let me know your thoughts on the post and what you want to know next.

#hiring Head of Engineering Culture & Programs, San Francisco, United States, fulltime #jobs #jobseekers #careers #SanFranciscojobs #Californiajobs #Engineering Apply: https://lnkd.in/gmNRMPVT Job Description Hey there! Block's CTO is on the hunt for someone awesome to lead our Engineering Culture & Programs globally. If you're passionate about team culture, engineering and know how to make work feel fun, engaging and energizing, then you might just be the perfect fit! In this role, at the Office of the CTO, you'll be in charge of making sure our teams, work and culture thrive across an ecosystem of nearly 5000 engineers. Key to this role is finding innovative ways to to bring a diverse, globally distributed team of engineers together as a single community. To achieve this, you will: Be a key adviser to the CTO on all aspects of the Block Engineering mission. Plan and execute critical projects aimed at improving the health, efficiency and morale of Block's Engineering teams. Examples include learning and development programs, initiatives promoting a sense of belonging, change management plans, remote work practices and support programs, and measuring & responding to the state of organizational health. Develop and refine engineering cultural programs across Block. This includes ownership of the global Engineering All-Hands, horizontal mentorship programs, open-source initiatives, onboarding programs, AMAs, retrospectives, internal portals/guidebooks, and more. Work to improve communication, collaboration, and alignment throughout the engineering organization, continuously enhancing our ability to meet the needs of our engineering teams. Build communities to foster diversity and belonging, and build a sustainable culture of improvement by learning from each other. Cultivate avenues for open feedback within the engineering organization and leverage this input to propose new initiatives to better the overall health, happiness, and cohesion of the organization. Build a strategy to connect Block with the broader engineering community through conferences, tech-talks, open-source outreach & sponsorships, UGs, etc. Build and lead a team responsible for developing and implementing these initiatives and practices both internally & externally.

Stop calling the software engineer position - "middle." It just doesn't make any sense. Get it - you have Junior and Senior positions - titles showing engineers' seniority. Middle - means the distance between two points, one of which is the beginning, and the other one - is mainly the end of some stage. For example, middle age is between childhood and old age, and middle school - is the distance between elementary and high school. Both show the beginning and the last stages of the process. In the case of senior engineers - it is only the beginning of the fantastic careers of IC engineers. You can become staff software engineer and grow higher, you can become one of the tech archetype of staff ( go check book "Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" by amazing Will Larson ), or even move to management track. So, the middle - does not show engineer being in the middle of their career. And yeah, if you have a "Middle Software Engineer" title in your company - you need to put more work into planning a career ladder for your people.

Software engineers are the highest impact employees in the world. There is no other role that allows you to impact the world at scale like a good software developer can. As Tony Summerville recently mentioned to us, "If you think of everyone in the past 50 years who has done big things, it's been someone that had their hands on the keyboard." The only way to ensure that your developers are driving the highest impact is by having effective, high-impact managers as well. But this area doesn't get as much love, training, press, or tooling. This is why we're focused on engineering managers. High-impact engineering managers drive high-impact engineers. High-impact engineers change the world. #softwareengineering #engineeringmanagement #devsaredifferent

Beyond thrilled to welcome Paul Roberts to the engineering team at LightSource! Brilliant, renaissance man, engineering tour-de-force, artist... these are all words that come to mind when I think about Paul. -- I remember even just 2 short years ago, the idea of recruiting Google Staff Engineer was comical. They would never join a startup? But fast forward, LightSource is a growth-stage company, with Fortune 500 customers, and top flight investors... but that's not what brings great people to the team. The #1 determining factor that candidates consider when looking at new roles is the people -- the team; the folks they'll be working (grinding) with on a daily basis. With each chapter of hiring, the caliber of LightSource just seems to get better and better. @Paul: I am so honored to have you on the team. And cannot be more excited for our *customers* who will benefit from the innovations you'll launch. (fun fact below as usual). This man truly has software in his DNA!

In hiring for software engineers there is no greater myth than "the bar" as a universal and immutable standard of quality. Would you like to know a secret? The bar will look suspiciously like your senior-most leadership at a company, and unsurprisingly it will select for people that are agreeable to them. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that those who are hired, and then promoted, are those who agree the most with a company systemically. The problem is that the needs of a company evolve over time, and a company mired in bias will find themselves unable to hire and promote themselves out of the stagnancy and debt they incur. This is why it is critical to hire people who are very different from us, who think in novel ways, who came from different backgrounds, and are able to show us something surprising. There is nothing more fatal to innovation and progress than groupthink and hype. Hire someone who will challenge you, and you will grow far more for it.

I've had people roll their eyes when the #StaffEngineer role comes up. According to these people, the Staff role is nothing more than title bloat. If you've followed me for more than a few days, this next bit is gonna SHOCK you: I disagree! Yes, it's a relatively new title, but I think it's the result of the industry realizing that a new role was needed as opposed to the industry creating another fake rung on the career ladder. Prior to the Staff Engineer role's existence, the only next step up for a #SeniorEngineer was management. This was either a full-management-dedicated role, where hands were never again on a keyboard, or an unholy amalgamation of a senior dev and a manager, where one person was expected to manage their team of devs AND continue contributing code. The latter (no pun intended?) did NOT work. It's simply too much for one person to successfully...manage (#DadJokes). So the industry at large split the roles more completely and came up with a new name for the role focused on the tech side of things: Staff Engineer. (Thanks for coming to my TED talk.) #leadership #code #SoftwareEngineering #dev Pictured below: Someone who's reached the top of the career ladder/latter and is trying to think of a new rung they can add.

Handling ambiguity well is a key component to advancing as a software engineer. How do you quantify "ambiguity" without being hand-wavy? Here's a framework for how to think about ambiguity at each engineering level (see attached screenshot): 1. Junior (IC3) - No ambiguity. We know exactly what we need to do, project just needs to be completed. 2. Mid-level (IC4) - Feature-level ambiguity. We know the solution but don't know the details of how to implement it yet. 3. Senior (IC5) - Roadmap-level ambiguity. We know what problem to solve and why, but we don't know what to do to solve it yet. 4. Staff (IC6) - Strategy-level ambiguity. We don't even know what problems we should tackle. IC6s create scope. If you have another way of thinking about engineering ambiguity I'd love to hear it. How do you quantify ambiguity?

How to level up from Senior to Staff Engineer? "A key part of becoming a Staff is taking more responsibility and making it easy for other leaders." Part 2 of the multi-part series about growing up in your tech career is out in my newsletter today: https://lnkd.in/eH48yHgr, and it covers a few actionable items to help you get closer to your Staff Promotion. Subscribe now to the newsletter, if not already done: blog.gouravkhanijoe.com Please let me know the feedback or shoot any questions! -- Follow Gourav Khanijoe for daily Engineering interesting bytes!