Conflicts are healthy Did the title of this section, set off alarm bells in your head? Maybe it depends on your experience with conflicts. In the early days of my career, I thought conflicts were unhealthy, and I used to get into conflicts a lot because as an engineer, I had my opinion on solving a problem a certain way. And obviously, my way was the best way because I had done my reading and compared other solutions and made my decision based on that research. However, there were many other alternative solutions that I hadn’t considered, simply because I wasn’t aware of them. But as an inexperienced, young engineer who was concerned about proving his point, I was blind to the better alternatives! ...

Background As a relatively senior engineering manager, I have been transforming into a less technical person over time. The reason being, I am in charge of two fantastic teams that both have excellent engineers. I generally rely on the technical leads of the respective teams to own the technical aspects of their domains and try to interfere as little as possible. I do this to empower them to take more ownership and learn to be accountable. After all, it is humanly impossible to be everywhere at the same time. I build my teams based on trust, psychological safety and accountability. However, I do review their technical proposals and other documents or design diagrams etc. and I challenge them by asking questions. I have never had to tell them what is right or wrong so far, and I don’t think that I’ll ever need to do that either because our hiring process is good enough to filter out problem candidates. I give them the feedback they need at the time they need it, covering their blind-spots when necessary. ...

Background I grew up as a third culture kid, born in India and raised in the United Arab Emirates. At a very early age, I had encounters with some racist kids, often while in a school bus in the lane next to mine. This altered my perception of myself, created an inferiority complex when compared to the instigators of the racist incident, and I felt helpless and trapped. The problem in the UAE was not a lack of diversity. ...

Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager, you already have numerous responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad, and organization Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there. ...

What is Homebrew? Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS and Linux systems. Although it is called homebrew, the command is shortened to brew. The thing about homebrew is that every command and option sticks to the theme of brewing. I haven’t gone and dug out why this is the case, but I found it amusing. As I had used homebrew a couple of times when setting up my work laptop and now setting up my own, I got curious and wanted to know what options the command accepted. The brewery terminology also was intriguing. ...

Background So you got your brand new MacBook Pro. And now you are dreading the time you are going to spend setting it all up. I was. It is a time sink. So I made a little guide that is selfishly for myself in the future if I were to format this one or buy another one. Someday I’ll script it all as a brew bundle and just install it. ...

Background I have been an avid reader since about 2016. A friend of mine at work introduced me into the world of non-fiction books. And I got hooked. Since then I have read more than a 100 books. I mean do have a life and a full time job, so I think it is pretty good that I manage to read at least 10 books a years, but 2018 was probably the year I read a lot more than the others. ...

Most good organisations expect their engineering hires to have gone through a system design interview. For a vast majority of people this might sound like a weird thing to do as most people don’t individually design large scale systems. So expecting someone to design a highly scalable and available system in less than 60 minutes is a daunting task. We must also consider the fact that not everyone gets to work in organisations that build large scale distributed systems. I think the time when I worked in FactSet was when I dealt with extremely large volumes of data and we focussed on the performance of queries from the database to sub 5 ms in order to ensure that even with latency, users would be able to see their graphs plotted in a second or so. Most applications wouldn’t really care about performance at that level because for their line business it probably doesn’t matter that much. ...

Featured image: Photo of Group of Men Wearing Assorted Scarves Holding Sticks What is culture? You are probably tired of seeing this word mentioned in countless job descriptions and conversations in and outside your organisation. “That’s not the culture here.” Or “that’s our culture”. Or “we have a transparent culture”. Quite often this is just an abuse of the term culture. But because it is popular, it makes those making the claims feel like they work at a great organisation. ...

Featured image: Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels Preamble “Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” - Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson, 1999. That is an impressive definition and one that is easy to understand by anyone who reads it. ...