Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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Why 5 Whys isn't enough
management•

Why 5 Whys isn't enough

5 Whys is a prevalent engineering process in a modern tech company. When your company has operational incidents (and even the biggest and best ones do), 5 Whys is there to find the root cause, which in turn yields the next steps to make sure those incidents don’t happen again. I could tell the engineering culture of the company needed work when an internal team had an outage related to an expired SSL cert. It wasn’t the outage that made me concerned; it was the attitude of the team who had the outage. “What steps have you taken to make...

6 min readRead more →
management•

Convincing or Instructing

To convince someone, tell them why, then how, then what, in that order. To give an instruction, tell someone what, and time permitting, consider sharing the how, and why, in a reverse of the previous sequence. Simon Sinek’s insightful Start With Why TED Talk took about 15 minutes to change how I would give all presentations forever after. Intrisically it’s known that you have to share the motivation of why anyone should care about what you have to say. But based on the evidence of so many terrible talks you’ve both attended, and presented yourself, you know how easy it...

4 min readRead more →
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Managing Expectations

“This team isn’t delivering enough.” You’ve had a fully funded team of engineers working on a product for years. It has fundamental issues with quality and completeness, and still isn’t integrated with the core platform seamlessly. As time has gone on, you’re getting further behind, not closer. There is either a problem with execution against the strategy, or with the strategy itself. You reflect. You’re sure that the quality of the engineers is not the issue. The drive and work ethic is there, and they collaborate effectively. Everyone understands the plan, and everytime you question the decision making of the...

5 min readRead more →
essays•

Stop saying Tech Debt

If you gave two options to someone who cared about business outcomes, about what they could have, which do you think they’d choose? new product feature or reduce technical debt fix a bug or reduce technical debt improved sales channel or reduce technical debt more accessible UI or reduce technical debt increased performance or reduce technical debt Technical debt, or more simply tech debt, is the losing horse in every race because only one group cares about the problems caused by it: the engineers on the team supporting the product. A clean, well architected system is easier to reason with,...

4 min readRead more →
management•

What are your engineering culture values?

Perform an activity frequently enough, and you will start to see patterns. After being involved in the process of creating software for two decades, I’ve decided to curate a living document of the high level patterns which are most applicable for how to build and maintain software well. Before beginning, it’s crucial to make a statement which is obvious in retrospect: not all of these patterns are equally applicable to companies of differing maturity e.g. a one person startup is a vastly different animal to a 50,000 person megacorp. These observations most apply to mid-level startups, or large companies that...

7 min readRead more →
Hiring advice for bootcamp graduates
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Hiring advice for bootcamp graduates

I'm currently trying to hire as many software engineers as I can, and more and more I'm seeing applications from candidates who retrained via an intense, engineering bootcamp. I want to hire every single one of them. In general whenever I'm interviewing someone I want them to succeed regardless, but there's a lack of diversity of thought in tech and when I see someone with a background in marketing, customer support, or even a short order cook, I get excited about what they could teach me. Anecdotally, I see the tech enthusiastic clique who started coding when they were a...

9 min readRead more →