Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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management•

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
essays•

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 →
management•

Manager README 2021

It has been a while since I wrote my first manager README. The idea is simple: help people who are going to be reporting to you understand the way you think, what you believe, and what you expect. For this one, I'm going to write it without looking at my previous attempt to see how my worldview has changed in the intervening three years. Team The primary responsibility of an engineering manager is to be accountable for the engineering delivery of the team. That output must be high quality, timely, and delivered in a way that is sustainable. This is...

5 min readRead more →
Corporate values as memes
essays•

Corporate values as memes

This is perhaps only my second, and hopefully final, time where I play futurist. I'm going to argue that memes are the future of corporate values. You know, those pithy, untruthful, and ignored statements that the senior leadership of your company claim defines their identity and culture. I want to replace them with the inane nonsense that you see across imgur, 9-gag, and icanhascheezburger. I'll show that this brave new world of corporate values as memes has clear benefits and should be embraced by providing real examples of how this amazing future could look. But first lets take a brief...

8 min readRead more →