What's an Effective Engineer?
- They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results.
Adopt the Right Mindsets
Focus on High Leverage Activities
- Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested
- Use Leverage as Your Yardstick for Effectiveness
- 80% of the impact comes from 20% of the work.
- Focus on high leverage and not just easy wins.
Optimize for Learning
- Change jobs if you have to.
- Optimizing for learning is high leverage.
- Adopt a growth mindset.
- Talk to people. Become good at telling stories. It gets better with time.
- Those with a growth mindset believe that they can cultivate and grow their intelligence and skills through effort.
- Own your story.
- Invest in the rate of learning
- Learning compounds. Compounding leads to exponential growth. Earlier the compounding starts, the better.
- Working on unchallenging tasks is a huge opportunity cost. You missed out on compounded learning.
- Prioritize learning over profitability.
- Invest your time in activities with the highest learning rate.
- Seek Work Environments Conducive to Learning
- Fast Growth: Companies where #problems >> #resources. Opportunity to choose high impact work.
- Make sure you are working on high priority projects.
- Openness: Look for culture with curiosity, where everyone is encouraged to ask questions.
- Fast Paced.
- People smarter than you.
- Autonomy: Freedom to choose what to work on. Smaller companies => More autonomy.
- While on Job
- Make a daily habit of acquiring new skills.
- Read code written by brilliant engineers.
- Jump fearlessly into code you don't know.
- Always be learning. Invest in skills that are in high demand.
- Read Books. Attend Conferences.
- Build and maintain strong relationships.
Prioritize Regularly
- Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years.
- Prioritize tasks based on ROI.
- Regular prioritization is high leverage activity.
- On TODO Lists:
- Maintain a 'single' todo lists where all tasks are listed.
- Don't try to remember stuff. Brain is bad at remembering. It's rather good at processing.
- Ask yourself regularly: Is this the most important thing I should be working on?
- Focus on what directly produces value.
- Learn to say no.
- Focus on the important and non-urgent.
- Find ways to get into flow. “A state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.”
- When possible, preserve larger blocks of focused time in your schedule.
- Limit the amount of Work in Progress.
- Cost of context switching is high.
- Prioritizing is difficult.
- Prioritization is high leverage. It has huge impact on your ability to get right things done.
Invest in Iteration Speed
- Continuous Deployment is high leverage.
- Will save a lot of time in manual deployment of code. They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results.
- Move fast to learn fast.
- Move fast and break things.
- Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn at faster rate.
- Invest in time saving tools.
- If you have to do something more than twice, write a tool the third time.
- Tools are multipliers that allow your to scale your impact beyond the confines of a day.
- Faster tools get used more often.
- Faster tools can enable new workflows that previously weren't possible.
- Productivity skyrockets with tools.
- Time saving property of tools also scale with team adoption.
- Shorten your debugging and validation Loops.
- Extra time spent in optimizing debugging workflow can help you fix annoying bugs with less headache.
- Debugging is hard. It's time consuming. Upfront investments to shorten debugging loops are worth it.
- High test coverage to reduce build and site breakages.
- Fast unit tests to encourage people to run them.
- Fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time.
- Master you programming environment.
- One editor. One high level language. Shell. Keyboard > Mouse. Automate manual workflows. Use interactive shell. Make running specific tests easy.
- Faster you can iterate, faster you can learn.
Measure what you want to Improve
- Use metric to drive progress.
- If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
- Good metric.
- Helps you focus on right things.
- Drives forward progress.
- Helps you guard against future regressions.
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Performance ratcheting: Any change should strictly improve the metric.
- Bad metric can lead to unwanted behavior.
- Examples:
- #hours worked < productivity.
- click through rates < long click through rates.
- Metric you choose influences your decisions and behavior.
- Look for metric that, when optimized, maximizes impact for the team.
- Actionable metric - Whose movement can be casually explained by team's effort.
- Responsive metric - Updates quickly to give back feedback whether a given change was =ve or -ive.
- Choosing a metric is high leverage.
- Dedicate time to pick right metric.
- Instrument everything to understand what's going on.
- Measure anything, measure everything.
- Graphite, statsd. A single line of code lets you define a new counter or timer on the fly.
- Measuring goals you want to achieve is high leverage.
- Internalize useful numbers.
- Knowledge of useful numbers provide a valuable shortcut for knowing where to invest efforts to maximize gains.
- Need upfront work. Need not be accurate, ballpark idea suffices.
- Knowing useful numbers enables you to do back of the envelope calculations to quickly estimate the performance properties of a design without actually building it.
- Internalizing useful number help you spot anomalies. Be skeptical about data integrity.
- Log data liberally.
- Build tools to iterate on data accuracy sooner.
- Examine data sooner.
- When numbers look off, dig in to it sooner.
Measure your progress. Carefully choose your top-level metric. Instrument your system. Know your numbers. Prioritize data integrity.
Validate your ideas early and often.
- Not validating early leads to wasted efforts.
- Don't delay get feedback.
- Find low effort ways to validate work.
- Power of small batches. Helps you avoid making a big mistake by stopping the flow.
- Approach problem iteratively.
- No large implementations.
- Working solo? Be wary. Be extra vocal and get feedback.
Improve project estimation skills.
- Beware of mythical man month. Communication overhead is significant.
- Reduce risk early.
- Rewrite projects - almost always fail.
- Additional hours hurt productivity. Causes burnout.
- Do the riskiest task first.
- Allow buffer room for the unknown.
Balance Quality with Pragmatism
- High code quality. Code readability.
- Establish sustainable code review process.
- Code reviews help:
- Catch bugs and design problems early.
- Sharing working knowledge of the codebase.
- Increases long term agility. Easier to understand, quicker to modify.
Manage complexity through Abstraction
- Example: MapReduce.
- Right abstractions make huge difference.
- “Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization,”
- “Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make.”
- The right abstraction can increase engineering productivity by an order of magnitude.
- Simple abstractions avoid interweaving multiple concepts, so that you can reason about them independently rather than being forced to consider them together.
- Designing good abstractions take work.
- An abstraction's usage and popularity provides a reasonable proxy for its quality.
Automate Testing
- Unit test cases and some integration testing provide a scalable way of managing growing codebase.
- A suite of extensive and automated tests can reduce overall error rates by validating the quality and by safeguarding against regressions.
- Tests also allow engineers to make changes, especially large refactorings, with significantly higher confidence.
- Despite its benefits, it can be difficult to foster a culture of automated testing.
- Focus on high leverage tests.
- Writing more tests, creating a virtuous feedback cycle and saving more development time.
Repay Technical Debt
- Technical debt refers to all the deferred work that’s necessary to improve the health and quality of the codebase and that would slow us down if left unaddressed.
- Accumulating technical debt is fine as far as it is repaid within time.
- Refactor often.
Reduce Operational Complexity
- Keep no. of technologies low. Don’t sway towards shiny new technologies.
- Every additional technology you add is is guaranteed to go wrong eventually. Will need your time.
- Do the simple thing first.
- Embrace operational simplicity.
- The first solution that comes to mind is generally complex. Don't stop. Keep peeling off the layers of onion.
- Simplify the architecture to reduce their operational burden.
- “What’s the simplest solution that can get the job done while also reducing our future operational burden?”
- Discipline to focus on simplicity is high leverage.
Fail Fast
- Fail immediately and visibly.
- Doesn’t necessarily mean crashing your programs for users.
- fail-fast to surface issues immediately.
- Failing fast is high leverage as it saves debugging time.
Relentlessly Automate
- Automating mechanics is good.
- Automating decision making - no.
- Hone your ability to respond and recover quickly.
- Leverage recovering quickly > Leverage preventing failures.
- “script for success,” practice failure scenarios, and work on our ability to recover quickly.
- Make batch process idempotent
- Make processes retryable, i.e., not leaving any global state.
Invest in your team's Growth
- Invest in onboarding.
- The higher you climb up the engineering ladder, the more your effectiveness will be measured not by your individual contributions but by your impact on the people around you.
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"You’re a staff engineer if you’re making a whole team better than it would be otherwise. You’re a principal engineer if you’re making the whole company better than it would be otherwise. And you’re distinguished if you’re improving the industry.” - Focus primarily on making everyone around you succeed.
- Your career depends on your team's success.
- Make hiring everyone's responsibility.
- Shared ownership of code.
- Keep bus factor more than one.
- Shared ownership removes isolated silos of information.
- Build collective wisdom through post mortems.
- Invest in automated testing.
- Automated test cases lead to higher confidence when refactoring.
- Write test cases when the code is fresh in mind.
- Don’t be dogmatic about 100% code coverage.
- Value of tests increases over time and cost to write goes down.
- Hire the best.
- Surround yourself with great advisors
“Leverage is the lens through which effective engineers view their activities. ”
10 Books to read:
- Peopleware Productive projects and Teams. Amazon. My Summary.
- Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others. (Debugging Teams) Amazon. My Summary.
- High Output Management
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
- Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values
- Your Brain at Work
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
I copy pasted these bullet points because they are as such in the book
It was a great read, and I'll advise it to all the junior developers now from now on