?? Candidate-driven Market
Yassine Kachchani
Co-founder & CEO at Gemography | Publisher of Exec Engineering, a weekly digest on Engineering + Talent
Thanks for reading Exec. Eng. a weekly newsletter for the busy tech executive.
If it’s your first time stopping by — Hi, I’m Yassine. I spend a big chunk of my time digging into Engineering Management and Talent Acquisition, especially where the two overlap. I share the most interesting resources I come across in this newsletter, all curated by hand.
Hope the insights bring value.
Hiring Engineers
?? In a candidate-driven market, engineering organizations try to offer the best possible working environments for potential employees. But what about companies that aren't in a position to offer the same perks as others with more resources? In this panel, senior-level engineers look at ways organizations can stand out in a candidate’s market. (Sarah Milstein, Arsene Toumani, Mark Brincat, Dalia Havens / LeadDev)
?? Interviewer: are you really looking for a job? This a question many tech recruiters seem to ask when interviewing candidates. In this thread, the SWE community shares some strange questions asked during interviews, trying to make sense of them. (r/cscareerquestions)
?? Over 700 tech startups have experienced layoffs this year, impacting at least 93,519 employees globally. Tech giants like Google, Netflix, and Apple are also undergoing massive job cuts. This has resulted in an overwhelming amount of talent flocking to early-stage Web3 startups. (Rachel Wolfson / cointelegraph)
?? GitHub launched a holistic Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging strategy in 2021. As they experienced significant growth across their employee base over the past year, they're still building upon their DEIB foundation to accelerate the potential and power of a diverse open-source community. (Dawn Beatty / GitHub Blog)
Managing?Engineers
??From quiet quitting to China's lying flat movement, the world is seeing a moment of fundamental change around the idea of success and sacrifice, and workers worldwide begin to question what ambition really means to them. (Cassie Werber, Sarah Todd / Work Reconsidered Podcast)
?? Effective leaders have long managed the emotions they display at work, in a way to fulfill the expectations of their role. Research suggests that leaders perform emotional labor with a frequency matching that of front-line service workers. Unmanaged, organizations risk decreases in productivity and performance, and high turnover of leadership talent. (Dina Denham Smith, Alicia A. Grandey / HBR)
?? The transition from developer to team lead can be both challenging and rewarding. New leaders start owning high-impact decisions, mentoring and coaching their peers, and cultivating leadership skills. Adding pull request reviews to the plate with limited bandwidth isn't feasible and doesn't scale with their time, and a solution to this is empowering the team to perform code reviews effectively. (Curtis Einsmann / LeadDev)
?? Stand-ups, daily scrum, huddles, or roll calls are powerful daily check-in tools engineering teams can use to maximize productivity. This podcast episode talks about how stand-up is done, what it consists of, and some pitfalls teams may be deterred by along the way while focusing on the importance of not holding the team up. (The Rabbit Hole Podcast)
?? Managers should beware of the counterclaims when confronting bias. Discussions of discrimination in the workplace have a better chance for resolution when managers understand the common ways dominant groups deflect criticism. When members of groups with more power and resources are accused of discrimination against those with less power and fewer resources, they will sometimes seek to deflect criticism by portraying themselves as the victims of discrimination. (Felix Danbold, Ivuoma N. Onyeador, Miguel M. Unzueta / MIT Sloan)
?? Communicating effectively as an engineer means empathically increasing the resolution of your writing. That is especially true in a remote setting where writing replaced talking. Reconsidering what and how you write would make you avoid the gut-punching "What do you mean?". (Karl Sutt)
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Remote Trend
?? As employees continue to work remotely, it's important to pinpoint compliance blind spots and unaddressed problems that can sneak into a remote workforce, like device usage and surveillance, taxes and remote worker locations, remote access to confidential information, and more. (Francine Breckenridge / Newsweek)
?? Survey: 47% of leaders say remote work is bad for employee well-being and leads to a sense of social isolation, meaninglessness, and lack of work-life boundaries. While some of these arguments sound logical, they decry the negative impact of remote and hybrid work on well-being, yet, they gloss over the damage to well-being caused by the alternative, namely office-centric work. (Gleb Tsipursky / Forbes)
?? Remote work might be a little challenging when trying to be productive. This article gathers insights and observations that'd help TPMs, PMs, and Engineering leaders struggling with this new future of work or actively seeking remote roles. It suggests additional data points to recalibrate the methodology and approaches to managing software programs. (Aadil Maan / Building Romes)
? Remote work is not a disease or affliction from which we need healing. How we work has phenomenally changed, and there is no undoing this new reality. Employers have been experiencing and continue to be in for a rude awakening. Those who resist the winds of change are most at risk of becoming extinct. (Casandra Reid / Newsbreak)
Misc.
Top posts of the week
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I also share my own personal insights and thoughts on Engineering Leadership and Talent Acquisition every other day, let’s connect!