?? Employee experience

Welcome back to yet another edition of the eng. exec. newsletter.

If it's your first time stopping by — Hey, 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. It’s curated for busy tech leaders who can’t afford to spend as much time on this topic as I do.

I hope you find the insights helpful.

Hiring Engineers

• A prominent economist, author, and talent investor discusses how to better match human talent to opportunities, de-bureaucratize philanthropy, achieve higher-quality governance, identify fields of likely progress, and how to get it all done. (Michael Chui, Tyler Cowen / Forward Thinking Podcast)
• Lyft is the latest ride-hailing firm in the US to pause hiring through the end of the year. The company has been battling surging expenses as inflation reaches levels not seen in four decades. (Niket Nishant, Krishna Chandra Eluri / Reuters)
• In a tight labor market, it’s critical for employers to put their best foot forward and showcase benefits in job postings, to potentially entice job seekers. Hiring Lab’s first report on US benefits focuses on employer advertisement in Indeed job postings of three key nonwage forms of compensation — health insurance, paid time off, and retirement plans. (AnnElizabeth Konkel / Hiring Lab)
• As insane as it may sound, it's common for candidates to cheat their way into securing an offer from companies. Recruiters and hiring managers share their "hiring fraud" experiences and discuss the topic of inaccurate vetting due to deceptive candidates. (Thread / Hacker News)
• Mid-level software engineer shares detailed insights on his interviewing journey with 12 different companies, adding thoughts and takeaways from his experience. (Thread / Subreddit)

Managing?Engineers

• There is an emerging competition for talent in the tech industry. It's essential for companies to consider the full scope of their employees' working experiences to attract and retain top talent. This post makes a clear case for employee experience and covers key reasons why it matters for employees, their employers, and external parties. (Dee Wauchope, Fredrik Delin, Heiti Hoffschmidt / Thoughtworks)
• Ideas and must-reads on fostering an inclusive engineering culture by building safe spaces in engineering teams, for managers and CTOs. (Ishaan Singh, Ella Morrish / LeadDev)
• Researchers from across the world, who study organizational behavior, leadership, and employee engagement and performance, share their input on "quiet quitting", by answering the question of why employees are choosing to limit extra-role behaviors, as well as giving effective advice to managers on creating a work environment where employees want to engage. (Ally MacDonald / MIT Sloan review)
• Prioritizing mission over product for sustainable long-term growth? Noom founder and CEO Saeju Jeong shares and brings to life many of his make-or-break moments, and how his dedication to his mission has driven his scale journey. In the past, he has repeatedly turned his back on successful products in the name of his mission to help as many people as possible live healthier lives. (Reid Hoffman, Saeju Jeong / Masters of Scale podcast)
• Modern work evangelist Mark Cruth shares very interesting, insightful and counterintuitive findings from Atlassian's deep dive on what is separating healthy teams from unhealthy ones. It's a conversation about the State of Teams report, answering questions like whether hybrid or in-office is the best for modern teams, and what work principles are the most important to keep in a remote world. (Mark Cruth / Dev Interrupted podcast)

Remote Trend

• GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij shares his experience building a company with no offices and employees spread around the world and gives advice on how to run an all-remote company. (Sid Sijbrandij / HBR IdeaCast)
• Investors continue to believe in?Hofy’s mission, which makes the transition to work-from-home easier by delivering office equipment to remote hires. The company today closed a $15 million Series B round led by CNP with participation from Stride, 20VC, Day One Ventures, Kindred Capital, Activum and TrueSight. (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)
• Microsoft survey about remote work productivity finds 87% of workers feel they're just as efficient at home as in the office, while 85% of business leaders suspect their employees are shirking at home. Microsoft says business leaders need to get over "productivity paranoia" as it may endanger the future of hybrid work. (Liam Tung / ZDNet)
• Early remote work adopters had mixed results regarding their experimentation, and formalized flexible work policies tended to be the exception rather than the rule. This dynamic changed dramatically when Covid-19 forced remote work onto businesses and employees. This article addresses international cross-border taxation issues posed by remote work. (Erik Christenson, Imke Gerdes / Bloomberg Tax)

Misc.

• Timestone is a high-throughput, low-latency priority queueing system Netflix initially built in-house to support the needs of their media encoding platform. But now, millions of critical workflows within Netflix flow through Timestone on a daily basis. (Kostas Christidis / Netflix Technology Blog)
• Best practices on how to roll out centrally managed, developer-centric application security with a third-party CI/CD system like Jenkins or ADO. (Kevin Alwell / Github blog)
• Spotify introducing software visualization. (Renato Kalman / Spotify Engineering)
• Understanding the ins and outs of distributed systems is important for both backend engineers and for anyone working with large-scale systems. Roberto Vitillo, the author of the book Understanding Distributed Systems, shares a few chapters of the book on resiliency. (Gergely Orosz / Pragmatic Engineer)
• Calendly made its first acquisition by taking over?Prelude, a specialist in automating scheduling and organization around job recruitment. (Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch)
• Cloudflare will help connect startups that use its?serverless computing platform?to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds.
• ADP's Chief Data Office, Jack Berkowitz, describes how focusing on the outcomes the organization wants to achieve leads to better processes and results. He also dives into the topic of AI ethics and outlines how other organizations might consider assembling an AI ethics board. (Jack Berkowitz / MIT Slogan Review)
• There is powerful software everywhere we look, and?we’ve been consuming?it?without much regard for its long-term effects. Today we’re faced with an ironic question:?Did we overeat on software??(Andrej Safundzic / Future)
• Airbnb introduces their experience upgrading Data Warehouse infrastructure to Spark and Iceberg. (Ronnie Zhu,?Edgar Rodriguez,?Jason Xu,?Gustavo Torres,?Kerim Oktay,?Xu Zhang / The Airbnb Tech Blog)
• Meta CEO said the metaverse already appears to be transforming beyond the traditional trajectory and considers fitness apps the third step in virtual reality’s evolution because their technology connects people across the world through physical movement.

Top posts of the week

Have any feedback or topics you’d like to see more on? Let me know in the comments.

Also, I share my own personal insights and thoughts on Engineering Leadership and Talent Acquisition every other day, let’s connect!