On Software Engineering & Fractional roles

Whether hiring for execution or leadership roles in Software engineering, A statement we often hear is..?

“It’s hard to hire & retain good engineers..”

I’ve built & scaled all functions in engineering orgs from 0 to 100+ and recruiting, training & mentoring was often where most time was spent. Many leaders would agree. Yet, It’s a constant battle to retain good engineers or managers and keep them motivated. Sometimes leaders start generating exciting work or experiments, whether it’s useful for the business at that time or not. Engineers who proactively look for problems in Software they write or operate, improve & fix those are very few. Even the most gifted engineers get stuck in feature factories and firefighting units.

Organisations are human-centric systems and within that “Software engineering“ in itself is a System with its own lifecycle. Before I delve deeper into how one can use Fractional roles in engineering, I feel it’s important to probably try to explain what all does “Software engineering“ entail. Is it just writing code that’s most efficient using the best algorithms ? Traditional minds will agree. And in the age of AI and Copilots, writing code itself is not the biggest piece of work..

Software engineering encompasses a whole gamut of skill-craft like writing clean & understandable code,? Instrumentation, Testing, Simulating in lower to higher environments, Creating & managing the lifecycle of IT/Cloud infrastructures, Operating in live environments, Observing your instrumentation, Security & Compliance, Scaling & Responding to failures, Learning from failures etc. In fact the intersection of work between associate functions such as Product management, Customer experience, HR/People with Software engineering is a skill. IMO, It's imperative to look at Software engineering as a people-centric system where various priorities are in flux and skilled people come together to solve problems.

So even if we agree to disagree that Software engineering in itself is a System and needs all of the above done right - How can companies (small, mid or large) leverage Fractional’s while scaling the team and at the same time improve their System ?

Fractional economy :

More and more engineers & leaders are quitting the hustle culture and are creating the Fractional economy by investing in themselves and providing their Craft as a service. These men & women have honed their craft and cross-functional collaboration skills over many years and bring exceptional skills & leadership to navigate such challenges in Systems. The motivations for most Fractional’s I’ve interacted with as part of the Council and Fractional networking groups are amazingly similar, I,e..

1. Own & solve challenges for organisations (small, mid or large) using their craft.
2. Execute hands-on from Day 1.
3. Hire from their network, bring in other Fractional’s if needed or train / mentor existing teams.
4. Make teams / companies sustainable and extricate themselves.?
5. And get paid for their Fractional time :)

Some of the specific circumstances in Engineering teams where Fractional leaders or teams could add immediate value are..?

1. Needing experience and specialised skills to solve a critical technology problem or get you started on new technologies fast.?
2. Addressing skill-gaps in the team by hiring a skilled Fractional to assist with execution and even hiring & training.
3. Public Cloud or Hybrid adoption & cost-management strategies and execution.
4. Lead large-scale transformation projects across cross functional & diverse groups.
5. Reduce toil (Fire fighting) and improve resilience & customer experience of your products by Instrumenting, Measuring availability (SLOs/Four Golden signals), Responses to failure & learning from failures.
6. Improve developer productivity by automating creation of dev environments, integration testing and continuous delivery to live environments & measure productivity with Flow metrics.??

We at CFCXO are a not-for-profit organisation to raise awareness about Fractional craftsmen & economy. We would love to hear how we can help your organisation to leverage fractional professionals in your success. Please reach out to me or any of my colleagues tagged to this post to explore.