Posts tagged with Management
Breaking Down Team Organization
Steven Sinofsky — former Microsoft Windows executive, now a16z board partner — wrote a really in-depth article about organizing teams within companies: Functional versus Unit Organizations For the uninitiated, functional organization is grouping people by discipline: marketers as a team, software…
How to Find a Good Manager
Recently, I was talking with a colleague at work who was about to leave the company, and they were asking me for any tips to take with them to their new job. In my head, the cliche that “people leave…
The Folly of Stack Ranking and Measuring Impact
Recently I came across a brief statement on Facebook about the well-explained evils of stack ranking, with a half-hearted Devil’s Advocate argument about how impact can absolutely be an objective metric, measured and ranked[1]. I still…
The Greener Grass on the Management Side
In modern tech companies, there’s a dual career ladder structure for software engineers: they can either progress more technologically (as senior and lead engineers) or advance on the management side (as engineering managers and directors). The best companies ensure…
How Culture Matters
I really like this quote from Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein, courtesy of this article from Stratechery contrasting cultures from familiar tech companies: If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leadership…
Transitioning to Management is Trial by Fire
A couple months back, I wrote about how promotions typically work inside of midsized to large companies. In short, they’re usually descriptive in nature, so the individual only gets the new level and title after they’re essentially doing…
