What It Really Means to Be an Effective Engineer
summary
Reports findings from interviews at Google Facebook Dropbox Airbnb Stripe Instagram and more and a 2015 book that reframes effectiveness as maximizing leverage the ROI on engineer time rather than hours worked. Gives concrete data points: Instagram sells to Facebook with 13 engineers supporting 40 million users so each engineer covers ~8 million users and ~$77M in value. Recommends concrete practices and tools: do the simple thing first, invest in debugging monitoring and iteration speed, and use design the alliance and share assumptions to build trust fast.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:35You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life.
- 6:39Impact Produced Hours Spent
- 7:27Effective engineers focus on high-leverage activities
- 7:46What are the high-leverage activities for engineers?
- 11:00What's the costliest mistake your team's made in the past year?
- 11:12Effective engineers build the simple version first
- 12:34Effective engineers validate their ideas early and often.
- 18:03Effective engineers build infrastructure for their relationships.
- 18:21What are the best practices for building good infrastructure for our relationships?
- 20:23RELATIONSHIP INFRASTRUCTURE Effective engineers explicitly design their alliances.
- 21:38Effective engineers explicitly share their assumptions
- 22:40Effective engineers build trust by making the implicit things explicit
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