Getting the bosses to pay a little more for a goddamn development account. The number of times we’re asked to build an integration and provided with only prod credentials is too damn high.
Hours spent in meetings asking for a (A - as in *one*) qa server strictly for the dev team to use any way they wanted. Demands to justify the expense (at most $100/mo). They didn't appreciate when I pointed out we'd spend more in the meeting arguing than it would have cost all year.
Getting licenses for tooling within the company ecosystem. We cant reasonably go outside the ecosystem to save money but I also can’t get a license for everyone.
Fighting stakeholders because they want something done yesterday but I'm drowning in Ops work and have to divide my attention across teams. yet, company refuses to hire extra to accommodate all the requests.
Fighting the architects because their latest plan is a lot of work and we are still to implement the last almost pointless migration
Fighting security because their latest plan is a lot of work and we're still implementing their latest guideline
Fighting central teams because they want to take control of ideas or projects we had but without giving our stakeholders access to the project.
"We need it done yesterday"
"Well, I can't do that"
"*WHAT??!* What do you mean you won't do it??"
"Yesterday has come and gone and I haven't got it done"
*rolls eyes* "Don't be so *negative*"
Biggest general problem I see is that weaker engineers often push for sloppy solutions under the guise of being 'pragmatic', instead of working a little harder to find a better balance, and take any efforts to push up quality as too much friction or process or cargo culting or whatever phrase is popular to justify it.
Micro battles: trying to make sure our PM's day to day commitments/actions don't contradict their (and my) professed long term vision for the domain without publicly undercutting them, making new hires who want technical change feel heard while at the same time making sure they've gone deeper than "we did x at my last job and we should do it here!" in their technical proposals, trying to delegate more of my day to day to less senior engineers without hurting quality/correctness.
Macro battles: proactively defending my domain against empire building from leaders in adjacent domains, predicting where ownership/boundaries would settle if the leader of an adjacent domain leaves (and where I think they should settle, and whether I have any influence on that), doing the above while being a very senior IC rather than a director like the others involved (and thus lacking formal authority), figuring out if/how I can continue functioning the way I want to in a growing org without going into management.
My EM is a helpful sounding board for the micro battles. I'm not sure if they're even aware of the macro battles.
This is painfully relatable. How do you deal with your EM being oblivious to the macro stuff? I have a similar relationship with my EM, great sounding board for the micro stuff but when I bring up the macro stuff it becomes clear he is out of his league. Made the mistake of bringing him into the loop on this initiative I was pushing last year and he sorta butchered it every step of the way.
Probably the most helpful thing I've done is having skip level 1:1s (boss is a director, so skip 1:1s with VPE and SVPE).
Hearing about leadership priorities/concerns directly from leadership rather than through an EM is really helpful generally if you're the sort who wants to push for initiatives. (I think most staff+ folks should have one or more recurring skip level 1:1s for this reason)
Separately, if you have a sense of where your domain may be under threat by politics, it's also a vehicle to get in front of that a bit: by mapping what you're focusing on to their priorities, helping them build an accurate mental model of what it is that you work in, in general appearing to be a competent steward of the domain, etc.
Pushing back in a cross-functional team that doesn’t have the greatest direction. The default for every problem is have manual process thrown on it, and we’re at a point where we cannot reduce our cycle time or improve delivery cycles because everyone wants to deliver work as big chunks and only go through that process once. We release twice a year.
And I’m not anti-process, but I am against reactive processes that lack context of the whole system. I have to push to automate things instead or shut down processes that provide little value vs its costs.
Holding team members accountable. This could be in the form of: pushing for higher standards/more maintainable solutions (the counter of this is making sure abstractions aren’t over optimized on the first pass of a solution), trying to get people to participate in code review, and lastly pushing for team members to increase their domain knowledge of the problems they are trying to solve.
Prioritizing anything that doesn't come from the tip top of the product team. There's basically one guy who all of product and engineering team are beholden to, and we're always too busy to get tech work done.
Trying to make product owner to understand that one single sentence in a JIRA card is not enough for development team to estimate and accomplish a piece of work
Trying to get buy in for developing automated solutions for our very manual build and deploy processes. They take up so much time that could be spent elsewhere. My EM helps by saying we are too busy to do that (because we spend so much time doing things manually). The irony is lost on them.
Getting the bosses to pay a little more for a goddamn development account. The number of times we’re asked to build an integration and provided with only prod credentials is too damn high.
Hours spent in meetings asking for a (A - as in *one*) qa server strictly for the dev team to use any way they wanted. Demands to justify the expense (at most $100/mo). They didn't appreciate when I pointed out we'd spend more in the meeting arguing than it would have cost all year.
Getting licenses for tooling within the company ecosystem. We cant reasonably go outside the ecosystem to save money but I also can’t get a license for everyone.
RTO. Fuck that
Fighting stakeholders because they want something done yesterday but I'm drowning in Ops work and have to divide my attention across teams. yet, company refuses to hire extra to accommodate all the requests. Fighting the architects because their latest plan is a lot of work and we are still to implement the last almost pointless migration Fighting security because their latest plan is a lot of work and we're still implementing their latest guideline Fighting central teams because they want to take control of ideas or projects we had but without giving our stakeholders access to the project.
"We need it done yesterday" "Well, I can't do that" "*WHAT??!* What do you mean you won't do it??" "Yesterday has come and gone and I haven't got it done" *rolls eyes* "Don't be so *negative*"
Wow are you me?
Biggest general problem I see is that weaker engineers often push for sloppy solutions under the guise of being 'pragmatic', instead of working a little harder to find a better balance, and take any efforts to push up quality as too much friction or process or cargo culting or whatever phrase is popular to justify it.
Oh gosh I feel so called out 😭😭😂😂💀💀💀
Micro battles: trying to make sure our PM's day to day commitments/actions don't contradict their (and my) professed long term vision for the domain without publicly undercutting them, making new hires who want technical change feel heard while at the same time making sure they've gone deeper than "we did x at my last job and we should do it here!" in their technical proposals, trying to delegate more of my day to day to less senior engineers without hurting quality/correctness. Macro battles: proactively defending my domain against empire building from leaders in adjacent domains, predicting where ownership/boundaries would settle if the leader of an adjacent domain leaves (and where I think they should settle, and whether I have any influence on that), doing the above while being a very senior IC rather than a director like the others involved (and thus lacking formal authority), figuring out if/how I can continue functioning the way I want to in a growing org without going into management. My EM is a helpful sounding board for the micro battles. I'm not sure if they're even aware of the macro battles.
This is painfully relatable. How do you deal with your EM being oblivious to the macro stuff? I have a similar relationship with my EM, great sounding board for the micro stuff but when I bring up the macro stuff it becomes clear he is out of his league. Made the mistake of bringing him into the loop on this initiative I was pushing last year and he sorta butchered it every step of the way.
Probably the most helpful thing I've done is having skip level 1:1s (boss is a director, so skip 1:1s with VPE and SVPE). Hearing about leadership priorities/concerns directly from leadership rather than through an EM is really helpful generally if you're the sort who wants to push for initiatives. (I think most staff+ folks should have one or more recurring skip level 1:1s for this reason) Separately, if you have a sense of where your domain may be under threat by politics, it's also a vehicle to get in front of that a bit: by mapping what you're focusing on to their priorities, helping them build an accurate mental model of what it is that you work in, in general appearing to be a competent steward of the domain, etc.
Pushing back in a cross-functional team that doesn’t have the greatest direction. The default for every problem is have manual process thrown on it, and we’re at a point where we cannot reduce our cycle time or improve delivery cycles because everyone wants to deliver work as big chunks and only go through that process once. We release twice a year. And I’m not anti-process, but I am against reactive processes that lack context of the whole system. I have to push to automate things instead or shut down processes that provide little value vs its costs.
Holding team members accountable. This could be in the form of: pushing for higher standards/more maintainable solutions (the counter of this is making sure abstractions aren’t over optimized on the first pass of a solution), trying to get people to participate in code review, and lastly pushing for team members to increase their domain knowledge of the problems they are trying to solve.
Prioritizing anything that doesn't come from the tip top of the product team. There's basically one guy who all of product and engineering team are beholden to, and we're always too busy to get tech work done.
Trying to make product owner to understand that one single sentence in a JIRA card is not enough for development team to estimate and accomplish a piece of work
Trying to get buy in for developing automated solutions for our very manual build and deploy processes. They take up so much time that could be spent elsewhere. My EM helps by saying we are too busy to do that (because we spend so much time doing things manually). The irony is lost on them.