Driving Clarity

Engineering with Intention

This site contains a few gems of wisdom I have gleaned during my time as an engineer and engineering leader.

Blog Entries

Leadership

Architectural Excellence

Operational Excellence

Team Culture

Other

Glue: This article illustrates a real problem in tech: that some of our most capable engineers (frequently women) get pushed out of tech because they see and do the essential work to keep the team running, but it is percieved as not promotable work. The article is worth reading in full because it also includes some fantastic insights, for example:
- Getting promoted as a woman or minority is diversity work.
- Capable engineers who spend a lot of their time doing glue work may need to stop doing that glue work, even though it is likely the most impactful work, so they can focus on growing skills necessary to advance their career.
The Pendulum or the Ladder: This article by Charity Majors helped me think about my own career and how to keep growing without losing the things I love doing. In short: Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, another totally valid career path is to “pendulum” between individual contributor work and management (people or project management), and doing that will actually make you more effective at all of those roles, as the best individual contributors have a good understanding of the business objectives and good people skills, and the best managers (both people and product) have a good grasp of the technical details in the space they’re managing.