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It’s not easy out there. A lot of managers are looking to bring stability to their teams as the industry continues to navigate a great deal of turbulence.
This month we have articles on using your experience for good, picking up the pieces after a round of layoffs, and watching out for burnout in remote teams. In no particular order, here are five recent articles you need to read on LeadDev.
1. Meg Adams, Leading as the most experienced engineer in the room
“Great engineering leaders are forged through the fires of experience,” writes Meg Adams, an Executive Director of Platform Engineering at Estée Lauder. However, this wealth of experience can manifest in unhelpful ways too.
“When we become over-reliant on domain expertise as the most familiar tool in our leadership toolkit, we will apply it indiscriminately and inappropriately. This typically manifests as rigid prescriptiveness,” she writes.
2. Addy Osmani, How great managers create stability during turbulent times
These are certainly turbulent times, and Google’s Addy Osmani has 10 ways to help you establish a sense of stability for your team(s) as we navigate rolling layoffs, AI-led disruptions, and a looming economic downturn.
“Engineering leaders who create stability amidst organizational turbulence play a vital role. Investing in your team’s growth and development, providing ample support, and leading by example will ensure that your team emerges stronger and more adaptable,” he writes.
3. Chris Stokel-Walker, How to handle layoff survivors’ guilt
Talking of turbulence, the relentless cycle of tech layoffs looks to continue into the summer, and this month Chris Stokel-Walker turned the lens on the engineers left behind to pick up the pieces.
“For every employee fired, many others remain in post, and the backlog of work to do never gets any shorter. While the wrench of seeing your job taken away from you is difficult, it’s also a challenging time for those who remain behind,” he writes.
4. Dianing Yudono, How to avoid burnout in remote engineers
“Working remotely may not seem like the sort of environment where burnout thrives, but it is.” Here, Dianing Yudono from Shopify explains how to spot the signs and protect your team against burnout, even when you aren’t in the same room as them. And she has receipts!
“If an engineer has to work unsustainably, managers and leaders should apologize instead of publicly praising the sacrifice, which can set unrealistic expectations for others and worsen the prevalence of burnout,” she writes.
5. Jennifer Riggins, Can platform engineering help you do more with less?
The hype around platform engineering has been growing for a couple of years now, as talk of Golden Paths and exceptional developer experience spreads outside the halls of Netflix, Google, and others. Now, as engineering teams are asked to do more with less than before, can that hype turn into real business value?
“With burnout in software engineering at a high, leaner teams make for a less-than-optimal solution. Fortunately, the emerging practice of platform engineering offers an opportunity for developer teams to reduce their cognitive load and do more with less,” she writes.
