Status Updates From The Engineering Executive's...

To reflect on last few chapters I found useful:

1. ch23, as always the author defines a standard pattern for reading the survey and find action items. This exercise is in general missing for my org of 100 peoples, which should have bi-annually survey.
2. building engineering hub: the author has downplayed the politics - have the team own the missions/critical area not required approval are not sufficient.

For these hiring and performance review chapters, I would just read "Scaling people", which provides a more systematic way to tackle the problems. The writing of these chapters are vague and shallow, hard to read, missing information and examples.

ch18 is very informative regarding to not burnout in case your standard is higher than the organization's.

1. acknowledge that holding other accountable might become "you two do not work together"
2. org has finite resources so low-standard work is a must.
3. be a role-model if you want other to change
4. recognize that other might be in different life situation as you.

ch17 reminds me ch12 "Task-Relevant Maturity" from high throughput management. In general you always inspect your reports' work. Depends on their proficiency level, you set different inspection interval.

Another thing to reflect is that inspection meeting is for leadership to build trust on engineers, instead of because leadership lack of trust of the team..

ch14 feels like a repetitive of ch5 (how to build values), ch13 (how to work with CEO, peers and engineering) and ch10 (how to meeting).

ch13 briefly discussed how to navigate the corp politics. I think overall the author had the same view as "The Staff Engineer's Path": understanding different points view and understand why people don't agree, why people points finger at you.

Ultimately it is easy to claim this is the best approach than exercise everyday because human's emotion exists.

I've constantly wanted to skip a lot of chapters. I think the book will be much better if different chapters can be grouped into different categories: how to get the job, how to establish engineering cultures/values, how to work with other orgs..etc

This is the third book I read from this author and all of them are having the same problems.

Reflect on Ch9: a lot of time whether to make a decision or not, I haven't thought about the "company, team, self" framework. It helped in retrospect as a lot of decisions were hard to make and debate about.

Although the author also provides a way for you to be energized, is to "prioritize some energizing work".

Ch8 provides a judgement for micromanagement:

1. Are you carefully considering the feedback from who closet to the work?
2. are you adding friction for the team who would have arrived at the same decision without your involvement?

ch5 is ok, it lists a few aspects make values useful: reversible for example, is interesting, makes the value more applicable.

Lack of example for ch6 makes it really dry and hard to read.

A poorly delivered chapter about planning and scratched surface of politics during the planning.

1. run Zero-Based Budgeting every year
2. how to spend time to validate the unscoped project: have a 10% allocation for validating projects.
3. Planning shall not award the least-efficient org. Whereas the author here does not provide a solution: "only CEO can address them".

Reflect regarding the ch3:

for the current corp job, we did not have a clear definition of fundamental rules: what standard development stack to use, how to approve exceptions.

Then we end up suffering about who should make decisions too. If what's team is doing follows the standard development stack, the team itself can make the decision. Right now the trade-off is not clear thus make people wondering..

Great and thought-provoking listen. Finished the Engineering strategy chapter and it inspired me start working on our own.