Also how one gets better at running a large engineering team.
People thing being a VPE or CTO is just hiring and meetings and strategy and that somehow it can be done without intimately knowing how everything works.
Read! The! Code!
People thing being a VPE or CTO is just hiring and meetings and strategy and that somehow it can be done without intimately knowing how everything works.
Read! The! Code!
You can figure out so much at the leadership level through the code:
- why teams are orgβd the way they are
- who are the influencers
- where the tech debt lives
- what will block company strategy
- a sanity check on project scopes
- how to manage/debug incidents
- why teams are orgβd the way they are
- who are the influencers
- where the tech debt lives
- what will block company strategy
- a sanity check on project scopes
- how to manage/debug incidents
Imo one of the first things you should do as a new Eng manager or leader is
- read the code
- set up your environment
- write down what youβve learned
- share it
- read the code
- set up your environment
- write down what youβve learned
- share it
People often think that my demand people know the details in code is the wrong elevation or micromanagey but if your job is to run software teams you better know how the software is being written.
I donβt think you should to memorize every line or review every PR (madness!) but I do think getting to know how the codebase works at a fairly low level makes the high level decisions higher quality and faster.
BONUS (and self-hype) but a product person that can ready the code is unstoppable. A bridge between what to build and how to build can reduce cycles of definition & negotiation. So PMs, learn to read the code, too.
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