Effective Engineer

Part 1: Adopt the Right Mindsets

Focus on High-Leverage Activities

How should we decide what actually to work on in order to more effectively achieve our goals? Assess the activities’ leverage:

Leverage =  (Impact Produce) / (Time Invested)

Another way of thinking about leverage is the commonly-mentioned Pare- to principle, or 80–20 rule—the notion that for many activities, 80% of the im- pact comes from 20% of the work.

Increase your Leverage in Three Ways

Your overall leverage—the amount of value that you produce per unit time—can only be increased in three ways:

  1. By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity
  2. By increasing the output of a particular activity
  3. By shifting to higher-leverage activities

To increase the leverage of each activity, ask yourself these three questions:

  1. How can I complete this activity in a shorter amount of time?
  2. How can I increase the value produced by this activity?
  3. Is there something else that I could spend my time on that would produce more value?

Optimize for Learning

Invest in Your Rate of Learning

Compounding leads to an exponential growth and learning, like interest, also compounds.

Improve yourself 1%, it is a high-leverage investment to devlop the skills and knowledge to make use of future opportunities.

Seek Work Environments Conducive to Learning

Factors to consider when choosing a new job:

Dedicate Time on the Job to Develop New Skills

Always Be Learning

Learning opportunities aren’t limited to the workplace. Here are ten starting points to help inspire a habit of learning outside:

Prioritize Regularly

In any engineering discipline (and in life), there will always be more tasks to do than you have time for. Wroking on one task means not working on another.

So how do you determine if something else has higher leverage than what you’re currently doing?

Focus on the Import and Non-Urgent

  1. Important and urgent: Crises, Pressing Issues, Deadlines
  2. Important and Not Urgent: Planning and prevention, Building relationships, New opportunities, Personal deveopment.
  3. Not Important and urgent: Interruptions, Most meetings, Most emails and calls
  4. Not important and not urgent: Surfing the web, busy work, time wasters.

Limit the Amount of Work in Progress

Increasing work linearly increases the likelihood of failure exponentially

Fight Procastination with If-Then Plans

We identify ahead of time a situation where we plan to do a certain task.

The planning creates a link between the situation or cure (the if) and the behavior that should follow (the then). When cure triggers, the then behavior follows automatically without any conscious intent.

Part 2: Execute, Execute, Execute

Invest in Iteration Speed

Move Fast to Learn Fast

Because learning compounds, the sooner you accelerate your iteration speed, the faster your learning rate will be.

Investing in time saving tools

Time saving tools pay off large dividends.

It’s not sufficient to find or build a time-saving tool. To maximize its benefits, you also need to increase its adoption across your team. The best way to accomplish that is by proving that the tool actually saves time.

So start small. Find an area where a tool could save time, build it, and demonstrate its value.

Master Your Programming Environment

Measure What You Want to Improve

Use Metrics to Drive Progress

Good metrics accomplish a number of goals:

  1. Help you focus on the right things
  2. When visualized over time, they help guard against future regressions
  3. Can drive forward progress
  4. Lets you measure your effectiveness over time and compare the leverage of what you’re doing against other activities you could be doing instead.

Pick the right Metric to Incentivize the Behavior You Want

when deciding which metrics to use, choose ones that:

  1. maximize impact
  2. Are actionable
  3. Are responsive yet robust

Because the choice of metric can have such a significant impact on behavior, it’s a powerful leverage point. Dedicate the time to pick the right metric, whether it’s just for yourself or for your team.

Be Skeptical about Data Integrity

We need to be careful about how we use data. Sometimes, we pick easy-to-measure or slightly irrelevant metrics, and use them to tell a false narrative about what’s happening.

Make sure your data is reliable. The only thing worse than having no data is the illusion of having the right data.

Validate Your Ideas Early and Often

Optimize for feedback as soon as possible–in other words, understanding what customers actually want and then iterating on feedback.

Invest a small amount of work to gather data to validate your project assumptions and goals.

Improve your project estimation skills

Project estimation is one of the hardest skills that an effective engineer needs to learn.

Use Accurate Estimates to Drive Project Planning

A goo estimate is an estimate that provides a clear enough view of the project reality to allow the project leadership to make good decisions about how to control the project and hit its targets.

Project schedules often slip because we allow the target to alter estimate. A more productive approach is to use the estimates to inform project planning, rather than the other way around.

How do we produce accurate estimates?

As engineers, our jobs typically require us to fix outstanding bugs, conduct interviews, attend team meetings, hold one-on-ones with our managers, partic- ipate in pager duty rotations, train new engineers who join the team, respond to email, and tackle many other recurring duties. Once you factor in these de- tails, an 8-hour workday doesn’t actually provide 8 hours of working time on a project

Define Specific Project Goals and Measurable Milestones

Define specific goals to reduce risk and efficiently allocate time, and outline milestones to track progress. This allows us to build alignment around what tasks can be deferred and decreases the chance that a project inadvertently grows in scope.

Reduce Risk Early

Tackling the riskiest areas first helps us identify any estimation errors associated with them

Don’t Sprint in the Middle of a Marathon

There are a number of reasons why working more hours doesn’t necessarily mean hitting the launch date:

Increase the prob- ability that overtime will actually accomplish your goals by:

Part 3: Building Long-Term Value

Balance Quality with Pragmatism

High software quality enables organizations to scale and increases the rate at which engineers can produce value, and underinvesting in quality can ham- per your ability to move quickly.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to be overly dogmatic about code reviews, standardization, and test coverage—to the point where the processes provide diminishing returns on quality and actually reduce your effectiveness.

Establishing a Sustainable Code Review Process

Benefits of Code review:

Fundamentally, there’s a tradeoff between the additional quality that code reviews can provide and the short-term productivity win from spending that time to add value in other ways.

Automate testing

Repay Technical Debt

Technical debt refers to all the deferred work that’s necessary to improve the health and quality of the codebase and that would slow us down if left un- addressed.

Technical debt doesn’t just accumulate when we make quick and dirty workarounds. Whenever we write software without fully understanding the problem space, our first version will likely end up being less cleanly designed than we’d like.

The key to being a more effective engineer is to incur technical debt when it’s necessary to get things done for a deadline, but to pay off that debt peri- odically.

Minimize Operational Burden

Embrace Operational Simplicity

When engineering teams don’t focus on doing the simple thing first, they either end up being less effective over time because their energy is spent on a high upkeep cost, or they reach a point where the operational burden gets so high that they’re forced to simplify their architecture

Having too complex of an architecture imposes a maintenance cost in a few ways:

It’s fine to experiment with a new programming language for a prototype or a toy project, but think hard before using it in a new production system

Build Systems to Fail Fast

Slowly failing systems muddy the sources of code errors, making it difficult for us to discover what went wrong.

Inevitably, bugs will arise and soft- ware will be misconfigured, and we will need to spend time reproducing the issues and pinpointing the sources of errors. The more directly we can link the feedback to a source, the more quickly that we can reproduce the problem and address the issue.

By failing fast, we can more quickly and effectively surface and address issues.

Relentlessly Automate Mechanical Tasks

When deciding whether to automate, the judgment call that an engineer must make is: Will I save more time overall by manually doing a particular task or by paying the upfront cost of automating the process?

Engineers automate less frequently than they should, for a few reasons:

Activities where automation can help include:

Make Batch Processes Idempotent

An idempotent process produces the same results regardless of whether it’s run once or multiple times

When idempotence isn’t possible, structuring a batch process so that it’s at least retryable or reentrant can still help. A retryable or reentrant process is able to complete successfully after a previous interrupted call.

Hone Your Ability to Respond and Recover Quickly

Building confidence in your ability to recover lets you proceed more boldly.

Invest in Your Team’s Growth

Investing in onboarding is just one way to invest in your team’s growth. Investing in other people’s success is important for another reason: you can get swept up the ladder with them.

Make Hiring Everyone’s Responsibility

Design a Good Onboarding Process

Share Ownership of Code

There’s a common misconception that being the sole engineer responsible for a project increases your value. While that can feel good and may even increase your job security, it also comes with a cost.

Identifying others on your team who can relieve some of those demands gives you more freedom to focus on other high-leverage activities.

Build Collective Wisdom through Post-Mortems

The more you learn from each experience, the more you’ll take with you into your next project, and the more you’ll succeed.

Build a Great Engineering Culture

This will help you be more productive, streamline decisions, and recruit other strong en- gineers. You build a great culture by fostering the same habits you need to effectively deliver impact.

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