Choosing paths, technical impact, and learning frameworks 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #146
Welcome to a new edition of the Monday Ideas! Every Monday I send you a few engineering / management ideas to start the week on the right foot!
Let’s dive in! 👇
1) 🔒 Sure, you can roll your own auth — if you hate free time
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2) ⚖️ Choosing between IC and EM for your career
A pivotal moment in many people’s career is switching to a management role, or deciding to stay an individual contributor. There is often a lot of anxiety associated with this, as the difference between the roles is huge, and people feel there is no going back.
I spoke with a lot of people, especially on the podcast, about the transition, and here is the best advice I collected:
✏️ Prototype the switch — by taking on some EM duties as an IC. This is usually possible in some fashion: talk with your EM about the best way — how can you help them? In most companies, people become EM after having displayed some managerial behavior as an IC. You can explicitly go after it to figure out if 1) you are good at it, and 2) you like it.
🚪 Design an off-ramp — becoming an EM is not a promotion, it is a full career change, so it’s entirely possible you will figure out it’s not for you. You can discuss with your manager setting a probation period into the role (e.g. 6 months) which you can easily revert to your IC role if things don’t go as expected.
🔄 Consider the pendulum — managers benefit from understanding tech, and engineers from understanding mgmt. Both change over time, and I believe it can be healthy to swing between IC and EM roles over the years. So, look for healthy environments in which managers and ICs are effectively peers. In any case, do not consider the transition a one-way street: it is not, and we will see more and more hybrid roles in the future.
I wrote more advice about how to navigate your career in this full guide 👇
3) 🛠️ How to have technical impact as a manager
In recent times we have often talked about how engineering managers are becoming more technical than before, because of leaner teams and AI. But managers are also typically swamped, so you can’t expect them to jump into coding and perform neck and neck with ICs.
So, as a manager, how do you have technical impact?
Start by reflecting on the unique qualities you bring to the table, with respect to other engineers. These may vary, but the best candidate to begin with is business perspective.
As a manager, you have context into a lot of things that other engineers may not have a clue about. Is it time to invest in foundational, long-term work, or is it time to be scrappy? What is the appetite for this feature? Can we get more resources to go after this?
These constraints need to affect technical decisions, and you are the best person to make it happen. So here are the situations where you can use this to pull your technical weight 👇
Design conversations ✏️
In my experience, design conversations are the prime avenue for EMs to valuable technical impact. For two reasons:
Good design serves business — this is where you make sure interests are aligned and people build the right thing.
Good design is loosely coupled to the tech stack — even if your tech chops may decay with time, design skills are timeless and you will still retain the ability to jump in and ask good questions, even if you are not coding that much anymore.
Technical strategy 🗺️
A good tech strategy fits the wider company strategy and shows how to reach its goals by creating leverage through technology.
When it succeeds in doing so, it is a real superpower. It makes it easier to advocate for resources and it creates alignment around the work to be done.
Technical strategy can also be very technical, by including scale assumptions, buy vs build decisions, and design tradeoffs. This is all work you can have a decisive impact on.
Asking the right questions ❓
Finally, in your team’s life there is a long tail of situations where technical / semi-technical conversations happen — think of retrospectives, post-mortems, people venting about this or that decision, and so on.
In any of these, you may or may not feel like you belong. I have found that the feeling of belonging, or, conversely, the feeling of being an impostor, is prompted by the sneaky idea that you can only contribute by providing a solution to things.
That’s not true.
There is a lot — a lot — of value in just asking questions. What feels confusing about this? Why is this a constraint? What would the perfect solution look like, and why? What if we had just 2 days to build it?
On technical matters, people on your team will almost always be in the better spot for making the right call, but you can still help them. You can make them think. You can ask questions for them to answer, because you are not the best person to answer them anymore — and that’s 100% ok.
I wrote a full piece about how to stay technical as a manager below 👇
4) 🎓 The ICAP framework for learning
The ICAP framework was created in 2014 by Michelene Chi, who demonstrated how higher student engagement leads to a better learning outcome.
ICAP buckets learning experiences into four main categories, in ascending order of engagement, and, therefore, effectiveness:
🔴 Passive — experiences where you are just exposed to some learning material, like a book, or a lecture.
🟡 Active — experiences where you have exercises to complete as part of your learning like regular online courses.
🟢 Constructive — experiences where you learn by doing. Building is a core part of the learning process, like in a workshop.
🟣 Interactive — experiences where constructive learning is augmented by asking questions and getting continuous, real-time feedback, like in pair programming.
Interactive learning leads to the highest retention, especially in areas that are very hands-on, like tech skills.
So you can put popular education options on this scale, from the most passive to the most engaging: books, newsletters, online courses, workshops, 1:1 coaching, pair programming, you name it 👇
When it comes to the quality of learning, there is no doubt that the more you move to the right, the better.
However, deep interactive experiences are not always the best call. In fact, these are also:
Hard to design — it’s tough to create learning material that includes a lot of building and active stuff, as opposed to simple slides or text.
Hard to scale / expensive — the more feedback loop people need, the more bespoke the experience needs to be, the worse it scales. Some of the most interactive learning experiences in tech are pair programming and coaching, which are both 1:1.
Demanding for the learner — interactivity is about intensity. You are getting more results because you are putting in more effort. You can’t always afford that.
Passive experiences may have low retention but are also cheaper and low-effort. Sometimes that’s bad — but sometimes that’s just what you need.
E.g. I am a fan of the RealLifeLore Youtube channel to learn more about geopolitics. I don’t have a personal goal about this, so I am just happy to watch some videos, knowing that my understanding will be shallow, and retention low. Also, I usually watch them over lunch, so I really don’t have the bandwidth for more. For this use case, the passive approach is perfect!
So, I believe you can maximize learning by finding the right blend of passive and active experiences, based on what you need the learning for.
I wrote about the various ways you can invest in your engineers’ growth in this full article 👇
And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca