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Monday 3-2-1 — zombie scrum, cattle vs pets, hiring for diversity

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💡 Monday 3-2-1

Monday 3-2-1 — zombie scrum, cattle vs pets, hiring for diversity

Edition #3

Luca Rossi
Jun 20, 2022
7
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Monday 3-2-1 — zombie scrum, cattle vs pets, hiring for diversity

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Hey, Luca here — welcome to the Monday 3-2-1 💡

Every Monday I will send you an email like this with 3 short ideas about:

  1. 🎽 Engineering Management

  2. 🔨 Technical Strategy

  3. 🎒 Hiring & Onboarding

I also send an original long-form article every Thursday, like the last one:

  • Scaling Your Team from 5 to 250 Engineers

To receive all the full articles and support Refactoring, consider subscribing 👇


1) 🎽 Zombie Scrum

Whatever methods and processes you use for work, it is healthy to tweak them and make them suit your team better.

For example, many smart teams take Scrum and use only ~60% of it, adapting the rest to their workflow. I call it Zombie Scrum.

Some common tweaks are:

  • Replace daily scrum with something lighter / async. We did this ourselves.

  • Release work continuously instead of only at the end of the Sprint.

  • Have fewer retrospectives — e.g. every month / quarter instead than every Sprint.

I wrote more about Scrum in a previous article 👇

Refactoring
Does Scrum make sense in 2022? 🤔
Software development continuously reinvents itself. Practices, languages and frameworks all change at a fast pace. This is less true, historically, for the development cycle itself. When it comes to how we work together, there hasn’t been much progress over classic frameworks like…
Read more
a year ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Luca Rossi

2) 🔨 Treat your servers like cattle, not pets

In a presentation around 2011, Randy Bias famously said: treat your servers like cattle, not pets.

Here is an excerpt from Randy himself:

In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a heard. For Example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.

The metaphor is clear. Pets are expensive, fragile, and require bespoke work. Cattle is homogeneous, their maintenance is standard and each individual can be replaced (sorry, cows! 🐄).

It is a beautiful picture that applies to much more than infrastructure.

The essence of engineering is turning pets into cattle.

3) 🎒 Hire for diversity early on

In the U.S., women hold 14% of software engineering jobs, while black and hispanic workers sit between 6 and 8%.

The best way to bring in women and underrepresented minorities in your team is to do it very early on.

Other than making your team better, this creates a virtuous cycle where you become a magnet for that kind of talent.

Doing it early is critical because it becomes very hard to bring in diverse talent after you have already amassed a big gender / cultural imbalance in your company.

I covered more hiring strategies here 👇

Refactoring
How to Win at Hiring Against Big Companies ⚔️
As a former founder I often speak with other founders to discuss our respective experiences. One of the most common topics is hiring — especially engineering hiring. A popular complaint is that it's hard for startups to compete against big companies, who have deep pockets and enticing career paths…
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2 years ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Luca Rossi

And that’s it for today — I wish you a great week! 🚀 If you liked the article, consider doing any of these:

1) ❤️ Share it — Refactoring lives thanks to word of mouth. Share the article with your team or with someone to whom it might be useful!

Share

2) ✉️ Subscribe to the newsletter — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. That also gives you access to the community and the curated library.

p.s. 30-days money-back guarantee, no questions asked!


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Monday 3-2-1 — zombie scrum, cattle vs pets, hiring for diversity

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