How to run a spike
Timeboxed investigation is the cheapest way to buy certainty, and most teams do it in a way that produces neither certainty nor code.
#engineering-management
14 pieces tagged engineering-management,
from April 25, 2025 to August 18, 2026.
What "done" actually means
Every team has a definition of done and most of them are a checklist nobody reads. Here is the version that changes behaviour.
The onboarding document that actually works
Most onboarding docs are written by people who already know. Here is what a new engineer needs on day one, in order.
What a staff engineer does all day
The role is genuinely ambiguous and that ambiguity is load-bearing. An attempt at a concrete description.
Platform teams that don't get resented
Internal platforms fail for predictable reasons. The successful ones share four properties.
Hiring juniors in 2026
The entry-level pipeline is breaking in a way that will be expensive in five years. Some of the fixes are cheap.
The cost of a meeting, in engineering terms
Not the hourly rate. The fragmentation. Here's why a 30-minute meeting costs four hours.
The engineer's guide to saying no
Refusing work badly is a career problem. Refusing it well is one of the most valuable things a senior engineer does.
On-call is a design problem
If your rotation is painful, that's information about your architecture, not about your people's resilience.
Documentation is a product and you should staff it like one
Every team says docs matter. Almost none of them assign an owner, a budget, or a metric.
The postmortem that changes something
Most incident reviews produce a document and a ticket that never gets done. Here's the difference.
The technical interview is measuring the wrong thing, again
Every hiring process eventually optimizes for the wrong signal. The current one has a new failure mode.