CPP - My framework to be the best team in the team
Be candid
- Share your honest thoughts and motivations
- Show your struggles, even to your superiors and reports
Be Proactive
- Challenge the status quo
- Openly address issues
- Try to learn something new every day
Be Pragmatic, not dogmatic
- Don't just follow a solution just because of past experiences or because some other engineer said so
- Always try to find the balance between engineering and business priorities
- Understand and communicate that addressing debt that hurts productivity also has a (hidden) business impact.
How I mentor "junior-heavy" teams
TODO: Add pragmatic engineer post
Excerpt:
Coding
- Pair less experienced engineers with more experienced ones
- Supportive code reviews. Encourage not just offline ones, but talking code over
- Mob programming exercises
- Review their code, and work and give (supportive) feedback
- Where do they need the most support to grow? Can you help?
- With direct feedback
- With mentoring yourself
- With connecting them with mentors
- With pairing (and letting them drive)
- This is where having been a senior engineer can be really helpful
Engineering practices
- Discuss what "quality" means on the team, and document them Definition of Done on a feature. Discuss, document, follow.
- Complete relevant courses on technology used
- Summarize learnings
Getting things done
- Expose them to the business
- Product manager / designer / data scientist collaborating directly with people
- Share business goals, updates
- Team and org-wide demos
- Start small
- Give smaller, better defined tasks to them. This might mean cutting scope, and doing more pre-work (for you, the manager, and the PM)
Mistakes, outages, bugs
- Expect them, and embrace them. Do NOT create a culture of fear
Expectations
- Career ladder: define what their level looks like, and what the next level is
- Competencies: define the dimensions on which they are evaluated (e.g. coding, architecture, execution etc)
- Current situation: figure out (with them where they are. Make a plan to close the most pressing gaps)
Be realistic
- It will take time to grow
- Progress will be slower
- Set expectations upwards, and hold your back for the team
- Can you bring in seniors externally (e.g. contractors) for the sake of mentoring? Try it!
- Do celebrate progress and wins. One step at a time!
