Out Of Scope

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Out Of Scope - #2

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Out Of Scope - #2

The worst type of bug

Emily Kager
Mar 14, 2022
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Out Of Scope - #2

emilykager.substack.com

Welcome Back!

Pop quiz! What’s the worst type of bug?

Well, from experience I would have to say stomach bug, which is how I spent most of this week down and out. After living in bubbles for 2 years, I guess we should all be prepared for our coddled immune systems to react strongly to anything they encounter now. Be careful out there!

… I still managed to emerge and get in a dig at Tesla fanbois though. I crave the drama.

Twitter avatar for @EmilyKager
Emily Kager @EmilyKager
it’s a joke unless you are offended and then it’s not
10:06 PM ∙ Mar 10, 2022
699Likes41Retweets

The Case For Mob Reviewing

You’ve all heard of pair and mob programming but something we’ve been trying recently in our team is pair or mob reviewing.

I currently work on a platform team so our team reviews a lot of code that my immediate teammates didn’t write. It has been difficult to onboard newer members of the team (including me!) to the huge scope of all the different changes that come through our review queue. Our onboarding docs included a collection of past reviews as examples of “bad changes” that needed to be blocked in the past or caused outages. These are helpful but didn’t cover all of the everyday cases!

So what is mob reviewing? It’s exactly as it sounds, we schedule a weekly meeting where whoever can make it goes through our team review queue together. We’ve also tried to curate interesting or complex changes to each other, but this can be more time consuming, and sometimes the benign is helpful to chat about as well.

On my smaller team at work, there are only two engineers including myself (is two really a “team”? maybe a pair?). We build components used by other teams, so we get a lot of external contributions/changes to our code. If there are some larger or more complicated changes in our queue, we will schedule quick 5-10 minute meetings a la carte to chat through the changes and review together.

We don’t do this for reviewing each other’s code as often, but I think with the right attitudes (constructive and respectful, not attacking), it could work there too! Designers already do this with their synchronous design crits.

Why?

  • to knowledge share from teammates with more context to teammates with less context

  • to catch more potential issues when talking through changes

  • to onboard and level up new team members

  • to build confidence for all teammates for reviewing without context

  • to get reviews done in a timely manner

  • to connect the remote team

Does anyone do something similar? Would this work for your team? Do you do anything else unique to onboard new team members?

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ICMYI

We talk about the hot engineering market most times as a good thing. You can quit your job and go get a better one! But we don’t talk often about the cost on the people left behind who aren’t quitting their jobs (and not everyone can or wants to).

  • Normal burnout as tickets pile up with fewer people to work on them

  • Morale and motivation hits as you see your teams shrinking and maybe feel under-compensated and undervalued

  • The burden of interviewing and onboarding new employees

  • Exhausting priority churn

Do you all have a weekly limit on interviews you do?

Leave a comment

Twitter avatar for @GergelyOrosz
Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz
One thing I heard very little talk is interviewer burnout at high-growth companies (both startups and big tech). When Uber in Amsterdam doubled in six months, me and others were doing 4-5, sometimes 6 interviews per week. It was hell. Several ppl developed "interview burnout."
6:27 PM ∙ Mar 7, 2022
810Likes54Retweets

The hottest topic of the moment is the RTO (return to office).

I’m going to include some discussion next week about the RTO debate so please comment your hot takes (on both sides of the argument). Its important to note on every hot take of the debate - who benefits from this position? Most people I know including myself want remote flexibility, but are there any negatives to remote work?

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Twitter avatar for @ndsnas
san @ndsnas
lmfao come on
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2:54 PM ∙ Mar 6, 2022
156,773Likes16,891Retweets

I definitely do not miss the commute.

Twitter avatar for @karenkho
Karen K. Ho @karenkho
Reasons why people don't want to return to offices: -commuting -dress codes -the cost of buying lunch -the hassle of packing lunch -the necessity of code-switching -distractions from open-office layouts -poorly ventilated meeting rooms -commuting
1:03 AM ∙ Mar 6, 2022
257,646Likes38,444Retweets

I love uses of tech for good.

Twitter avatar for @KodyKinzie
Kody @KodyKinzie
Some idiot texted me a phishing link to steal crypto wallets so I've been sending him the entire bee movie script thousands of times using Owasp Zap
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5:11 AM ∙ Mar 6, 2022
2,577Likes332Retweets

That’s it folks!

Stay safe and healthy and see you next week!

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Out Of Scope - #2

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1 Comment
Cesar
Mar 18, 2022

Regarding the ICMYI section:

I couldn't agree more. I think it's happening more often than we think, we just don't talk enough about it. Thanks!

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