jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
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Subcategories: Other, Productivity
Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback - Jaewon Yoon , Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal and Ashley Whillans A nice older article that crossed my desk again arguing that you’ll get more open and useful input from a broader range of people people by asking for “advice” than “feedback”. As always, you don’t need to follow every piece of advice you get, but you should at least take the advice seriously enough to consider.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Delegation | Strategy: Prioritization |
Scaling yourself as an engineering manager - Sally Lait When our responsibilities grow, we need to grow too. That means focussing on the truly important, not doing the things that simply don’t make the cut of the priority list, getting the help you need. Not discussed in this article, though it’s at least as important, is delegating tasks and efforts you know how to do well and were doing previously to your team members, helping them grow as well. This article also gives some time...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
Own Your Feedback (Part 1): Receive Better Feedback by Asking - Padmini Pyapali We’ve talked about giving feedback to our team members, but we need feedback, too - from our managers, or researcher’s we’re supporting, or other stakeholders. Pyapali makes some specific recommendations for getting good feedback from others. They all involve asking, and how to ask: Be Timely and Specific - you’ll get better feedback if you’re asking soon after the thing you’re asking about, and if you ask specific questions Provide a Reason...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Managing Up | Managing Your Career: Other |
Get More Feedback This Week - Laura Tacho Specific guidance along the lines of what we discussed last week about getting more feedback: Be specific - ask for super-specific feedback/advice/guidance Be timely - ask for it immediately after what you want input on, or even before Be gracious - reward the behaviour you want to see more of! Thanking them, taking the input seriously, and even letting them know later how you incorporated the input makes it more likely you’ll get good feedback in the...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity | Strategy: Prioritization |
Too Many Things - Sven Amann As research computing team members and managers, we all have way too many things on our plate, and the battle to being productive and effective is focussing relentlessly on our priorities and letting less important tasks slide. I actually generally do a pretty decent job of that - except when workloads peak and I’m much busier than normal, which is of course exactly when I need to be best at focussing on the priorities. In this blog post, Sven...
Continue...Getting in the room - Will Larson One problem we sometimes have, when “managing up” within our organization, or trying to work with research communities, is the struggle to be in the right room when decisions are being made. Research computing staff, being a supporting role, can often be an afterthought (if thought of at all) when making plans, funding decisions, or setting strategy — with the end result that sometimes decisions are made which are unimplementable, or implementable only with great difficulty, when it...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Time management when everything’s a priority - Elizabeth Harrin, Girl’s Guide to PM Most of these items are things you will have seen before, but even pros routinely practice the basics: Schedule Your Time Know the Difference Between Urgent and Important Understand Your Priorities Delegate and Help Plan at Different Levels Know When You are Most Productive Deal With Email Integrate Your Schedules Deal With Conflicts Stay Positive I recently tackled two things on this list. I started blocking off my schedule for tasks that...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Email Etiquette: How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response - Jocelyn Glei As you move up in research computing (or anywhere really) you start communicating more, especially upwards, with people whose attention is torn between more and more things. That means for your emails to work you have to make them increasingly self-contained but also concise. There’s 9 points here but four of them are key tools in my kit: Lead with the ask - You’re sending this email to achieve...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Offboarding |
OffBoarding as an Engineering Leader - Iccha Sethi We’ve had a few articles here about your-first-90-days at a new job; this is an article about your last days as a manager as you move to a new position. Sethi mentions several areas to focus on: Your team - informing them, and documenting pending performance issues, salary, equity, or promotion status, and then informing them of the departure Documenting the status of the team as a whole and their projects Documenting the status of any projects...
Continue...Things I Learned from Looking at 500 Research Computing Manager Jobs over 10 Months - Jonathan Dursi (me) As you know, the newsletter has always had a section on job postings for leads and managers of research computing teams, and since June I’ve also been keeping them on a job board. We’ve now hit 500 jobs that were posted at one time or another, so I thought I’d summarize the patterns I’ve seen: There are a lot of jobs out there for people managing research...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Technical Leadership: Other |
Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. - Will Larson When I was asked at my SORSE talk if it was possible to be both lead developer and manager, I replied that anything was possible but it is really, really hard. The most stressed I’ve been in the last couple of years was when I’ve had both significant technical and managerial responsibilities - they are completely different skillsets requiring your mind to be in different kinds of places. Bouncing between the two is definitely playing...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People - Daniel Markovitz It came up in our discussions of some “measuring developer productivity” articles last year that, especially in research, teams are productive, not individuals. And to make teams productive you have to spend time (leveraged!) time of making sure your team processes are working smoothly. That means ensuring good communications, making work visible (we’ve been pushing towards Jira and Confluence - it’s been a slog bug we’re starting to see the benefits) and clarifying communications...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness - Tim Cochran This is aimed at software developers, but much of it would apply just as easily to those running systems or curating research data. Team members are effective if they’re quickly and frequently getting feedback - did this change work, does this solution meet the requestor’s needs - and not waiting for things or having their day chopped up into little pieces. That means as managers it’s important to make sure we have the tooling and processes in place to...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing Your Career: Other |
Writing Is One of the Best Things You Can Invest In, as a Software Engineer. The More Experienced People Become, the More They Tend to Realize This. - Gergely Ortoz Speaking of non-technical skills being underrepresented in technical job descriptions… Communicating well is absolutely essential part of a job in any interdisciplinary endeavour like research computing, and written communication is becoming absolutely vital as teams go remote. That doesn’t necessarily mean particularly good grammar or vocabulary - we’re an international community, many in our community...
Continue...Maximize your mentorship: search and secure - Neha Batra I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that as research computing managers we are given precious little guidance, or useful advice. If we want those things, we have to seek them out ourselves. Like with putting together a solid list of job requirements, the steps for finding and recruiting mentors to give us some advice aren’t surprising or challenging - there’s no “One Weird Trick for Getting Mentorship”. You just have to figure out what you’re...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured - Just Not How You’d Expect - Antoine Boulanger, OKAY A while ago we had a flurry of “measuring developer productivity” articles, mainly pointing out that the idea was a bit misguided. There’s a management book, “How to Measure Anything”, which I think of as “Error Bars for Business Types”. Fine book as far as that goes; not really for us as an audience. But one point that book made stuck with me - as managers, the purpose of a...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing A Team: Other |
The SPACE of Developer Productivity - Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, ACM Queue We’ve covered several times the challenges of measuring developer productivity, particularly individual developer productivity. Forsgren et al walk us through recent literature on the subject, disabusing us of some common myths and encouraging us to instead, as managers of developers, keep an eye on the SPACE dimensions of how well our team is doing: Satisfaction and well-being - employee satisfaction, developers having the tools...
Continue...One mentor isn’t enough. Here’s how I built a network of mentors - Erika Moore We’ve talked about assembling a group of mentors before, such as in #60. People by and large are more than happy to give advice and suggestions to others coming up in their field. Here Moore, writing in Science’s careers section, gives very specific and useful steps about how to build a network of people that one can ask for advice: Cast a wide net Get to the point - send...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Always be quitting - Julio Merino If we knew we were quitting (or just going on a long vacation) in two months, what would we be doing differently at work? Probably documenting a lot more, making sure people were coming to meetings so that they could take our place when we weren’t there, training up people to be able to take over parts of our role for us. But those activities are key and routine parts of being an effective manager or technical leader. Merino...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Writing is Networking for Introverts - Byrne Hobart This is an older (2019) article that recently started circulating again, and I really like it. Relationships are a key part of being an effective leader, and for building your career. Trust speeds collaboration, and we trust people we already know and have interacted with. Increase the circle of people who trust you (and you trust) so you can have more effective and frequent collaborations requires building your relationship network. “Networking” has come to sound like a...
Continue...Stop Looking For Mentors Stay SaaSy We could all use a bit more mentorship, but searching for A Mentor may make it harder to get the input we need. This article suggests making it easier on yourself: Instead of looking for a mentor, just find somebody who can answer some questions you have. Then, if you think they can answer some more, ask them again. In reality, a mentor is mostly just somebody that answers questions more than once. That’s it. It’s not cinematic.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
The Best Leaders are Feedback Magnets — Here’s How to Become One - Shivani Berry Relatedly, if we want to grow, we need good, actionable, feedback. In our industry, a lot of our directors are pretty hands off, which certainly has advantages but means we don’t get the guidance we’d benefit from. Berry has two broad categories of recommendations for how to get more feedback and accelerate your growth: Learn how to accept feedback well - manage your knee-jerk reaction, think of it as an...
Continue...Navigating Your Career Towards Your Own Definition of Success - Miri Yehezkel Your Action Plan to DRI Your Career - Cate Huston There’s only one person in charge of your career, and that’s you - you’re the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) in the lingo of Apple’s internal decision-making process. Huston spells out concrete steps to take in planning your next move; Yehezkel’s article talks more about figuring out what you want, and how to prepare yourself at your current position before taking those next steps....
Continue...Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter - Alex Chesser If you’re interested in working in the private sector at all, this is a worthwhile read. No, you shouldn’t hop on a call with everyone who sends you span on LinkedIn. But as Chesser says, there are real jobs out there with good recruiters sourcing for them. And you can’t always tell who is who from the messages. Chesser provides some scripts for interacting with recruiters. The scripts aim to weed out low-value...
Continue...Don’t Worry, You’re Not Wasting Your Mentor’s Time - Lara Hogan Can’t agree with Hogan’s post enough. It’s worth finding mentors (multiple mentors, who have different areas of expertise) and consulting them often. I have a few semi-regular calls with research computing team leads, mentors, and others who sometimes have questions or are looking for advice. It’s a joy to speak with them. I sometimes offer perspectives or insights, and some fraction of what I share ends up being useful, but I get at least...
Continue...Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum - Charity Majors As I’m decidedly back on the IC side of this particular pendulum, this has been on my mind a little bit. Majors raises two anxieties she’s heard people have with this: “What if I never get another shot at people management”, and “am I too rusty to go back”. In both cases, her advice lines of strongly with my experience. For the first one, you’ll have to have to actively fight off opportunities to go back...
Continue...Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team - Gergely Orosz There’s no perfect jobs, but there are bad jobs, and there are overall good jobs which nonetheless are a very bad match to what you personally prefer and want to be doing every day. Once you get an offer you can start reverse-interviewing in earnest. I don’t mean the “what does success look like in this role” kind of question you ask in the last 5 minutes of a 60 minute interview slot, I mean...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact - Brie Wolfson, First Round Review We start off in tech with ticket trackers and to-do lists, and tend to carry that through to our first leadership jobs. But they’re inadequate when you become a manager or lead. As a leader you no longer have the comfort of merely being responsible for set of discrete tasks that can be independently ticked off. You’re probably not even only responsible for individual projects. No, you’re...
Continue...Preparing to Tell Your Boss “I Quit” - Nihar Chhaya and Dorie Clark, HBR So knowing that, you’re going to take that new position anyway? Great! You’ve got this. Now you just have to tell your boss. (And by the way — you have to tell your manager before your peers or your team members. You just do. I’ve seen people try to do it the other way. It’s worse for everyone.) Like preparing for any awkward conversation at work, there’s really no way forward...
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