What Do Executives Do, Anyway?

Engineering Impact is a weekly newsletter that highlights trends in engineering leadership, productivity, culture, and scaling development teams.

This week features posts on: 

• What Do Executives Do Anyway?
• Engineering Career Development at Etsy
• Scaling Organizational Empathy With Box’s VPE
• 21st Century Recruiting

 

CAREER LADDERS

Engineering Career Development at Etsy

Here, Ryan Bateman shares Etsy's Engineering Career Ladder, along with a guide on how they designed and developed it and how they’ve continued to shape it over the past year. 

Read the Full Post [12 min]

 

LEADERSHIP

What Do Executives Do, Anyway?

Avery Pennarun, Co-founder at Tailscale, reflects on Andy Grove’s High Output Management to discuss the job of an executive in a large organization, which in part is to “ratify decisions” (not to make decisions, but just to listen and endorse good decisions). Then, the “failure modes” outlined in this post are particularly useful as they look at what happens when the executive is overly involved or absent in decision making. 

Read the Full Post [10 mins]

 

SCALING

Scaling Organizational Empathy With Box's VPE, Saminda Wijegunawardena

As a company grows, the ever-increasing distance between individuals within the organization can begin to erode at their ability to execute. In this interview, Box's VPE shares five strategies for combating abstraction and strengthening alignment at scale. 

Read the full post [10 mins]

 

RECRUITING

21st Century Recruiting

“Talent is not hired—talent is grown.” Avishai Ish-Shalom, Engineer in Residence at Aleph VC, asks “where does talent come from?” and points out that in software engineering—where there are DevOps engineers, full-stack devs, data scientists—many of these professions didn’t exist until recently. He says “instead, hire people with the ability and motivation to learn and adapt, and then build an organization with the right culture to support them.” 

Read the full post [8 mins]