Senior to staff engineer curriculum, part 5 of many: View from above

Doc to read: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 


This session is all about... executives. How do they work? What do they do? What problems do they have?


Prompts for discussion:

  • Let’s talk about signal vs noise - what do you see execs struggling with and how can you help?

    • Do you have the same problem when you delegate?

  • Sometimes exec decisions are based off things you didn’t expect.  Tell me about a time when this happened to you, what was the eventual outcome?

  • Engineers tend to have the deep view, Execs have the broad view.  What should you anticipate when presenting to Execs?

  • Who actually makes decisions at DD?  (This place doesn’t seem very hierarchical to me.)

  • How do Execs at DD influence company and org direction?

  • What implicit values do you see execs displaying?  How can you do similar things when you’re leading?

  • Look at an Exec’s calendar, how much context switching do you see?  What does this tell you about how they work? (How much trouble can 1 engineer cause in a year? What about an org of 1000 of them?)

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