Teaching and managing for technologists
summary
Personal story of switching from coder to manager with concrete takeaways: helped Reed College students learn to code; started managing a 5 person team that grew to close to 50 people at a fast‑growing microblogging company and hit painful scale (22 direct reports was untenable); recommends rules like the 25% rule (make each report 25% more effective), avoid coding on core paths, run hack weeks, write tech ladders (see GitHub Urban Airship) and track burnout, promotions and recruiting.
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:38Managers are overhead
- 9:29Success stories
- 10:21Team growth
- 10:55Technical and organizational debt
- 12:45Standups
- 13:15New manager
- 13:43Do no harm
- 15:21Get to know your team
- 16:26One-on-one meetings
- 20:44Being available
- 23:24Managers should not code
- 24:28Recruiting
- 25:58Programmers as managers
- 26:15Velocity
- 29:20Technical skills
- 33:27Effective manager
- 33:46Deep experts
- 37:26Values
- 37:50Incentives
- 39:41Compensation
- 40:39Tech ladders
- 42:07Why hiring
- 42:36Bad meetings
- 44:10Difficult conversations
- 46:05Be clear
- 47:08Cut yourself some slack
- 47:34Measure
- 48:01Peer groups
- 49:00Demand
- 49:19The 25 Rule
- 49:52Hack the organization
- 50:09Try something new
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