Do you know a good real-life example of the "Inverse Conway Maneuver"?
Learn about "Inverse Conway Maneuver" in practice and how your engineering work brings money to the table for your company.
This digest brings a beautiful example of the “Inverse Conway Maneuver” 😍. It shows how organizational structure can produce an architecture that fits the business needs well.
I am always on the lookout for great tech content. If you know great newsletter/blog authors drop a comment 💬 I will make sure to take it into account. Every piece of good engineering content will make this digest more valuable.
Being an Engineering Manager at Flo (10 min)
In this article
and share some great insights from their time working at Flo. The article is packed with practical advice coming from their real-world experience. It covers Flo’s engineering structure, A/B testing challenges, and platformization efforts.
The article contains a beautiful example of an “Inverse Conway Maneuver”. Flo is a health mobile app. Shipping apps to users frequently is hard. However, shipping backend code frequently can be done much faster. So to increase their delivery speed, they formed teams with more backend engineers and fewer mobile engineers. This incentivizes architecture decisions that move more logic to the backend 👌🌟. Simple & beautiful, love it 😍
Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers
Value: Learn great tech practices from the trenches
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from (8 min)
Sean Goedecke
Engineers tend to be disconnected from the business models of their companies. We focus on writing clean code, making sleek designs, and doing smart optimizations 🧑💻. Seldom do we ask ourselves whether our work brings enough money to pay for our salaries 🤔 🫰.
If you look at your team of engineers, and add up all their yearly salaries, you will probably get quite a large number (let’s mark it with X). You should ask yourself “How is my team contributing X+ to the company’s ARR?”. If you do not have a clear answer to that (ideally supported by numbers and metrics) your job might not be that stable 😬.
This article gives you a good framework to think about the value that you are bringing to your company.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how your engineering work brings money to the company
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
A Production Incident is an Opportunity for You (6 min)
Production incidents are usually not something engineers view as great career opportunities. Usually focus is on driving impactful initiatives. This article will show you how you can use incidents to your advantage and bring benefits both for your company and for your career.
As it is focused on finding a way to thrive in incidents it reminds me of a quote from another article “Why Firefighting Ruins Your Company“.
It easily leads to a culture where the normal, day-to-day work is not taken quite as serious as it should and people are almost waiting for things to be escalated, the task force formed and fun starting. Rather than focusing on the root causes of escalations and making changes to architectures, processes, ways of working and the culture to avoid escalations in the future, the company spirals down a path where escalations, crises and task forces become the normal way of operating.
To be very clear
‘s article is not promoting the above culture (there is even a big disclaimer on top of the article on that.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to use production incidents to your advantage
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The Power of Reframing To Change Your Career Trajectory (9 min)
Our brains are inevitably filled with biases, wrong assumptions, and negative emotions. All these quirks are not helping us to think rationally and find the best way forward. We often tend to frame situations much more negative than what they are. We see potential opportunities as dreadful challenges, potential collaborations as fierce competition, and we fear change.
This way of thinking can lead us to spend effort in the wrong direction and miss valuable opportunities coming our way. In this article
talks about how building a positive mindset can impact your career perhaps even more than any other self-improvement you can do.Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn how changing your mindset can create different outcomes
ToT Rating: ⭐
You Have Metrics — Now What? (11 min)
A few digests back we had an article on setting up DX Core 4 metrics to measure developer productivity in your engineering organization. In this one
describes how to use those metrics once you have them. She makes a good distinction between diagnostic and improvement metrics which will help you with making an action plan for acting on the results of measuring productivity.Audience: Engineering Managers / DevEx
Value: Learn how to use developer productivity metrics
ToT Rating: ⭐
Stop being so nice (5 min)
Engineering managers (especially the ones new in the role) tend to measure their success by how much their reports like them. This mindset will affect your team negatively for many reasons and this article by
will explain all of those.Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn why being nice is not nice for your team
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s all for today! ✅
See you soon!