How do you communicate with non-tech stakeholders?
Learn how not to overwhelm your non-tech partners with all the tech details.
Two themes reappeared in multiple newsletters I’ve read for this digest.
Communication is a must-have skill for engineers. Coding can only get you so far.
Comparing yourself with others will cause you both to not act and make you feel bad. Stop doing it.
The first one is quite a recurring theme well beyond this digest, meaning it is probably quite important. If you are an engineer struggling with communication and soft skills, go invest in that.
The second one does not come up often. But you probably know how comparing yourself with that super successful dude from Instagram/LinkedIn/Whatever makes you feel. It is not fun. Let go of that comparison and focus on yourself.
Engineering Influence: How to Communicate for Real Product Impact (6 min)
As an engineer, you realize (hopefully) quite quickly the importance of communication. Just writing code does not make what you are doing successful. Product Managers prioritize bets using value and effort as inputs and need you to estimate the effort part. Product designers create all kinds of magnificent UX designs, but they need you to tell them what’s feasible. Data analysts sift through the data for insights, but they need you to set them up with all the events. Each of those (and other) roles plays their part in making you and your team successful. You need to effectively communicate with all these people. Otherwise, your coding itself is not gonna cut it at a certain point.
We engineers tend to miss the audience and appropriate level of detail quite often. We go on blabbering about our CI/CD pipelines, transactional outboxes, or god knows what else in front of our PMs, designers, and other non-tech folks. Some do it because they are unaware of the audience, and some even do it thinking all that tech buzz will impress people. Read this article from
to stop doing that and make your team more successful.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to communicate to a non-technical audience
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
Growing the Development Forest 🌲 — with Martin Fowler (1h podcast)
This one requires no introduction.
hosts the legendary Martin Fowler as they have a chat on the impact of AI 🤖, managing tech debt ⚖️ and the state of agile 📜.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about impact of AI, tech debt and agile
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How Fear of Doing Worse Holds Us Back From True Career Growth (6 min)
Being risk-averse has its upsides, and being careful has its upsides. Often, the root cause behind being risk-averse is fear of failure. Perhaps have some friends preparing for interviews for months (sometimes even years) without ever applying or not joining a course, activity, or band for feeling inadequate. You need to fail to succeed and this article is all about that.
PS: overcoming fear holding you back innevitably reminds me of Litany Against Fear from the Frenk Herbert’s Dune universe 🏜️.
Audience: Anyone really
Value: Learn not to fear failure
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The 1 Career Secret Nobody Tells You: It’s Okay to Not Know (6 min)
There is so much content out there on engineers working in big tech companies, crazy-fast promotions stories, engineers making tons of money, etc. Reading all this can have an Instagram-like effect on you where you feel like a failure after reading about so much success you are not a part of. I love this article because it tells you not to blindly chase what everyone else is chasing and not to feel bad about it.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn to align your career with what you want to do
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Working from Europe for a US company is the ultimate career and lifestyle hack (3 min)
If you want to make a lot of money, the US is the place to be 🇺🇸. If you want to spend money wisely, Europe is the place to be 🇪🇺.
‘s simple advice is to work for a high-paying US company from Europe and get the best of both 💡. 🇺🇸 + 🇪🇺 = 😎Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how the get the best of the US and EU
ToT Rating: ⭐
How I was able to get promoted while constant reorganization (6 min)
If you haven’t heard of the word reorg recently you are among the lucky ones. Reorgs can leave engineers thrown in another part of the org, with scrapped projects or without managers that had all the context about their previous performance. This article shares some first-hand advice on how to navigate reorgs like a boss and even grow career in spite of them.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Learn to navigate reorgs
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s it for this Monday! ✅