Engineering

The office debate seems to never end, with lots of companies now demanding on-site work, both established corporations and fast-growing AI and tech startups. I see posts on social media from people who don’t understand why people want to work from home, while others state that they would quit immediately if their employer forced them back to the office full time. Companies face a difficult trade-off between the benefits of in-person collaboration and the assumption that being in the office leads to higher productivity, on the one hand, and employees’ work–life balance, focus, stress levels, and personal freedom on the other. For many engineers, working from home enables greater productivity through fewer interruptions and more time for focused work. ...

A few days ago (May 19) I attended the AI fokus conference. I attended last year as well, and I think this year’s version was improved with even better talks. It was a great venue, very well planned with good breaks for coffee and lunch and I had lots of interesting conversations with different people during the breaks. Always fun to meet people you haven’t seen in a few years. ...

We need to talk about feedback loops. Short feedback loops are the heartbeat of Agile. Once, cutting development cycles to two weeks was a massive achievement (and for many, it still is). But the core principle, learning quickly from what we build, seems to have been lost, even though the tools to do it are better than ever. Continuous delivery, continuous discovery, and releasing features to users early and often are now standard for many web-based products. Some ship dozens of times a day, others test with users early and often. Even for teams dealing with hardware or complex deployment cycles, the potential for rapid feedback exists. ...

Here are some blog posts and articles I thought found interesting the last month. (Books will be covered separately.) AI related Bob has written two good blog posts with scathing critique on how many organisations adopt AI and neglect solving their real issues. I found them very interesting and funny, even though I don’t agree with everything. AI won’t save your dysfunctional organisation “I recently watched a team use AI to generate a comprehensive competitive analysis. The document was impressive: well-structured, extensively detailed, professionally formatted. It was also built entirely on the team’s flawed assumptions about their market position, which the AI had helpfully elaborated into fifty pages of confident wrongness.” Ouch. I don’t fully agree with point 4, there are lots of good managers as well and in a best case scenario, they get to spend more time doing valuable things - spread knowledge, improve clarity, solving problems, coordinating, helping their teams grow and develop. ...

The urgency gap Over the last few months, I’ve sat across from product leaders and engineers in different companies and they all told me the same story: a frustration from product managers and the leadship team about lack of urgency in dev teams and whether they truly care about the company’s success. Product leaders and managers are super eager to deliver new features and to fulfill commitments to customers, but feel that the development teams are slow and don’t care if a feature gets pushed. “Why don’t the engineers feel a sense of urgency? They don’t care if a feature gets delayed for weeks!” “It feels like they don’t care about the success of the company!”. ...