Leadership insights, thoughts from lived experiences and readings
Do you need to understand philosophy to be a great leader? Do you need to have a leadership philosophy of your own? How will you build one if you are not knowledgable on philosophy in the first place? A leadership philosophy is a structured approach to leading others. Leaders often write philosophies as a guiding… Continue reading Leadership and Philosophy
Last month a medium article on payments ecosystem through a LinkedIn connection Ahmed Siddiqui caught my eye. It's part of a series of articles on how debit and credit cards work end to end. I found the article very informative and the author an ex-marqetan. When I reached out over slack, he told me about… Continue reading The Anatomy of the Swipe: Making Money Move by Ahmed Siddiqui
Will Skill Matrix or Skill Will Matrix is a way to assess your employee’s skill and willingness to do a specific task. Based on that assessment, you can choose how to best manage the employee towards success. An employee will fall into one quadrant or another depending on the task and their skill and will.… Continue reading Will Skill Matrix
AHappyJob, an online portal for job-seekers, recently contacted me to ask a few questions around challenges of leading engineering teams. They published a blog post with my answer about it here - http://blog.ahappyjob.com/the-challenges-of-leading-engineering-teams/ What do you wish engineers understood about the challenges their managers go through? My Answer: When engineering managers are giving relatively high… Continue reading The Challenges of Leading Engineering Teams – AHappyJob Post
A good quote on leadership related to lack of bias for action - "A decision is better than no decision". Something similar we say in chess, "A bad plan is better than no plan".
Today I finished The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition). This is one of the 2 books that I have been procrastinating for two decades to read. The other book is The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. When pragmatic programmer came out 20 years back, it was a phenomenon… Continue reading The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition
I finished listening to High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove this week. I felt this book is a bit outdated as it was written 37 years back. For that time, it must have been a good book as Grove spelled out a lot of now well-known management tactics and strategies in this book. Also as… Continue reading High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
When it comes to job satisfaction, software engineers score high marks across the industry. I wanted to check what are some of the major components of job satisfaction for you. These may very well be the building blocks to create a job satisfaction index for software engineers. Here is my list in the order I… Continue reading Job Satisfaction Index for Software Engineers
Today I finished The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhou. This is a recent management book target to new managers or those who are mostly in line management level as opposed to mid-level management or executive leadership. The book brings personal experiences of Julie starting as… Continue reading The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou
Yesterday I finished reading The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier. This is a must-have book for any software engineering manager and a great book for anyone who is even remotely involved with software engineering in any capacity. I liked the book so much that I immediately ordered… Continue reading The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier
I finished The First 90 Days by Michael D Watkins today. I don't think it's very relevant for me but at higher level of leadership, this will be a good book to check. In this book Michael elaborates below 9 points for successful transition of leaders into new jobs with new responsibilities. 1. Promote Yourself… Continue reading The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
These are some of the topics that a standard backend engineer should know. Here we are consciously excluding any particular tool, framework or programming language. Instead we want to focus on topics related to high level system design and architecture. It can't be an exhaustive list ever. I will try my best to keep adding… Continue reading High Level System Design and Architecture Topics
Leader's Whiteboard 