Tilled Tech Leadership Library
This library is a resource of collected resources that I’ve found helpful along with way of my journey, learning as a leader at Tilled.
Tech Articles
Tech Culture Insight
- Reddit: How do you build a strong team in a remote environment?
- Reddit: What makes you feel valued as a developer?
- HackerNews: Opinions on owning and AWS us-east-1 outage
- Reddit: What Are your “red flags”?
- Reddit: Engineers. What would you like to see from your manager?
- Reddit: How to shape competency based interviews
- Reddit: I don’t get the corporate take on compensation
- Open Source Employee Survey - Getting Feedback
- The Poisonous Myth of Hustle
- Reddit: What is the ‘best’ behavior, you, as a leader, are not willing to tolerate?
- SRE Leadership? - biggest head aches you face
- Difference between Junior, Mid, Senior
- Paylocity’s Engineering Principles
- Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
Leading People
Hiring
- How to structure the interviews process to limit bias in hiring
- Reddit: What would your ideal technical interview look like?
- Reddit: Job ad to tell when an org wants and actually needs a SRE
- Reddit: Good questions to expect
- Engineering management 101: evaluating your team’s performance
- Reddit: SRE Job Description
- Interview Questions Top 11 🧵
- Hiring Without Whiteboards
CFPs
Talks
Newsletters
Big Lists
Podcasts
Books
Meeting the standard vs being the standard
How do we evaluate whether or not we, or our team members, are performing at a “high-level”? Is your “high-level” high enough?
- “I know it when I see it”
- Performance reviews?
- Number of tickets closed/commits/bugs/some other metric/company poll
- Being held accountable for goals
- Just be better than the worst person (NO!)
How do we encourage a culture of excellence? “Just hire good people” is part of the solution but it is certainly not the entire solution.
Without something to strive towards, it is too easy to get complacent and slowly rot, especially if we tolerate mediocrity.
1:1 Questions
Looking to make the most of your 1:1s with your manager/direct report?
People often confuse 1:1 with “status report.” But the truth is, a status report can be shared async (i.e. over Slack). Meetings — especially ones between a manager and direct report — should be leveraged for those more nuanced topics, where a quick Slack message just won’t do the trick.
If you’re a manager, this is your time to shine as an advocate and coach, while catching underlying issues before it’s too late.
Here’s a list of topics to start prioritizing in your 1:1s (with a few sample questions to get you started):
EQ check
- On a scale of 1 - 10, how stressed are you right now?
- On a scale of 1 - 10, how motivated do you feel when you start each day?
- On a scale of 1 - 10, how satisfied are you with your job right now?
- What are you most excited about at work right now?
Optimization check
- What’s eating up the most of your time right now?
- What is your biggest blocker?
- What are you struggling with the most?
- What would make your day-to-day 10% easier?
Career coaching:
- Let’s explore your top growth areas / opportunities.
- Let’s explore opportunities to take on new tasks / responsibilities.
- Let’s discuss how you’re performing against the expectations of your role.
- How can I best support you as your manager?
You don’t have to hit each of these topics every time, but prioritizing 1 or 2 of them will help ensure you and your manager/report are making the most out of your time together and addressing some of the higher impact, more critical issues outside of the usual status update.
Looking for more ways to maintain the lines of communication open with your direct report? Check out our Feedback Friday template in the comments below.