I’ve been reading and writing engineering peer reviews for a long time (almost twenty years - where does the time go?), and the vast majority of these are a waste of time for the reviewer and the individual in question. For the record, I think peer reviews are fantastic and we should leverage them more - but they need to be carefully structured and cultivated so that everyone benefits from the exercise.

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We all know that technical interviews are broken. Or so say the majority of the folks on the internet who have an opinion to share. I want to join the side of the argument who admits that something isn’t working for technical interview models, but I think “broken” is the wrong word. I want to argue that technical interviews tend to optimize for the wrong things, and the fundamental problem is optimizing for scale. How repeatable is the interview? How many interviewers can effectively run this interview loop? What candidate through-put can we reach? What’s our effective time-to-hire with this interview? How consistent are our output metrics for candidates experiencing this interview? Do you see how none of these questions are anything like: how well will this candidate perform in this position?

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This is not a post about using <your favorite ai tooling> to write your performance reviews. Don’t do that. This is a post about how to leverage your team to do a lot of your performance review work on your behalf. This works best on growth oriented teams that cultivate a high degree of psychological safety (I have thoughts about achieving this). It will also work better if your leadership style tends toward servant or transformational.

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I recently read Ease of maintenance is a feature along with some HN commentary. I walked away from this nodding emphatically along with the concept that ease of maintenance is a feature, and choosing sides among the crowd who are for or against a particular implementation or language. I also walked away a little angry that Ronak pointed out something important, gave some candidate assessment tooling, but didn’t provide instructions for actually developing this ‘feature.’ While I’m not going to solve the entire problem for you in this post, I am going to attempt to convince you that dependency management is critical to ease of maintenance.

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Full disclosure: I am in the middle of an adventure in uncharted territories. I’m one of those individual contributors who turned to management because it made sense for some number of reasons that felt more beneficial than my urges to continue making individual contributions. I like to pretend that I’m on some sort of engineer-manager pendulum, but in truth I’m just moving from one challenge I don’t yet understand to the next. As I’ve stumbled through management territory, I found a few things that seem to work and have gotten positive feedback from others. I’m writing this to solidify my understanding of these tactics, put them out for wider review, and to ask for feedback on how to improve them.

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