Code Capsule - Part 2

The Most Important Step Of Every Great Conversation

The Most Important Step Of Every Great Conversation

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on September 1, 2021

If you’re like me, chances are you walked into many high-stakes conversations without even realizing what was at stake, and without having either a goal or a game plan on how to achieve that goal.

And then, you walked out without understanding what the heck just happened and why everything turned out so wrong.

Having good conversations is a skill. You need to keep track of all of your interlocutors’ signals including values, beliefs, arguments, body language, logical fallacies, and so on, while keeping track of your own presence and communication.

So if on top of that you realize mid-flight that you didn’t plan exactly what preferred outcome you wanted from the interaction, then it’s game over.

Entering a conversation with a goal can be the deal-breaker that will make the conversation a success for both parties, or a drag and the beginning of a conflict.

Most shortcomings can be avoided by preparing and practicing the art of conversation, and by taking care of the most important step of all.

Making Teams Effective At Remote Work

Making Teams Effective At Remote Work

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on August 17, 2021

On my quest to make my teams effective at remote work, I went through a boatload of content. Articles, podcasts, courses, videos, everything that was relevant, I consumed and annotated.

I reviewed 40+ resources about effective remote teams so you don’t have to. Here’s my takeaway.

Unsurprisingly, all the content offered by GitLab is brilliant. They really know what they’re doing, and the quality of what they put out there has been top-notch so far. I also didn’t want to use only them as an example, so I went out of my way to find other companies, and other examples of success to form an opinion that would be as objective and as realistic as possible.

After reviewing 40+ resources, spending hours absorbing and summarizing them, and boring my friends and colleagues about it, I thought I’d put everything into a nice little package to share what I’ve learned with others. This is what his article is.

The article is geared towards managers on how to adapt teams and organizations to become effective at remote work, and not so much on how to be a more productive individual within a remote setup.

If you’re an individual contributor, you will find interesting ideas in this article nonetheless, and also ideas on how to convince your manager to help your team and organization be effective at remote work, so read on!

To create the right environment for organizations and teams to be effective and successful, the topics you must cover are the following:

Be explicit about which ‘remote’ you pick
Set a culture of remote work from the top
Embrace an async-first mentality
Adopt management by objectives
Don’t let individuals choose their WFH days
Recognize the need for meaning and bonding
Organize for physical and mental health recovery
Adapt all the supporting organizational processes

The rest of this article dives into the details for each of those topics, and at the very end, I am sharing all the useful resources which I’ve come across.

Finally, note that this article explores all the main ideas and concepts for effective remote teams and organizations. However, it doesn’t cover how you would plan a transition and then execute this transition. I will cover this aspect in a future article. Join my email list to be notified when it comes out.

Burnout Is Real, and It’s No Picnic

Burnout Is Real, and It’s No Picnic

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 28, 2021

Every knowledge worker will face burnout, or have coworkers who do. Here I share what I’ve learned about it as an engineering manager.

The Skills Map of Senior Tech Career Progression

The Skills Map of Senior Tech Career Progression

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 15, 2021

Peter Drucker—the founder of modern management—said in his 1999 article “Managing Oneself” that knowledge workers should plan their second career well ahead of time.

That’s admirable advice.

Except that for the rest of us, planning our first career is already a major life struggle.

And I can talk at length from my own experience. A little more than ten years ago, back when I was still a naive junior engineer, career progression was a very nebulous concept.

Now that I’m at a point where I’m managing other tech managers, I’ve gained enough perspective on the topic that I can share valuable insights that my younger self would have loved to hear and learn.

In a previous article, I covered why soft skills matter and how they can make your career stagnate if you don’t address them. I also shared what the next job roles are from the senior developer role.

I wanted to create a simple representation to enable anyone with a career in tech to grasp how career progression looks like and what it requires.

In the rest of this article, I’m presenting a skills map of career progression, starting all the way from the senior developer role. This map covers both the individual contributor and managerial career paths.

Unlock Your Soft Skills To Win The Career Game

Unlock Your Soft Skills To Win The Career Game

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 11, 2021

Have you ever received feedback from your manager that you should improve your communication skills? Or that you should create more visibility for your work? And another one, that you should work on your influencing skills? These are all related to soft skills, and it can be confusing what they mean and how to improve on them.

As a tech manager, I find myself giving that feedback regularly to engineers. About 50% of them get it, however, the other 50% roll their eyes and reply “Soft skills? Pffft, I’m an engineer, I don’t need that. All I gotta do is code harder and learn technologies A and B and I’ll keep on going.”

And that’s where they’re wrong, as sadly, I’ve seen such neglecting of soft skills ending up costing many of them years of stagnation for their tech career. The same could happen to you, or might already be happening to you without you realizing.

I wanted to follow up on my article about career progression for senior developers, by addressing the topic of how to map and learn the skills needed for tech jobs.

Soft skills and teamwork
skills are what’s gluing
hard skills together.

So in this series of three articles, I’ll first be covering what is the difference between hard skills and soft skills, and why soft skills matter even if a great part of your job is purely technical.

Another difficult problem is how to prioritize those skills so you can improve predictably. To address that, in the second article I’ll share a map that I’ve created and which shows how different types of skills relate to different career paths.

Finally, in the third and last article, I’ll cover the top skills you should focus on as a senior engineer or as an engineering manager if you want to see fast progress in your personal growth.

Let’s get started with defining the types of skills and why they matter.

Remote Work Stole Our Foundation

Remote Work Stole Our Foundation

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on June 29, 2021

I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal remote work setup lately, and also about the organizational setup that my tech teams are using to work together.

When most of us still worked in collocated office spaces, there were many organizational features that we didn’t even realize were there and that we took for granted.

And it doesn’t matter that the pandemic started more than a year ago. It’s never too late to reflect on what can still be improved, and apply changes for the better.

I distilled it down to the following features.

Becoming a Manager of Managers

Becoming a Manager of Managers

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on June 24, 2021

After I shared my article about the next career moves as a senior developer, someone asked me the following question over the weekend:

“I’m a senior engineer who recently switched to leading a team of engineers. How do I grow in the managerial career path and become a manager of managers?”

It’s a great question, and not a trivial one. Becoming an engineering manager is often straightforward, but the next step, becoming a manager of managers, ends up being a career blocker for many.

If you’ve been wondering the same thing, then the first step is to look at your current workplace by addressing the following questions:

Did you see any colleagues becoming a manager of managers via an internal process over the past year?
What type of projects did these colleagues work on, with who, and in which department? Can this be reproduced?
Is your department or a nearby department growing, and will a position of manager of managers open soon?
Do you see yourself staying at your current company for the coming two to three years?

If you could answer YES to all of the above, it means there is a chance you could grow internally. From there, you have to start planning to position yourself so you get the job when it opens.

If you answered NO to any of the above, then you’re in the wrong company, and it’s time to plan a move. Selecting the right next job and company, so it’s aligned with your career aspirations, is going to be a crucial step.

In this article, I’ll be diving into both cases by providing a guide on how you can plan this career move, and if you’re lucky enough to get a shot at it, how to handle your transition into your new role.

In addition, as I’ve run dozens of leadership interviews and selection processes, and as a manager of managers myself, I’ll be sharing insider information on how managers will evaluate you and will decide whether you get the job or not.

Career Growth: What Paths After Senior Engineer

Career Growth: What Paths After Senior Engineer

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on June 15, 2021

“I don’t know what’s next in my career” is a sentence I hear frequently from senior engineers.

In fact, I hear this question so frequently that I decided to write this series of articles to address it.

When I ask those senior engineers how they have approached their career planning until now, what I hear is “I thought if I just worked harder and wrote more code, eventually someone would notice and I’d get promoted to staff engineer.”

Unfortunately for so many senior developers, this type of thinking is a major misconception on so many levels. Just writing more code isn’t going to get anyone promoted. Just waiting to be noticed isn’t going to get anyone promoted. Also, there is more than just the individual contributor or managerial path as possible career paths for engineers. And finally, getting promoted—like other forms of external validation—shouldn’t be the ultimate goal in anyone’s career, because it’s not fulfilling.

In this article, I am making a recap of the most realistic career moves from the senior engineer position. I’m dividing the possible moves into the four categories from the diagram. For each category, I will cover what it’s all about what it would require to get there.

A Practical Way to Cultivate Self-Awareness in Yourself and Others

A Practical Way to Cultivate Self-Awareness in Yourself and Others

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on May 12, 2021

Many engineers have great tech skills but see their careers hit a roadblock when they’re unable to pull the self-awareness necessary to grow further.

I’ve encountered many such engineers in my career and tried to help as best I could. I wish I could say I was successful at it, but generally, the effects of my feedback would last for a few weeks, and then those people would surely fall back into their usual bad habits and triggers.

Last week, I found an interview with Esther Perel, and it’s been a real game-changer for me. Perel is a psychotherapist and shared advice on the topic, which for once was practical and directly applicable.

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