Mastodawn

terra tauri Jan 10, 2025

Reading Platform Engineering again and I came across this interesting quote:

If you only promote people who solve big technical problems, you’re going to have
a hard time retaining the people who do the work to smooth out the usability edges, actively listen to the customer teams, and adjust their work priorities to fix the stuff that is causing the most pain. So, look closely at what you are celebrating, compensating, and promoting, and make sure you are including work that makes the product better, whatever that looks like, even if it isn’t the hardest technical bits. You may even want to reevaluate your engineering ladder to make sure the expectations at each level reflect all of the skills you now demand. Remember, this is a cultural change, and cultural changes that don’t involve changes to what is valued (as seen by what you recognize and reward) are destined to fail.

Might be something that people find interesting for no particular reason.

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terra tauri Jan 10, 2025

A lot of fascinating insights into how companies should be hiring and promoting in here. It will be interesting to see what people end up discussing in this section.

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terra tauri

Here's another good one:

Platforms create their value through leverage, and one aspect of leverage is efficiency—supporting substantially more scale without needing to hire more people into the platform team. However, as this chapter’s introductory quote suggests, this is in conflict with the fact that systems often run into new problems just because of scale, particularly operationally. This means constant-sized teams supporting scaling platforms can wind up in “operational hell,” where neglected operational problems start having ongoing acute business impact, eroding customer trust. As the system is handling critical load at scale, it can take months to remediate the acute impact and years to address the core issues, and all the while new product features are stalled. To avoid this, platform teams need to routinely invest in operational practices, even when times are good.