Leo Epstein

All too often, meetings are created for topics that could easily have been covered in an email, slack/teams message, or any other form of asynchronous communication. Developers need time to do deep work, and get into their flow state, so minimizing meetings is a key aspect of using 'the right communication channels.' Meetings should be held when to inform teams about overall goals of projects, as opposed to minor individual updates.

Engagement and satisfaction are a key part of the developer experience. Companies should measure engagement and satisfaction in a quarterly developer experience survey with particular questions asking about how a developer feels the company could improve their developer experience. This could include questions around what kinds of roadblocks they face in the course of a day as a software developer, along with questions about what company practices impact their performance the most.

Clear definition of goals and expectations is crucial in software development. One of the major issues to avoid relating to this is to make sure that metrics never become goals. Story points, Jira Tickets, PR numbers, these should not be goals. Software engineers should be able to work without having to worry about these kinds of goals in place. Success should be measured on the team level, as individual productivity is not a good metric to base success off of due to the collaborative nature of software development.

The best way to learn, is to analyze one's failure. It's easy to celebrate success, and it should be celebrated, but analyzing a failure is going to be much more productive in the long run. If for example, you have a build fail, it is critical to analyze why that build failed in the moment when it is fresh. In an environment that doesn't encourage risk taking, developers may be inclined to avoid talking about it as much, whereas the far healthier way to deal with a failure is to face it head on and make sure to learn from it so that that same failure doesn't reoccur.

As a leader, you should always be learning about new approaches to your craft that will bolster your leadership capabilities. The best leaders recognize that they should always be seeking to improve their own abilities, and then be able to teach those skills to their team members. Experience is the best teacher for this, and while you may be able to learn certain skills by taking courses, and improving your own knowledge, knowing how to apply those skills is crucial as a leader. If you want to be a leader based only on conceptual knowledge, think again.