- "What does sponsorship look like?" Lara Hogan.
- Differentiates between mentoring underrepresented people, and sponsoring them into new opportunities.
- "How to develop someone's troubleshooting skills." Alison Green, Ask a Manager.
- Alison's advice isn't specific to the practice of engineering, but she's a ruthlessly practical and effective manager who gives excellent advice.
- "How to ask good questions." Julia Evans (@b0rk).
- Julia Evans is a national treasure, whose advice on how to learn and level up in your tech career is engaging and in-depth.
- "On Being a Senior Engineer." John Allspaw, Kitchen Soap.
- Long read for sure, but a good framing of what we look for in senior engineers.
- "You Must Try, And Then You Must Ask." Matt Ringel.
- "Some Thoughts On Mentoring." Cate Huston.
- "The Feedback Fallacy." Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, HBR.
- Key quotes:
- "Focusing people on their shortcomings or gaps doesn’t enable learning. It impairs it."
- "All we can do—and it’s not nothing—is share our own feelings and experiences, our own reactions. Thus we can tell someone whether his voice grates on us; whether he’s persuasive to us; whether his presentation is boring to us. We may not be able to tell him where he stands, but we can tell him where he stands with us. Those are our truths, not his. This is a humbler claim, but at least it’s accurate."
- "For each of us, excellence is easy, in that it is a natural, fluid, and intelligent expression of our best extremes. It can be cultivated, but it’s unforced."
- "Excellence is an outcome, so take note of when a prospect leans into a sales pitch, a project runs smoothly, or an angry customer suddenly calms down. Then turn to the team member who created the outcome and say, “That! Yes, that!” By doing this, you’ll stop the flow of work for a moment and pull your colleague’s attention back toward something she just did that really worked."
- Key quotes: