Jade Rubick
@jaderubick.bsky.social
I write the Engineering Leadership Weekly newsletter at https://www.rubick.com and host the Decoding Leadership podcast. Human specialist. He/him. Former VPE at New Relic, Gremlin, Mode, etc. Music at: https://bsky.app/profile/jadethree.bsky.social
A better heuristic is: whoever is the better organizational and people leader should be the STO.
Implementing Amazon’s single threaded owner model a retrospective | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned.
rubick.com
When customizing engineering levels, be sure to only choose things that vary depending on the level of experience. Sometimes people want to add items that are baseline expectations. For example, the values of the company.
Implementing software engineering levels (with fully-usable examples) | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Jade shares example engineering levels, that you can use to craft engineering levels at your company.
rubick.com
TIL you can prompt Claude like this when you're running close to your 5 hour limit: "Set a timer for 3 hours, and kick this off in 3 hours Add extensive mutation testing and fuzz testing to flesh out the test suite and find any potential bugs. If needed add a mutation and/or fuzz testing harness."
A good people manager can work around their lack of expertise by using the skills of the people on their team. And it is harder for a person with less people management skills to compensate for the lack of that skillset.
Implementing Amazon’s single threaded owner model a retrospective | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned.
rubick.com
Listen to people's feedback. Ask where the pain points are. Unless you're sensing these things, you're making guesses about what to improve.
Use OKRs to drive equity | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
If you want to see results, make someone accountable to it. Describes how we used OKRs to improve equity.
rubick.com
We discuss managing energy levels, embracing productivity, and the importance of community and self-awareness in leadership.
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/decodingleadership/episodes/28--Lena-Reinhard-on-making-space-for-leadership-that-matters-e36tcqo
podcasters.spotify.com
NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
martinfowler.com
I'd heard of mutation testing before, but was playing around with it this afternoon, and dang, it's such a great technique. And Claude can whip up a mutation testing framework like *snap*. Curious if you could use a loop with mutation testing, and Claude writing tests to wrap legacy code in tests?
@charity.wtf writes a wonderful piece on "AI demanding more engineering discipline. Not less." I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days. I do think a lot of engineering is going to get a lot more difficult. Like, building a dark factory is REALLY HARD.
Will Larsen @lethain.com on the revised rules of engineering leadership lethain.com/revised-rule... Love to see notes from people observing what is working and what isn't. Insightful as always.
Revised rules of engineering leadership.
From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal themsel...
lethain.com
An engineer makes a breaking change that saves their team a month. But ten other teams each spend two weeks adapting to it — five months of engineering time gone. Cheap for the team, expensive for the organization. The cost was externalized. (238 characters)
The danger of fan out work | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Fan out work spreads tasks across many teams, leading to hidden, externalized costs and poor incentives. We explore the issue and potential solutions.
rubick.com
The first barrier is typically at the 15-25 engineer mark. This is the time that your amoeba has gotten too big, and needs to split.
A detailed look at FaST agile -- a practice well worth your time | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
An introduction to FaST, describing how it works and what the tradeoffs of adopting it are
rubick.com
Shitty software can make people so miserable. Don’t build shitty software. (Talking to a person in tears because of a set of cascading issues that add up to them being able to do something important to them)
One of the things that's hard for people in leadership positions is that they cannot show up without having a major impact on how people are thinking, what people are saying, how they're behaving -- Beth Adele Long
27. Beth Adele Long on reliability and leadership by Decoding Leadership
I sit down with Beth Long to discuss her extensive experience with reliability engineering from working at companies like New Relic, Jeli, Gruntwork, and Adaptive Capacity Labs. Beth shares her insights on the role of executives in incident management, the balance between product development and reliability, and how different organizations approach incident coordination. We also explore reliability as a product and the importance of organizational culture in effective incident response. I learned a great deal, and thought about some aspects of reliability in completely new ways. I hope you do too!
creators.spotify.com
LLMs will likely be the most powerful propaganda tool that has ever existed arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475
AI systems out-persuade expert humans
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has...
arxiv.org
You want to make it clear to the interviewer that they own their portion of the interview, and that they can alter the format of the interview. And this extra step will result in improvements to the interview that will pay off in the quality of the assessment.
The ultimate playbook for hiring engineering managers - a step-by-step guide | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
I share a complete guide to how to hire engineering managers, including a sample interview plan
rubick.com
Try to come up with three solutions to every problem. Explicitly list out the tradeoffs of each approach.
Velocity role 3 - the Dodger | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
This post explores an archetype that makes teams faster -- the Dodger. They dodge obstacles.
rubick.com
The Product Council focused too much on writing strategy and not enough on implementing strategy. It's relatively easy and risk free to write a good strategy doc. But it is difficult, and involves a lot of risk, to implement.
Solving cross-team priorities with a Product Council - an experience report | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Jade shares an experience report on the use of a Product Council to solve executive alignment on product direction, and cross-team execution challenges.
rubick.com
It is a common trap to get into that your manager will identify something to work on. You'll work on that, make progress, and then they'll point out something else to work on to get promoted. This can feel like moving the goalposts.
Implementing software engineering levels (with fully-usable examples) | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Jade shares example engineering levels, that you can use to craft engineering levels at your company.
rubick.com
At a recent role, a recruiter suggested that we set up a Slack channel for each of the roles we were interviewing for. We were having a lot of communication that was happening in side channels. This streamlined our communication significantly, and is now something I recommend.
The ultimate playbook for hiring engineering managers - a step-by-step guide | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
I share a complete guide to how to hire engineering managers, including a sample interview plan
rubick.com
It's important to make your SLAs easy to consume. When you approach teams with work, you need to be using the SLAs to simplify the decision-space for them.
How security, reliability, and design teams can get other teams to do work for them -- the Objective Expert Model | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Security, reliability, and design teams can use the objective expert model to get other teams to do work for them, in a scalable way that encourages good relationships with other teams.
rubick.com
These are all important techniques for creating teams that can operate more autonomously!
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/decodingleadership/episodes/9--Jade-Rubick-on-removing-yourself-as-a-bottleneck-e2m49sf
podcasters.spotify.com
Each person brings a topic: something that was challenging from last week, or something they are facing now.
Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe the practice.
rubick.com
Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D., and I discussed incentives, mechanisms for shaking up ineffective use of time, how to build a culture of effective meetings, and power dynamics.
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/decodingleadership/episodes/35--Rebecca-Hinds-on-designing-the-best-meetings-e3kd8fr
podcasters.spotify.com
Working in this way is assembly-line work, instead of problem-solving work. This results in engineers disengaging from the customer problems they should be solving. You're finishing tasks, not solving problems.
Make your team miserable with one of these popular project-management anti-patterns | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Three anti-patterns are ubiquitous: task treadmill, million-meeting agile, and Gantt-aholic project management. Describes them and links to better alternatives.
rubick.com
Free idea: for the romantic old couple: tandem CPAP machine
If you put Innovation Labs under engineering, it will look like a place people go work on cool ideas without shipping anything. And it breeds deep resentment with the rest of engineering. If you put it under Product, you clarify that this is a scouting function – the work is to experiment and sco...
Adding innovation labs | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Covers advice for setting up innovation labs in companies, pointing out a lot of the dangers and opportunities.
rubick.com
We dive deep into the engineering leader's role in technical direction, and building teams and culture.
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/decodingleadership/episodes/20--Margaret-Le-on-technical-leadership-and-building-strong-engineering-cultures-e2vctfj
podcasters.spotify.com
This is very thoughtful and expanded my thinking on AI in surprising ways. What happens to us when we talk to machines all the time? Moving piece and also a lot of interesting history. Worth your time I think. www.alexkroman.com/p/everyone-b...
Everyone Becomes a Manager
How AI Work Actually Plays Out
alexkroman.com