teams

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team of 8-10 people might have been lucky to have one or two “10x engineers”, or “workhorses”, the kind of engineer that both ...

In today’s shocker, Meta is to “create a new applied AI engineering organization aiming for an ultra-flat structure of up to 50 employees to one manager”.

In my past CTO life I directly managed a VP of Engineering, who managed 2 directors, who managed 6 managers, who managed 30 or so engineers, had peer VP of Product, Head of Desi...

In his 2001 memoir “How to Lose Friends & Alienate People” Toby Young proposed a universal theorem.

Update: I wrote a longer article, “What “S’Up”? Using Triads to Develop Tribal Leadership” on the Artsy Medium blog about this.

It’s no secret that hiring and retaining engineering talent is going to be only more challenging in the years to come. The world’s largest companies across all industries are no...

A Facebook Live interview during CTO Summit NYC 2016 following a talk on Inspiring Team Leads to Give Away Their Legos. The interview recording is no longer available.

I recently published a blog post on LAB, the Life at Artsy Blog entitled “What do Software Engineers Do?”. Its goal is to offer a non-technical perspective to software engineeri...

If there is a single thing I can point to as the key to creating a successful engineering organization, it’s the extreme focus on recruiting the best people in the world who sha...

You have recently graduated and looked for work. You put together a good resume and e-mailed it around. You got some interest from a few tech companies and maybe programming hom...

I recently worked on the Artsy Engineering Compensation Framework, and more specifically on the Engineering ladder, open-sourced today. I have done this before, but never with s...

tl;dr Watch this video instead!

I had a great conversation with Aliaksandr Astapenka and Pavel Paulau about open-source on CTOCast #6. It’s in Russian. CTOCast подкаст о технологиях, процессах, инфраструктуре ...

I find myself on all sides of the remote engineering debate. I have managed large remote teams from China to Argentina. I have a handful of remote engineers today at Artsy in pl...

My QCon 2014 talk Mentoring Engineers and Humans.

I get this question a lot. I turned to my friends, HN and Twitter for some advice.

I was showing Inez & Vinoodh’s Stephanie Seymour’s photograph on Artsy to a friend. “Beautiful!”, she exclaimed and clicked on the Inez & Vinoodh artist profile. I lost ...

Facebook’s GIT repository is a single 54GB animal that builds Facebook. It’s not that big - they haven’t seen the MS Windows one! Actually, I take that back - anecdotal evidence...

“Wednesday night’s American Horror Story: Coven delivered an interesting theory on youth culture: Millennials are actually dead inside.” I’m quoting Bustle’s article, which quot...

I felt compelled to troll healthcare.gov, too. It’s an easy target: The JavaScript assets aren’t even compressed. Look at their sheer incompetence! But, if you dig just a little...

This year my colleagues at Artsy created a formal fellowship program. We went out to many US colleges to recruit some of the brightest seniors. From thousands of applications we...

Over the past 15 years I have interviewed hundreds of Engineers. I had the pleasure of hiring quite a few, but I also had the duty to reject many.

I gave a talk last week at AppNexus on building and scaling a test-driven culture.

I visited a friend who lives in a remote, tropical region of the United States. He’s a doctor and a practicing eye surgeon. The island has both the very rich and the extremely p...

A resume is what you did, it’s not who you are.

When I joined Microsoft in ‘99 I was taught how to properly interview candidates. I was shown the wheel of competencies, a kind of a wheel of fortune where a color represents th...

I had a short, but lively debate over code reviews with @skamille at New York’s QCon 2012. That same day she wrote an interesting blog post on code reviews. She argues that “cod...

Last night I gave a talk on pressing the big scary red reset button at the NY CTO School. The first talk before me was by @malcolmcasey, CTO of Skillshare, another awesome NYC s...

I want to talk about your scope of influence as a Software Engineer and how to expand it.

I am not a patient person. But years of software practice have taught me how to take my time while coding or how to, otherwise, remove time from the equation.

When choosing to use an open source project you might want to know whether it’s still developed or at least maintained. For Ruby projects I used to check Rubygems release dates....