Hate interruptions? Ever feel like you’ve lost your ability to focus on coding?
Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, knows your pain and she’s on a crusade to help devs everywhere reclaim their focus.
Spoiler: She's got a message for managers who can’t meet with devs whenever they want: “Don’t like it? Well, suck it up.”
The thing about productivity is, you can’t have it both ways. You can either protect your devs’ ability to focus by providing them meaningful time for creativity or you can call them into meetings all day long for constant feedback - but you can’t have both.
These concepts don’t have to be at odds with each other, though. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Katie details exactly what managers can do to foster a harmonious, productive environment between themselves and their devs. She also talks about the importance of “shifting left,” the dangers of doing it too quickly, and why “hiring great people and getting out of their way” may not be a good mantra.
Episode Highlights Include:
- (5:31) Defragmenting a developer’s calendar
- (8:16) Why video games optimize for flow
- (10:59) It takes 23 minutes to get into a flow state
- (16:58) The problem with being solutions-oriented
- (26:44) When “shifting left” goes wrong
- (36:33) Katie's smallest investment with the biggest ROI
You're Invited to INTERACT on April 7th
Join engineering leaders from Netflix, Slack, Stack Overflow, American Express & more at LinearB's virtual engineering leadership conference, INTERACT on April 7th, 2022.
1 day, 20 speakers, 1,000s of engineering leaders - all driven by the Dev Interrupted community. If you are a team lead, engineering manager, VP or CTO looking to improve your team, this is the conference for you!
Top comments (1)
I've never heard of "defragging your calendar" but I'm definitely going to try implementing it into my workweek!