Weekend Reads #2: Headwinds, Efficiency & Finding Something New
The tech industry is adapting and weathering the storm.
Software Engineering
14 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview Question: many may be job-hunting for different reasons right now and, if you’re an engineer, chances are that you’ll go through a coding interview. This is a solid read on patterns common to most such interviews.
How to Implement Trie (Prefix Tree) - Blind 75 LeetCode Questions: this is a good read on the Trie topic but, perhaps more than that, it’s a good intro into a popular series hosted at HackerNoon that covers many top LeetCode questions.
Making your Code Look Pretty: moving away from interviewing a bit, this is a topic dear to my heart. We tend to be logical folks as engineers (most of the time), and topics like aesthetics can fall through the cracks. That’s a shame considering that code is read more often than written, and a nicely laid out function is a gift to countless future colleagues. This one provides a good, actionable starting point.
Leadership & Management
Two-Pizza Teams Are Just the Start, Part 2: Accountability and Empowerment Are Key to High-Performing Agile Organizations: this is Part 2 in a great running series by AWS. I’ve often found that, amongst all of Big Tech, Amazon’s practices seem to be the easiest to translate to SMEs and startups, and the ones that end up being the most effective.
Single Threaded Leadership - Lessons learned at Amazon: single threaded leadership is a concept that many are unfamiliar with, and that I first learned about at Amazon. This is a short introduction to STL.
Business
‘Metaverse’ job openings are down 81% as Facebook, Apple, and Google roll back hiring: even tech titans are feeling the economic headwinds, and their hiring decisions can often be used as a bellwether for much of our industry.
Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve, launches ‘Simplicity Sprint’ to gather employee feedback on efficiency: I think that companies laying people off or reducing / freezing hiring are driven by two key factors - reduce costs / burn rate, and get more for their current people investments. Google is not alone in this conversation - I can see these undertones in many other companies that had inside leaks, including Meta.
The Scoop: One Deep Layoff or Death By a Thousand Cuts?: as always the Pragmatic Engineer brings valuable inside info from interesting companies. The analysis on the different types of cut strategies employed is particularly noteworthy.