Top-down or bottom-up? Where do initiatives come from? A completely bottom-up culture is one where employees and teams feel empowered to make their own decisions and champion the initiatives they think are important. However, when those initiatives need broader support, they slow down. If teams disagree about direction or priority, the lack of a

Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, often hands out stickers that say: “Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy.” “Nines” here refers to service level objectives (SLOs), a common mechanism for measuring system availability. “Three and a half nines of availability” means that 99.95% of the time, the service is up and running. SLOs are useful, but

Be prepared to ignore your scope when there’s a crisis: there is no such thing as “not my job” during an outage, for example. You should also have a level of comfort with stepping outside your day-to-day experience, leading when needed, learning what you need to learn, and fixing what you need to fix.

Engineers sometimes dismiss organizational skills as “politics,” but these skills are part of good engineering: considering the humans who are part of the system, being clear about the problem you’re solving, understanding long-term consequences, and making trade-offs about priorities.

Whenever there’s a feeling of “someone should do something here,” there’s a reasonable chance that the someone is you.

Job ladders vary from company to company,

If your organization has published a statement of values or principles, that can help you see what the leaders care most about. But these values are aspirational: the real values of the company are reflected in what actually happens every day.

Good decisions need context. Experienced engineers know that the answer to most technology choices is “it depends.” Knowing the pros and cons of a particular technology isn’t enough—you need to know the local details too. What are you trying to do? How much time, money, and patience do you have? What’s your risk tolerance? What does the business

Organizations differ on what attributes they expect of their most senior engineers and what kind of work those engineers should do. Although most agree that, as Silvia Botros has written, the top of the technical track is not just “more-senior seniors,” we don’t have a shared understanding of what it is.