I’ve helped establish best practices and healthy engineering cultures in greenfield scenarios, when I was the first technical hire in an early stage environment. I’ve also come into a small company with significant technical debt and introduced changes to the engineering practice in ways that were embraced by the legacy team. But I’ve never had the chance to reform engineering practices and culture at a very large organization, I’m considering it as a path for professional growth, and I’m looking for ways to learn more about doing it before I dive into the deep end.
I’m talking about a software company with dozens or even hundreds of engineers, with large amounts of technical debt, that has a giant, monolithic codebase that’s highly-coupled and poorly tested, a release process that is slow and brittle. And in this scenario, I either lack the authority to dictate global change or I think that an authoritarian approach would be inappropriate and ineffective, or I have no authority at all and have to drive change locally, from the bottom up.
If I didn’t know a lot about what best practices were, I’d be reading things like Clean Code. If I didn’t know a lot about strategies for approaching technical debt, I’d be reading things like Working Effective with Legacy Code. If I didn’t know a lot about leading a small team in general, I’d be reading things like Radical Candor. But none of those quite capture the problem I’m describing.
Can HN recommend any books, blogs, videos, podcasts, personalities I should be looking at?
I’m talking about a software company with dozens or even hundreds of engineers, with large amounts of technical debt, that has a giant, monolithic codebase that’s highly-coupled and poorly tested, a release process that is slow and brittle. And in this scenario, I either lack the authority to dictate global change or I think that an authoritarian approach would be inappropriate and ineffective, or I have no authority at all and have to drive change locally, from the bottom up.
If I didn’t know a lot about what best practices were, I’d be reading things like Clean Code. If I didn’t know a lot about strategies for approaching technical debt, I’d be reading things like Working Effective with Legacy Code. If I didn’t know a lot about leading a small team in general, I’d be reading things like Radical Candor. But none of those quite capture the problem I’m describing.
Can HN recommend any books, blogs, videos, podcasts, personalities I should be looking at?