While this sounds like a setup for a supremely cringe joke, it gives us three different perspectives on a big question: are Computer Science degrees important for success in the tech industry? What about degrees in general? Can not having one - or having the wrong flavour of degree - limit your opportunities?

Today, let's talk about career progression, from the perspective of three engineering managers. What it means to advance when there are different tracks to explore, what it takes to get that next level, and what managers (i.e we) look for when recommending you for a promotion.

Links:

• On the Proper Care and Feeding of Monkeys
• Episode 16: It's a Spreadsheet, Bro — Our episode on authority
• Episode 7: Nothing Engineer — Our episode on job titles.
• Progression: Define and measure career growth for your team
• Urban Sports Club's public career ladder
• Julia Evans | Get your work recognized: write a brag document
• A Work Log Template for Software Engineers

We often feel stressed, or hear others saying they feel stressed. But what is stress, really? And how could it ever possibly be a good thing?

This episode we give some tips on dealing with stress, look at what factors may cause it, and talk about how to recognise it in your direct reports and help them deal with it too.

Links:

• 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero | 43 Folders
• Getting Things Done® - David Allen's GTD® Methodology
• Drive | Daniel H. Pink
• The Pomodoro Technique — Why It Works & How To Do It
• Frontiers | What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches
• Project management triangle - Wikipedia

Every company claims to want a strong feedback culture. But what does that even mean? What's so desirable about it, and what are you missing that's preventing you from getting there?

Links:

• Radical Candor
• The Culture Map
• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
• 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

Some battles are old as time itself. Godzilla vs. Kong. Man vs. Food. Tabs vs. Spaces.

And Product vs. Tech, it seems as well. But why do we so often find a rift there? Surely we're working towards the same goals. Surely we must be able to collaborate and get along.

This ep, we explore some of the reasons tension can occur between these two disciplines - and why, actually, that's okay!

Links:

• Inspired: How to create tech products customers love, by Marty Cagan
• Product shouldn't be left to product managers
• Ubiquitous Language

You refresh the app for the hundredth time, but your bank balance still reads 0€. It has to be a bug, you think, reaching for your apartment keys, which... are no longer in your pocket. In fact, looking closer, the lock on the apartment appears to have changed since this morning. Odd.

A horn startles you, and you turn to see a car that looks suspiciously like your own passing by. MacBooks emblazoned with your company's logo are piled high in the back seat, almost obscuring the view. You catch a glimpse of the driver, and gasp in recognition. And... is that your wife in the passenger seat? Oh dear.

He'd seemed such a nice young man, too. Stepping into the elevator with a large bag and a disarming grin - how could you ever be suspicious of a smile like that? Sure, the false nose and poorly matching facial hair were a bit strange, but you do get all sorts in startups these days; it's best not to discriminate.

If only you'd hashed your passwords.

Links:

• Okta Hack - BBC News
• A Deep Dive into the Real Security Threats From the Twitch Leak
• Gorillas Leak
• Artix Linux Migration Guide — To install the artix-keyring package, you need to temporarily lower pacman's security levels for the installation in your /etc/pacman.conf.
• Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster - O-Ring Concerns - Wikipedia
• Kevin Mitnick - Wikipedia
• Catch Me If You Can - IMDb
• GitHub Security
• Could your printer be a security risk?
• "I don't care about cookies" browser extension
• NeverSSL — This website is for when you try to open Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc on a wifi network, and nothing happens.
• Oxide.computer - Hardware for Running Infrastructure at Scale

Technical Debt. Every company has it, some more than others. But why is that - are some companies better at tackling it, do they not create it at first, or a combination of the two? Is it simply inexperience, or was it taken out with intention but then never paid back?

This episode, we talk about strategies for making tech debt manageable, the dangers of leaving it unchecked, and how to have that conversation with product owners and stakeholders.

💙🇺🇦💛

Links:

• Distroless: Language focused docker images, minus the operating system
• endoflife.date
• Time to Market - Wikipedia
• Dependabot
• Rector - Instant Upgrades and Automated Refactoring
• Beautiful Technical Debt
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• Building Microservices (2nd Edition) by Sam Newman

We're coming into 2022 swinging for the fences! This episode we talk about the paradox of authority. Does your job title of Big Fancy Bossman actually enable you to get your way? What are the trade-offs of a directive management style? When should you shut up and let things be, even if you can see someone is about to make a massive mistake?

Plus, a heck of a lot of book recommendations this episode - when the covers are pretty, the titles make you sound smart, and your Kindle has some storage space left, what do you have to lose?

Links:

• The First 90 Days - Michael Watkins — "Conventional wisdom says the higher you go the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily, paradoxically. When you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forwards. You may indeed gain increased scope to influence decisions that affect the business, but the way you need to engage can be quite different. Decision making becomes more political, less about authority and more about influence."
• /r/maliciouscompliance
• The SRE Book - Error Budgets
• Consensus Protocol - Wikipedia
• Empowered - Marty Cagan
• Inspired - Marty Cagan

complexity

/kəmˈplɛksət̮i/ noun

the state of being formed of many parts; the state of being difficult to understand

It seems to be commonly-held in some circles that tools like Kubernetes bring with them a lot of complexity. "We'll never need those - we're not Google-scale!"

Well, how true is that? What complexity do orchestration tools bring to the table, and where are the trade-offs? Is there actually complexity there, or just the perception of complexity? Can you achieve the same stuff with a couple of VMs and a load balancer?

And most importantly: after this episode, will Warnar ever be the same man again?

Links:

• Hacker News comment by FlyingSnake — The more I look into k8s ecosystem, the more I'm convinced that it's one of those things that suits FAANG etc, but the regular Joe developer has caught on the fad and wants to add it to his repertoire, even though it's an overkill.
• Hashicorp Nomad
• Apache Mesos
• Helm - The package manager for Kubernetes
• The Operator pattern - Kubernetes
• Distroless - language focused Docker images, minus the operating system
• AWS Fargate - Serverless for containers
• Google Cloud Run

Links:

• What is observability? | Grafana Labs
• Pingdom - Website Performance and Availability Monitoring
• OpenTelemetry - High-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability
• The Istio Service Mesh
• Domain Oriented Observability | Martin Fowler
• Grafana Tempo
• Grafana Loki
• Prometheus
• Pattern: Distributed Tracing | Microservices.io
• Jaeger Tracing
• Shift-left testing | Wikipedia

With a title like this one, how can we not make it to the top of Hacker News?

This episode we discuss all the reasons you might not want to go down the Microservices route, and then tell you how to do it anyway. There's a lot of things to think about when you're on this journey, and we've gone ahead and made all the mistakes so you don't have to.

Plus, listen to the end to hear our collective shame about one time we all really buggered things up by trying to Standardise All The Things. Ah, simpler times...

Links:

• Samson Q2U Dynamic USB/XLR microphone
• Native Instruments Komplete Audio 1 USB Audio Interface
• Martin Fowler: Microservice definition
• Wikipedia: Domain-Driven Design
• Martin Fowler: Bounded Contexts
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software (aka The Big Blue Book) by Eric Evans
• Building Microservices by Sam Newman
• Event Storming
• Sam Newman: Demystifying Conway's Law
• Agile with Edele: Building an Interaction Map
• Building Evolutionary Architectures by Patrick Kua

It's time for a break. We've focussed too hard, over the last dozen episodes, on bringing you top quality content related to engineering management, organisational culture, and whatever the third thing is that we say in every intro. Move over, titular easy problems - it's time for a podcast about parenting.

In this episode, we discuss side projects, whether companies should be able to lay a stake to the work you do in your free time, parenting, the peer pressure that comes alongside seeing others' side projects on social media, parenting, how and why you can be incentivised by your employer to work on side projects, parenting, creativity and how productisation can stifle your side projects, take a quick break from that to chat about parenting, before finishing up with a quick chat on trust and parenting.

Incidentally, one of us just became a dad. Coincidence?

The stars have been gone billions of years now. Black holes burnt out. All but one, where the last dregs of civilization fought over the last dregs of Hawking radiation, before that black hole too ran its course. Now there's only you, floating in the void.

A chime. Unmistakeably early 21st century, even untold millennia later: a push notification. You reach for your phone, pushing the obvious questions away - how has this artefact survived the aeons, the implausibility of it still having power or network - and with hands numbed by entropy, clumsily thumb the sensor to unlock it and read the eleven fateful words of the end of time itself:

"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn!"

This week, whether it's your first or your fifteenth job in the tech industry, we try to give some advice in finding it. How do you know which companies are going to be good places to work? When hiring, what stands out to us in a CV, and what's an obvious red flag? And how much is a life of Microsoft™ SharePoint® worth to you?

Links:

• Why senior engineers hate coding interviews
• Routing the technical interview

Your monitoring is on point, you have a symfony of alerts with appropriate priority levels, runbooks are written and up-to-date, and your services autoscale like an absolute mother hubbard.

But Johnny Stakeholder doesn't give a damn how sophisticated your stack is. Johnny Stakeholder is going to trigger an incident at 4am, with the only details being a blurry photo of an inscrutable 500 error. Yes, Johnny Stakeholder takes pictures of his screen with his phone. Johnny Stakeholder suggests you deal with it. Johnny Stakeholder is going on a cigarette break and when Johnny Stakeholder gets back he expects it to be fixed.

In this second half of our Incident Response two-parter: what should happen when the pager goes off? We dissect a typical incident (at least, from our experience). How do you organise an effective response? What steps should be taken to understand what the underlying issue is? And what if you're not able to fix it in a reasonable time?

Links:

• Increment: What happens when the pager goes off?
• The role of the incident commander
• PagerDuty: Incident Roles

We're trying something new this week - it's a two-parter! We decided to live up to our name and talk about critical incident response procedures.

In this first half, we talk about how to craft a sustainable on-call rotation, how to compensate your engineers for living with the stress of on-call, and how to convince management that you need an on-call rotation.

Plus, Warnar definitely does not advocate for drink-driving. Don't do that.

Links:

• MTBF, MTTR, MTTA, and MTTF
• Crafting Sustainable On-Call Rotations
• How Monzo do on-call
• How Monzo's on-call system evolved
• Google SRE: Error Budgets and Maintenance Windows
• Fifth Gear: What's Worse, Drink Driving or Driving Tired?

If you're the kind of person who can't stand the clackety-clack of mechanical keyboards, then we're probably not the colleagues for you.

clackety-clackety-clack

After making clicky noises down the mic for the first half of the episode, we set our sights on hero culture. Why is it problematic, how do you know if you have it within your company, and what can you do to try and mitigate it?

clackety-clackety-clack

Are you the hero, and if so is it the one you deserve?

clackety-clackety-clack

Links:

• Kieran's Primary Keyboard: Dygma Raise (Kailh Speed Bronzes) — I think I actually broke myself with this keyboard. It's too good, I just can't seem to go back to anything else!
• Kieran's Other Keyboard: Anne Pro 2 (Gateron Blues) — I actually don't recommend this if you're looking for a wireless daily driver - the battery life is awful. But if you're leaving it wired in it's pretty nice.
• Kieran's Other Other Keyboard: Ajazz AK33 (Zorro Blues) — I have two of these, as they can be picked up very cheap (about €30 if you don't need backlighting). They're a very good gateway drug!
• Warnar's Keyboard: Microsoft NEK 4000 — This thing has lasted Warnar almost a decade and is still going strong.
• Another "Interesting" Split Keyboard - Ergodox EZ — If you had a gun to my head and told me to buy a new keyboard, it would probably be this one.
• Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole — This is an incredibly entertaining insight into the mind of a terminal yak-shaver.
• Performance Analysis Methodology - Brendan Gregg — Patterns - and more importantly anti-patterns - for how to pick who to blame for all your team's problems.

Job titles probably aren't important, except that they are. This episode, we wrap our heads around exactly why that is, both from your own point of view as well as your managers'.

Then Kieran ruins it all by quoting the Agile Manifesto.

Again.

Links:

• Obsidian
• nvALT
• Coda.io
• Italo's blog post - Do Job Titles Matter?
• Kelsey Hightower on Twitter: "Job titles are important; that's the problem."

This week, we get deep into knowledge silos. How do you know if you have - or are - one? Is information trapped in heads somewhere? Where's the duct-taped together part of your application that might explode at any moment? Do you even know it exists?

If all that sounds anxiety-inducing, we come to the rescue with some tips on how to identify, mitigate, and avoid knowledge silos, so that the next time that one critical person takes a holiday the entire organisation's wheels don't grind to a halt.

Links:

• IFTTT - Send your lights into a color loop when the ISS passes overhead
• The Global Internet Is Being Attacked by Sharks - Slate
• Gremlin - Build Reliable Systems
• Loom - Video Messaging for Work
• Event Storming

Tonight on the Critical Channel, we're joined by Warnar Boekkooi for the incredible Code Review Extravaganza!

Ready to be amazed? Come one, come all, for an evening of wonder and fantasy, exotic spectacle and death-defying stunts! Featuring Jira workflows! Quantum tabs! Raspberry Pis in a bin!

Plus: for one night and one night only, a reading of the most amusing commit messages to ever be reviewed by our hosts. You won't want to miss this!

(No clowns were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

Links:

• Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs
• CodeCov
• Working Agreements
• A Structured RFC Process

This week on the Critical Channel: Ítalo wants a tiny house. Kieran wants a $13 AliExpress screwdriver set and free conference t-shirts. Max wants more migrations. Pedro is not completely convinced. Some people hate change. HOOOONK.

In the main topic of this episode, we go into disaster plans and rollback strategies for when you have huge migrations, before talking about managing "cultural migrations", where a change requires a shift in organisational thinking over time.

Links:

• Living Big In A Tiny House
• iFixit Kit
• LaunchDarkly

Getting burnt out is the worst. We get vulnerable, share our burnout war stories, as well as tips for how to recognise when you're approaching the point of no return, and how to protect yourself against it.

Also I start the episode by smashing my funnybone.

Dare I say it, this is a really good one.

Grazie mille!

Links:

• Talkit burnout tracker for Slack

This time, we decide it's a good idea to be kind, rewind, and introduce the idea of the show, getting incredibly meta and podcasting about podcasting, before discussing security, compliance, and just how much we should automate.

Links for this episode:

• criticalchannel.io/2
• Podcast Method

We hit the ground running in this inaugural epsiode, discussing where the boundary in terms of responsibilities lies between developers and operations. How much should developers own in terms of understanding and running the technologies they're using, and where should any handoffs occur? And, while we're at it, where does SRE fit into the jigsaw puzzle?

Links for this episode:

• criticalchannel.io/1
• DevOps Topologies
• Accelerate State of DevOps 2019 (PDF)
• The DevOps Handbook
• The Phoenix Project