Dan Tehranian

My #1 management rule that I’ve seen even very senior people get wrong - people’s actions will mostly mirror how you treat them: If you treat devs like children with blinders on they will act like children. If you hide costs from devs they won’t care what things cost. If you don’t have devs on the hook for when things break they won’t care so much about when they break. If you treat office workers as untrustworthy they will act untrustworthy. If you force RTO to keep an eye on people they will waste more time in the office. The tighter you squeeze your fist the more falls through. Thats not to say there aren’t exceptions to this but it’s true in the general case.

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Feeling lost in your engineering leadership journey? Let me share a quick story: I once joined a company as a tech lead. I was in love with the tech stack, but I later discovered they were not solving any meaningful problems. I realized I had no direction, no clear roadmap, no north star. Like many of us, I was stuck. I then came across a mentor who introduced me to the concept of "career clarity". So, What's career clarity?🤔 It's simply knowing what you want and why you want it. It fuels you to take action, learn and grow continuously. With career clarity, you will: ✅ Have a sense of direction ✅ Make better decisions ✅ Know what to say no to ✅ Prioritize and focus on the right things. How can you achieve career clarity? 👉 Evaluate your own values, strengths and goals 👉 Talk to people who have career clarity 👉 Take calculated risks and explore 👉 Get a career coach With career clarity, you will transform from feeling stuck to feeling confident and fulfilled in your engineering leadership journey. ----- P.S. Click the link below when you read this to sign-up to my newsletter Rise Above. It's read by 10,000 people including Fortune 500 execs, founders, engineers, and investors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. https://lnkd.in/ewb_2PhU

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Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

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At Cockroach Labs, we’re not just adapting to the future, we’re shaping it. What if you could run scaled-out workloads on spot instances? What if by doing this, you could not only test at the same scale as your customers with hundreds of nodes, but also deliver substantial cost savings in your org? We didn’t want this to remain as just a hypothetical, so we tried it. Adam Storm’s blog post reveals how we’ve evolved database testing with spot instances, pushing the boundaries of cost efficiency and demonstrating what a true "cloud-native" architecture can mean when coupled with ambition. I see tremendous potential in using spot instances for staging or test clusters at scale. https://lnkd.in/eEXHMqKG

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TL;dr - RIP Terraform. Time to say goodbye. I just ran into this obituary for Terraform and Hashicorp. The most probable future seems to be the maximization of sales motion and the minimization of engineering investment - just adding another product to the price list and unleashing the sales force at it. The worst possible outcome would be if IBM decided to make Terraform part of their still-born cloud offering. Or maybe we’ll have Terraform for mainframe? #terraform #hashicorp #ibm #upgrade

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Crisis doesn’t create leaders—𝗶𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 When everything’s on fire, the best leaders don’t just fix the problem—they manage the panic. My years as an engineer and manager at Amazon taught me a thing or two (or a million?) about how to stay calm during high severity incidents. Here’s how to keep your cool when it feels like things are on fire: 1️⃣ 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝗿: Ground decisions in data and resist the urge to react emotionally. Emotional reactions add fuel to the fire—facts will guide you out. 2️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 & 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: In times of crisis, silence breeds confusion. Keep your team updated with short, actionable updates to maintain clarity. Include timelines, customer impact, and next steps. 3️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗥𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗹𝘆: Not everything can be solved at once. Identify the biggest impact areas and tackle them first. Write out a list of questions you need to answer, prioritize based on impact, and start from the top. 4️⃣ 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗲: Don’t hesitate to engage and bring in additional support. Trust your team to handle key pieces of the incident. High-pressure moments are when autonomy shines. Leading through high-severity incidents isn't just about technical expertise—it's about maintaining composure under pressure. Calm leadership inspires trust, clarity, and results. Stay calm, lead strong, and watch your team follow suit. 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: How do you think about leading thru stressful times? Tell me in the comments. ⤵ ---- ♻️ Repost and share these leadership tips ➕ Follow me, Ashley V., for more 📲 Book an anonymous coaching session

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My biggest takeaway from #ELCAnnual2024 last week was that trust and psychological safety are the foundation of everything we do. Whether I was listening to a talk on improving team velocity, product-engineering alignment, measuring performance, leading through change, or collaboration — trust was at the core. Without trust, your team will struggle to work through conflict.  Without trust, your team will become disengaged and stop delivering to its highest potential. Without trust, interactions will feel adversarial rather than collaborative. Here are 3 ways to build trust in your team: 1. Communicate the “why” behind decisions, rather than focusing on the “what”. 2. Start collaborating early in the process, asking for input and ideas on how to approach a project. Don’t show up with the solution and throw it over the wall to your team. 3. Address tension and conflicts directly. Working through conflicts builds trust because it shows you care about the relationship. What are your favorite ways to build trust on your teams? Check out all of the great resources from ELC: https://lnkd.in/gdZRuz-a

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This morning, I woke up feeling a lot of feelings, one of which was powerless. But as a leader, I want to make sure my team understands my values and principles have not - and will not ever - change. Here’s what I shared with my team: Today is a weird day. It feels like the future is both uncertain and, at the same time, very clear. I’m still working through my thoughts and emotions, but I wanted to share something that has not changed. I want Tech Ops to be a diverse and inclusive team. Having different backgrounds and perspectives allows us to see challenges and opportunities from many points of view. We should celebrate all of the different aspects of diversity we have on the team — but always push ourselves to do more. So, regardless of what our political leaders believe, I continue talking about DEI — I know we’re a long way from a fully equal playing field, especially in Technology. #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI

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Absolutely this, design and engineering need to be best friends. Bringing engineers into the design process gives them the "why" behind what they are building and allows them to see the impact their work has on the user. Bringing design into the engineering side helps with understanding complexity and gaining a deeper understanding of the product they are designing for. Together, both sides work alongside with product to communicate and align on user experience, business needs and timeline. If your design team is simply throwing cards over the wall to engineering, there's no way you'll build a product that's best-in-class for your users

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One of my favorite acronyms in #SoftwareEngineering is WTF - Where to Focus. When you have a small team you should focus as much energy as possible on the pieces that make your business competitive and buy everything else. I guarantee your cost estimate to justify building a tangential capability over buying it is missing a bunch of hidden cost factors.

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“For Graeber, bullshit jobs carry with them a moral imperative: ‘If you’re not busy all the time doing something, anything—doesn’t really matter what it is—you’re a bad person.’ But the flipside of that logic seems to be: if you actually like doing X activity, if it is valuable, meaningful, and carries intrinsic rewards for you, it is wrong for you to expect to be paid (well) for it; you should give it freely, even (especially) if by doing so you are allowing others to profit. In other words, we’ll make a living from you doing what you love (for free), but we’ll keep you in check by making sure you have to make a living doing what you hate.” — Geoff Shullenberger, a writing professor at New York University I couldn't help thinking that here, the professor is describing, how “open source software” thing works. And then, I found: “The free software industry, perversely enough, has become a paradigm in this respect... software engineering work was divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of ‘applying duct tape’ to allow different core technologies to work together, because the designers had never bothered to think about their compatibility. ... increasingly, open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free.” — David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

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One of the most valuable traits I look for when hiring engineers is a genuine, insatiable curiosity. The most impactful developers are constantly tinkering, taking things apart, and exploring how systems work under the hood. Early in my career, I had a manager who really emphasized the scientific method as a framework for problem-solving within engineering. The idea was to approach each challenge by forming hypotheses, testing them rigorously, and drawing data-driven conclusions. This mindset stayed with me. It’s one I try to instill in my own career and inspire in other engineers. But how do you foster curiosity and a scientific approach to engineering in your team? A few ideas: ⚙️ Make work a safe space for experimentation. If you penalize mistakes too eagerly, you discourage risk-taking and ongoing learning. 🖥️ Give engineers problems to solve, not just features to build. Software engineers are builders at their core. Give them space to tinker with problems. 📶 Provide engineers with opportunities to work in different feature areas—the change of scenery will re-engage curiosity that may have diminished after spending too much time in their current system.

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Every leader of a Tech Organization should strive for making that org better: More productive, more customer-focused, more fun to work in. 🌟 There is tons of things you can do (and equally many to avoid) when it comes to: ➡ structuring your org, ➡ aligning its teams around common goals, ➡ dealing with technical challenges, ➡ getting ready for leveraging AI, ➡ leading your org through changes. As also leadership is most fun when it's done together in a group, I will host a full-day workshop "How to Build and Run a Successful Tech Organization". 😃 In a group of like-minded tech leads we will discuss the above topics at Digitale Leute Summit 2024 in Cologne. A few spots are left. Get yours now at https://lnkd.in/dXyFnvGi (The discount code "DLS24JAN20" gives you 20% off. 😉) 🗓 14.11.2024 📍 STARTPLATZ Cologne ⌚ 9:00 - 17:00 Have a look at the several other amazingly valuable workshops as well: - Design Sprint for AI solutions with Markus Maass and Lars Becker - Product Discovery workshop with Frederik Vosberg and Timothy Krechel - OKR workshop with Christina Lange - Effective Product Strategy workshop with Tim Herbig - Masterclass on Team Topologies with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (Team Topologies) 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 from Team Topologies #dlsummit

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With the power of #o1preview, I’ve effectively become an entire cross-functional Product Engineering team for a small hobby website. This experience feels remarkably like being a Full Stack Product Manager, orchestrating every layer of development with the help of this AI-driven model. So far, phenofuse.io has: • Image generation, authentication, and generation rate limits • Promoted content functionality • Mobile responsiveness • Scalability and performance optimization • Unit tests and monitoring • SSL implementation and security best practices • Over 4,000 lines of code All of this was accomplished with under $50 spent with OpenAI — less than half the cost of a single billable hour for most software consultants. While a skilled software team could execute this work much faster, their cost could easily exceed 100x more. Let’s break it down: • 1 PM, 1 Designer, and 2 Senior Full Stack Engineers • Each billed at $100/hour, for one week (40 hours each = 160 total hours) • 160 hours × $100/hour = $16,000 I’ve additionally been experimenting with innovative techniques. In order to move beyond a simple local vs prod environment, I request CLI commands from #o1preview to extract my cloud resource definitions and dynamically convert them into #infrastructureascode, enabling me to quickly spin up a separate cloud-hosted non-production environment.

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I rarely post on LinkedIn, but I'm curious to find some folks to chat with about some ideas for an Enterprise Product Management product. My thesis is that the current suite of tools do not do a sufficient job providing features for managing sprawling, complex suites of products + product lines that mature tech organizations maintain. Most PM products are geared toward startups and smaller companies with simpler products, but few tools help PMs and other leaders manage the sprawling complexity of a situation like 30 products over 6 product lines, 14 industry solutions, and components from a dozen acquisitions. Let me know if you'd be down to chat for 20 minutes one day about it!

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🎃The October issue of #CheckpointChronicle is now out 🌟 It covers Ververica's Fluss, #ApacheFlink 2.0, Iggy.rs, Strimzi's support for #ApacheKafka 4.0, tons of OTF material from Jack Vanlightly, Christian Hollinger's write up of ngrok's data platform, nice detail of how SmartNews use #ApacheIceberg with Flink and #ApacheSpark, a good writeup from Sudhendu P. on #ApachePolaris, notes from Kir Titievsky 🇺🇦 on Kafka's Avro serialisers, and much more! https://lnkd.in/djc-HERy

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Over the course of each month, I spend a few moments each day or so collecting interesting links, and then, at the end of the month, I bundle them (with the help of some nifty automation scripts) into an easily digestible reading list. Here's everything that I found interesting in May 2024 about engineering leadership: #qfm #quantumfaxmachine #blog #engineering #leadership #management https://lnkd.in/eYQxe7sX

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So true! In my opinion, every effort, whether it's new features or services, should include the creation of proper data and analytics to measure its effectiveness and adoption. The necessity of a feedback loop through telemetry and analytics cannot be overstated. It turns data into actionable insights, enabling iteration and refinement of the offerings. Without this, we risk repeating the same errors or just offering the wrong solutions. understanding the customers and having a constant feedback look is a must!

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