Meritocracy is Trailing Indicator

Another great Rands post that completely nails the challenges with designing career paths at a growing tech company. I’ve seen this first hand a number of times and nobody ever gets it right. I’m sure there is no perfect answer as there are always tradeoffs, but this post at least exposes a lot of the pitfalls and requirements.

Engineering Growth Framework

Speaking of designing career paths at growing tech companies, Medium made public their system which seems pretty good.

Of course, implementation is everything and how well this system jives with your local culture may vary.

Git Flight Rules

Apply space flight ideas to software development? This is like cat-nip for me. Also, a helpful reference for when you inevitably screw up your git repo.

Unit Testing Doesn’t Affect Codebases The Way You Think It Would

I’ve had a few conversations recently where it would be helpful to backup my intuitions around software development with numbers. I’ve never been much for metrics on code though it was a Big Deal according to my college professors.

Academia, what do they know.

I found this article interesting even though it’s really unclear how much stock to put in the accuracy of these numbers or even what conclusions to draw. I’m now interested in this subject though.