Software Engineering Daily

Engineering Insights with Christina Forney

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/software-engineering-daily/id1019576853?i=1000621014568

#podcast #SoftwareEngineering

This episode discusses optimizing software engineering team effectiveness and productivity through data-driven insights.

- As companies and codebases grow large, it becomes difficult to measure team effectiveness. Engineering leaders often rely on intuition rather than data.

- Uplevel pulls data from Git, Slack, Jira etc and uses ML to generate insights about developer productivity, velocity, burnout risk and more.

- The gap between leadership and engineers is growing. Most engineers feel leadership doesn't understand day-to-day challenges.

- Leadership often makes strategic decisions without considering their impact on engineers. This results in mistrust between both sides.

- Uplevel aims to bridge this gap by providing transparency into engineering work. Their data helps leaders make more informed decisions to improve team productivity.

- For example, data revealed a team's meetings were poorly scheduled, hampering deep work. So leadership introduced "no meeting Fridays" to address this.

- Engineers want to be measured, but using meaningful metrics like deep work time and burnout risk, not vanity metrics. Uplevel provides these.

- Async communication is important, but a balance of sync and async is ideal. Engineers don't want 100% async environments.