You have an experience that you brought some discussion topic to your team but result in silence, don’t you? The style of team building is also changing after COVID-19. I think we have much more chance to have the situation like the above as the number of remote meeting increases.

This article describes how to encourage the team to participate in the discussion actively so that we can build a productive and positive engineering team atmosphere.

Bike Shed Effect – Power of Trivials

Have you heard about Bike Shed Effect? …

One of the most controversial topics of engineering is how to handle technical debt. I would like to talk about my opinion on how we can secure the time to work on this.

Technical Debt? Implement the Feature Anyway

Engineers sometimes complain that your manager or business does not understand technical debts. Stakeholders and product managers bringing new ideas to the backlog to expand the sales. Or requesting urgent bug fix to react to premium customers’ complaints.

“All right, I understand the need for re-design. But do we really need to take that now? Now, we are in the critical moment in the business”

You might…

I would like to write about one nature which effective tech leads should have based on my experience. As effective tech lead, you need to fire some particular people.

Rich Get Richer

One of the criticism of capitalism is that rich get richer. The rich start a good business based on their capital. Poor need to stick with regular business. The one-side game of rich causes excessive gap between rich and poor which make our society unstable. Donella Meadows, who writes “Thinking in Systems”, pointed that is one of the typical example of self-reinforce loop. The gap keep increasing.

This is not limited…

How does your current organization manage release? Do you have a strict release process like CAB (Change Advisory Board)? Or, you can make a release plan by themselves as long as the plan is published ahead of time? Or do you have no process at all?

I would like to talk about my opinion on how the release process should be.

Unexpected Side-effect of CAB

I would like to present controversial data which shows the fact that the release process by external members (typically called CAB) does NOT contribute to the success of changes. Rather, it results in slower MTTR (mean time to recovery).

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I have been working as an architect on the current opportunity for more than one year. I am still in the process of learning. I learned one thing from the experience. That is: a job as an architect is indeed difficult because its decision-making process depends on a specific context.

Decision Made in a Context

Let’s imagine a situation like this. You are the project member of the new web service. You are responsible for technical choice and architecture design. We are planning the promotion with famous influencers. Hence we expect a sudden spike of access when she makes a post on her SNS. On…

Today, all enterprises are migrating to the cloud. I would like to talk about the importance of learning knowledge in the age of on-premise under these circumstances.

Issue

Let me pick up one example from my past experience.

We had a problem like the following. System A and System B getting timeout occasionally. The analysis of this problem was problematic. Many engineers have tried to resolve the issue but they could not. The issue had remained unresolved for years.

Career and Chance

If you are a young engineer and get bugged about your career planning, I recommend you to forget about it. Because the good portion of your career depends on chance.

John D. Krumboltz and his team found that changes take an important role in a career. It’s difficult to counsel a student’s career because of this. The team compiled the so-called “Planned Happenstance Theory”. I don’t describe the theory in detail as we have a lot of articles out there on the internet. …

OKR and Management by Objectives

Management by Objectives is the most commonly used methodology in any knowledge worker industry. Especially in the tech industry, a simple framework named OKR is widely used as the current best practice of Management by Objectives.

Andrew Grove introduced OKR in his book “High Output Management”. The framework is pretty simple. Setup the objectives by the following factors:

• Objective — Qualitative goal to achieve. Typically set as moon shot goal.
• Key Results — Quantitative and concrete achievements connected to the Objective

Here I have to make an interesting question. Why OKR uses these two factors: Objective and Key Results?

Bright Side and Dark Side of Goal Settings

Many…