Management: Pair Up with Engineers

Dec 2, 2021

One of the practices that I have adopted is to ask if any team member experiences a blocker or a technical challange and pair up with them for an afternoon for a hands-on technical implementation or debugging. That allows me to keep a good pulse on the team, the overall technical direction, opportunities for coaching, and getting to know people by establishing closer relationships.

Here are two of my most recent experiences:

A junior developer was tasked to develop best practices around and implement Kubernetes policies on top of Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper. During sprint planning, we went over the tasks of what is expected out of that initiative. I did sense that there were still some unasked questions so I scheduled time to pair up. During our session we:

filled technical gaps that the junior developer had; we both learned how to use kustomize
discussed how and made architectural decisions; we developed a pattern on how to stitch together kustomize and helm and get the best of both worlds
identified coaching opportunities; we went over a step by step process that demonstrated how a senior engineer would approach such a problem
united around a common goal, followed up on our vision, and built trust in each other

During standup, one of our senior developers expressed he was struggling with a browser test for ArgoCD. For an unknown reason, the selenium library was returning an empty object back from the ArgoCD login page. I scheduled time to pair up as I was truly curious and we:

learned from each other; we tried to handle redirects, that was a failure; we tried switching libraries, the same result; we brought in a quality engineer; it was getting close to EOD when we realized that the login webpage that a TLS configuration based on an internal CA and was silently failing; we made the appropriate changes to the web driver to handle that situation, and VOILA.
took a small break to catch up on personal stuff; felt less formal than a 1:1
united around a common goal, followed up on our vision, and built trust in each other

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