The Effective Engineer | Edmond Lau | Talks at Google

Talks at Google
Talks at Google
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Published 2015-12-14
How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?

In this talk, Edmond will share the most valuable insights that leaders from various top tech companies learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make. He will distill down some of the key themes and share a unifying framework called leverage that you can use to identify activities that produce disproportionate results.
All Comments (21)
  • @rubbalsidhu9463
    1. Optimise for learning 2. Invest in iteration speed 3. Validate your ideas aggressively and iteratively 4. Minimise operational burden 5. Building a great engineering culture
  • @8Trails50
    This guy should also give a talk on public speaking. Very easy to listen to, excellent talk.
  • @michaeltener4790
    To add to what Ed said about unit testing. "Rails Conf 2013 The Magic Tricks of Testing by Sandi Metz" was a great talk (on the youtubes) to solving for the unit test problem. It reduces to "write unit tests your public methods" and "test drive your private methods which are ok to break" Another engineer shouldn't be afraid to run your test suite.
  • @aleckendall974
    Excellent lessons. Applying the engineering mindset of breaking down problems to feature validation (experiment-driven development) was the best take-away for me.
  • @michaelmoser4537
    Another issue is that these approaches need an environment where critical thinking and questioning of assumptions is actually encouraged and where programmers are not just supposed to 'just do it', so question #0 is where do you find such an organization and how do your fit in ?
  • @conw_y
    Brilliant. Every engineer needs to here this!
  • @rahulkulkarni1780
    Fantastic Talk. Very well put! Taking a lot of good points to work from here.
  • @alexqi1125
    The polling's result before class makes me feel psychologically balanced. :-)
  • @jhaohenghu
    Actually, after work many years, I recognize that if your team is not effective enough, that is your problem because you join the wrong team/company. Every leader likes positive words but rare to implement them.
  • @TomerBenDavid
    Great talk but I found a small part of it to be effective engineer and a great part of it to be the effective company
  • @peterwaksman9179
    Wondering what reward structure exists for effective engineers? Another thought: what you describe as an "effective" engineer is a pretty good description of the senior engineers who built the original codebase. Of course they are most effective because everyone else has to spend most of their time deciphering that codebase and the weird conventions the senior engineers created. Those senior engineers might be pretty hopeless if you threw them into someone else's small pond. On the other hand, a lot of what you describe as in-effective is the process of building features your marketing team did not correctly prioritize. In the end, what you are saying is a very corporate message: engineers should simply want to improve themselves- it is their fault if a company does not succeed. Coming back to the orginal question.
  • @justinutube
    The internet and information systems are the ultimate levers. Nearly infinite leverage. But you have to choose the right boulders to move. Don't be afraid to try moving the wrong ones if you at first think they are right - just one right one can set you up for life.
  • @DucNguyen-nk2dj
    This talk makes me think how these principles can be applicable for non-software engineers.
  • @Drganguli
    This talk is more about project management than about engineering