The Thriving In Engineering Digest: 6-25

A curated week.

Between Slack pings, executive requests, and whatever LinkedIn is yelling about this week, it’s hard to stay sharp and inspired.

That’s where The Thriving In Engineering Digest comes in. Each week, I dig through Substack, Medium, X, and other corners of the internet to bring you the highest-signal reads on leadership, AI, feedback, strategy, team dynamics, and more.

If you’re short on time but want to keep growing, this roundup is for you.

Let’s get into it.

1 - Unlocking Career Growth: Intrapreneurship as a Software Engineer

Chaitali Narla – a seasoned engineering executive with Google and Glid – provides a guest post for Gergely Orosz. She details the concept of “intrapreneurship” as a pivotal skill for career growth in challenging job markets.

In an era where tech job opportunities are narrowing, “intrapreneurship,” a blend of internal entrepreneurial spirit, can significantly boost your career. Narla, drawing on her extensive experience at Google, highlights seven habits that embody this approach:

1. Confronting problems proactively

2. Embracing end-to-end project ownership

3. Fostering cross-functional relationships

4. Securing organizational sponsorships

5. Overcoming the fear of rejection

6. Making impacts visible

7. And multitasking effectively

Narla's experiences underscore the value of approaching issues comprehensively and engaging varied team roles beyond engineering, all while maintaining visibility and influence within the organization. She encourages engineers to look beyond assigned tasks and pursue high-impact initiatives, emphasizing that building meaningful cross-departmental connections and translating technical challenges into business contexts can accelerate promotions and success.

Main Takeaway:

Intrapreneurship is about taking initiative by seeking and solving high-impact problems, building rapport across departments, and driving results independently.

Why It Matters:

For engineering leaders, fostering an intrapreneurial mindset within teams encourages innovation, enhances problem-solving capabilities, and drives impactful outcomes even in rigid corporate structures.

Read This If You’re Interested In:

• Developing skills to thrive in a tech career

• Learning from top metrics to be a standout engineer

• Navigating organizational structures for promotion

• Building cross-functional rapport and influence

• Achieving long-term career growth through self-driven initiatives

2 - AI Revolution: Speeding Up Code Reviews Without Sacrificing Quality

In this insightful post by Justin, the focus is on the often-dreaded process of code reviews and how they have traditionally been slow and inefficient. However, code reviews are vital to maintaining code quality in projects where large teams, often distributed across various regions, contribute.

This review process usually falls under two categories: retroactive and proactive. Retroactive involves reviewing the code after it’s written, while proactive involves pair programming where reviewer and developer work in tandem. Unfortunately, code reviews can cause significant delays – sometimes taking longer than the actual feature development.

With AI-generated code on the rise, code reviews are both more necessary and more complicated than ever. Enter AI-driven tools like CodeRabbit, which promise to expedite the review process by providing quick and context-informed assessments that align with organizational standards. These tools aim to merge the objectivity of automated checks with the subjective nuances of human judgment, ultimately streamlining the process and keeping engineers productive.

Main Takeaway:

AI tools like CodeRabbit can drastically reduce code review times without losing the crucial element of human-like subjective judgement.

Why It Matters:

For engineering leaders, the efficiency brought by AI in code reviews means fewer bottlenecks, quicker deployments, and more consistency across development practices – which translates to happier teams and stakeholders.

Read This If You’re Interested In:

• Optimizing code review processes for faster feature deployment

• Integrating AI to balance objective and subjective code assessments

• Enhancing teamwork amidst distributed and diverse engineering teams

• Incorporating modern AI tools into traditional code review workflows

• Understanding the impact of AI-generated code on existing review practices