Month: February 2022

Silly Baboons, Stubborn Elephants II: Navigating Culture Differences Across R&D groups

In September 2019 I published Silly Baboons, Stubborn Elephants: A Product Engineer’s Guide to Working with Platform Engineers. Since then I’ve expanded my thinking on culture gaps inside engineering organizations and how they affect our ability to collaborate across different groups with different motivations and incentives into a talk, presented at Reversim 2021 conference (right before Omicron hit and everything shut down again for COVID).

The talk is in Hebrew, so I’ve included the slides and my speaker notes (with bonus content I didn’t have time for!) translated into English after the video.

Update [September 2023]: I gave a short version of this talk at LeadDev Berlin in 2022 which is now available in English! Yay!

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Posted on by Rina Artstain

This email should have been a document

Everyone knows about the terribly boring and ineffective meeting that should have been an email, but… Should it really have been an email? I’m not so sure. I think email in the workplace was fine when that was all we had, but that form of communication has outlived its usefulness and should mostly be replaced by other mediums. There, I said it.

Photo by Maksim Goncharenok from Pexels

Emails are traditionally used for 3 main purposes:

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Posted on by Rina Artstain

Tips for starting a new job

This post is part of my mentoring conversation series which includes relatively short posts on topics that have come from a mentoring session. Often, these conversations produce insights which could benefit a wider audience.
Any identifying information is removed and I always inform participants before posting anything we talked about.
Photo by Matt Hudson on Unsplash

In today’s mentoring session we’re helping someone who’s about to start a new job and is worried about onboarding. There is an infinite amount of content on how to start a new job and how to onboard well, so I’m going to focus on 3 tips:

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Posted on by Rina Artstain

Defensive estimations and time management

This post is part of my mentoring conversation series which includes relatively short posts on topics that have come from a mentoring session. Often, these conversations produce insights which could benefit a wider audience.
Any identifying information is removed and I always inform participants before posting anything we talked about.

In today’s mentoring session we’re dealing with a manager who doesn’t trust task estimations and asks to reduce them, resulting in stress and overtime. Add to that a feeling that you’re not keeping up with the tasks you’ve committed to completing… This is, of course, not the healthiest environment, but unfortunately, still quite common.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels
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Posted on by Rina Artstain