Amro's Blog

Amro's Blog

puns, pizza, and performance reviews

  • Home
  • Get That Eng Promo

    Navigating your engineering career can be difficult, and one thing that can be especially frustrating is working toward promotion. Career ladders, managers, mentors, projects, deadlines, peer feedback, annual reviews–the list goes on. How do you know what to focus on next? To make matters worse, you might receive mixed signals: peers tell you that you…

    Amro Mousa

    January 17, 2023
    People
  • Evergreen Interviewing Tips For Now And Later

    Many tech companies are conducting layoffs thanks to economic conditions and over hiring. You may not have interviewed in a while and you might even find it intimidating. I’d like to share some suggestions based on my time as a hiring manager, and mistakes I’ve made interviewing. Some nuance up front: this is my perspective…

    Amro Mousa

    November 3, 2022
    People
    interviewing, layoffs
  • Encouraging Ownership

    The best teams I’ve been on have displayed high levels of ownership. Ownership is a cultural trait that helps teams avoid failure by providing people the agency to pick up important work. We’ll focus on unmanaged work in this post because that’s the sort of work that is often dropped, and talk a bit about…

    Amro Mousa

    May 23, 2022
    People
  • Hey Amro, what’s on your desk?

    I shared a Tweet with a photo of my current work setup and a few folks asked what I use so I thought I’d put together a blog post with all the hardware on my desk. I have conflicting goals in choosing the gear I use to do my work. For instance, I want to…

    Amro Mousa

    January 12, 2022
    Uncategorized
  • Approaching Code Review

    Code review is great way to maintain and improve your team’s codebase, and like a lot of team process having an intentional, positive culture around it makes it better. One of my earliest patches at Twitter was adding a short-lived token-based system for logged out requests (think login, signup, etc.). The patch itself wasn’t so…

    Amro Mousa

    December 13, 2021
    People, Programming
  • Facilitating Instead of Dictating

    Early in my career I thought showing my worth on a team meant having my ideas win. I was far too attached to those ideas, which left me frustrated when they weren’t chosen and worst of all made working with others more difficult. Over time I learned the right approach wasn’t to dictate solutions, but…

    Amro Mousa

    September 2, 2021
    People
  • Delivering Difficult News

    Earlier this year I was asked if some engineers from our team could help build a newly prioritized project. Doing so meant putting our team’s current work at substantial risk of failure. I knew canceling our project was the right thing to do because the incoming request was more important and because continuing our current…

    Amro Mousa

    August 23, 2021
    People
  • It’s About Managing Expectations

    Some time back my team was asked to take up a critical project on short notice. My product manager and I found out about the project on Monday evening and we were told it needed to ship on Friday the same week to 3 client platforms with a small team. We had just four days…

    Amro Mousa

    August 9, 2021
    People
  • Software Engineering Isn’t Magic

    The other day I was chatting with a friend who is both very competent and early in their software engineering career. They had noticed it sometimes took others less time to solve problems than it took them, and when they’d ask for help, these folks knew the answer or could often point them in the…

    Amro Mousa

    March 13, 2021
    People, Programming
  • Thoughts on Teams

    People have different value systems. Someone may value very expensive headphones, or cameras and you may value sneakers. Someone may value working really hard, and you may value having time to live and travel. It’s best to not push your value system onto others, because it can harm relationships. It’s okay and good that people…

    Amro Mousa

    January 25, 2021
    People
1 2
Next Page→

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

  • Follow Following
    • Amro's Blog
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Amro's Blog
    • Edit Site
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar