Hey, I'm Jake.

this is a work in progress!

I'm a Software Engineering Team Lead for Newsround and I line manage all software engineers on this team!

👋🏻This README is here to give you an idea of how I like to work, hopefully you'll find this useful and refer back to it from time to time - if you need anything at all, just pop over, Slack me, email me - whatever you feel comfortable with!

My role as team lead

My role varies from team to team and person to person - this will be a very general guide and not exhaustive.

1. I am here to support you. My main objectives here are to support you in your personal development and growth, help you enjoy your work, coach you through any challenges or issues you face whilst also being responsible for handling your pastoral care such as holidays, approvals, sickness and regular catch ups. Ultimately I want you to be the best you can be and I'll go out of my way to understand you and support you to achieve that.

2. I am here to guide the current and future technical direction of our product. My role here is to ensure we are aligned with team, product, business and wider technical strategies to ensure we can constantly ship high quality code in a way that benefits our product and aligns with our wider business strategy. Ultimately I want to ensure we can deliver high quality working software at all times.

3. I am here to advise and guide the team on best practices and standards, fostering continuous improvement and promoting collaboration across the business and ensuring we are shipping high quality, production ready systems.

4. I am responsible for managing technical risks to our product, I'll ensure technical debt and technical risks are visible, well understood and mitigated. I'll also ensure that visibility and ownership of these risks are well understood by the team and any mitigation required is a well agreed concencus.

5. Sometimes, I'll write code, but if I do, it'll be happening as part of a pair or mob! I might step in from time to time to steer us out of trouble if things aren't going to plan. I avoid having full ownership of development of work where possible.

Ultimately though, my top priority is to ensure our team is healthy and moving forwards in the right direction.

Making decisions

My role on the team is not to be an "ultimate decision maker". Whilst I will have opinions and thoughts on most matters, I will only seek to give advice and guide the team, it is ultimately up to the team to self organise and reach consensus on the right approaches. I am on the other hand accountable for the engineering work within the team.

Schedule

I'm normally in the office for 9am and I tend to leave between 5-5:30pm.

I generally expect people to be in the office before 9:45 and leave anytime after 4pm (providing you've worked your contracted hours that day).

Working from home is OK and as a general guide once every 2 weeks is OK. You should let me know as soon as possible if you wish to work from home. I understand though that life happens... if something unexpected crops up like your car won't start just get in touch with me as soon as possible to let me know you can't make it in and will be working from home for the day.

If you are working from home, I expect that you'll make arrangements to dial into any meetings you're required in that day, including stand up.

Please don't work outside of your hours, work life balance is important - nobody is expected to work in the evenings.

Feedback

Feedback is an important part of the continuous improvement lifecycle, I'll often given you feedback in a variety of ways - at one to ones, over Slack, at lunch - if you prefer to receive feedback in a particular way, just let me know.

I will also expect you to give me feedback from time to time, it's important to my development as your team lead. If I feel like I haven't received any feedback in a while, I might ask you directly for it or send out an anonymous survey to receive it.

I also expect you to regularly give feedback to your peers - feedback is critical in our personal development and trust me, they'll thank you for it 😉.

Catch Ups

I will schedule a bi-weekly catch up in your diary when you join my team, it's important to know that these catch ups are your time to discuss anything that's on your mind, what you need, how you're doing, if there is anything I can help with and how you're progressing with your Objectives and Key Results. You should be leading these conversations and coming prepared - take a few moments before our catchup to write anything down anything you'd like to discuss with me, it can be hard thinking on the spot!

Sometimes we will go for a walk, coffee, canteen, ice-cream - it won't always be in a stuffy meeting room!

Please don't wait until our catch up if something is on your mind or stressing you out - come grab me at my desk, Slack me, email me - don't wait - I will always have time!

If you need something

1. I often have headphones in, it helps me drown noise out when I'm working on something that requires thought, but it doesn't mean I'm too busy to chat, just come pull up a chair, don't be worried about disturbing me!

2. Slack or email me - if you don't want to chat in person or if you want to arrange a private in-person conversation later, just ping me!

3. Fire me a calendar invite - I'll be there!

Be yourself

A huge part of my role is to ensure that we're all continuously learning new things, collaborating with one another, listening, understanding and most important of all, being yourself.

I believe we do our best work when we can truly be ourselves, be who you need to be in my team - if you feel like you can't for any reason please talk to me.

Have fun

Software engineering can be an exhausting activity, I don't expect my team to sit in silence, have fun, thrive of each other and push yourselves further.

Enjoy your time in my team 💥, we succeed together 💪.