StaffEng – Details, episodes & analysis

This episode is a celebration of the journey we have been on as this podcast comes to a close. We have had such a great time bringing you these interviews and we are excited about a new chapter, taking the lessons we have learned forward into different spaces. It's been a lot of work putting this show together, but it has also been such a pleasure doing it. And, as we all know, nothing good lasts forever! So to close the circle in a sense, we decided to host a conversation between the two of us where we interview each other as we have with our guests in the past, talking about mentorship, resources, coding as a leader, and much more! We also get into some of our thoughts on continuous delivery, prioritizing work, our backgrounds in engineering, and how to handle disagreements.  As we enter new phases in our lives, we want to thank everyone for tuning in and supporting us and we hope to reconnect with you all in the future!

Links

• David Noël-Romas on Twitter
• Alex Kessinger on Twitter
• Stitch Fix
• Stripe
• JavaScript: The Good Parts
• Douglas Crockford
• Monkeybrains
• Kill It With Fire
• Trillion Dollar Coach
• Martha Acosta
• Etsy Debriefing Facilitation Guide
• High Output Management 
• How to Win Friends & Influence People
• Influence

The structures of an organization can often be self-reinforcing, and in a changing environment, this becomes a recipe for future vulnerabilities. That is why senior ICs need to play a slightly discordant role at times by alerting teams to issues conventionally outside of their bubble of concern. Peter Stout is a Technical Director at Netflix where he has a cross-functional role at the juncture of business and technology. He joins us on the show today to share some of the finer details around what inhabiting this position in the above manner looks like. We start by hearing Peter describe himself as a generalist, and share how this played out in the broad focus of his college degree as well as in his career pivot from Chemistry into Software Engineering. We discuss the rapid growth of the engineering team at Netflix, how this has led to less tightly-defined roles for junior and senior engineers, and how this factors into the way Peter approaches his place in the organization. Peter talks about the shift he made from technician to technical director and how much of the skills he learned from the former position he brings into the latter. He talks about his tendency to seek out the blank spots in the organization and how he tries to focus on a long-term vision, using that to guide him as he connects the dots between teams and influences decision making. Here Peter considers his role as a disruptor and how he gauges how much pressure to apply while still staying largely in sync. We also have a great conversation about Peter’s approach to mentorship and his philosophy around how he grew into the leadership position he occupies. Tune in today!

Links

• Peter Stout on LinkedIn
• Netflix
• Range
• The Leadership Pipeline

Credit Karma is a company that helps people understand their credit. Today’s guest, Mason Jones, was brought onto the Credit Karma team to move the company from a monolith to microservices. The company has grown almost four-fold since he joined, and Mason is now a senior staff engineer whose role swings from engineering to project management to technical writing, depending on the project he is working on. Prior to working at Credit Karma, Mason was involved in a number of small start-ups, and he explains how these experiences have translated into very useful skills in his current job. He also explains how he shares these skills with other engineers in the company, and some of the challenges that have arisen during mentoring sessions. Security, velocity and reliability are core values at Credit Karma and Mason shares how he, as a leader, upholds them, and how he continually expands his knowledge in order to have the maximum positive impact on the company. 

Links

• Mason Jones on LinkedIn
• Credit Karma

Today’s conversation is about resilience, and as today’s guest, Lorin Hochstein, notes; “Resilience is about the stuff that isn’t visible through the metrics.” Lorin is a senior software engineer at Netflix who is on a mission to improve the company’s engineering department through creating a culture within which peer-to-peer learning and the process of reflecting on past mistakes are foundational. Lorin is responsible for the development of a few grassroots programs at Netflix which address the company’s lack of deliberate knowledge sharing, which he talks about today. We also discuss the value of close calls as opposed to incidents, and how Lorin works around the challenge of measuring the negative outcomes which didn’t occur. Although he makes sure to point out that he does not bear a "staff" title (Netflix does not have them), he is certainly doing some interesting staff-type work, and his passion for value creation is inspiring. 

Links

• Lorin Hochstein

What works for a small company may not work for a large company, so what do you do when your organization experiences rapid growth, and the old way of doing things is no longer sustainable? In today’s episode, we speak with Stacey Gammon, a tech lead and Principal Software Engineer at Elastic. She has been with the company for almost five years and in that time has been able to observe firsthand the challenges that come with rapid growth in areas like scalability, communications, and project management. Tuning in you’ll hear Stacey break down the details of her role and how she manages teams and people. She elaborates on how Elastic is currently approaching the problem of scalability and how it is still a work in progress. We hear from Stacey about the many projects they have going on at one time and why the biggest challenge is often saying no to new projects. Later, we discuss retrospectives and why they can be a safe and effective way for teams to learn from past errors. Stacey shares the details of the formal mentorship program at Elastics and unpacks why the long-term benefits of delegating outweigh the extra time commitment it requires in the short term. Stacey shares her feelings on spending a large portion of her time in meetings and why she believes one-on-one meetings are valuable. We loved having Stacey on the show, and we’re sure you will find the conversation every bit as insightful and thought-provoking as we did! For all this and more, tune in today!

Links

• Stacey Gammon on LinkedIn
• Kibana
• Elastic
• Tanya Riley

Please note that this episode contains brief mention of suicide.

Today's guest needs no introduction! Of course, they will get one anyway:

Will Larson is the CTO of Calm and has worked at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is also an author and has written two books, one of which is on Staff Engineering and serves as the inspiration for this podcast! In our conversation with Will, we discuss one of his earliest blog posts on a catastrophic launch at Digg and why he felt it was important to write about his experiences. We talk with Will about the expanding role of Staff Engineers and how that is affected by the rate of change in the field of startups and technology companies as a whole. Later, we explore the tracks of technical leadership and management within technology companies and the pros and cons of the pendulum model. Will shares what he’s learned about the skills needed for leadership positions and why working with a team of managers versus a team of engineers requires a completely different skillset. After that, we talk about Will’s career in writing and public speaking. We loved having Will on the show, so join us for engaging conversation spanning many topics from the potential for leadership in technology companies to the joy of writing!

Links

• Will Larson on LinkedIn
• Will Larson on Github
• Will Larson on Amazon
• Irrational Exuberance
• Calm
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
• Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity
• High Output Management
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Today’s guest is Mahdi Yusuf, Tech Lead for the Server Architecture Team at 1Password. Our conversation is about what it means as well as what it takes to navigate the needs of the org, client, and staff in order to find the best path forward. We kick things off by hearing more about what Mahdi’s job at 1Password involves and he talks about the chief concerns and responsibilities of working on the platform code that the rest of the app is built on. Mahdi’s role specifically requires him to do a lot more than write code though, including designing projects, communicating between nodes in the org, and mentoring staff. This is a balancing act indeed and our conversation moves to focus on what it looks like to handle these tasks with equal measure. One of the biggest skills the position of Tech Lead requires for Mahdi is empathy, and he talks about how a big part of what he does involves listening to concerns and working out when it is best to make a pivot and focus on something different for the overall good. In an environment with so many different stakeholders, knowing what this is can be a huge challenge! We wrap up our conversation with Mahdi on the subject of excelling in your career, talking about what it takes to do truly good work, thinking bigger than the specific problem one is working on, and the necessity of having difficult conversations. So to hear Mahdi’s insights on creating rock-solid products while maintaining a healthy and effective team, tune in today!

Links

• Mahdi Yusuf
• Mahdi Yusuf on LinkedIn
• Mahdi Yusuf on Twitter
• 1Password
• Architecture Notes

Amy Unger, our guest on today’s show, is passionate about providing a high-quality service to the customers who use the products she is working on. Amy has a diverse skill set and an equally diverse set of tasks that she undertakes weekly for GitHub, and at the core of everything she does is her drive to provide value. Amy came into the for-profit space from the academic programming space, and she explains the different experiences she has had in these realms. We discuss what a tech lead role consists of, in comparison to the deep diver role that Amy currently holds, the responsibilities that come with it, and why she loves what she does.  Amy also shares her thoughts about trade-offs, and the considerations that all engineers should be making before they embark upon certain projects.

Links

• Amy Unger on LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Heroku
• Code4Lib
• Digital Commons - bepress

Today we welcome Brian Lawler, who is a Principal Engineer at Iterable! Brian has a load of experience with software architecture, having worked in the space for over 25 years, at a number of different companies and amassing a large amount of wisdom and expertise in the process. The rise of Iterable stands as a testament to the great ethos and community at the company and Brian generously shares a lot of insider info on how the teams and processes work. We get to talk about his specific role as it stands, his first period of employment at Iterable, and his thoughts on leadership style and problem-solving. Brian underlines the way they approach meetings and the feedback that follows before we hear how he divides his time as Principal Engineer. The conversation also covers how to keep a multidisciplinary organization in alignment, processes for flagging bugs, and the inextricable importance of mentorship in a company such as this. So for all this great stuff and much more from a seasoned pro, be sure to join us!

Links

• Brian Lawler on LinkedIn
• Iterable
• Accenture

On today’s episode of StaffEng, we speak with the formidable Matthew Bilotti who works as a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Twitter and has been at the company for 11 years. Matthew currently leads a team that plays a critical role in user safety. Matthew has also taken on a key role when it comes to mentoring junior members at Twitter. In our conversation, Matthew talks about why he’s spent so many years at Twitter, his deep passion for teaching, and why the work his team does is invisible until something goes wrong. Matthew also elaborates on what goes into hiring a new senior staff member and why, at Twitter, they make it possible to easily switch teams to help retain the employees after the company has spent so much time investing in them. For all this and much more, join us for a riveting discussion on leadership, mentorship, and how to balance idealism with realism in a mission-based company!

Links

• Matthew Bilotti on Twitter