It shouldn’t be a surprise that the outlook for many tech companies in 2023 is not rosy. With layoffs across the industry, we’re all going through a challenging time - whether you’re a dev or not.
The last 14 years have been an unprecedented boom time - but economic conditions will eventually challenge all companies. How do we, as leaders, handle these challenges?
I sat down with Michael Stahkne, VP of platform at Circle CI; Lewis Tuff, VP of engineering at Blockchain.com; Carolyn Vo, partner & head of engineering at Oliver Wyman, for a panel at Dev Interrupted's conference to answer that exact question. Here’s how these leaders described what effective leadership looks like in uncertain times.
1. Increase the quality and frequency of communication
Some people will see this as counterintuitive. If times are tough, don’t you need more time to get work done? However, stellar communication is one critical way to lead effectively in both prosperous times and times of crisis.
Michael had a strong viewpoint on this: in an async remote world, he will communicate when he needs to, and he expects his colleagues to share when they need time back. They have tools with settings to mute communications and get notifications as they see fit, and they can choose when to respond.
Why meeting communication matters
It’s important to acknowledge that part of communicating well involves meetings (gasp!). It’s common to hear engineers complain about meetings. Yes, it’s good to streamline meeting schedules to reduce synchronous status updates that force context-switching. There are, however, ways to have effective meetings—and some are essential. Many meetings are crucial working sessions where you can collaborate with your colleagues.
Yet not all communication is formal. Informal signaling is also key. For example, Carolyn shared how she jokingly refers to herself as “Jr. Probationary Intern” to break down the artificial separation between you and your teammates as you become more senior. You can’t get rid of the power dynamic completely, but you don’t want your new people to be scared of you, and you need to have their trust to understand people’s motivations. Carolyn chooses to try to lower that separation through humor and direct acknowledgment.
You can't let this happen:
2. Connect motivation to business results
Understanding your team’s motivation is also essential. When things are uncertain, you must determine what motivates each team member. They’ll have questions like “Will I get to write the code I like?” And you have to answer immediately, “Yes, you will,” or “Yes, but you’re going to be reallocated to this new group.”
Michael also noted an often underrated motivating factor: How is your company oriented?
If your company is customer-oriented, if you’re focused on what they’re trying to achieve and are helping them do that—it softens the blows that land on your own company in tough times. Cutting back on your bets and focusing on your high-impact projects can also help with this and is sometimes necessary; sadly, this is often seen in layoffs or “reductions in workforce”.
Instill excitement through experimentation
Once you understand people’s motivations, you can help bring joy by providing space for teams to have fun.
When valuations are going up and to the right, it’s a lot easier to have work feel fun - so in an uncertain period, it’s imperative to get teams excited when you can. It lets people stop focusing on the downturn and instead on things that excite them.
Everyone can define “fun” differently, but knowing your team’s motivation can help you find the right ways to provide some levity and keep everyone aligned. You can bring fun in simple ways, like sharing something interesting you learned at the start of a meeting or, in Michael’s case, by throwing in emojis on Slack and shooting memes at a high rate per day.
For Lewis, teammates can find fun by having space to experiment and try new things with little pressure. Even if you disagree with your direct report’s decisions, part of providing space to experiment is still advocating for them and letting their choices play out—even if what they’re making feels like something you’ve seen before. Even then, the variables can be different, and it could turn out entirely differently. Whatever you do, don’t tell everyone you disagree with your team member’s idea.
3. Have the tough conversations
One way to understand how much fun a team can have is to understand your tolerance for failure, which can get stricter as things get uncertain. But being transparent about this tolerance will continue to give team members the space to enjoy their work.
There is a myth that you must filter lousy news and hard decisions as a leader. But being transparent helps people understand the context behind why things are happening and helps ensure people aren’t being shocked. If you end up filtering news, you breed rumors and speculations, which can produce resentment.
Blame is a communication killer
Another pitfall to avoid with tough communication is blame. One example of blameful leadership is when a team member asks for a raise, and the leader says, “I want to give you one, but my boss won’t let me.” This type of blaming irks leaders like Michael, partly because it comes off as inauthentic. Authenticity is an integral part of being transparent and conducting successful challenging communication. There are a lot of discussions you can have during tough conversations beyond finding someone else to blame. Plus, people who own messaging are more likely to get promoted.
What to avoid when providing critical feedback
Providing harsh feedback can be challenging, particularly across cultural boundaries where how tough feedback is communicated can vary wildly. Like Carolyn, this is an area of improvement I see for myself as a leader, and somewhere, I’ve made mistakes. One example: I had to communicate critical feedback to a team member and thought I was writing a thorough and fair review by simply writing extensive feedback and including positives and negatives.
However, I didn’t spend enough time thinking about how to communicate that critical feedback: I started by addressing an area of concern and initially shared the feedback in writing vs. having a conversation with them. In some cultures, such as the Netherlands, this might have been perfectly acceptable--but in working with a US-based team member who was seeing layoffs at other companies, it backfired. Instead of helping provide feedback to initiate improvement, I’d caused them to worry that their job was at risk.
In the end, I had to assuage this team member's worries--and acknowledge my own failure in how I communicated the criticism; I lacked context and empathy in my communication. When sharing critical feedback, I needed to remember the old US business adage of two positives to one negative.
4. Remove team roadblocks but track team progress
While communication is crucial for leadership, particularly in tough times, it isn’t the only thing. It’s also important to buckle down and ask yourself, “How can we as leaders remove roadblocks?”
If we want our team members to direct how they want to progress, we need to figure out how to support that and track it. By tracking this for your reports, you can align how you feel they progressed with how they feel while tailoring things to the individual. For engineering leaders, understanding the health of your team - without being a data-driven tyrant - is a crucial first step.
A helpful next step is to find the individuals who are driving the company's principles and have them mentor teammates. Leadership can come from every seat but often requires effort to foster culturally and enable team members' progression.
Leading teams in uncertain times
Leading in uncertain times hinges on communication, transparency, and understanding motivation. You can’t treat everyone the same, as everyone has different goals and ideas for fun. The more you tailor to your individuals, the more you can help your team thrive in uncertainty.
Watch my whole conversation with Carolyn, Michael, and Lewis on our YouTube 👇
“Treating devs like human beings” may sound like it should be an obvious idea. Yet we see the opposite happening on a regular basis - developers measured on lines of code, managers who expect engineers to act like automatons, and too many practices that sacrifice developer happiness and decay teams for short-term delivery.
To discuss how to fix these negative practices that too often damage our industry, I was joined by 3 experts in making the transition from churn and burn software development to more successful, human-centric development.
Here are the 6 major takeaways from my conversation with Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI; engineering leadership coach Lena Reinhard and VP of Engineering at Range, Jean Hsu.
1. Humanize Interviews
Sometimes, we must remind each other that developers are knowledge workers, not robots. During our conversation, Kelly shared her view on one of the roots of this problem: the belief that engineers shouldn’t be required to code as part of the interview process.
Her reason? Such tests don’t reflect actual working conditions. After all, when was the last time anyone stood over your shoulder at work and watched you code? Instead, she advocates for more problem-oriented system-design interviews that showcase how candidates think.
Jean aligned with this, saying interviews should focus more on what it’s like to work with a person instead of how technically strong they are. However, humanizing interviews starts before the interview itself - it means thinking about what your job descriptions and interviews cater to: Do they support people who have kids? People who already have a second job? Or do they hone in on “super passionate” developers who often have more free time?
2. API for Humans
Beyond interviews, Jean thinks that treating your working developers as humans is one of the industry’s biggest gaps. People moving into leadership and management roles are not trained to communicate and figure out, “Hey, what’s important to this other human?” She recalls one communication workshop where a person shared the takeaway “I feel like I just learned an API for humans.”
Kelly Vaughn brings a unique perspective to this discussion - that of a trained therapist. She leverages this training to monitor behavior and patterns of speech to see when interventions are needed and to understand the needs of her developers. It’s interesting to compare this approach to other managers who don’t get the same in-depth training in communication and in improving their emotional intelligence. So many times we promote developers to managers and actually set them up for failure. As a leader, it’s crucial to view developers not just as resources but as complex humans so that you can help them understand what they really want and how to create mutual value as part of the team. If we solely focus on the value to the business - and not the developer experience in building that business value - we sacrifice for short-term productivity bursts and decrease retention rates, causing major issues and costing the business money in the longterm.
One of my favorite examples of how to approach this dichotomy comes from Jean - one of her engineers told her they were having challenges balancing full-time work with other goals. This engineer was talented and a valuable member of the team, so Jean worked with them to transition them into a part-time role that let them have more time back for personal projects and more closely fit what they were looking for. This kind of relationship is challenging to develop, but when done right can both deliver for the business's needs and recognize each human's unique challenges.
3. Can a Dev Manager Be Non-Technical?
With this focus on communication and humanization vs. technical skills, the natural next question is whether or not developers need to be led by managers with technical skills. From Lena’s experience, many great engineering managers are people who haven’t been developers and likely never will. It doesn’t take someone from a technical background to enjoy working in tech and understand the motivations of their developers. Yet we continue to see companies where leaders seem to think that the way to fill gaps is pattern matching their engineers. They’re making people leaders who have similar skills or behaviors to their subordinates or who excelled as an individual contributor without necessarily having leadership skills. This contributes to engineers who struggle or burn out in poorly-fitting roles.
Part of the joy of engineering leadership is seeing your engineers grow. Part of letting them grow is to stop fixing for them and start coaching them to do the solving themselves. And when you come from a non-technical background, that temptation is less, which is part of why many great managers are not from a technical background.
4. Bringing Your Full Self to Work
Our panelists views one-on-ones not as a place to give performance advice, but as a place for engineers to share their dreams, personal endeavors, and concerns. Kelly, Lena and Jean all felt that one-on-ones were a powerful tool for leaders to break through the dehumanizing barriers of software development as production line. In fact, because of Kelly’s background as a trained therapist, she views a successfull one-on-one as something close to the therapy, though she cautions this approach doesn’t fit everyone.
However, just like a therapy session, a good one-on-one should be individualized, confidential, difficult to cancel and devoid of surprises. A leader also needs to bring their whole self to the meeting, or the employee won’t bring their whole self.
Lena resonated deeply with this. It can be tricky for people to bring their whole selves due to culture, and a leader should figure out what their employees’ boundaries are between personal and work life. It’s also important to recognizes that it’s not just regional or company culture, but also generational culture that affects those boundaries. At Range, Jean’s team report their mood for the day as well as what they’re working on during check-ins. She shared a story where she was explaining this process to another older engineering leader and that that person laughed in surprise that people would want to share something like mood in the workplace.
Jean feels strongly that the way a company talks is really representative of how they view their employees. For example, consider when companies call it “resource allocation” instead of “how employees spend their time.” In a higher-level position, you need to watch the way you talk and how you’re feeling about the people who work for you.
5. Metrics
Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience
You can get a feel for how humanizing - or dehumanizing - a company is by what metrics they use when measuring their devs. For example, lines of code is a dehumanizing metric because it’s meaningless to the actual value a developer can bring. One key to humanizing metrics is making sure the metric is something that a developer is aware of and has direct influence over. Kelly had a great example of humanizing vs. dehumanizing metrics: time to close a ticket vs. the impact of closing a ticket. The latter is much more powerful and speaks more to the nuance of what’s going on with a team.
As we talk about ad naseum at LinearB, metrics should focus more on team performance than individual performance. Metrics shouldn’t just track information, but also give people something to look forward to. People want to be doing their best work and as I’ve written, we can use metrics to improve productivity without sacrificing developer experience
6. Burnout
Another crucial challenge that stops people from doing their best work is burnout. Jean shared about a time when her company shut down for a short break and people were hoping everyone would come back from the break refreshed. But the break was amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and instead of returning refreshed, she came back tired. During a morning check-in, she shared how tired she still felt and how the short break didn’t make up for months of pandemic stress. One of her direct reports told her later how relieved they were that Jean shared, because they felt the same way! Acknowledging the elephants in the room is crucial as a leader; everything can’t always be rosy and your team wants to feel seen in the challenges you share.
Another important thing to understand about burnout is that it’s not just something you need to accept: Kelly pointed out that burnout is recognized as a mental health syndrome. Knowing that, leaders must be aware that cultural influences impact people’s willingness to talk about mental health, including regional and national cultural considerations. Your team members may not want to talk about it, so you have to look for signs before the burnout hits full force. Address these signs as soon as you can, and give the employee the time and the space they need to heal from it.
You’ve also got to manage upwards around burnout: When the pandemic hit, many companies said, “We care about you,” but didn’t take action. Instead of reducing capacity to 80% and telling people they could be less productive during that time, they tightened goals. They worried more about their performance than their employees’ humanity. As a leader within your organization, you need to raise your voice in leadership discussions and challenge the organization's negative actions by showing that there is a better way to lead.
Humanizing Means Performance
Humanizing developers is critical and isn’t divorced from performance. As Jean says, it’s not like you can say, “Let’s just get the team running; then we can focus on caring about them.” Caring about your team allows them to perform with great results!
Watch my whole conversation with Jean, Kelly, and Lena on our YouTube 👇
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This article is based on an interview with Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns who appeared on the Dev Interrupted podcast.
The success of Kubernetes was never preordained - it took years of work.
While today it has grown to be one of the largest and most popular open source projects and become the go-to API for building cloud-native applications worldwide - it almost wasn’t even open source.
Since its start in 2014, Kubernetes (an open-source orchestrator for deploying containerized applications) has transformed from a tiny project co-founded by three people, Joe Beda, Craig McLuckie, and Brendan Burns, into a production-grade infrastructure that powers large-scale production applications in various fields, from machine learning to online services.
Created with the intent to simplify the task of building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems, it allows people the world over to achieve new levels of velocity, agility, and reliability. Over the years, Kubernetes has grown into a large, successful open-source community - but it was a long journey getting there.
What is a container?
Before jumping into the history of Kubernetes, let’s first define a “container” because it often has a broad set of meanings.
Fundamentally, a container is the process of taking an application and packaging it, building a binary representation of the pieces that make up that application like the software, configuration files, etc., and having a protocol for distributing it around the world.
There are three pillars of what became known as containers:
- Packaging everything so it's exactly the same, for instance, on a laptop as it is out in the cloud
- The distribution of step 1 needs to occur easily and around the world
- Creating an environment where a bug in one component of the process doesn’t affect another component
How it started
When we interviewed Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns on the Dev Interrupted podcast, he told us that as an engineer, he found himself gravitating towards spaces with opportunity. While working at Google, he noticed that Cloud had a lot of white space and thought it would be an attractive space to work in. At the time, he led a small team of about seven engineers and decided to transition his team over to Cloud.
At the same time, his eventual Kubernetes co-founders Joe and Craig created Compute Engine, the virtual machine product for Google Cloud, and the three of them began to work together in Google’s Cloud division. While Joe and Craig focused on compute, Brendan worked in config management on things like CloudFormation and Terraform.
Ideas were starting to coalesce, and the three of them were witnessing the challenges people faced trying to adopt Cloud - a far too difficult process. There were also some internal systems at Google, in particular a system called Borg, a cluster manager that’s still used today, that served as the initial inspiration for the three developers as they dreamt up Kubernetes.
However, none of it would have been a reality without Docker.
Docker changes everything
As a prerequisite to the functionality of Kubernetes, people needed to be motivated to build container images and run containers. Docker was the startup that came along and convinced people why they should care about containment. All of a sudden, a use case existed, and an amazing opportunity presented itself.
Docker didn’t have a lot of experience at scale, and they were focused on one machine, with a container and daemon on that machine - what they were lacking was orchestration. If a system was built that could act as a container-orchestrator, it represented not only a massive opportunity to change the market but to change the entire cloud landscape.
When you think about what it takes to deploy an application up to the cloud or even to an on-premise collection of machines, it’s a lengthy process. It requires you to package up an application, distribute it, keep it running, have load-balanced traffic between the various pieces of the application, and an API to tie it all together.
Prior to Kubernetes, some of these systems were in place, but nothing like today. Kubernetes is responsible for mainstreaming the idea of a distributed systems application environment for building and constructing distributed systems that span machines far and wide.
With the need for orchestration realized, the next step was selling the idea to executives.
Selling open source
Convincing people that it was possible and a good idea was pretty straightforward. There were folks at Google who understood what Joe, Craig, and Brendan were trying to do. The real battle was fighting to make Kubernetes open source. As Brendan shared in our interview, they had a lot of internal arguments at Google about it being open source.
Mostly it came down to money and control. From a business perspective, if a product or system is massively successful and you’re the only one who can sell it, then you’re in a great position. Conversely, Brendan told us that he always felt that Kubernetes would only be massively successful if it had an ecosystem, and the best way to foster an ecosystem was to make it open source.
This viewpoint is centered around the community that comes together to build the software. An amazing community formed early on of people who helped build docs, who helped build tutorials, who would talk about their work at conferences, and then an ecosystem of companies that were betting their whole business on the success of Kubernetes. Startups began popping up, saying things like, “Well the prerequisite for using my monitoring software is that you have a Kubernetes cluster.” All of the attention and goodwill formed a sort of virtuous cycle around Kubernetes.
Success has a way of looking easy
Soon enough, Kelsey Hightower, principal engineer for Google Cloud and Brendan’s co-author of the book Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure, came along and started doing a ton of evangelism and driving attention towards Kubernetes
It can be easy to look back and assume that it was easy, because Kubernetes just took over. It's present in every major public cloud at this point, people expect it to be in new systems. But the truth is that in those early years, it took a lot of hard work to build and evangelize Kubernetes.
Brendan shared with us that his hope for the future is that the bits of Kubernetes sort of fade into the background. It’ll be there, and it’ll be important, but it won’t be talked about or thought about from day to day because, as he puts it, “There’s so much more that needs to be built.”
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The FIFTH EPISODE of Dev Interrupted––the Hebrew Edition has DROPPED. In this episode, Yishai Beeri, CTO at LinearB, chats with Eti Dahan Noked, VP R&D at Wilco about skilling up your engineers...how this differs from regular training and onboarding, and who's responsible for the success - managers or the engineers themselves? Eti shares some interesting insights both from her own career experience as an engineering leader, and her current role at Wilco, the platform built for skilling up engineers.
We can’t believe we’ve already reached the FIFTH excellent episode in the series, and we wanted to do a quick recap, ICYM our previous episodes on a diversity of topics that were really fun to record and full of excellent advice from seasoned engineering leaders in the industry.
Episode 1: Adi Shacham-Shavit
In our first episode, “Is the VP of Engineering Just a Glorified Project Manager?”, one of the most seasoned engineering leaders in the Israel community––Adi Shacham-Shavit SVP R&D at Transmit Security, drops deep wisdom on the many different aspects of engineering that have changed and evolved over the past two decades ––everything from process and practice through culture, quality, and ownership.
She takes a deep dive on how the VP Engineering today needs to bring a lot more business value and perspective, than the common misconception of just being “a glorified project manager”. Today this role has a much greater responsibility of translating and connecting engineering work to the company vision and purpose, she gives some tips on how to do this, and ultimately why this creates better engineers.
Episode 2: Linoy Shkuri
In episode two, Linoy Shkuri, R&D Manager at up and coming finserv startup Justt, talks about the joy of working in a SaaS company, and the fun with tinkering with really exciting new dev tools built with developer experience in mind in the episode “Why should you care about Developer Experience in a young, fast-growing startup?” She shares why it’s important to take a meaningful part in your local developer communities––as developers and companies, and to never be afraid to fail at something new today. Just be ready to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and fix it.
An important takeaway that Linoy shares is that as engineering managers we need to think about what will make our developers’ time memorable and meaningful––how to make sure they understand that they have grown in their time at this company.
Episode 3: Nofar Ben Kereth
Our third episode with Nofar Ben Kereth from Cloudinary, “Deciphering the R&D Operations Manager Role” takes a look at an emerging role in growing engineering organizations––R&D Operations, similar to product operations in product management and marketing operations in marketing. The R&D ops role comes to fill a void of the many non-specific, and oftentimes organization-wide challenges that growing companies need to overcome.
Nofar did an excellent job of demystifying what this role consists of, what’s in scope and out of scope, how this role interfaces with other similar ops roles in the company (have we mentioned product ops), and even how to motivate and drive folks to align with processes when they aren’t your direct reports.
Episode 4: Daniel Korn and Karni Wolf
In our previous episode of Dev Interrupted featuring Karni Wolf, Senior Engineering Manager at Snyk, and Daniel Korn, Director of Engineering at Lemonade––who together also lead the Engineering Managers IL community. This episode, “Congrats! You’re a Unicorn! But wait till you hear about these engineering challenges” is chock full of wisdom from two seasoned engineering managers in unicorn companies, that takes a look at engineering leadership in a rapidly growing and hyper-scale startup. Karni having grown with the company, and Daniel coming into a unicorn from a scale-up (later turned unicorn - BigPanda) provide different perspectives of evolving into a unicorn, and conversely landing in a unicorn.
They share some of the trials and tribulations, and things they’ve learned on the way, and provide some tips for aspiring engineering managers and engineering leaders in growing companies.
We have more great episodes coming that will focus on ICs and how they interface with engineering managers, Dev Advocacy from a senior perspective and interfacing with engineering managers and much more. Make sure to stay tuned…and we’re always looking for more guests, so REACH OUT HERE if you like to nominate a guest for the show.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
The typical model of business needs rethinking. Traditionally, businesses run in a rather industrial structure, almost militaristic. There are layers upon layers of management, with large gaps between the people who do the work and those who control the strategy. While this can work well in certain sectors, like manufacturing, it’s not ideal for a more innovative company.
So we talked to Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, about an alternative way to structure business: the team-of-teams model. In this model, the leadership of the company creates smaller teams that manage themselves. And instead of presenting specific targets, the leadership gives each team a problem to solve. That can range from managing our customer service to making a new product.
“A top heavy and top-down micro-management ecosystem is just not what resonates today with knowledge work and thought work that an art form like software development is,” Bob says. “So the team of teams model presents a different concept. Instead of having this hierarchical command and control, the leadership strategy pivots to creating an environment where there’s a shared vision and a shared mission.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:10
With more autonomy, teams are happier, more productive and work much more efficiently. But what do companies need to do to switch to this model?
Give autonomy through a shared vision
The first step is to make sure that the leadership team has a clear vision. What are you trying to achieve? This needs to be simple and summarize the ultimate aim of the company. Once you have that vision, everything else can begin to fall into place. You can allow teams to find their own way to an answer, which might be a solution you never would’ve dreamt of. Just make sure to give each team a set budget.
“Teams are granted a level of autonomy that then lets them define and discover their own purpose in where they fit in that vision,” Bob says. “Oftentimes it then provides invaluable feedback on how that vision needs to be altered based on what they’re seeing as opposed to that historical: I’m-just-being-told model.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:47
This autonomy is key to the team-of-teams model. When you give creative and innovative people freedom to explore a problem, they’re much more likely to find a novel approach.
Give problems, not tasks
When you’ve brought together bright minds and talent, there’s no need to set specific tasks. You simply give the team a goal: a problem to solve. With small teams, they can easily organize themselves and make sure that they’re working productively. They might not solve it how you originally intended, but it’ll get solved.
“The Team of Teams model gives you that flexibility and I’m not telling you what to do, I’m giving you a problem to solve,” Bob says. “When it comes to execution in a dynamic landscape, Team of Teams is almost always better.”
Sure, in some situations like the medical world, there’s a definite correct answer. Things must happen in a set way. But Bob adds:
“In the software world, I can’t think of a case where anyone knows the right answer … To say definitively: Build me exactly this in exactly this time and this will be your guaranteed result.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 19:18
Keep only four levels of hierarchy
But if you’re only going to give people objectives, and not set tasks, you need to make sure that individual employees are never more than four steps away from the CEO. Too many layers in between the worker and the CEO causes problems. So if you start to get too many levels, it’s time to start breaking your teams down into smaller groups.
“There has to be that cohesion of vision and purpose, and as you add layers between the individual contributors on the team to that CEO’s vision, you start to dilute the messaging,” Bob says. “So when I say: ‘there’s a problem, go solve it.’ They have a frame of mind and you know what our organization is striving towards … It really prevents that communication breakdown.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 15:39
Invest in your teams
Once you have your teams set up and can trust them to get on with a task, it’s time to start investing in them. Train them up. Help them grow as individuals and workers. Do that, and the whole team will improve.
“The foundational responsibility of leaders is to create an environment where your teams can thrive,” Bob says. “So I think continual learning is such an important dimension … If I don’t have the opportunity at work to find some level of mastery in a craft, I’m going to seek an opportunity where I can go get that.”
This is another reason why the old model doesn’t work. It makes people cogs in the machine, who don’t get those opportunities to master their craft and feel fulfilled.
“If you’re not, as a leader, investing in those teams to stay as sharp as possible, you’re doing a disservice to your teams. Eventually, your team skill sets are going to erode,” Bob says. “Carve out time for your folks to not only have access to content, but actually immerse in it.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 20:50
Let teams self-police
When teams are set up correctly, and have a good mix of skills, they’ll choose their own leaders. Perhaps through a vote. They’ll also often decide among themselves whether someone needs more training or needs to leave the team for good.
“The team self-polices to some degree. So if something gets escalated, it’s only in the cases where the team hasn’t been able to self-adjudicate,” Bob explains on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 8:44.
They’ll often elect their team leader, too. Which is good if someone wants to step back from that leadership role for a time or give someone else a chance to prove themselves. All these things are easier in the team-of-teams model.
Stop looking for the perfect person
Another advantage of this model is that you don’t need to be looking for someone with all the skills. It’s often much easier to find an individual that slots neatly into a team, or five people that form a new team, than to find that one perfect person.
“Maybe it’s not the perfect person, but it’s a perfect fit on this team because of personalities and principles and values,” Bob says. “Even if they don’t become that perfect person that I was looking for, they’re still going to be a valuable contributor to that team.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 32:31
It also makes it much easier to look for people who might need a little training, but you can always develop into a much stronger candidate. This opens up the pool of talent you have available to you.
Hear the full talk
This advice only scratches the surface of how organizations can make their business more efficient and productive. You can find out much more about the team-of-teams model and how it applies to business by listening to our podcast.
Learning to code doesn’t mean you have to become a programmer. Coding is one of those professions with a lot of transferable skills: logic, clear thinking, problem solving, and attention to detail, to name just a few. So learning a programming language can open up a whole range of opportunities, even if you decide to veer away from becoming a developer.
We spoke with Peter Bell, founder and CTO at CTO connection, on our podcast to see what avenues are open to those that learn how to program. Here’s what he said.
Be an individual contributor
If you enjoy programming, but don’t enjoy the management side of the role, then you’ll want to look into becoming an individual contributor (IC). An IC is someone who focuses on the actual programming, without any of the management responsibilities. In the past, this wasn’t a viable career path. But things have changed.
“It always used to be like: Hey, if you want to make more money and, you know, make your parents proud, then you've got to go become a manager and stop doing the thing you're actually good at. Which is writing code,” Peter explains. “So it's good that we've got the dual-track career path, now.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 04:43
Now, if you want to focus solely on being a programmer, that’s a viable option.
Get into management
The fact that we now have a dual-track career path means that if you’re particularly extroverted or enjoy training others up, you can choose to head in that direction. Sure, you won’t be coding as much. But your coding knowledge will help make sure that you can train up your team, and understand what they need to work on.
On a similar vein, it’s worth considering overseeing an entire product. This is where you can take that extra step away and really think about the user experience. What makes the best sense for them? How should this piece of software work? How do all these pieces fit together? A product manager needs the skills of any manager, but also needs to be able to think about the actual experience.
“Somebody who has a solid technical background who moves into product, it's another way of scaling your impact, because now you can think about the user experience and the flows without having to be like: Dammit, I got the semi-colon in the wrong place,” Peter explains. “So you get what the geeks are talking about, but you can actually focus on the impact for the users... You can still talk thoughtfully about, you know, how are we going to run this in a Kubernetes cluster and how are we going to think about, you know, real time stream queries against the data source?”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 05:06
Being able to take a step back away from the day-to-day coding can be great for those that enjoy reviewing code and looking for errors. When developing products, you won’t spend as much time writing new code, but you’ll get to think through the problems at a more abstract level.
Train or consults others
Another role, which can suit those that prefer the freelance life, is to move into training or consultancy. Companies are always looking to teach their staff about new techniques and languages. So if you have a knack for passing on your skills, you’ll be in high demand. In fact, Peter described on the podcast how he started off by writing blogs about ColdFusion.
“I started presenting a technical conference around the US and around the world, and then I realized, once I got to a certain point, that people would pay me to do this,” Peter says. “I've been on the other side where I'm paying someone to come in and talk about Redis or whatever. And I'm always saying to myself: This is really expensive, but we're still paying for it.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 06:36
Being able to pick up a new language or technology quickly is a skill that not many have. So if you can do it, you can easily go into consultancy or training and earn a substantial salary. For example, Peter explains that large companies will often pay between $10,000 and $15,000 for a single day training 30 engineers. If you can pull it off, and leave those engineers with the right skills, you only need a few jobs to make a good living.
Try being a sales engineer
If you’re someone who enjoys working with people and thinking about the overall architecture of a project, rather than the fiddly details, then you might have more impact if you become a sales engineer. This role is all about understanding a product inside and out, giving demos and presenting the facts. The best sales engineers are the knowledgeable ones.
“It’s this intersection between understanding computers and being able to speak to a human. And it’s a relatively rare trait,” Peter says. “It seems engineering is awesome because what you do is you get to go and hang out with other geeks, and understand their problems.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:20
So rather than focusing on coding, then coming back in six months with a finished product, you get to have those high-level talks. What are your big pain points? What are the issues with your engineering flows? How might this tool or product reduce cycle time? Which can often be a lot more rewarding and enjoyable.
Check out the podcast
These are just some of the jobs that are available to you, once you know how to code. But if you’d like to hear more about what Peter talked about, listen to our podcast.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
Flow can mean many things but when it comes to workflow it usually refers to that feeling, discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, when you enter a state of intense focus and lose yourself in an activity.
Video games are a great example. They take advantage of this feeling to keep you immersed, which is why it’s so easy for gamers to “lose time” and just get wrapped up. The same feeling usually drives your most productive and best work.
When you manage developers, their workflow should be treasured and valued. That’s why, to improve developer focus, it’s vital to avoid weighing them down with minor interruptions or non-urgent pings.
“Flow is characterized as this experience where the task that you're doing is perfectly matched to the skills that you have.”
-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 7:51
1. Acknowledge that it take 23 minutes for devs just to get into flow
Did you know that it takes 23 minutes to get into a flow state? For some people it takes even longer. That means that for every question, disruption, email, and interruption that you or your coworkers are subjected to, it could be half an hour of productivity down the drain. We talked to Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, about how she manages workflow
“Say you got a Slack ping, and you're like, “oh, I'll just ask a question.” How long does it take you to find the thread again? What's that total interrupt time? It's 23 minutes…that's been measured.”
-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:11
2. Defrag dev calendars
Some interruptions are unavoidable but many of them aren’t. Planning your calendar in a way that works around the needs and workflows of your team is necessary to maximize everyone's productivity.
For instance, scheduling meetings on days when weekly meetings already occur can help preserve focus time by not disrupting other working days.
Devs need to communicate with their managers on what times they have available away from normal workflow and then it’s up to engineering leaders to plan around those schedules. As a dev leader, you have to look at your devs’ calendars, not your own, and react accordingly.
“If you're a manager, when you're scheduling, don't look at your calendar, and then find a time and then see where you can slot the engineer in…look at the engineer's calendar and see, where can you tack the meeting on that it is after another meeting, or it is maybe at the start of the day, the end of the day… and ask them!”
-Katie Wilde on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 12:31
3. Suck it up - schedule your work around focus time
When managing large numbers of devs, it can seem like a chore to work around many different schedules or attempting to get meetings done only on specific days. We asked Katie what her trick to juggling so many different calendars and meetings was, and she had one thing to say: “Suck it up.”
Devs are the backbone of software production and it’s important to prioritize their productivity whenever possible. To help them stay on task and be able to really focus on their work, they need to have meetings planned around their day - not yours.
Providing consistency for your devs - meeting them when they are ready, available, and focused - helps them maintain a flow state and maximize productivity. But more than that, it’s the right thing to do. Devs want to build cool stuff, not have their days ruined by their own calendars.
Katie says it best:
“That might mean that, as the manager, you have a little bit weirder hours. I hate to say this, but kind of suck it up… There's no way to get around that.”
-on the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 13:23
Watch the full interview-
If you would like to hear more about how managers can work around a developers schedule and other great insight from Katie Wilde, check out the full podcast on your favorite podcasting application, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
In a typical manufacturing company, a supply chain is the chain of companies that you rely on to make your product. For example, a mobile phone manufacturer buys processor chips from a supplier. That supplier needs to buy a part from another manufacturer. And that manufacturer relies on yet another company for the raw metal.
But what is the software supply chain? And how do you keep it secure? We spoke with Kim Lewandowski, co-founder and head of product at Chainguard, to explain the details.
Your software supply chain is more complex than you think
The software supply chain can be complicated. Mainly because it’s difficult to know how far it reaches. Take a simple example: If you use Salesforce to keep track of your customers, you store your customers’ data on Salesforce’s servers. Not a problem, surely? But Salesforce could have a breach. And what about the servers themselves? Those servers might run on Windows. If that has a security bug, hackers have another way in. How about the software that Salesforce uses to host its website? If that is hacked, you have yet another breach.
“When I think of the software supply chain, it’s all the code and all the mechanics and the processes that went into delivering that core piece of software at the end,” Kim explained. “It’s all the bits and pieces that go into making these things.”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 11:28
Keeping the software supply chain secure involves checking who has keys
The important part of keeping your supply chain secure is making sure that you track down what you’re using. And checking that they’re secure and reliable. Every new third party can be a potential problem. If you don’t do your due diligence, you won’t know what risks you’re taking.
As Kim explained, a favorite analogy of hers is thinking about doing construction work on your own home.
“You have a contractor. Well, they need keys. They have subcontractors. You give the keys out to all their subcontractors. Who are they? Where are they from? What materials are they bringing into your house?”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 12:09
The more third party tools you use, the more out of control it can become
It all comes down to accountability. It can easily start spreading rapidly. One third-party tool that you use to create your software might rely on five separate third parties. And you don’t know what code they’ve got hidden under the hood. Your keys are suddenly all over the place.
The only way to keep it under control is to remind yourself to check and to do regular audits of the services you use. Kim believes it’s helpful to think of every new tool as a package coming to your home.
“How is your package getting to your house?” Kim said. “What truck is it riding on and who is driving those trucks?”
-On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 12:44
Get the full conversation
If you’d like to learn more about the software supply chain, and how to make sure that yours is secure, you can listen to the full conversation with Kim over on our podcast.
Starved for top-level software engineering content? Need some good tips on how to manage your team? This article is inspired by Dev Interrupted - the go-to podcast for engineering leaders.
Dev Interrupted features expert guests from around the world to explore strategy and day-to-day topics ranging from dev team metrics to accelerating delivery. With new guests every week from Google to small startups, the Dev Interrupted Podcast is a fresh look at the world of software engineering and engineering management.
Listen and subscribe on your streaming service of choice today.
At Netflix, we don’t just think about productivity - we engineer it. There’s an entire team within Netflix dedicated to productivity. I lead the Develop Domain along with my Delivery and Observability Domain peers, and together, we make up Productivity Engineering.
I recently sat down with the Dev Interrupted podcast to discuss all things productivity, how I run my team, and how other managers should view employee success. Here’s how we think about it at Netflix:
Can productivity be engineered?
In short, yes! Productivity is not a generic term for team performance or a perfunctory buzzword used during team meetings. The productivity team is an actual organization. The work we do is foundational to Netflix’s development teams. Productivity Engineering lives within the broader, central Platform organization.
The role of the Productivity Engineering team is simple: we exist to make the lives of Netflix developers easier. Abstracting away the various “Netflix-isms” around development, delivery, and observability, productivity allows devs more time to focus on their domain of expertise.
“We are sort of like the nerds’ nerds, if you will, enabling them to use our platforms and tools so that the work that they're doing is focused on studio and streaming, without thinking about everything that's under the hood.” - On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 2:31
With the recent addition of Gaming to the list of Netflix’s pursuits, the resulting focus becomes even more important.
Practically speaking, it’s the role of Productivity Engineering to help with things like coding, testing, debugging, dependency management, deployment, alerting, monitoring, performance, incident response, to name a bunch. Netflix utilizes the concept of a “paved road,” the frameworks, platforms, apps, and tools we build and support to keep our devs rolling. The idea is to keep workflows streamlined and enable developers to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. If the road ahead is cleared of obstacles, you’re going to get to where you need to go faster and with support along the way.
It’s also about helping developers enjoy the ride. To abuse another metaphor, a sound engineering experience should be like dining at a fine restaurant. If done right, you rarely remember the waitstaff, have a hard time finding something you like, or worry about how they prepared the food; you simply enjoy the experience. If Productivity Engineering is doing their job, they act as the restaurant and waitstaff with developers as the customer, providing nothing short of a beautiful end-to-end experience.
Measuring Outcomes vs. Output
Measuring all of that productivity can be hard, and there’s no one unicorn measurement to rule them all. Hence, developer productivity teams should focus on impact and outcomes. Above all, Netflix focuses on customer satisfaction. Our philosophy is that while how something is delivered is important, the impact of what’s delivered is ultimately of greater importance.
"If you're running around a track super-fast, but you're on the wrong track, does it matter? So really, what are you delivering? How you're delivering is important. But if that thing that you're delivering is ultimately doing what you want it to do, that's the most important thing."
- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 5:05
In this model, the outcome always wins over output or activity. For instance, standard productivity deployment metrics (DORA) as applied to our customers become an important proxy for measuring our success. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for productivity are viewed as a reflection of a team’s performance as it relates to customer satisfaction.
I’m a big fan of the SPACE framework, developed by Nicole Forsgren, for precisely this reason. How are our customers doing in terms of Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency? The answer to those questions reflects how we’re doing as a Productivity organization.
"This is our strategy, these are our hypotheses around, how we're going to improve our customers' productivity. Are those things paying off? And if you can't measure them in some way, who knows? Right? So yeah, we're getting a little more hardcore about this."
- On the Dev Interrupted Podcast at 24:17
Key metrics provide productivity teams with a holistic view of performance by establishing benchmarks. Understanding that everything needs to be viewed within the proper context, it’s difficult to improve as an organization if nothing is measured or tracked.
Comparing Productivity
Comparing developers’ productivity across teams is a thorny subject at best and downright dangerous for team morale at worst. As the old saying goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy” or what I typically say, “comparisons lead to unhappiness”, or with my kids “eyes on your own paper!”.
The productivity teams at Netflix take a contextualized view of dev teams rather than relying solely on raw data. Every project is different, the customer base is different, the use case is different, personas are different, and where a team is within the software development life cycle is different.
It’s a basic understanding that comparing apples to oranges is not good math. A team that is just starting out and building something new, is going to look very different than a team with a mature product. By recognizing this, it becomes almost impossible to rank teams against each other because very rarely, if ever, will teams be doing the same thing, in the same space, the same way, with the same people.
Even a measurement of an outcome pertaining to customer satisfaction (CSAT) is not straightforward. At Netflix and across the industry, we’ve found that satisfaction for internal teams skews lower than satisfaction for customer-facing teams.
The reason? Teams within Netflix are their own harshest critics. When attempting to gauge the performance of an internal team vs a customer-facing team, it’s understood that the internal team is almost always going to score lower on satisfaction, even if both teams are equally effective.
Context is everything. Measuring productivity means being mindful of context.
Pushing Productivity
Any company that wants to be successful must understand how to measure its success. Productivity doesn’t count for much if an organization is not moving towards desired outcomes.
By viewing productivity as more than just a concept or a raw set of data, the hard-working teams at Netflix have turned productivity into an actual apparatus. It is a living, breathing team of human beings whose devotion to empathetic efficiency improves customer satisfaction and dev team quality of life. I am incredibly proud to lead these teams, and I sincerely hope the work we do inspires other organizations to improve their developers’ experience.
And if you want to be as productive as Netflix, remember that metrics are only as good as their context!
Fact: Over 26% of adults in the United States have some sort of disability. To ignore such a massive part of the population would be ill-advised for any company, legally, financially, and above all, ethically. How can you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to maintaining a progressive and responsive organization?
We reached out to two experts - Alwar Pillai and Perry Trinier of Fable – on the topic of designing products that have inclusivity for people with disabilities at their core. Here are the 3 things they think every engineer, developer and product designer needs to know about inclusive design and how it will inevitably affect the future of their companies.
1. Inclusive design has already brought us Alexa, Siri and countless other smart gadgets
Often times people assume that tech companies are driving innovation through focus groups or trying to cater to the average consumer, but that’s not always true. Some of the greatest recent innovations in tech have been found by designing technology to be as accessible as possible to people with disabilities. By keeping the designing process inclusive, you maximize potential for growth.
Alwar Pillai: Each of us today use technology that’s been designed for assistive technology users first, from as simple as an electric toothbrush, which is designed for people with motor impairments, but this is something that everyone uses now… you have voice to text was for people with disabilities again. And now we have... Siri, and Alexa, and like dictation, and all of that existed because it was designed for people with disabilities first, so it is already proven that when you practice inclusive design, and design for the edge cases, there is that broader impact.
2. Inclusive workplace culture draws in better talent
When you put inclusivity and accessibility at the front lines of your work culture and development process, you not only maximize your potential customer base but increase your pool of applicants and make your workforce more efficient. Some of the best talent in the world of inclusive design comes from people who use accessibility technology daily. Maximizing your accessibility to potential employees gives your company the best shot at finding the right person for the job. What does it mean today to build an accessibility first dev culture?
Perry Trinier: I think it's like sort of the opposite of saying that accessibility is an afterthought. In this case, accessibility is absolutely primary. And it's also like a shared understanding on the team that accessibility isn't an extra feature or like a defect that they can backlog. It's just a table stakes dimension of the quality of what they build, and that they kind of aren't finished building what they're doing if it's still inaccessible.
Alwar Pillai: There's a lot of barriers when it comes to trying to build an inclusive team, to just the workplace tools that are out there, you know?... And so we've had to do a lot of... custom workarounds for some things. But it has resulted in every single person in the team understanding the impact of accessibility and taking that extra initiative and make sure whatever they're sharing with... each other internally is easily accessible to everyone.
3. Inclusive design’s influence is set to explode
There seems to be a cultural divide when it comes to inclusivity and many companies are hesitant to make the necessary changes to fuel a more accessible work culture. Making the effort to enact real change is necessary for the health of your business and the respect of the individuals who need accessible technology. More and more individuals and companies are seeing the need to stay current with inclusive design or, better yet, lead the way to establishing new and exciting ways to stay inclusive.
Perry Trinier: I think it's important to invest in helping the team members to build the knowledge and specifically set goals for reports to, for example, complete a course in accessibility. It's an important skill, just like security and performance are for front-end developers. And it should be treated in that same way for professional development. And there are tons of resources online courses on LinkedIn, Udacity. And there are lots of blog posts and talks by experts in the community like Marcy Sutton, and they’re directed to developers, like front-end developers who just need to learn what they need to know to be able to test their interfaces and to build experiences that everyone can use, so I would say that's the place to start is just with building up that capability.
Design is changing… Moving towards a more inclusive future
There is a fundamental gap in what is provided and what is needed for many people who use accessibility technology. The way of the future is to practice an inclusive design culture and keep every person in mind in your design process.
Alwar Pillai: The way we build digital products right now is broken. There is a digital divide between the experiences of people with disabilities and people who are able bodied. And we as people who are part of engineering teams and engineering cultures, it's our responsibility to make sure we change the way we build products and make the process more inclusive, so that more and more people have access to the products that we're building.
If you want to know more about Fable and their ability to help your company evolve and grow while staying accessible to everyone, please visit www.makeitfable.com. Be sure to listen to and review this interview’s podcast and many others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube or any of your favorite podcasting apps. Also, be sure to join the Dev Interrupted Discord community where we have conversations about topics just like this going all week long.