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**Gerhard Lazu:** I think we're touching on something very, very important. You keep mentioning systems, you keep mentioning teams... Now, a system means teams. It doesn't mean a technical system. It means how everything works. And a system can even mean a company. They're never closed systems, by the way; there are al... |
**Charity Majors:** A high-performing team is one that gets to spend most of their time and energy and focus solving new, hard problems that move the business forward, not trudging in salt mines of engineering, just trying to find bugs and reproduce bugs, and firefight. |
A high-performing team is one that ships often. It doesn't find it remarkable to ship. A high-performing team is one that can take a lot of stuff for granted, because there's a real structure, socio-technical structure around them that the CI/CD is well tended to. There are internal/external SLO's, people's time is tak... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So if a team would like to become high-performing, but let's say they're fighting their CI/CD pipeline, what would you recommend they do? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, a team or an individual? I feel like you can only really make decisions as an individual. And while I do believe in pitching in and trying to make the system better, there are also a lot of places where there are too many entrenched forces that are against change... And I really think that peo... |
Join great teams where you don't have to fight to make change, to make progress, where you can learn a lot from other great people. I've seen too many amazing engineers stick it out year after year at jobs that didn't appreciate them, where they weren't allowed to make the changes that they knew needed to be made. Ther... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[40:17\] So you make a high-performing team by joining a high-performing team, and then you become-- |
**Charity Majors:** It's the easiest way. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's the easiest way, okay. And what about the hard way? What about someone that says "No, I have decided that I want to make my team high-performing, and I will stick with them for as long as it takes"? |
**Charity Majors:** Do you have support? Do you have the support of your higher-ups? Do you have the support of your team? Because you can't do it on your own. This is a team effort, so you need to look -- and here's where I feel like engineering managers have a lot to answer for the state of things today... Because en... |
I feel like there's a lot of passivity on the part of a lot of engineering leadership, when -- who's gonna do it if not you? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What would you say about product people that -- I don't wanna use the word "boss", but let's say tell engineers what to do, and sometimes the engineers think "You know what - this doesn't feel right"? What would you recommend in that situation? |
**Charity Majors:** I don't think that that's a healthy situation. Product people should never be telling engineers what to do. It should be a triad. You've got product, design, engineering. You are all equals. All your voices matter. You're experts in your own domain. The idea of a product person telling an engineer w... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What does a healthy product engineering relationship look like? |
**Charity Majors:** It looks like a triad, it looks like a partnership. Nobody's trying to make anyone do anything; you're all aligned on wanting to move the business forward and wanting to do a good job. I'm not saying it's easy... But unhealthy power dynamics should be pretty easy to sniff out, and that's never okay. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We've been discussing with Ian Miell in a previous episode about the power of money, and especially money flows... And he makes a really good case where he says "You should really follow the money flows, because they will dictate what is important and what should happen." |
**Charity Majors:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How, in your opinion, does the money flow or money come into play when it comes to product and engineering? Because there must be a relationship. What does a healthy relationship look like? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, the naive, the simplistic answer that we often see is just to focus on "Features, features, features", because there's a straight line from feature to money. Or there should be. It's a more elliptical line from tech debt to money, or from observability to money, or from-- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Happiness. |
**Charity Majors:** Happiness, right. There are a lot of things that are more elliptical, but they're no less real. It's just a question of short-term investment versus long-term investment, and you can't just play the short-term game all day, all week, all month, all year, or you'll lose people, you'll lose happiness.... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[44:14\] So how would you measure what is important on a team? Money is not it, right? That's a short-term goal which has many negatives associated with it. It's important, of course, but it shouldn't be the sole driver. |
**Charity Majors:** No. It depends, to some extent... Here's one thing. I think every manager should be -- so I do think every engineer who builds a 24/7 highly-available service should be on call for their work. I also think that getting woken up two or three times a year for your service is reasonable. I think more t... |
Every engineering team has two constituents. There's your customers and there's your engineers. Neither one is more important than the other. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is really powerful. So how do you measure the happiness, or -- I think "measure" is maybe the wrong word. How do you determine how happy and healthy your engineers at Honeycomb are? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, you can start by asking them, and by doing anonymous surveys now and then. Good engineering managers have their finger on the pulse of their teams, and they should be sensitive to things. Is a team getting burned out? Are the demands unreasonable? Does the team need different composite -- do w... |
You can also look at top-level metrics like attrition... But honestly, I'm a big fan of just asking people and building up a trust relationship, so that people know they aren't gonna be punished for saying something. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Would you ask them regularly? Would you let them come to you? What works best? |
**Charity Majors:** Both. All. All of the above. And also, I like asking engineers about each other too, like "How is so-and-so doing? Do you feel like so-and-so is getting stressed or burned out?" Because a team of people tends to care deeply for each other, and they're often a lot more sensitive to each other's burno... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[47:03\] I really like the way you think about the human element. I really like the way you see us, the engineers, as people, at the end of the day. They're not machines; they have to talk to machines, but it doesn't make them one. |
**Charity Majors:** Engineers are not fungible. You asked about the socio-technical systems, and like -- there's a thought experiment that I use sometimes... Imagine the New York Times; you've got a socio-technical system, it's comprised of people, the tools, the systems etc. If you took all the people away and replace... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Context, yes. |
**Charity Majors:** Starting with how you really log in. It would take a really long time. The majority of the system lives in the heads of the people who work on it, so you can't take them for granted, you can't just replace them. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Not cogs. Not machines. They're not pets, they're not cattle... They're people. |
**Charity Majors:** None of the above. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So as a listener, if I had to remember one thing from this conversation, what do you think that should be? |
**Charity Majors:** If you're frustrated about the performance of your engineering team, take a long, hard look at your CI/CD pipeline. 15 minutes or bust. And observability, of course. Go use the Honeycomb free tier. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a good one. What I would say is be curious in production, because that's where all the interesting stuff happens. |
**Charity Majors:** I like that a lot. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would use another word instead of "stuff", but you know what I mean. |
**Charity Majors:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Lastly, I would like to talk about a book which - there's an early release, raw and unedited, that you can get for free. Observability Engineering. I think the tagline is even better: "Achieving production excellence." I think that's super-powerful. |
So we'll add a link to the show notes. You can go and download it for free, by the way. I think you will need to share your address with the happy and friendly people from Honeycomb... But otherwise, I've been reading it, skimming it shall I say; I haven't read all of it, but the index looks really good. The first ques... |
**Charity Majors:** Thank you. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The book, I know, will be available in its final version - and by the way, it's published by O'Reilly - in January 2022. |
**Charity Majors:** Sounds great. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what I'm wondering is when that happens, even if it's not January, would you like us to talk again, Charity? |
**Charity Majors:** That'd be great. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm looking forward to that. Thank you. |
**Charity Majors:** Awesome. Thank you. |
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