text stringlengths 0 2.46k |
|---|
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, don't feel bad, because that is super-common, and-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... We're also early adopters, so we try out every new thing, and so that's part of what we do. So there's some of that culture, like "We're gonna try the new thing and see if it works for us." So we have knowledge bases spread amongst startups that are alive over the years, for sure... But go ahea... |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[laughs\] That's fantastic. Well, I mean, if that's what you're doing, that's okay; that makes sense for you. But it is a cultural challenge. Do you build your own thing? I would say ideally not. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Probably not, right? |
**Rachel Potvin:** I mean, project management is not the core competence of -- unless that is your business. This kind of product that I was talking about - that is their core business, so they should use it, and they should build their own thing, and they should make it amazing, so that everyone else can use it. But i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes... |
**Rachel Potvin:** So it's just standards and consistency. And you don't want to -- I mean, we can go back to everything's a trade-off. You know, you don't want to be too heavy-handed about things, and be like "You must work this way..." |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna just ask that... Like, do you just dictate it? Yeah... |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[54:09\] Yeah... But there's certain things where it's -- it's a virtuous cycle, I think, where you say, "This is where we put design docs. Everyone do it, because then you'll find the design docs you want to find, and that's a good thing. So please do this." And you can -- as a leader, I can actual... |
And another thing I can talk about, which we touched on in decision-making, is different types of decisions hold different weight, and can be undone or fixed or changed more easily or less easily. Well, different types of teams are working on different types of projects. And so I've definitely seen the pattern where a ... |
So I also never want to say like "Well, Team B, you should be having a burndown chart that looks just like Team A, and I want to see the same amount of velocity and--" No. Team B probably has to do more prototyping, more research, there's going to be some dead ends in terms of maybe what they're investigating... Maybe ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In adequate amount, that's my favorite thing. My wife says, "How much do you want?", when it's like food, or... It's like, "An adequate amount. I don't want too much, or too little... I just want an adequate amount. Right in the middle there." |
When it comes to, I guess, "Not my problem" - not that this is a good attitude to have; like, you can say, "This is not my problem" when it comes to decision-making... How do you deal with who owns certain problems? Obviously, you've got a senior engineer in place, or a tech lead, or somebody that's in charge, but how ... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah. I mean, this is where -- so when I talk about the things you can do to effectively scale, I think I put them into pretty much three buckets. So there's a lot going on in code health, there's a lot of advice I have for teams around code health and developer experience, and so on; there's a lot o... |
The thing I set up at GitHub, which - you know, it was a learning process; all this stuff is a learning process. I think you're never done. You never say like "Okay, I set everything up that I need to do, and now my organization is humming perfectly, and I can just drink a Margarita", and whatever, right? But the Princ... |
\[58:13\] And so the most senior ICs had hands in the code on a daily basis, were deeply familiar with how things worked, and represented different product domains and infrastructure within the company. And me and my peers held the responsibility for cross-eng prioritization, and funding, and were able to move people a... |
So me and my engineering counterparts, we're able to have conversations with people and say, "Hey, can you come work on this problem? We're setting up a special virtual team to really address this thing. Let's get this done." I would always ask one of the most senior ICs to be champion for any decision that needed to h... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. I mean, the fact that you have some sort of garbage collection, essentially, which is what that is... It's almost like "How would you write a program, or a compiler, or something like that?" It's like "Well, you need garbage collection." That's kind of what that is. Like "This is not my pr... |
**Rachel Potvin:** And there's also -- like, the DevSat survey that I talked about, right? That's a great way where you're asking your internal engineering teams, anonymously, "Tell us, what are your biggest pain points? What are the things you're most worried about? What are the things that are not working for you?" A... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That takes trust though, doesn't it like it? |
**Rachel Potvin:** It does, it does. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You have to trust in that organization to say those things and not get the backlash, potentially. And then you have to have a frequency in some sort of case to get that feedback often enough, right? |
**Rachel Potvin:** I think you're so right, trust is so important... And so all this stuff plays into culture. I will tell you, I did AMA's with my team fairly frequently. AMAs is Ask Me Anything, right? And I was so happy when I would get really pointed, hard questions. I'd be like "I don't love this question, but I'm... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Is there freedom of speech here? Yeah. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Is there...? Yeah. And sometimes it's like "Look, you've got to move on. You can disagree and commit on this. This is what the answer is. I know you don't love it, but we've got to be able to move on." But other times, there'll be things that I'm not even aware about. |
\[01:02:00.01\] I tried all sorts of experiments. I did one time an anonymous AMA, which is a really funny experience. I think it worked out well, but I had people anonymously submit questions - and I should have called you guys to interview me and say the questions, or something... But I did it by myself. So I did lik... |
And even in the DevSat survey, one of the questions that I would ask is about psychological safety. How decisions were made on your team... So there's a lot of questions around the specific developer experience, but there are also culture questions on there, that then with that survey, I would give it, as a leadership ... |
And then actually the third group that would benefit from this survey was specific product areas. So GitHub - we decided that the paved path for development at GitHub was going to be using Codespaces, and so when we rolled that out, of course we got lots of interesting feedback on that survey about the experience of us... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I kind of know what you mean by this; this is sort of a question to kind of get deeper at it, but when you say "psychological safety", what do you mean? How does that translate to actionable findings and details? What actually is that? |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, because I have to say, you have to be careful about over-broadening terms like that, right? Psychological safety does not mean that no one can give you constructive feedback, right? And that's really important. When I talk about, again, scaling eng teams and culture, this is one that's coming t... |
It's actually -- and I'll get back to your psychological safety bit, but it was fascinating to me when I rolled out eng by design reviews, because the first design review happened; it was a topic -- I'm trying to think of what it was... It was something around monitoring and alerting \[unintelligible 01:05:18.13\] And ... |
\[01:05:47.15\] And so then we're in the room, and I'm getting these DMS, and people are saying like "This thing won't work. This thing they're proposing - it's never going to scale." And I'm trying to host a meeting, but then I'm DMing back, "Can you say that?" Like "Yes, I agree with you. Can you say that?" \[laughs\... |
And so that was like a cultural barrier to overcome, where GitHub had come from this history of consensus building, which is problematic also, right? Like, consensus is great when you get it, but you can't live by consensus, especially when you start to scale. You need directly responsible people who are accountable fo... |
And so I actually took over one design review just to talk about culture, and be like "Hey, how do we have these hard decisions where you're not being mean to a person; you're not saying mean things about that person. We need to be able to talk --" It's the same thing about blameless post mortems; human error amount mi... |
So that's a little aside, because I get nervous sometimes when we talk about psychological safety without that framing. But psychological safety to me is being able to say things that you're worried about, things that are on your mind, things that you think are important, without fear of retaliation, or retribution. An... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What does this liberty do then for toxicity? Does it squash it completely? Does it just expose it further? |
**Rachel Potvin:** Hey, look, toxicity is something I'm never going to tolerate. And I think that's a cultural thing as well. Like, what do you tolerate? I always say, how you reward and who you promote speaks more to your culture than anything you say. Right? And so when I would host training sessions on promoting, sp... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Complaining though... My framing there was more complaining. Because you can freely complain and be toxic; you could be pleasantly toxic, too. \[laughter\] And I just wondered how that blends, you know what I mean? |
**Rachel Potvin:** So it comes back to this concept of knowing when to disagree and commit. If I tell someone, "Look, I've heard your point, maybe I empathize with it, but I'm sorry, we're not doing anything about it", and then you keep bringing it up - that's being toxic, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Okay. |
**Rachel Potvin:** And so complaining is not productive when the solution is not happening, or the situation is not changing, right? So I do expect people to be productive. I do also want to hear about the things that are bothering people, that are maybe not fixable, because maybe at some point in the future they will ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. It depends... Trade-offs... The classic answer. |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[01:09:56.23\] Is that my answer to everything? Sorry... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, no, no. It's just what happens. It's inevitable. It's more like a defeatist position than anything. |
**Jerod Santo:** So while we're talking about trade-offs, you mentioned the three buckets of scaling engineering teams: code health, decision-making, and culture. We focus a lot on decision-making and culture. We talked about code health a little bit with regards to YAGNI, and premature optimization, things you can do ... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, great question. I feel like this is a podcast unto itself at some point, if we ever wanted to do that, because there's so many things... And it's overlapping with culture, as is everything; that's going to be my answer for everything today too, but... An example where it overlaps with culture i... |
But in general, having code owners, and the ability to affect large-scale codebase evolution requires people doing effective code review. And a failure mode I've seen is where -- you know, I had another principal engineer who was reporting to me at GitHub, who made a pretty simple change into -- basically, to keep it s... |
And so really having good code review tools... Again, we talked about design review - very important. And then developer experience, and like at what scale are you going to start thinking more about your developer experience is really important from a code health perspective. I'd love to tell you a little story about d... |
GitHub has this kind of unusual "deploy, then merge" strategy. So for code changes, you actually deploy your code first, check that everything's working, and then merge back into the main branch, so that main is always available for rollbacks. It's kind of an unusual strategy that I wouldn't necessarily recommend, beca... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.