Software Engineering Daily

Today’s episode is a keynote I gave at Full Stack Tech Radar Day in Tel Aviv. The talk is called “You Are Not a Commodity”.

This talk is also available as a YouTube video.

The slides can be accessed here.

The world of commodity engineering is coming to an end. Developers are becoming more productive, more flexible, and more entrepreneurial. How does this impact you as an engineer? And how does it impact large companies who need a fungible set of engineers to maintain their software?

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Programmers are in high demand, and software engineering is a career path that is fun, creative, and lucrative. There are many people who want to transition into a career in software and are looking for the right path toward writing code.

The traditional college computer science curriculum teaches some software engineering skills, but the time and financial cost of attending a university is prohibitive for many people who want to learn to code.

Over the past decade, there have been several new models for software education. 

Online video platforms such as Udacity and Coursera put computer science courses online to be watched at the viewer’s convenience. Online schools such as Free Code Camp allow someone to learn how to program without any experience, and with no financial payment. Boot camps with income-sharing agreements such as App Academy create an in-person education environment that mimics a university, but with better cost structure and incentive alignment.

Lambda School is an education system that takes elements of other software education models and combines them with newer SaaS technologies such as Slack and Zoom videoconferencing. Lambda School is an online software engineering curriculum with an income sharing agreement.

“Income sharing agreement” means that the student does not pay for their education until they get a job. With this model, the student can pay back Lambda School after their software engineering education gets them a high-paying software engineering job.

Andrew Madsen works at Lambda School, and he joins the show to describe the path that a student takes through Lambda School, the school’s curriculum for software education, and how Lambda School differs from the other options for coding education.

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Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists.

Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You might expect this core infrastructure which modern humans rely on to have been constructed with pure formulaic rigor.

But the best software tools are not built within a totally defined process. Software is built through messy iteration. When a piece of software looks pristine, that is often a function of how many mistakes have been made, and then subsequently corrected for.

There is no fixed process for how to build good software.

As our tools get better, we have to update our software engineering practices to utilize those new tools. We have to rethink the style that we are working in. We have to discard old tools and procedures in order to pick up the new ones, and have higher leverage.

As an organization scales, the structure of the organization needs to be modified. Team members need to be reallocated. Checks and balances need to be put in place. Rules and cultural practices need to codified, because a larger organization cannot have ties broken by an individual.

Software is built by humans, and every management decision must be considered in the light of human psychology. When we change a line of code, the code does not get emotional about being altered. But the same cannot be said of humans. Even a minor conversation between an engineering manager and a direct report can have lasting implications.

Will Larson is the author of An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. He works on Foundation Engineering at Stripe, and has worked in engineering management at Uber, Digg, and other software companies. Elegant Puzzle provides strategies, tactics, and ruminations on software development. Will joins the show to explore the multifaceted subject of engineering management.

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The software market changes every year.

As individuals and enterprises become more willing to buy software, there are new markets for entrepreneurs to sell software to. Good software has high margins and high retention, so even a niche software business can prove profitable.

As software spreads across the world, developing countries are showing a willingness to buy the same software tools as the developed countries, making the niche software businesses even more successful than expected.

It’s a great time to start a software business. But the fundamental challenges faced by an entrepreneur have not gone away. An entrepreneur must find the necessary capital, build an initial product, iterate on that product, market to their audience, sell to their customers, and retain their users.

Hiten Shah is an entrepreneur and investor who has started several businesses, both successful and unsuccessful. His latest company is called FYI which helps you find your documents in three clicks or less. He is also the host of the Startup Chat podcast, a show about strategies and tactics for software businesses. Hiten joins the show to discuss his experience in the software industry, including lessons on financing, product development, and the future of software products.

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Cloud computing, open source, and mobile computing are trends that affect every organization. When a large organization adapts to these trends, it is commonly referred to as a “digital transformation”.

Digital transformation causes many companies to reframe their business as a software company. A candy manufacturer now must think of itself as a software company that makes candy. An insurance company must now think of itself as a software company that issues insurance.

Capital One is a bank that was started in 1988. Capital One has always had an emphasis on software, but the company’s digital transformation has affected it as much any other company. The company is migrating to the cloud, building out microservices, rolling out continuous delivery pipelines, and shifting the internal culture to be more adept at using software.

Hillary McTigue is a senior director of data engineering at Capital One. She joins the show to discuss her experience implementing a digital transformation within a large company. Subjects we discuss include culture, management strategy, and the sequencing of different phases of a digital transformation.

Full disclosure: Capital One is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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Facebook’s strategy is shaped by long term goals, short term requirements, and the available resources of the company.

Long term goals are necessary for thinking through big decisions such as acquisitions, hardware product investments, and open source software ecosystems. To implement long term goals, Facebook needs to communicate the vision of the company and foster an internal culture that supports that vision.

Short term requirements can affect how the company is thinking on a more immediate time horizon.

When Facebook realized the importance of mobile computing, the mentality in the company quickly shifted from looking at mobile as a tax on engineering resources to a long-term source of business value. When Google started to work on Google+, Facebook engineers focused their resources on the potential competitive threat.

Facebook’s strategy is implemented by the engineers, product managers, and other employees of the company. Facebook is unique in its ability to allow those employees to self-assemble into work that is meaningful to the individuals as well as to the company.

As the long term goals and short term requirements of Facebook change over time, company resources are shifted to focus the company on the correct set of priorities. Some of those priorities might be speculative investments in new technologies. Other priorities might include doubling down on areas of the company that are showing promise.

Mike Vernal worked as a VP of product and engineering at Facebook for 8 years. He left the company in 2016 and joined Sequoia Capital, where he now works as a partner. In his time at Facebook, he helped architect and implement strategies relating to product direction and engineering.

Mike joins the show for a discussion about his time at Facebook and the strategic lessons that he learned from his time at the company.

RECENT UPDATES:

The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open!

The FindCollabs Podcast is out!

We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/

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Facebook engineering is designed to self-assemble.

When an engineer joins Facebook, the engineer goes through boot camp, where they are exposed to multiple projects to find a good fit in terms of technical skills and personal preferences. Since there are so many different initiatives within the company at any given moment, a new hire can usually find something to work on through this exploration.

As an engineer builds credibility within Facebook, opportunities to move to other projects or to become a manager will present themselves, allowing the engineer to move within the company as they mature and their interests change. The sense of autonomy and freedom to explore is one feature of Facebook engineering that distinguishes the company.

Facebook is a flat, decentralized organization by nature. But there have been existential moments in Facebook’s history where an executive mandate was required. During these existential situations, Facebook centralizes and becomes a more top-down environment.

Facebook’s most crucial inflection point to date was its shift to focusing on mobile computing.

Even two years after the launch of the iPhone, it was not obvious that the world of consumer computing would change completely due to mobile devices. Facebook was becoming a dominant place where consumers navigated to on desktop, and Facebook engineering was focused on optimizing that desktop experience.

As the impact of the iPhone became noticeable, Facebook found itself with a desktop web product in the middle of a platform shift away from the desktop. During this same time, Facebook was beginning to succeed with its advertising platform and was evaluating an initial public offering.

Facebook leadership was able to recognize the importance of mobile computing in time to develop high quality mobile applications, but there were numerous challenges.

The Facebook desktop web app had been difficult enough to build due to the unprecedented data requirements and amount of interactivity. Mobile introduced the additional hurdles of limited bandwidth and distinct native operating systems in Android and iPhone.

Facebook’s early efforts to build a mobile application involved a cross-platform HTML5 solution. HTML5 had insufficient performance for Facebook’s needs, and the company needed to develop native apps in order to deliver the desired experience.

Facebook’s ability to pivot to mobile is comparable to the classic story of Intel pivoting from a memory company to a microprocessor company. To succeed at mobile application development, Facebook had to shift its focus dramatically, reallocating engineering resources and acqui-hiring small mobile companies in order to build up the domain expertise for mobile.

As a side effect of this transition to mobile, Facebook developed an understanding of how dramatically software engineering was changed by the introduction of smartphones and the high bandwidth requirements of social networking. The challenges of this new paradigm led to the development of open source tools such as GraphQL and React Native, which have allowed countless projects to build applications more easily.

Jocelyn Goldfein was an engineering director at Facebook for four years, from 2010 to 2014. She currently works as an investor at Zetta Venture Partners. In her time at Facebook, Jocelyn saw the shift to mobile firsthand. In today’s episode, she describes how Facebook management works, and gives her perspective on the distinguishing characteristics of the engineering organization as a whole.

RECENT UPDATES:

The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open!

The FindCollabs Podcast is out!

We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/

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When Facebook was scaling in its early years, the company developed engineering practices that were unlike any other organization before it.

Early Facebook engineering developed unusual practices because the problem set was unusual. Facebook was a highly detailed, highly interactive, multi-user web application. Facebook was pushing the limits of PHP and JavaScript in a time when there were not simple frameworks to help with user interface development and data fetching.

In addition to unique engineering problems, the Facebook product itself was also unique. When a product has as much traction as Facebook did in the early days, how are you supposed to manage the direction of that product?

Should you double down on the core competency of the product, and make it as good as possible at simply connecting friends to each other? Or should you rapidly expand into adjacent systems like messaging, groups, and photos? How should you allocate developer resources when you have problems to be solved at every layer of the stack, from backend infrastructure to frontend performance?

At a typical company, you would put all these engineering problems and product opportunities into some kind of project management software and assign developers to work on them, and gradually make steady, measured progress. The downside of that approach is that it slows down the pace of product creation and experimentation, and turns software development into a top-down, bureaucratic process.

At Facebook, developers self-assembled into teams that did what needed to be done. The engineers who were the most productive and charismatic could quickly build a reputation for themselves and become technical leaders. These “influencer engineers” within Facebook had a proven track record, and would become magnets for other engineers who wanted to contribute to the projects with the most momentum.

Facebook is a case study in the ability for developers to self-organize into groups who are working on projects that are meaningful to the company and personally satisfying to the individual engineers. Many engineers in the software industry work under a less capable manager who has complete control over their creativity. This leads to employee churn, dissatisfaction, and burnout.

Facebook’s ability to move fast is predicated on its ability to match engineers with problems that are interesting to those particular individuals. Whether you want to work on newsfeed or developer productivity tools or machine learning research, there is a path within Facebook to finding a problem that is both important and fun.

Facebook’s unique set of engineering challenges required the company to develop a unique set of internal tools. Because Facebook had data and throughput requirements which were unprecedented, the available tools and best practices at the time did not satisfy Facebook’s requirements. Over the years, Facebook has developed its own databases, caching strategies, and JavaScript frameworks.

Nick Schrock worked at Facebook for eight years. He is best known as a co-creator of GraphQL, a tool for efficiently fetching data through a federated request language. GraphQL was the result of years of evolution of internal tooling within Facebook.

Nick has discussed the creation of GraphQL in other podcasts, and we will have a more dedicated episode around a retrospective of GraphQL in the near future. Today’s episode is about the process by which developers at Facebook self-organized, and Nick’s ideas around how to identify a need for an internal tool.

Since leaving Facebook, Nick has parlayed his experience in developer tools into Dagster, a programming model for data applications.

RECENT UPDATES:

The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open!

The FindCollabs Podcast is out!

We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/

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Facebook engineering is commonly described by two words: move fast.

Building products quickly has been a differentiating characteristic of the company since its inception. From the longtime engineers to the summer interns, Facebook instills a sense of immediacy and opportunity in all of its employees.

The goal of Facebook is to make the world more open and transparent, with the intention of creating greater understanding and connection through Internet services. More than any other company in history, Facebook has enabled people to communicate with each other via simple user interfaces and real, authenticated human identity.

Facebook must move fast, because the vision for Facebook is without precedent. It may feel like the Facebook mission is already finished, because you can already use Facebook to connect with anyone across the world with an Internet connection.

But once you are connected to somebody on Facebook, there are only a small number of interactions you can take: sending a message, sharing a photo, broadcasting a video stream. There are so many more parts of our lives waiting to be digitized, and many of these require a real identity system to work properly.

More than any other company, Facebook is positioned to expand our system of real-world human trust onto the Internet. The depth and breadth of the engineering problems required to accomplish this demands that Facebook move fast. To move slower would cause all of us to pay the opportunity cost of having to wait longer to interconnect our global society.

Pete Hunt worked as an engineer at Facebook for three and a half years. At Facebook, he helped build React, a set of technologies that have significantly improved frontend application interface development. After the Instagram acquisition, Pete was the first engineer from Facebook to join the Instagram team to help bring the two companies together.

Pete left Facebook in 2014 to start Smyte, a company that made trust and safety tools for marketplaces and social networks. Smyte was acquired by Twitter, where Pete now works on engineering problems relating to trust, safety, health, and infrastructure.

Pete joins the show for the first of several episodes with Facebook engineers. In these episodes, we will explore the engineering practices of Facebook–from scaling Facebook’s PHP monolith to open sourcing React and GraphQL. Other topics will include management, onboarding, and product strategy.

Our goal is to present a holistic picture of how Facebook engineering works, so that other organizations can learn to adopt practices that will allow them to move faster. We hope you enjoy this series on Facebook engineering.

RECENT UPDATES:

The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open!

The FindCollabs Podcast is out!

We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/

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Growing a software business requires an understanding of engineering, sales, and marketing.

As we learn software engineering, we also pick up some knowledge about how a business should operate. We know that there are customers, and that our product needs to be scalable to serve more customers. We know that some features are more important than others, and so we focus on building the features that matter the most.

But unless we make a deliberate focus, engineers do not learn how to sell and market a software product.

Learning how to sell and market software is an important skill to develop. It allows a software engineer to be self-sufficient. If you already know how to write software, sales and marketing are actually the only other pieces you need to be an “entrepreneur”. And the basics of sales and marketing are often easier and more fun to learn than the first painful days of learning basic programming.

Greg Kogan is an engineer who has shifted his focus to working as a consultant for companies that are trying to go to market with a technical product. Greg has helped grow companies such as Netlify, Scalyr, and Domino Data Lab. Much of his work is around products targeted toward developers.

Greg joins the show to describe his methodical approach to selling and marketing software.

RECENT UPDATES:

FindCollabs is a company I started recently

The FindCollabs Podcast is out!

FindCollabs is hiring a React developer

FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm, Kitspace, and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the most helpful community member award both go to Vynce Montgomery, who will receive both the SE Daily Towel and the SE Daily Old School Bucket Hat

We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/

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