StaffEng

Today we talk to Ben Ilegbodu, Principal Frontend Engineer at Stitch Fix, about how he manages to stay close to the code at a senior level. We hear how he arrived at Stitch Fix and what his first tasks were to identify the pain points in customer teams. From getting the IC's on his side to learning the importance of marketing your ideas to upper management, Ben talks us through his exciting career. He describes how he handles urgent tasks, and why it's crucial to do the important tasks first. We hear how giving an honest answer to where in the priorities list a task falls is key to inter-team efficiency, and why it's so important to keep communicating throughout long-term projects. Tune in to find out Ben's approach to mentorship, and how he plans on motivating high-school students to take the steps to become a developer. Don't miss out on this must-hear episode filled with practical advice on being a Staff+ engineer.

Links

• Ben Ilegbodu on LinkedIn
• StaffPlus Live Conference

Moving from an architect role to a product-oriented one might seem like a big leap, but there are overlaps between the two roles. Today's guest, Ashby Winch, has recently made this transition, and in today's episode, they share what this has been like. Up until recently, Ashby was an architect, with their most senior role at a large logistics operation in the U.K. Now, they have shifted to a product management job, and they are using the skills from the previous role for this new position. We hear about Ashby's diverse experience, how they came to work as an architect, and what inspired a career pivot. Ashby talks about the challenges they have had with having a loosely defined role and how they have made the best of this situation. Our conversation also touches on the relationship between architects and product managers, the importance of communicating context to developers, and advice Ashby wishes they knew earlier in their career. Tune in to hear it all!

Links

• LinkedIn
• Medium

Today’s guest is Josh Kaderlan, Staff Software Engineer at Lob, a direct mail and address verification API company that automates and simplifies direct mail and address verification, giving businesses greater flexibility, visibility, and accuracy of offline communications and data. There are so many different and non-traditional paths to becoming a staff engineer and, in today’s episode, you’ll hear a bit about Josh’s; starting in quality assurance, moving into development, and ultimately ending up where he is today, which he attributes to his wide breadth of knowledge and the valuable lessons he learned along the way. We discuss why Josh considers himself a generalist, the role that incident management plays in his work, and how he influences his peers by cultivating authentic relationships. Most important to Josh is how the work he does improves the experience of his colleagues and provides value to customers, and he shares some of his tips for staff engineers and organizations looking to have a similar impact. Tune in today to learn more and receive some practical advice and resources!

Links

• Josh Kaderlan on LinkedIn
• Lob
• ‘Staff Archetypes’
• Hacker News
• Rands Leadership Slack

During today’s conversation, we speak with Ben Edmunds, Senior Staff Engineer at Wayfair. You’ll hear all about his role at Wayfair, from his day-to-day active projects and how he goes about setting OKRs to the legacy and new deploy tooling he uses, and the method he has adopted to guide engineers. Ben shares ample advice for young engineers and stresses the value of learning more than one coding language. He reveals the finer details of life at Wayfair and the tools he uses to make sure that goals are reached, which include surveys, direct conversation, and partnership. We talk about the role of auxiliary engineering, the templates engineers build for application in partnership with an engineering team, and Ben points listeners in the direction of topics they should research, depending on whether they are looking to improve their software engineering or technical leadership skills. We hope you join us for an action-packed episode today!

Links

• benedmunds.com
• @benedmunds

Today’s guest is a principal software engineer at Microsoft who works at the interface between external and internal elements of the organization. Nell Shamrell-Harrington works on the ClearlyDefined open source project, which tracks open source licenses across open source ecosystems, and is also part of the Rust Foundation's Board of Directors. In today’s episode, you’ll hear about the “field commander” role that Nell plays in both of these organizations, and some of the major learnings they have had along the way (with particular emphasis on the importance of ensuring that technical interventions are responding to the needs of the business and the community). Nell also shares their experience of mentoring veterans through Operation Code, their approach to mentoring in general, and how this impacts their day-to-day job. 

Links

• Nell Shamrell-Harrington on LinkedIn
• ClearlyDefined
• Rust Foundation
• Operation Code
• Tanya Reilly on Twitter
• Sylvia Botros on Twitter

Oscillating between the roles of individual contributor and management has been a recurring theme on this show. Our guest today, Rich Lafferty, has some special insights into this pattern that can help anyone looking to improve their work. Rich works as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at PagerDuty and has spent many years interfacing with various departments and building projects and proposals. In our conversation with Rich, we discuss how his past roles have informed his work at PagerDuty and how he gets the most out of his teams without exploiting the authority that comes with his more senior role. We delve into Rich’s process for building proposals and learn some of his tips and tricks for ensuring the best possible outcome by investing in the foundation and design phase. We also explore the importance of early feedback, why you need to include a diverse group of individuals, and how to gradually grow your feedback group. Tune in as we discuss everything from risk management to high and low context culture, and much more!

Links

• Rich Lafferty
• Being Glue
• Behind Human Error
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• John Allspaw

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

Links

• Mason Jones on LinkedIn
• Credit Karma

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

Links

• Lorin Hochstein

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

Links

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

Please note that this episode contains brief mention of suicide.

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

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

Links

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