Panel: "Just" Engineering Culture

The hardest part of technology is rarely the tech itself. Systems are designed, used, and operated by people. People make mistakes, but they are also critical to keeping systems safe and reliable.

Today's track focuses on creating a "just" engineering culture. A culture where psychological safety (up and down the org) is the norm, and the people at the heart of engineering are not blamed for failures. They are part of the solution that ensures the organization learns from failure and continuously improves.

Today's panel brings together a group of panelists who will speak about how just culture is created and how they overcame (and in some cases still overcoming) the challenges they faced on the journey.


Speaker

Denise Yu

Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub

Denise is an engineering manager and Rubyist, most recently at GitHub, but currently on hiatus. At GitHub, she worked on the GitHub Sponsors program and other products within the Communities department, the mission of which is to make GitHub the best place for open source communities to thrive. She speaks and runs workshops frequently at conferences in North America and Europe on topics ranging from scaling organizational culture, to reliability engineering, to sketchnoting. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada.

Read more
Find Denise Yu at:

Speaker

Jacob Scott

Staff Software Engineer @stripe

Jacob is a technologist who is deeply curious about reliability in complex socio-technical (software) systems. He is currently a staff software engineer in the Platform & Ecosystem group at Stripe, focused on user facing event systems. Outside of work, he might be found at a nearby park with his one year old daughter or pursuing his avocation of collecting employees-only tech swag. Do you have a Facebook “illuminati” hoodie you are willing to part with? DM him on Twitter! 

 

Read more
Find Jacob Scott at:

Speaker

Jessica DeVita

Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft

Jessica DeVita has 20+ years of experience in IT operations in a variety of roles and industries including healthcare, entertainment, and cloud computing. She is currently working on her MSc. thesis in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. Jessica's publications include Learning from Incidents and To Deploy or Not to Deploy, That is the Question and her conference talks include DevOps Days New Zealand: Retrospecting our Retrospectives and CodeBeam: Unreachable Code: A Conversation about Safety and Human Factors. Jessica most recently served as SRE Manager for the AKS team at Microsoft. Previously she was at Netflix, Chef Software, UberGeekGirl, Inc., and St. Jude Medical.

Read more

Speaker

Vanessa Huerta Granda

Resiliency Manager @Enova, Co-Author of the Howie Guide on Post Incident Analysis

Vanessa is an Engineering Manager at Enova leading the Resilience Engineering team focusing on  their Production Incident process, learning from incidents, and leading the on-call rotation of Incident Commanders. She previously worked as a Solutions Engineer at Jeli helping companies make the most of their incidents. In 2021 she co-authored Howie: The Post-Incident Guide, an in-depth explanation for how tech organizations can learn from incidents. 

She has led the Chicago Women in Technology Conference and is an admin of the Learning From Incidents community. She is passionate about continuous improvement, getting teams to talk to each other, and Diversity and Inclusion in Tech.

Read more
Find Vanessa Huerta Granda at:

From the same track

Session Engineering Culture

Generous, High Fidelity Communication Is the Key to a Safe, Effective Team

Tuesday Oct 25 / 10:35AM PDT

A team's ability to communicate effectively and disagree productively is directly related to its resilience towards incidents and interruptions.

Speaker image - Denise Yu
Denise Yu

Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub

Session Engineering Culture

Recipes for Blameless Accountability

Tuesday Oct 25 / 02:55PM PDT

Building a culture of continuous improvement requires that teams value psychological safety, blamelessness, and admitting error. This can sometimes feel in conflict with an organization's desire to see accountability and ownership of the work.

Speaker image - Michelle Brush
Michelle Brush

Engineering Director, SRE @Google, Previously Director of HealtheIntent Architecture @Cerner Corporation & Lead Engineer @Garmin, Author of "2 out of the 97 Things Every SRE Should Know"

Session Engineering Culture

Reckoning with the Harm We Do: In Search of Restorative Just Culture in Software and Web Operations

Tuesday Oct 25 / 05:25PM PDT

“Psychological Safety” and “Blameless” postmortems are not enough. We’ve heard that we need a “Just Culture” but does that matter if your people are “stressed, exhausted, depleted, spent, drained”?

Speaker image - Jessica DeVita
Jessica DeVita

Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft

Session Engineering Culture

How Did It Make Sense at the Time? Understanding Incidents As They Occurred, Not as They Are Remembered

Tuesday Oct 25 / 04:10PM PDT

When we encounter undesirable outcomes, there is a natural instinct to look back, find something that went wrong, and fix it.

Speaker image - Jacob Scott
Jacob Scott

Staff Software Engineer @stripe

Session

Unconference: Engineering Culture

Tuesday Oct 25 / 01:40PM PDT

What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks.

Speaker image - Shane Hastie
Shane Hastie

Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com