Engineering Culture - how to build, organize and fuel the best engineering team possible

Building an awesome engineering team is challenging. What many engineering leaders don't realize is that the investments made in spending time defining & developing an awesome culture can become a massive magnet in attracting better engineers than you ever thought possible. This track explores case-studies from top engineering teams, small and large, and explains real-world ways that they've created an awesome engineering culture. Talks in this track will inspire you to push forward with the tools and information you need to define your own unique engineering culture.

Day of week:

Wednesday

Location:

Seacliff C/D

Host:

Pete Soderling

Presentations

Evolving culture and values. Understanding the tradeoffs. Growth through failure. The importance of leadership and open communication.

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By: Pedram Keyani
Engineering Manager at Facebook

Evolving culture and values: A company is a living and breathing thing. It has properties, many of them are constant and some of which need to change as it grows. This is an important thing to keep in mind in thinking about culture and values to make sure they evolve with your company size, types of people you attract and the everchanging environment you operate.

Understanding the tradeoffs: If you attempt to be good at everything you will fail miserable. Values are about picking the important things that matter for hiring and empowering people to have a company that wins in your competitive space.

Growth through failure: This is a perspective I have based on my work history pushing people and organizations to operate outside of their comfort zone will lead them to fail. Failure is a great thing, it is the flip side to growth and innovation. If you aren't failing and pushing people to fail then you aren't trying hard enough.

The importance of leadership and open communication: Scaling an organization is a difficult dance and one of the most important decisions a company can make is the the leaders and managers they pick. A common mistake is to take the best engineer who has been around the longest and put them in this position. This is harmful on a number of levels.

Culture Open Space

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By:

How GitHub (no longer) Works

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Zach Holman
Engineer, GitHub

If you do everything right, and you're successful, and you're lucky, then your startup will grow into a company. At that point, you'll either continue to flourish, or your employees — addled by years of free soda — will take over your meeting room in a fit of caffeinated rage and demand the end of company-wide Strategy Days by holding poor little Timmy from Marketing hostage with figurative red tape crafted from literal red herrings imported from the Baltic Sea.

So, you probably want to avoid that.

GitHub's gone through many stages of growth over the years, and each of those stages is different from the last. How you run your company at 10 employees is very different from 50 employees, which itself is very different from 250 employees. This talk will cover all the stumbling blocks GitHub hit as the company grew.

Presentations

Addressing the Power Shift in Engineering Recruiting

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By: Pete Soderling
Founder at Hakka Labs

If you want to lead an amazing engineering team, don't leave hiring to someone else. This talk will explain from-the-trenches, battle-tested tactics that an engineering manager can use to successfully attract the best developers to their team.

By introducing PR principles into the process, I'll explain the best ways to create your unique engineering story and how-to effectively use your engineers to promote your message. Learn how to better explain your specific tech challenges to create powerful talent magnets that attract the best and brightest.

We'll consider case studies of companies that do this well, and explore actionable ideas and marketing tips that will help you be make your company more attractive to the engineers you want to hire.

Building a Culture Where Software Projects Get Done

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Greg Brockman
CTO at Stripe

Software engineering has existed as a discipline for over fifty years, and still people continue to fall into all of the classic engineering fallacies. Rewrites fail with high frequency, feature creep smothers nascent projects, and engineering timelines get repeatedly pushed back until they are all but meaningless. None of these statements are surprising, but what's surprising is that great engineers who are very aware of these pitfalls can ensnared by them anyway.

In this talk, we'll go over how we've structured the culture at Stripe to avoid these traps. We're certainly not immune to the classic fallacies, but each time a project goes poorly we adapt our workflow to mitigate the relevant failure mode in the future. We'll describe the principles driving how we approach software projects (and the history of how we discovered them), as well as why it's important to bake these ideas directly into the culture.

Scaling engineering culture at Twitter

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Raffi Krikorian
VP Platform Eng at Twitter

Over the past two years, we've re-architected Twitter to support the massive user growth. What we learned, however, was that re-architecting Twitter was not simply a software engineering problem, but also a cultural problem. Similar to how our original infrastructure had scaling issues, our engineering culture was facing scaling problems too. We had to co-evolve our software along with our engineering organisation to get to the more resilient culture we have today. This talk is the story of the continuous work that we're putting into scaling that part of Twitter.