Conference: Nov 5-7, 2018
Workshops: Nov 8–9, 2018
Presentation: Am I a Brilliant Jerk?
Share this on:
What You’ll Learn
- Why brilliant jerks are devastating to teams.
- How to tell if you’re a brilliant jerk.
Abstract
Netflix’s culture memo famously says, “On a dream team, there are no brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is just too high.” Well, what is a brilliant jerk? If the cost to teamwork is high, what are some examples of the cost?
This presentation will focus on the jerk part of “brilliant jerk” and leave the brilliant calculation for another talk. We will spend a majority of the time on Emotional Intelligence and why it matters in developing and operating software systems effectively. Opinions and perspective will be drawn from my experience as an engineer and then manager at Netflix. I’ll provide my answers for the first two questions: what is and why you can’t afford to have a brilliant jerk. I’ll also provide criteria I’ve used to self-assess and answer the most important question: “Am I a brilliant jerk?”
Interview
I manage a team called playback API. When the customer sits down in front of their Netflix device and presses the play button, what they see and hear on the screen is our responsibility.
When I joined Netflix seven years ago, I read the culture deck, the point about brilliant jerks really stood out to me. At the time, I had an intuition of what I thought the phrase meant, I had worked with people you might describe as challenging. But, I didn't fully appreciate the wisdom behind the statement.
Throughout my time at Netflix, first as an engineer then as a manager, I’ve built up an appreciation for why “no brilliant jerks” is so important to our culture. The motivation for my talk is to share my experience with others, so they can fully appreciate the wisdom.
Anyone who works on a software team and wants to improve their culture. Or if you think you have a brilliant jerk on your team or have a secret notion that you may be a brilliant jerk yourself.
I’m not just presenting an argument for why you don't want a brilliant jerk on the team, but I’m also going to talk through what to do if you have one or if you are one. People can change, we can rehab brilliant jerks.
On the playback API one of the things that we've been considering is moving from a stateless to a stateful architecture. The motivation for us to move in that direction is to achieve sublinear scale. But, moving in that direction is not an easy trade off. Stateless systems tend to be simple versus stateful systems which tend to be more complex. Managing state is a hard problem. Moreover, we've built up best practices and lessons learned for stateless, we're going to be throwing away a lot of these if we transition to stateful.
Similar Talks
.
Tracks
-
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Architectural practices from the world's most well-known properties, featuring startups, massive scale, evolving architectures, and software tools used by nearly all of us.
-
Going Serverless
Learn about the state of Serverless & how to successfully leverage it! Lessons learned in the track hit on security, scalability, IoT, and offer warnings to watch out for.
-
Microservices: Patterns and Practices
Stories of success and failure building modern Microservices, including event sourcing, reactive, decomposition, & more.
-
DevOps: You Build It, You Run It
Pushing DevOps beyond adoption into cultural change. Hear about designing resilience, managing alerting, CI/CD lessons, & security. Features lessons from open source, Linkedin, Netflix, Financial Times, & more.
-
The Art of Chaos Engineering
Failure is going to happen - Are you ready? Chaos engineering is an emerging discipline - What is the state of the art?
-
The Whole Engineer
Success as an engineer is more than writing code. Hear inward looking thoughts on inclusion, attitude, leadership, remote working, and not becoming the brilliant jerk.
-
Evolving Java
Java continues to evolve & change. Track covers Spring 5, async, Kotlin, serverless, the 6-month cadence plans, & AI/ML use cases.
-
Security: Attacking and Defending
Offense and defensive security evolution that application developers should know about including SGX Enclaves, effects of AI, software exploitation techniques, & crowd defense
-
The Practice & Frontiers of AI
Learn about machine learning in practice and on the horizon. Learn about ML at Quora, Uber's Michelangelo, ML workflow with Netflix Meson and topics on Bots, Conversational interfaces, automation, and deployment practices in the space.
-
21st Century Languages
Compile to Native, Microservices, Machine learning... tailor-made languages solving modern challenges, featuring use cases around Go, Rust, C#, and Elm.
-
Modern CS in the Real World
Applied trends in Computer Science that are likely to affect Software Engineers today. Topics include category theory, crypto, CRDT's, logic-based automated reasoning, and more.
-
Stream Processing In The Modern Age
Compelling applications of stream processing using Flink, Beam, Spark, Strymon & recent advances in the field, including Custom Windowing, Stateful Streaming, SQL over Streams.
-
Performance Mythbusting
Real world, applied performance proofs across stacks. Hear performance consideratiosn for .NET, Python, & Java. Learn performance use cases with OpenJ9, Instagram, and Netflix.
-
Tools and Culture: What's Beyond a Stack of Containers?
Containers are not just a techology. It's a platform. Push your knowledge.
-
Web as Platform
All things Browser, from JavaScript Frameworks for animation and AR / VR to Web Assembly and from protocol work to open standards evolution.
-
Beyond Being an Individual Contributor
Beyond being an individual contributor. Building and Evolving managers and tech leadership.
-
Building Great Engineering Cultures
Why engineering culture matters. Track features org scaling, memes as a culture tool, Ally skills, and panels on diversity / inclusion.
-
Hardware Frontiers: Changes Affecting Software Developers Today
Topics around: Quantum computing, NVM, SMR, GPU, custom hardware, self-driving cars, and mobile hardware.
Conference for Professional Software Developers
