"Just" Engineering Culture

A just culture is one where organizations and their people value resilience and improvement. It is one where leadership and their people can admit mistakes, accept failure, and jointly feel accountable to learning and improving. This track will provide practices and processes that demonstrate how both psychological safety and safety engineering can lead to higher quality software and happier teams. It will talk about moving beyond just blameless postmortems and retrospectives to building a culture where folks are rewarded for being the messenger. Topics will include incident management techniques, risk management practices, and learning practices.


From this 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

Panel: "Just" Engineering Culture

Tuesday Oct 25 / 11:50AM PDT

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.

Speaker image - Denise Yu
Denise Yu

Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub

Speaker image - Jacob Scott
Jacob Scott

Staff Software Engineer @stripe

Speaker image - Jessica DeVita
Jessica DeVita

Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft

Speaker image - Vanessa Huerta Granda
Vanessa Huerta Granda

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

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

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

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 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

Track Host

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"

Michelle Brush is a math geek turned computer geek with over 20 years of software development experience. She has developed algorithms and data structures for pathfinding, search, compression, and data mining in embedded as well as distributed systems. In her current role as an Engineering Director, SRE for Google, she leads teams of SREs that ensure GCP's Compute Engine and Persistent Disk products are reliable. Previously, she served as the Director of HealtheIntent Architecture for Cerner Corporation, responsible for the data engineering platform for Cerner’s Population Health solutions. Prior to her time at Cerner, she was the lead engineer for Garmin's automotive routing algorithm. She is the author of 2 out of the 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.

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