29. An Honest Look In The Mirror

Johanna Rothman on Programming Leadership, Thomas “Tido” Carriero on Product Love, Adam Davidson on Lead From The Heart, Josh Wills on Software Engineering Daily, and Amitai Schleier on Programming Leadership.

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This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 20, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP

The Programming Leadership podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Marcus Blankenship.

Marcus started out by asking Johanna why it is important to think about managing ourselves. Johanna says that when we don’t manage ourselves, we don’t have the capability to manage other people. For example, if we insist on micro-managing people, they cannot grow and we prevent them from doing their best work.⁠

⁠Marcus asked her what micromanagement has to do with managing ourselves. Johanna says that micromanagement comes from fear. You need to learn to manage yourself to manage this fear and reduce your need to micromanage. ⁠

⁠She says the reason the first book is about managing yourself is that if you can avoid doing the things that make people feel badly, you can create an environment where people can excel.⁠

⁠They talked about surveys and Marcus asked Johanna’s opinion on anonymous versus named survey responses. Johanna says that when you have a culture where there is a lot of blaming and micromanagement and little coaching, she would recommend an anonymous survey.⁠

⁠Marcus talked about how technical managers often know how to do the work itself very well and he asked Johanna when this can trip us up. One way it trips us up, she says, is that people on the team don’t get a chance to practice if the manager is writing code instead of managing. Second, when you have not been in the code in a while, you do not know what it looks like anymore. ⁠

⁠Marcus asked how managers can get time to think in today’s high time-pressure environments. Johanna says that if you are spending a lot of time in meetings, you should be looking at whether you can delegate any of those meetings to the people doing the work. This delegating is not sloughing off your responsibilities, but making sure you are not part of a team that you are not supposed to be a part of.⁠

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-better-manager-means-starting-yourself-johanna/id1461916939?i=1000460138590

Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/becoming-a-better-manager-means-starting-with-yourself-with-johanna-rothman/

THOMAS “TIDO” CARRIERO ON PRODUCT LOVE

The Product Love podcast featured Thomas “Tido” Carriero with host Eric Boduch. Tido oversees all of engineering, product, and design at Segment. Segment provides customer data infrastructure or CDI, helping companies collect, unify, and connect data about their own interactions with their customers. It gives these companies a unified view of their customer data across all channels.⁠

⁠When he joined Segment, Tido was blown away by how robust the ecosystem was and by the attractive idea of empowering business teams, marketing teams, and product teams by installing application tracking once and being able to turn on integrations with the flick of a switch. Often, he says, a lot of business and marketing and less technical folks are blocked from doing the best job they could do because of tough integration problems that Segment solves.⁠

⁠Segment naturally has a lot of adjacencies. They touch critical customer data and they need to decide whether to use that to empower engineering, marketing, or others. This requires being clear at the beginning of the year that they will pick two or three bets as an organization to focus on.⁠

⁠Eric asked Tido what product leaders often do wrong. Tido says the biggest mistake product leaders make by far is not looking in the mirror and making an honest assessment of where things are. Getting attached to an idea makes it harder to give it a critical look. Often, you’re only a small pivot away from a valuable product. As the leader of an organization, he sees his job as creating a culture where failure is not just okay but celebrated. If people are getting slapped on the hand for failure, they will just get even more committed to their first ideas. Healthy teams that seriously innovate look at the data and are willing to pivot when it tells them unpleasant things. 

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/thomas-tido-carriero-joins-product-love-to-talk-about/id1343610309?i=1000459980786

Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/edited-tido-joins-product-love-mp3

ADAM DAVIDSON ON LEAD FROM THE HEART

The Lead From The Heart podcast featured Adam Davidson with host Mark C. Crowley. Adam Davidson is the creator of the Planet Money podcast and is staff business writer at The New Yorker. He has a new book called The Passion Economy. The theme of the book is that choosing your career used to mean choosing between work that makes your heart sing and work that pays well but disconnects you from your passions, but the new world order demands that we follow our passions and pursue work that leverages both our talents and our interests.⁠

⁠Adam’s grandfather worked his entire career in a ball bearing factory and only made a good living by working double shifts. He believed that people who follow their passions go nowhere in life.⁠

⁠Adam’s father was the opposite. Making money was far less important to him than following his dream of performing as a Broadway actor.⁠

⁠These two men represent the dichotomy of having to choose financial success or your passion but not both.⁠

⁠The people of Adam’s father’s generation and his grandfather’s generation had to choose between a life of passion and a life of financial success, but people today, Adam says, are lucky. They are lucky for the reasons that terrify us. Adam says, “All of these forces that have done so much damage to the stability of the 20th century economy also provide exactly the tools that allow us to figure out what we uniquely love and are good at and find those people, even if they’re thinly spread all over the country or all over the globe, who also crave what it is we can provide and are willing to pay for it.”⁠

⁠Mark summed up the book as being about combining your training and expertise with a personal passion to find your own niche. According to Adam, some people take a total left turn and go into a completely different field later in their lives, but the most successful people he has met combine their passion with the skills they have previously acquired.⁠

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/adam-davidson-new-rules-for-thriving-in-twenty-first/id1365633369?i=1000462188105

Website link: https://blubrry.com/leadfromtheheartpodcast/54035306/adam-davidson-the-new-rules-for-thriving-in-the-twenty-first-century/

JOSH WILLS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY

The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Josh Wills with host Jeff Meyerson. Josh Wills was the director of data engineering at Slack when Slack was building out a solution to scaling its data infrastructure. When the first analysts at Slack were hired, their only option was to spin up their own little databases that had cached copies of Slack’s main transactional database. Eventually, Slack hired data engineers that built systems that could scale up what an analyst could do.

They built up a lot of infrastructure involving Airflow jobs producing Parquet files on S3 that were queryable through tools like Presto and it was, according to Josh, a “ghost city” for a while. All the while, the analytics team was still using the existing infrastructure of ETL jobs running on the transactional database. It wasn’t until Slack started aggressively hiring analysts, data scientists, and engineers from the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world that they had people who knew how to use the stuff Josh and his team were building.

Jeff asked how the various design philosophies coming from the new hires from Google and Facebook got resolved. Josh said it got resolved by him making all the decisions. There were a million things to do, so the design direction was often the result of whoever was the first mover.

If Josh had it all to do over again, he would do many things differently, but he knows that nobody would appreciate it because they would have never experienced the inferior designs. It is hard to appreciate the pain that something saved you. Most of your good decisions are invisible and taken for granted while your bad decisions cause pain and suffering forever.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/slack-data-platform-with-josh-wills/id1019576853?i=1000462100792

Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/10/slack-data-platform-with-josh-wills/

AMITAI SCHLEIER ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP

The Programming Leadership podcast featured Amitai Schleier with host Marcus Blankenship. Amitai talked to Marcus about his fork of qmail called notqmail. Qmail is a Unix program for running an email server that, unfortunately, hasn’t been updated in twenty years and has a number of rough edges.

Over the last twenty years, Amitai has invested time into softening qmail’s rough edges through improved package management. More recently, Amitai started thinking about getting the people who are working on their own forks of qmail to collaborate on a single fork.

The first step was getting some advice. A key piece of advice came from Llewellyn Falco. Llewellyn said, “Qmail already has a lot of nice seams and interfaces. Without too much more work and risk, you could add a couple more seams so that whatever modernization is required could be done as plugins or extensions. The next problem to think about is egos. Not all ideas are going to win.” He then gave Amitai the best piece of advice: “Whatever you do, offer yourself to other programmers to get their code converted to extensions first. As to which implementation of a particular new feature is to be incorporated, that decision is not your call. Take as extensions as many implementations as people want to give and let users decide.”

Marcus asked about how to influence a group of people on a project without being coercive. Amitai says that he discovered years ago that when a situation is a little confused, his default response is to seek to lower his perceived social status. Otherwise, he cannot influence the way he wants to if he’s a big shot that people are supposed to listen to.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/collaboration-and-notqmail-with-amitai-schleier/id1461916939?i=1000462047766

Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/collaboration-and-notqmail-with-amitai-schleier/

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