Creating Culture

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:

Friday

Location:

Grand Ballroom - Salon F

Host:

Pete Soderling

Presentations

Mentoring Humans and Engineers

10:40am - 11:30am

By: Daniel Doubrovkine
Head of Engineering, Artsy.net

This year Artsy, a 60-person startup, has introduced our first formal fellowship program for seniors. We went out to many US colleges to recruit some of the best and brightest. From thousands of applications we’ve selected a dozen people that have joined the arts and tech teams over the course of a summer. Some have received full time job offers at the end, others went back to finish school. Each fellow was assigned a mentor. For many, this was a very first experience as a manager.

In this talk we'll discuss about what it means to be a mentor, how to structure a mentorship program, talk risks, costs and rewards. We'll use the material sourced from the fellow members of the New York CTO Club, a group that combines several generations of management experience.

GitHub Communications Culture and Tools

1:45pm - 2:35pm

By: Matthew Mc Cullough
Trainer at GitHub

Having a talented and compatible set of team members is a foundation to producing great work together. And yet, communication tactics and knowledge distribution tools play a more subtle but equally important role in helping everyone passionately pull towards a common goal.

In this talk, we will examine the last four years of the culture of communication at GitHub. We'll start by looking at the foundational elements, including our internal mobile and web apps, use of pull requests, and emoji. From there, we'll step towards the 2011 and 2012 hiring of remote employees across a variety of time zones, and how collaboration evolved to include shared music streams and weekly virtual gatherings to create a sense of togetherness, constantly challenged by working thousands of miles apart. As we travel through the most recent history of 2013 and 2014, we'll look at the introduction of mini-summits as a more productive alternative to all-hands-gatherings, the introduction of formal leaders, the emerging use of synchronous meetings and centralization of all formal leadership roles at the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

This review will provide you with a plethora of tools, techniques and cultural patterns that have been implemented at a rapidly growing company. Hearing how GitHub works and continues to evolve will allow you to more informedly apply, consider, and defer some of these same elements to successfully shape your own technology company.

Climbing Off The Ladder, Before We Fall Off

11:55am - 12:45pm

By: Chris Angove
Chapter Lead at Spotify

Our industry has undergone many changes over the years. From small groups waiting for time on mainframes to large teams working with waterfall projects to the small Agile teams of today, we have continuously striven to perfect the craft of software development. However, one aspect of our lives remains unchanged. The career ladder is still, in many places, the only way to advance our careers, gain respect and experience new challenges. This one size fits all approach often ends with attrition, unhappiness and people being promoted out of positions they enjoyed. While the linear path is correct for some, the system fails for many engineers and hurts retention of our teams.

In this discussion I will outline the challenges presented by having only the linear growth option, the organization of Spotify and some examples of how we are trying to provide non-linear options in addition to more traditional models to improve happiness and retention within the team. My goal is not to define a perfect solution, rather I would like to start the discussion that will lead to positive change within our ecosystem.

Presentations

Creating Culture Open Space

4:15pm - 5:05pm

Learnings from Building and Scaling Gilt

3:00pm - 3:50pm

By: Michael Bryzek
Co-Founder & CTO at Gilt. MIT Alum. Husband. Father. Triathlete.

We built and scaled Gilt by building an environment where great engineers can create amazing things.

This talk is a reflection on what we have learned along the journey from startup to one of the leading ecommerce companies. We start with a baseline of behavioral psychology - and reflect on the decisions we made and tradeoffs we considered as we scaled.

The Pivotal Way

5:30pm - 6:00pm

By: Josh Knowles
VP of Engineering, Pivotal

Pivotal Labs is a consulting company with early ties to the agile community. In this talk we will walk through the strong engineering culture which has made the team successful as well as look at how things have evolved over the past 20 years. We'll dive deep into the life-cycle of a developer starting with recruiting through their career progression to management or technical leadership.