Schedule

As you become an increasingly senior IC, subtle changes in the scope of your role shape the kinds of influence you can have and are expected to have. Mapping out these changes through a few different lenses can help you identify which of the various options you actually wish to seek out, and think about how you want to plan your future career.

Although the Senior IC ladder is starting to become more defined, what being ‘staff’ or ‘principal’ is still varies greatly from company to company. And just like stepping into management, deciding to move from Senior to Staff or from Staff to Principal changes the day-to-day work and expectations placed on ICs. And so why aren’t more people talking about this shift, and what does leadership actually look like as Senior IC?

In this panel, we’ll discuss what being a Senior IC really means in the absence of matching technical ladders. We’ll consider core responsibilities, from engineering strategy to making technical decisions, and leading big projects - and our panelists will shed light on the kinds of work they do to help you navigate the Senior IC ladder.

As you grow as a technical leader, identifying career paths and opportunities can be difficult and you can easily get stuck without knowing what it takes to get you to the next level. So as a Senior IC,  how do you get here?  What is the job like? How do you map your career map?

We invited senior ICs who are leading the industry to talk about their career journey, how they navigated being a deeply technical senior individual contributor, how they viewed their own personal development, and how they grew and sought out new opportunities.

Should you automagically decide for your user, or leave the choice to them? You disagree with your colleague on a solution, how do you resolve it? Do you start the next project, or document the last one?

In decisions like these, how do we address philosophical conflicts? “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” -- or rather, a utilitarian approach. In this chat, we’ll explore how Vulcan logic can inform communicating and acting ethically.

Being a good leader means knowing when (and when not) to delegate. Learning how and when to delegate is often one of the hardest skills for individual contributors to master. In this story telling session Leslie Chapman, Distinguished Engineer, will explore the right ways and times to delegate, and the pitfalls of not delegating properly.

As you grow as a technical leader, identifying career paths and opportunities can be difficult and you can easily get stuck without knowing what it takes to get you to the next level. So as a Senior IC,  how do you get here?  What is the job like? How do you map your career map?

We invited senior ICs who are leading the industry to talk about their career journey, how they navigated being a deeply technical senior individual contributor, how they viewed their own personal development, and how they grew and sought out new opportunities.

As a senior IC, you’re expected to lead, execute and complete deeply technical projects across teams. And getting projects across the finish line is not easy. You must navigate your role as a leader, both technical and organization, throughout the process and understand at what altitude you should be working.

So how do you successfully execute big projects?

In this panel, we’ll be focusing on successful strategies for landing big projects. We’ll discuss the principles of how to plan, conceptualize, and deliver big projects. Our panelists will also share their views on the role of a senior IC within a big project, thinking about what level of involvement you need to take and strategies to empower the people doing the work.

Running a month-long, high-touch, structured incident response to ensure Google Meet scaled up appropriately during COVID19 without any user-facing outage required quick and creative adaptations to our standard incident management practices to succeed. This talk will cover how we organized the work -- human, technical, and organizational -- needed to prevent outages while we strove to keep ahead of pandemic-driven explosive product growth, and we’ll apply it to future long-running, large-scale incidents.

Most aspiring guitarists will learn how to play power chords, a simple chord shape that can be moved up and down the neck to play just about any song. In this talk, we’ll learn a few simple techniques that you can use to define and execute technical strategy. Just like power chords, these techniques won’t make you a virtuoso, but they’ll immediately allow you to define and communicate strategy. This talk will be most useful for folks just getting started with technical strategy, but even virtuosos may get a useful tip or two.

One of the most impactful decisions that most of us will make is whether to replace a creaking software system with something new, or whether to iteratively improve the current system. Either choice is generally a significant investment. Spoiler: the answer (as with so many other questions that come to a staff engineer) is ‘it depends'.

This talk explores the technical, organizational, cultural, and psychological factors that matter when we choose between full rewrites or incremental change.

As a senior manager, you’ll likely have to manage a senior IC - and this is really different from managing more junior counterparts. The person you’re managing might be more senior than you, or equal in seniority - but by the nature of your role, you’ll often control how much they are paid, when they’re promoted, and if they’re satisfied in their job.

In this panel, we’ll explore the senior IC <> manager relationship, thinking about how to create a mutually beneficial partnership. We’ll explore how to support senior ICs, thinking about workload and growth opportunities, and navigate the more complex parts of your relationship.

As you grow as a technical leader, identifying career paths and opportunities can be difficult and you can easily get stuck without knowing what it takes to get you to the next level. So as a Senior IC,  how do you get here?  What is the job like? How do you map your career map? 

This talk will cover how to define your development journey as a Senior IC, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and keep track of your progress.

As an engineering leader, your feedback loops become longer, meaning it's harder to evaluate your own performance and identify areas for improvement. It can also be difficult for engineering managers to receive information on their own performance, as it’s difficult for people to give negative feedback to their boss.

So how can you create a space where feedback can be given safely? In this panel, we’ll explore how engineering leaders can actively seek and receive feedback, and how to interpret feedback to steer self-improvement.

Engineers often complain that “we don’t do enough investment”. We leave code to rot over many years; accidents waiting to happen or mud that slows down our shipping speed.

Engineers go into battle with product managers, arguing for investment over new features, and we lose. Over and over again. And when you look at the different backgrounds and skill sets - perhaps that’s not surprising. As an ex-consultant myself, I can confirm that persuasion is the name of the game. And most engineers don’t get taught to persuade at all.

This isn’t sensible - unless the engineers are hugely over-estimating the benefit of doing the investment work, the organization isn’t making good choices. And the battle mentality is clearly counter-productive: driving barriers between two groups whose entire job description is about collaboration.

We need to fix this, and we can. This talk will help you understand and sell the value of investment work so that you can collaborate with non-engineers to get it prioritized.

Is managing up bad?

What if you realize that your reports are managing you as well. The philosophy of “no one is perfect” gets applied to managers as well.

In this talk, I will share why it is a good practice to have. How you can manage up and build a healthy culture of being managed by your reports.

On-call processes often come with some baggage. And that’s understandable - asking engineers to give up their weekends, evenings, and early mornings isn’t the most thrilling of prospects. At worst, on-call can lead to demotivated teams and burnt-out individuals. So how can you create efficient (and even liked?) on-call processes? In this panel, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of an effective on-call process - thinking about how to diagnose your current state, iterate and improve, and how to avoid mistakes along the way.

Leading a globally distributed engineering department that spans eight different timezones is no walk in the park. It takes a lot of effort and intention to make it all work. With this talk, I want to share some of the strategies we use to help make this globally distributed team successful and still feel like a cohesive unit.

One practice we lean on is async stand-up posts. I publish a weekly internal blog post on Sunday evening (Monday morning for our Thailand folks). The body of the post contains my updates for the department and then engineers leave their status updates in the comments.

While async standup posts are great, the team still needs face time with each other. We do this via weekly roundtables. These roundtables are optional one-hour long zoom calls that occur on a four-week rotating schedule to accommodate all of our different timezones.

During the roundtables, the team can chat about anything that is on their minds. We record these roundtables and I take notes. After the roundtable is over, I post the recording and the notes so anyone who could not attend can catch up on what was discussed.

Finally, to make a distributed team work well your culture has to be async first. To start, set the expectation that PRs and Issues should be open for at least 24 hrs for review to allow all team members a chance to weigh in. Treat Slack as an async tool and not a synchronous one. When you do this, folks become a lot more thoughtful in their written communication. People begin to think and plan ahead better. The stress of walking away from your computer during the day completely goes away. Lastly, record your meetings so folks never feel left out because they can always catch up with the recording later.

Whether you are new to the engineering manager role or a director who has years of experience, there is always an opportunity to grow your skills and improve your effectiveness. As managers, it may seem like there is so much we are responsible for but rarely do we get the feedback on which are the top responsibilities and skills we should focus on. It’s hard to prioritize when everything is important.

But to be an effective engineering manager, director, and VP, you need to tie the work you do to the most impact for the organization.

In this talk, we’ll cover:

• A quick overview of a career track for managers and individual contributors
• 3 key skills every manager, director, and VP need to focus on
• Pitfalls that you can learn to avoid in order to build the most effective teams
• Effective tools for distributed teams

As a manager and senior leader, this talk will give you a good high-level outline of different areas of growth that should be on every manager's career development framework. These key skills are paramount to your personal success as a manager and to your team’s success toward achieving the company goals.

Coaching is a skill that’s often talked about when we discuss growing our teams, and like any skill, coaching requires intentional thought and practice. However, leaders aren’t often trained in honing their coaching tactics - which can leave some people to feel unsure of how to hold effective coaching conversations.

In this panel, we’ll explore how to hold effective coaching conversations as leaders - thinking about strategies for understanding what the other person is saying, actively listening, and how to ask the correct kinds of questions.

As a technical leader do you have problems with different disciplines and communities of practice within your organization? Do you find misconceptions about what different groups can do getting in the way of achieving your objectives?

In this talk, I'll explore these problems through the lens of Sturgeon’s Revelation usually stated as “ninety percent of everything is crap”!

In a career, it's surprisingly easy for a good developer to have only worked with bad product people. Or a good product manager to have only worked with bad UX people. Or a good UX Designer to have only worked with bad developers. And so on.

Each of those people builds generalizations based on their experiences. Creating coping mechanisms for those generalizations that start being counter-productive when they finally get to work with good people. You'll see how easy it is for people inside and outside of a discipline to have radically different experiences of its competencies. We'll work through some options to help break down those misconceptions — so we can create happier, more empathic, teams!

For any engineering department to be truly effective, strong cross-functional relationships must be developed with other departments. And while vital, forming relationships with product, design, marketing, sales, customer support, etc, can bring all kinds of unforeseen challenges. In this panel, we’ll explore how engineering departments can form strong relationships with other teams. We’ll discuss how to articulate and communicate engineering’s priorities and concerns, how to understand the perspectives of other departments, and how to avoid common mistakes when collaborating with other departments.

In the contemporary world of machine learning algorithms - data is the new oil. For the state-of-the-art ML algorithms to work their magic it's important to lay a strong foundation with access to relevant data. Volumes of crude data are available on the web nowadays, and all we need are the skills to identify and extract meaningful datasets. This talk aims to present the power of the most fundamental aspect of Machine Learning - Dataset Curation, which often does not get its due limelight. It will also walk the audience through the process of constructing good quality datasets as done in formal settings with a simple hands-on Pythonic example. The goal is to institute the importance of data, especially in its worthy format, and the spell it casts on fabricating smart learning algorithms.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) concepts are increasingly adopted by many technology organizations and teams. CI/CD enables teams to establish processes that increase velocity, collaboration and quality of their codebase. CI/CD enables developer & operations teams to break down unnecessary silos and gain a deeper knowledge of their respective arenas, while focusing on the important things like shipping great software.

In this talk we’ll cover the Whys, the Whats, and the Hows of setting up a CI/CD pipeline and making it work for us as we strive to ship better software, faster.

We’ll finish the presentation with a hands-on demo of building a sample pipeline with CircleCI.

We're going to show you the most important team-based metrics to track, how to identify workflow bottlenecks, and proven tactics for improvement.

It can be daunting to look at job listings and see that you fulfill few or none of the preferred qualifications. "Sure, I'm a software engineer, I can pick up new languages, but I don't have '2+ years experience working in applied Machine Learning'."

In this talk, we go over tips on how to land an opportunity that allows for technical domain exploration, how to efficiently learn from the experience, and how to utilize your new domain expertise for career growth.

Join us for our demo where Mert Kilic, Senior Software Developer at our Berlin Tech Hub, will give an introduction to our new restaurant courier app which we launched in February this year. He'll give some insights into the technical challenges of building a courier app, the technologies which we used to develop it, how we communicate throughout the infrastructure and present a live demo.

Join our solutions engineer to understand how we can help reduce deployment time and cost with an accuracy that you and your team can rely on.

Looking to hire a word-class engineering team faster without wasting engineering or recruiting time? Join us as we show you how Codility can help engineering leaders predict the real-life skills of your candidates, fast-track high performers and hire twice as fast, giving your engineers more time to solve problems that matter.

Data teams represent an organizational transformation for most companies. What problems do data folks solve? Do they work with engineering? Do they do R&D on the side until they prove their worth by building something truly valuable?

These are embarrassingly common questions for most companies, from small startups to large Fortune 500 corporations. In the absence of good answers, data teams are left at the mercy of a myriad of business requests. No roadmap, no direction. Just SQL.

Luckily, there is a way to turn data service organizations into an integral part of your business, while adding value with every single contribution, by shifting toward becoming a data product team. This implies listening to internal and external customers, and building tools that increase your company's operational efficiency and reduce the need for ad hoc queries.

In this talk, I'll walk through what it would take to achieve this for your organization. If you're a data or engineering leader and have struggled with managing internal work in progress of your data teams, this talk is for you.

This demo will cover Instana's observability platform and automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution, designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservice and cloud native applications. It will cover how the system can help improve your uptime and give you better visibility into the workings of your system.

The Marco Polo Network is the largest trade finance network in the world. The network spans 60+ regions and 140 countries in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The network needs to support the secure operation of hundreds of thousands of independent nodes and prevent the leakage of node-specific information.

The Marco Polo Network Management System (NMS) was built to support the vast network in a scalable and automated fashion. Marco Polo NMS automates end-to-end processes, monitors network activity and alerts on platform, data center, and cluster health.

See Moogsoft in Action Join us for a live demo on how we can help you reduce noise, conquer alert fatigue and deliver a seamless customer experience. With Moogsoft, you don’t just observe. You get to turn data into action!

Teams that write code together should be able to debug issues together. But while we think a lot about engineering collaboratively, we rarely develop processes for debugging collaboratively. Often, debugging is the hardest part of the job. What does an engineer do when the logs have expired, she can’t reproduce the issue, and she's tested five different hypotheses? I’ll talk about a workflow that allows teams to collaboratively debug issues without repeating work or losing progress and why it makes sense.

I've had some bad days in my career — production outages, customer emergencies, escalations, you name it. But to be fair, I've never cost my employer $500 million because of poor UX or accidentally lost a $370 million piece of equipment because of an integer overflow.

While not all errors that we make are nearly this noticeable or catastrophic, we can learn from these notable mistakes how making human assumptions about the complex systems we create can lead to unintended consequences in the real world.

In this talk, we discuss both of these incidents - one highly technical and the other highly human and UX driven - to understand how a DevSecOps mentality is intended to overcome the biases we have for simplicity in our human model of complex systems. Lastly, we'll examine real-world solutions to automated testing and reasoning about how our modern, complex, distributed systems behave in the real world.

You may have heard the hype; now see it in action. With Honeycomb, modern dev teams build and operate resilient, reliable systems because they can clearly understand them. Running queries and getting results fast should be table stakes. Ask any question and get results fast, no matter how many fields, without writing new code. Reduce toil and delight your users.