Choose Boring Technology Culture

May 1, 2023July 14, 2023 mipsytipsybusiness, culture, startupsLeave a comment

Honeycomb recently announced our $50M Series D funding round. We aren’t the type to hype this a lot; Emily summed it up crisply as, “Living another day on someone else’s money isn’t business success, even though it is a lovely vote of confidence.”

Agreed. The vote of confidence does mean more than usual, given the dire state of VC funding these days, but…raising money is not success. Building a viable, sustainable company is success.

Whenever we are talking to investors, something that inevitably comes up is what a bomb ass team 🌈 we have. They have always been impressed by our ability to recruit and retain marquee names, people we “shouldn’t have been able to get” at our stage; honestly it’s even better than they realize, because we have heavy hitters all up and down the company, most of whom simply aren’t as well known. 😉 (Fame, and this may shock you, is not a function of talent.)

People join Honeycomb for many reasons, but “culture” is one of the most commonly cited. We have never been shy about talking about the ways we think tech culture sucks, or the experiments we are running. But this has given rise to the occasional impression that we are primarily cultural innovators who occasionally write software. We really aren’t.

In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. We try to choose boring culture.

What The Fuck Does “Culture” Even Mean?

Ok, so this is where the problem starts. This is why it grates on my nerves any time someone starts making pronouncements about how “your culture is bad”, “culture is the problem”, “fix your broken culture”… AUUGGGHHH. Those sentences are MEANINGLESS.

What does “culture” even mean?? Let’s consult the interwebs:

Culture: “An umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions and norms for a group; knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of those individuals”
Culture: “The shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterize an organization; working environment, company policies and employee behavior”
Culture: “Maintain tissue cells, bacteria, etc in conditions suitable for growth”

Well, at least that last one makes sense. 😛 But if culture means everything, then culture means nothing. That’s just not helpful!

Instead, let’s disambiguate company culture into two categories. There is the formal culture of the organization (meetings, mission/vision, management, job ladders, hiring practices, strategy, organizational structure, team dynamics, and so on), and there is the informal culture of the people, the ways that humor, playfulness, and practices manifest in groups and individuals.

Organizational culture is professional, formal, structural, institutional. Managerial responsibilities, promotions, compensation plans, and fiduciary duties are just a few of the .many aspects of organizational culture.

Informal culture is chaotic, joyful, free-spirited, and fun, individualized, inherently anarchic and bottoms-up. It’s things like writing release notes in limerick form, bringing banana bread to work after an outage, long pun threads, slack channels dedicated to pets, competing on the number of employees named “Jess”* vs “Chris”*.

Organizational culture is the cake; informal culture is the frosting. Organizational culture is what leaders are hired to build, informal culture is what bubbles up irrepressibly in the gaps. (I wish I had better names for these!) And when it comes to formal, organizational culture, you don’t want to be in the business of innovating.

Culture Serves The Business

As a leader, you should absolutely care about your culture, but your primary responsibility is the health of the business. The purpose of your culture is to make your business succeed. It does not serve you, and it does not serve the people you care about, to be unclear on this front.

I don’t mean to make it sound like this is simple or easy. It is not. You are dealing with people’s lives and livelihoods, and it is all about tradeoffs. What might be best for an individual in the long run (for example, leaving your company to pursue another opportunity) might harm your business in the near term. Yet you might decide to celebrate them in leaving and not pressure them to stay, because you believe that what’s best for your business in the longer term is for employees to be able to trust their managers when they say, “I believe that working here is the best thing you can do for your career right now.”

The transactional nature of work relationships is how they differ from e.g. family relationships. You can form intense bonds and deep friendships with the people you work with — you may even form bonds that transcend your work relationship — but your relationship at work comes with terms and conditions.

Your company culture can’t be everything to everyone. Nor should you try.

You HAVE to care more about the health of the business than about culture for culture’s own sake. Even if — especially if — you have lots of strong opinions about culture, and there are lots of ways you want to deviate from common wisdom. Doing well at business is what earns you more innovation tokens to invest.

“Choose Boring Technology Culture”

Dan McKinley coined the phrase “choose boring technology” and the concept of innovation tokens nearly a decade ago.

“Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad [2]. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough….The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. — @mcfunley

The moral of the story is that innovation is costly, so you should choose standard, well-understood, rock-solid technologies insofar as you possibly can. You only get a few innovation tokens to spend, so you should spend them on technologies that can give you a true competitive advantage — not on, like, reinventing memcache for the hell of it.

The same goes for running a business, and the same goes for organizational culture. We have collectively inherited a set of default practices that work pretty well, like the 40 hour work week and having 1x1s with your manager. You CAN choose to do something different, but you should probably have a good reason. To the extent that you can learn from other people’s experience, you probably should, whether in business or in tech; innovation is expensive, and you only get so many tokens. Do you really want to spend one on a radical reinvention of your PTO policy? How does that serve you?

Innovation gets all the headlines, but I would posit that what most companies need is actually much simpler: organizational health.

Great Culture begins with Organizational Health

There’s this book by Patrick Lencione called “The Advantage: How Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.” (He is best known for writing “Five Dysfunctions of a Team“.) This guy is to organizational health what James Madison was to constitutional government: a very specific kind of genius.

I picked up “The Advantage” in 2020, around the time Honeycomb stopped teetering on the brink of failure, once it became clear we were likely to be around for a while. It made a huge impression on me. He makes the case that most businesses spend a ton of energy on trying to be “smart”, and relatively little on being “healthy”.

Healthy orgs are characterized by minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover. Health begets — and trumps — intelligence.

As Lencione says, an organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. People in a healthy organization will learn from each other, identify problems, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusion, they will cycle through problems and rally much faster than dysfunctional rivals will. And they create an environment in which everyone else can do the same, which creates a multiplier effect.

The healthier an org is, the more of its collective intelligence it is able to tap into and use. Most orgs exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital available to them, but the healthy ones can tap into almost all of it.

Organizational Health Is Too Boring

No one would disagree with any of this, in principle. ☺️ EVERYBODY wants to work at a place where the mission, vision, and values are clear, meaningful and inspiring; where everyone is rallied around the same winning strategy; and where it’s crystal clear how your role specifically will contribute to that success. Everybody agrees that a healthy organizational culture leads to better outcomes.

So why isn’t every company like that?

Well, it is much easier said than done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is unglamorous work, difficult to measure, and at the end of the day we are always making risky decisions between conflicting tradeoffs based on partial information. We are imperfect meat sacks who lack self awareness, struggle to understand each other, and get hangry and snap. And the job is never done. You never “get there”, any more than you are ever perfectly healthy with perfect relationships.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We don’t have to be perfect to be a meaningfully better presence in people’s lives. We just have to be healthy enough to achieve our goals.

Nobody Wants An “Exciting” Company Culture

When you tell your partner you had an exciting day at work, do they respond with “uh oh 😬🔥🧯”?

All too often, excitement at work comes from strategic swerves, projects getting canceled, lack of focus, missteps or conflicts, anxiety and passive aggression, outages or downtime, outrageous demands coming from out of left field, or getting information at the last minute that you should have had ages ago. Living on the edge of your seat can be very stimulating! Firefighting is a huge rush, and if you’re part of the essential glue holding this creaky vessel together, you can get hooked on feeling desperately needed.

But this isn’t good for your cortisol levels, and it doesn’t move the company forward. When so much of your energy goes to bailing water and staying afloat, you don’t have much left over for rowing the oars. You want energy going to the oars.

Should work be exciting? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s not the adjective I would reach for. Emotional rollercoaster rides don’t provide the kind of circumstances that tend to unlock great design or engineering, or collaboration or focus. I would rather reach for words like achievement, fulfillment, pride, comradeship, or the joy of being part of something greater than yourself, not “exciting” or “fun”.

Leaders Worry Too Much About Making Work Fun

As a leader, your job is not to “make work fun”. You are not here to entertain your employees. Your responsibility is to build a formal culture that works, that supports the success of the business.

So what, am I dooming you to a life of bureaucratic beige and meetings without puns? Fuck no.

If formal organizational culture is like the architecture, then informal culture is furnishings, light displays, murals and banners — whatever you do on the inside. You don’t want someone getting overly creative with the load-bearing beams. Save that for when it’s time to paint “Frozen” murals on the walls and hang the matching icicle curtains.

You want formal culture to be boring, stable, reliable, load-bearing…because this creates a safe structure for people to bring the humor, the fun, the joy, the delight, without any fear of building collapse. The company doesn’t have to bring the fun; people bring the fun. Have you met people? People are fucking weirdos. 🥰 If you create an emotionally safe zone and the conditions for success, informal culture will thrive. 🪅People bring the fun🪅 — they always do.

The best informal culture is almost always bottoms up. But managers, execs, HR/People teams, etc can encourage informal culture. One of the most powerful things you can do is just participate. Show up for drinks, play the board games, keep the puns rolling, get silly with your team! Your participation gives people permission and shows that you value their creative cultural labor at work.

Of course there are no bright lines — companies can throw great parties! — but that’s not the job; building a healthy org is the job. Doing that right frees people up to have joy at work. It makes the celebrations that much bigger, the fun that much funnier.

Success Is Rocket Fuel For Fun

Think back to the most corporate fun you’ve ever had at work — the biggest parties, celebrations, blowouts, etc. Were they holiday parties and random occasions, or were they actually linked to great achievements? I bet they were the latter.

You don’t gather at work for the fun of it, you come together to do great things. It stands to reason the peak moments of joy and bonding are fueled by a sense of accomplishment.

Even on a smaller scale, levity and joy are inextricably linked to doing great work and making customers happy. For example, ops/SRE teams are notorious for their gallows humor around outages (ops is ALWAYS the funniest engineering team, in my experience ☺️). But dark humor is only funny when you are also taking your work seriously. Joking about the inevitability of data loss stops being funny real fast if you are actually playing fast and loose with customer backups.

In the absence of success, progress, and high performance, the kind of “frosting” behaviors that bring so much hilarity to work — joking and teasing, puns and stories — actually stop being fun and start making people feel distracted, irritated and on edge. You don’t want to hear a steady stream of jokes from somebody who keeps letting you down.

Side note: unhealthy orgs may have pockets of humor, but it often comes at the expense of other, less prestigious teams. Lots of people may feel too anxious, powerless or threatened to participate. Your experience of whether those companies are “fun” or not is likely to depend heavily on where you sit in the hierarchy. But a healthy org creates the level conditions for humor, playfulness and creativity throughout the org.

Investing Your Innovation Tokens

So yeah. Despite our reputation for cultural innovation, I’d say we’re actually pretty conservative when it comes to operating a company.

Not only are we not revolutionaries, we are actually trying to do as little differently as possible, because innovation is costly!! Instead, we (as a leadership team) are more focused on trying to execute well and improve upon our organizational health. For the past year, we have been laboring especially hard over strategy — the diagnosis, guiding policy, and set of coherent actions we need to win. Our first responsibility is to make the business succeed, after all.

Which brings us back to the topic of innovation tokens.

I started writing down some of the innovation tokens I feel like we’ve spent. But it dawned on me that when I look at most of the cultural experiments we run, and the things we talk about and write about publicly — stuff like the dangers of hierarchy, hiring, interviewing, high-leverage teams, engineering levels, rituals for engineering teams, etc — it doesn’t feel like innovation at all. It’s all just about trying to have a healthier organization. Hierarchy sucks because visible hierarchy has been shown to dampen people’s creativity, motivation and problem-solving skills. Engineering levels are important because they bring clarity. And so on.

What makes something rise to the level of an innovation token is the amount of time we end up asking other people to invest lots of their time into.

Like, we are 1.5 years into a 4 year experiment having an employee on our board of directors. We are about to spin up an internal Advisory Panel to more broadly distribute the impact of our employee board member around the company.
In the past, we have experimented with regular ethics discussion groups.
Last year we did a deep dive into company values with small breakout groups.
Some internal decisions around things like values are handled, not by estaff, but by a group of six people; one employee representative of each org, nominated by their VP; who do a deep dive into the material together and come back with a decision or recommendation.
We are about to start the process of developing our own leadership curriculum. We know that we need to equip our managers with better tools, and culturally indoctrinate new employees, so I am excited to build something with our cultural fingerprints all over it.

We run a lot of experiments around transparency, like, the agenda for exec staff meetings can be viewed by the whole company. After every board meeting, we present the same thing we showed to the board to the whole company during all-hands. We are transparent on salary bands. Stuff like that.

We are far from perfect; we have a long ways to go, and when I look around the org it’s hard not to only see all the work left to be done. But we are a lot healthier and better off than we were a year ago, which was better off than we were two years ago, let alone three.

The Experience Of Making This Will Be With Us Forever

A few months ago I was reading this lengthy profile of Sarah Polley in the New Yorker, as she was doing a bunch of press for her new movie, “Women Talking”. (The movie itself sounds incredibly intense; I am still trying to find time and emotional energy to watch it. Someday!)

One thing she said got lodged in my brain, and I’ve been unable to forget it ever since. She’s talking about the experience of having been a child actor, and how intensely it informs the experience she strives to create for everybody working on the set of one of her movies; where parents get to go home and have dinner with their kids, etc.

[He] told her, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect a few people for a little while, in a way that is out of our control. The only thing that’s certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us—it will become part of us—forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience.”

Making a movie that lots of people want to see, one that was a good financial return on investment, buys you the ability to make even more movies, employ more people, take even bigger creative risks. If all you want to do is be a niche indie player, working on a shoestring budget, more power to you. But if you really believe in your ideas, and you want to see them go mainstream … you need mainstream success.

Sarah Polley makes movies. We make developer tools. ☺️ But the same thing is true of working at Honeycomb.

If we are very lucky, and work very hard, our work may help teams build better software and spend fewer, more meaningful hours at work, for a long time to come. I love our mission. But the only certain thing is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, become part of us, forever.

So we should try our best to make it a good experience. ☺️

charity.

Footnotes

(1) Inherited Defaults

How to access these inherited defaults can be a bit more complicated than I make it sound. Working as a manager at Facebook for two years taught me more about these defaults than anything else I’ve ever done in my career. Big companies have had to figure a lot of shit out in order to function at scale, which is why I often advise anyone who plans on starting a company or being a director/VP to do a stint at one. Will Larson’s book “An Elegant Puzzle” does a great job of laying out defaults and best practices for engineering orgs, and his blog has even more useful bits.. Otherwise, you might wanna get yourself an advisor or two with a lot of operator experience, and get used to asking questions like “how does this normally get done?”

(2) Corporate Fun

There’s plenty of stuff in the grey area between formal, organizational culture and informal, individual culture. Companies often stray into fun-like adjacencies like holiday parties, offsites, etc. Fostering a sense of “play” and informality is actually really important for making teams click with each other, and obviously the company should foot the bill if it’s a work function. Just be mindful of what you’re doing and what your goals are when you veer into the rocky shoals of Forced Corporate Fun. 😆

Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”

March 29, 2023July 14, 2023 mipsytipsyadvice, culture, startups, vendorsLeave a comment

I recently got a plaintive text message from my magnificent friend Abby Bangser, asking about a conversation we had several years ago:

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you. A long time ago I remember you talking about what an adjustment it was becoming a vendor, how all of a sudden people would just discard your opinion and your expertise without even listening. And that it was SUPER ANNOYING.

I’m now experiencing something similar. Did you ever find any good reading/listening/watching to help you adjust to being on the vendor side without being either a terrible human or constantly disregarded?”

Oh my.. This brings back memories. ☺️🙈

Like Abby, I’ve spent most of my career as an engineer in the trenches. I have also spent a lot of time cheerfully talking smack about software. I’ve never really had anyone question my experience[1] or my authority as an expert, hardened as I was in the flames of a thousand tire fires.

Then I started a software company. And all of a sudden this bullshit starts popping up. Someone brushing me off because I was “selling something”, or dismissing my work like I was fatally compromised. I shrugged it off, but if I stopped to think, it really bothered me. Sometimes I felt like yelling “HEY FUCKERS, I am one of your kind! I’m trying to HELP YOU. Stop making this so hard!” 😡 (And sometimes I actually did yell, lol.)

That’s what I remember complaining to Abby about, five or six years ago. It was all very fresh and raw at the time.

We’ll get to that. First let’s dial the clock back a few more years, so you can fully appreciate the rich irony of my situation. (Or skip the story and jump straight to “Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to“.)

The first time I encountered “software for sale”

My earliest interaction with software vendors was at Linden Lab. Like most infrastructure teams, most of the software we used was open source. But somewhere around 2009? 2010? Linden’s data engineering team began auditioning vendors like Splunk, Greenplum, Vertica[2], etc for our data warehouse solution, and I tagged along as the sysinfra/ops delegate.

For two full days we sat around this enormous table as vendor after vendor came by to demo and plump their wares, then opened the floor for questions.

One of the very first sales guys did something that pissed me off me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — maybe he was ignoring my questions or talking down to me. (I’m certain I didn’t come across like a seasoned engineering professional; in my mid twenties, face buried in my laptop, probably wearing pajamas and/or pigtails.) But I do remember becoming very irritated, then settling in to a stance of, shall we say, oppositional defiance.

I peppered every sales team aggressively with questions about the operational burden of running their software, their architectural decisions, and how canned or cherry-picked their demos were. Any time they let slip a sign of weakness or betrayed uncertainty, I bore down harder and twisted the knife. I was a ✨royal asshole✨. My coworkers on the data team found this extremely entertaining, which only egged me on.

What the fuck?? 🫢😧🫠 I’m not usually an asshole to strangers.. where did that come from?

What open source culture taught me about sales

I came from open source, where contempt for software vendors was apparently de rigueur. (is it still this way?? seems like it might have gotten better? 😦) It is fascinating now to look back and realize how much attitude I soaked up before coming face to face with my first software vendor. According to my worldview at the time,

Vendors are liars
They will say anything to get you to buy
Open source software is always the safest and best code
Software written for profit is inherently inferior, and will ultimately be replaced by the inevitable rise of better, faster, more democratic open source solutions
Sales exists to create needs that ought never to have existed, then take you to the cleaners
Engineers who go work for software vendors have either sold out, or they aren’t good enough to hack it writing real (consumer facing) software.

I’m remembering Richard Stallman trailing around behind me, up and down the rows of vendor booths at USENIX in his St IGNUcious robes, silver disk platter halo atop his head, offering (begging?) to lay his hands on my laptop and bless it, to “free it from the demons of proprietary software.” Huh. (Remember THIS song? 🎶 😱)

Given all that, it’s not hugely surprising that my first encounter with software vendors devolved into hostile questioning.

(It’s fun to speculate on the origin of some of these beliefs. Like, I bet 3) and 4) came from working on databases, particularly Oracle and MySQL/Postgres. As for 5) that sounds an awful lot like the beauty industry and other products sold to women. 🤭)

Behind every software vendor lies a recovering open source zealot(???)

I’ve had many, many experiences since then that slowly helped me dismantle this worldview, brick by brick. Working at Facebook made me realize that open source successes like Apache, Haproxy, Nginx etc are exceptions, not the norm; that this model is only viable for certain types of general-purpose infrastructure software; that governance and roadmaps are a huge issue for open source projects too; and that if steady progress is being made, at the end of the day, somewhere somebody is probably paying those developers.

I learned that the overwhelming majority of production-caliber code is written by somebody who was paid to write it — not by volunteers. I learned about coordination costs and overhead, how expensive it is to organize an army of volunteers, and the pains of decentralized quality control. I learned that you really really want the person who wrote the code to stick around and own it for a long time, and not just on alternate weekends when they don’t have the kids (and/or they happen to feel like it).

I learned about game theory, and I learned that sales is about relationships. Yes, there are unscrupulous sellers out there, just like there are shady developers, but good sales people don’t want you to walk away feeling tricked or disappointed any more than you want to be tricked or disappointed. They want to exceed your expectations and deliver more value than expected, so you’ll keep coming back. In game theory terms, it’s a “repeated game”.

I learned SO MUCH from interviewing sales candidates at Honeycomb.[3] Early on, when nobody knew who we were, I began to notice how much our sales candidates were obsessed with value. They were constantly trying to puzzle out out how much value Honeycomb actually brought to the companies we were selling to. I was not used to talking or thinking about software in terms of “value”, and initially I found this incredibly offputting (can you believe it?? 😳).

Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you

Ultimately, this was the biggest (if dumbest) lesson of all: I learned that good software has tremendous value. It unlocks value and creates value, it pays enormous ongoing dividends in dollars and productivity, and the people who build it, support it, and bring it to market fully deserve to recoup a slice of the value they created for others.

There was a time when I would have bristled indignantly and said, “we didn’t start honeycomb to make money!” I would have said that the reason we built honeycomb because we knew as engineers what a radical shift it had wrought in how we built and understood software, and we didn’t want to live without it, ever again.

But that’s not quite true. Right from the start, Christine and I were intent on building not just great software, but a great software business. It wasn’t personal wealth we were chasing, it was independence and autonomy — the freedom to build and run a company the way we thought it should be run, building software to radically empower other engineers like ourselves.

Guess what you have to do if you care about freedom and autonomy?

Make money. 🙄☺️

I also realized, belatedly, that most people who start software companies do so for the same damn reasons Christine and I did… to solve hard problems, share solutions, and help other engineers like ourselves. If all you want to do is get rich, this is actually a pretty stupid way to do that. Over 90% of startups fail, and even the so-called “success stories” aren’t as predictably lucrative as RSUs. And then there’s the wear and tear on relationships, the loss of social life, the vicissitudes of the financial system, the ever-looming spectre of failure … 👻☠️🪦 Startups are brutal, my friend.

Karma is a bitch

None of these are particularly novel insights, but there was a time when they were definitely news to me. ☺️ It was a pretty big shock to my system when I first became a software vendor and found myself sitting on the other side of the table, the freshly minted target of hostile questioning.

These days I am far less likely to be cited as an objective expert than I used to be. I see people on Hacker News dismissing me with the same scornful wave of the hand as I used to dismiss other vendors. Karma’s a bitch, as they say. What goes around comes around. 🥰

I used to get very bent out of shape by this. “You act like I only care because I’m trying to sell you something,” I would hotly protest, “but it’s exactly the opposite. I built something because I cared.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that vested interests can create blind spots, ones I might not even be aware of.

And that’s ok! My arguments/my solutions should be sturdy enough to withstand any disclosure of personal interest. ☺️

Some people are jerks; I can’t control that. But there are a few things I can do to acknowledge my biases up front, play fair, and just generally be the kind of vendor that I personally would be happy to work with.

Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to

So I gave Abby a short list of a few things I do to try and signal that I am a trustworthy voice, a vendor worth listening to. (What do you think, did I miss anything?)

🌸 Lead with your bias.🌸
I always try to disclose my own vested interest up front, and sometimes I exaggerate for effect: “As a vendor, I’m contractually obligated to say this”, or “Take it for what you will, obviously I have religious convictions here”. Everyone has biases; I prefer to talk to people who are aware of theirs.

🌸 Avoid cheap shots.🌸
Try to engage with the most powerful arguments for your competitors’ solutions. Don’t waste your time against straw men or slam dunks; go up against whatever ideal scenarios or “steel man” arguments they would muster in their own favor. Comparing your strengths vs their strengths results in a way more interesting, relevant and USEFUL discussion for all involved.

🌸 Be your own biggest critic.🌸
Be forthcoming about the flaws of your own solution. People love it when you are unafraid to list your own product’s shortcomings or where the competition shines, or describe the scenarios where other tools are genuinely superior or more cost-effective. It makes you look strong and confident, not weak.

What would you say about your own product as an engineer, or a customer? Say that.

🌸 You can still talk shit about software, just not your competitors‘ software. 🌸
I try not to gratuitously snipe at our competitors. It’s fine to speak at length about technical problems, differentiation and tradeoffs, and to address how specifically your product compares with theirs. But confine your shit talking to categories of software where you don’t have a personal conflict of interest.

Like, I’m not going to get on twitter and take a swipe at a monitoring vendor (anymore 😇), but I might say rude things about a language, a framework, or a database I have no stake in, if I’m feeling punchy. ☺️ (This particular gem of advice comes by way of Adam Jacob.)

🌸 Be generous with your expertise.🌸
If you have spent years going deep on one gnarly problem, you might very well know that problem and its solution space more thoroughly than almost anyone else in the world. Do you know how many people you can help with that kind of mastery?! A few minutes from you could potentially spare someone days or weeks of floundering. This is a gift few can give.

It feels good, and it’s a nice break from battering your head against unsolvable problems. Don’t restrict your help to paying customers, and, obviously, don’t give self-serving advice. Maybe they can’t buy/don’t need your solution today, but maybe someday they will.

In conclusion

There’s a time and place for being oppositional. Sometimes a vendor gets all high on their own supply, or starts making claims that aren’t just an “optimistic” spin on the facts but are provably untrue. If any vendor is operating in poor faith they deserve to to be corrected.

But it’s a shitty, self-limiting stance to take as a default. We are all here to build things, not tear things down. No one builds software alone. The code you write that defines your business is just the wee tippy top of a colossal iceberg of code written by other people — device drivers, libraries, databases, graphics cards, routers, emacs. All of this value was created by other people, yet we collectively benefit.

Think of how many gazillion lines of code are required for you to run just one AWS Lambda function! Think of how much cooperation and trust that represents. And think of all the deals that brokered that trust and established that value, compensating the makers and allowing them to keep building and improving the software we all rely on.

We build software together. Vendors exist to help you. We do what we do best, so you can spend your engineering cycles doing what you do best, working on your core product. Good sales deals don’t leave anyone feeling robbed or cheated, they leave both sides feeling happy and excited to collaborate.[4]

🐝💜Charity.

[1] Yes, I know this experience is far from universal; LOTS of people in tech have not felt like their voices are heard or their expertise acknowledged. This happens disproportionately to women and other under-represented groups, but it also happens to plenty of members of the dominant groups. It’s just a really common thing! However that has not really been my experience — or if it has, I haven’t noticed — nor Abby’s, as far as I’m aware.

[2] My first brush with columnar storage systems! Which is what makes Honeycomb possible today.

[3] I have learned SO MUCH from watching the world class sales professionals we have at Honeycomb. Sales is a tough gig, and doing it well involves many disciplines — empathy, creativity, business acumen, technical expertise, and so much more. Selling to software engineers in particular means you are often dealing with cocky little shits who think they could do your job with a few lines of code. On behalf of my fellow ~~little shits~~ engineers, I am sorry. 🙈

[4] Like our sales team says: “Never do a deal unless you’d do both sides of the deal.” I fucking love that.

Rituals for Engineering Teams

August 15, 2022July 14, 2023 mipsytipsyculture, engineering, management, operations, rituals, startups13 Comments

Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.

It got me thinking about the many rituals I have initiated and/or participated in over the course of my career. Of course, I never thought of them as such — I thought of them as “having fun at work” 🙃 — but now I realize these rituals disproportionately contribute to my favorite moments and the most precious memories of my career.

Rituals (a definition): Actions that a person or group does repeatedly, following a similar pattern or script, in which they’ve imbued symbolism and meaning.

I think it is extremely worth reading the first 27 pages of the book — the Introduction and Part One. To briefly sum up the first couple chapters: the power of creative rituals comes from their ability to link the physical with the psychological and emotional, all with the benefit of “regulation” and intentionality. Physically going through the process of a ritual helps people feel satisfied and in control, with better emotional regulation and the ability to act in a steadier and more focused way. Rituals also powerfully increase people’s sense of belonging, giving them a stable feeling of social connection. (p. 5-6)

The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging. You show that you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. You feel like you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. This is powerful shit!

It seems especially relevant these days when so many of us are atomized and physically separated from our teammates. That ineffable sense of belonging can make all the difference between a job that you do and a role that feeds your soul. Rituals are a way to create that sense of belonging. Hot damn.

So I thought I’d write up some of the rituals for engineering teams I remember from jobs past. I would love to hear about your favorite rituals, or your experience with them (good or bad). Tell me your stories at @mipsytipsy. 🙃

Rituals at Linden Lab

Feature Fish Freeze

At Linden Lab, in the ancient era of SVN, we had something called the “Feature Fish”. It was a rubber fish that we kept in the freezer, frozen in a block of ice. We would periodically cut a branch for testing and deployment and call a feature freeze. Merging code into the branch was painful and time consuming, so If you wanted to get a feature in after the code freeze, you had to first take the fish out of the freezer and unfreeze it.

This took a while, so you would have to sit there and consider your sins as it slowly thawed. Subtext: Do you really need to break code freeze?

Stuffy the Code Reviewer

You were supposed to pair with another engineer for code review. In your commit message, you had to include the name of your reviewer or your merge would be rejected. But the template would also accept the name “Stuffy”, to confess that your only reviewer had been…Stuffy, the stuffed animal.

However if your review partner was Stuffy, you would have to narrate the full explanation of Stuffy’s code review (i.e., what questions Stuffy asked, what changes he suggested and what he thought of your code) at the next engineering meeting. Out loud.

Shrek Ears

We had a matted green felt headband with ogre ears on it, called the Shrek Ears. The first time an engineer broke production, they would put on the Ears for a day. This might sound unpleasant, like a dunce cap, but no — it was a rite of passage. It was a badge of honor! Everyone breaks production eventually, if they’re working on something meaningful.

If you were wearing the Shrek Ears, people would stop you throughout the day and excitedly ask what happened, and reminisce about the first time they broke production. It became a way for 1) new engineers to meet lots of their teammates, 2) to socialize lots of production wisdom and risk factors, and 3) to normalize the fact that yes, things break sometimes, and it’s okay — nobody is going to yell at you. ☺️

This is probably the number one ritual that everybody remembers about Linden Lab. “Congratulations on breaking production — you’re really one of us now!”

Vorpal Bunny

We had a stuffed Vorpal Bunny, duct taped to a 3″ high speaker stand, and the operations engineer on call would put the bunny on their desk so people knew who it was safe to interrupt with questions or problems.

At some point we lost the bunny (and added more offices), but it lingered on in company lore since the engineers kept on changing their IRC nick to “$name-bunny” when they went on call.

There was also a monstrous, 4-foot-long stuffed rainbow trout that was the source of endless IRC bot humor… I am just now noticing what a large number of Linden memories involve stuffed animals. Perhaps not surprising, given how many furries were on our platform ☺️

Rituals at Parse

The Tiara of Technical Debt

Whenever an engineer really took one for the team and dove headfirst into a spaghetti mess of tech debt, we would award them the “Tiara of Technical Debt” at the weekly all hands. (It was a very sparkly rhinestone wedding tiara, and every engineer looked simply gorgeous in it.)

Examples included refactoring our golang rewrite code to support injection, converting our entire jenkins fleet from AWS instances to containers, and writing a new log parser for the gnarliest logs anyone had ever seen (for the MongoDB pluggable storage engine update).

Bonfire of the Unicorns

We spent nearly 2.5 years rewriting our entire ruby/rails API codebase to golang. Then there was an extremely long tail of getting rid of everything that used the ruby unicorn HTTP server, endpoint by endpoint, site by site, service by service.

When we finally spun down the last unicorn workers, I brought in a bunch of rainbow unicorn paper sculptures and a jug of lighter fluid, and we ceremonially set fire to them in the Facebook courtyard, while many of the engineers in attendance gave their own (short but profane) eulogies.

Mission Accomplished

This one requires a bit of backstory.

For two solid years after the acquisiton, Facebook leadership kept pressuring us to move off of AWS and on to FB infra. We kept saying “no, this is a bad idea; you have a flat network, and we allow developers all over the world to upload and execute random snippets of javascript,” and “no, this isn’t cost effective, because we run large multi-terabyte MongoDB replica sets by RAIDing together multiple EBS volumes, and you only have 2.5TB FusionIO (for extremely high-perf mysql/RocksDB) and 40 TB spinning rust volumes (for Hadoop), and also it’s impossible to shrink or slice up replsets”, and so forth. But they were adamant. “You don’t understand. We’re Facebook. We can do anything.” (Literal quote)

Finally we caved and got on board. We were excited! I announced the migration and started providing biweekly updates to the infra leadership groups. Four months later, when the migration was half done, I get a ping from the same exact members of Facebook leadership:

“What are you doing?!?”
“Migrating!”
“You can’t do that, there are security issues!”
“No it’s fine, we have a fix for it.”
“There are hardware issues!”
“No it’s cool, we got it.”
“You can’t do this!!!”

ANYWAY. To make an EXTREMELY long and infuriating story short, they pulled the plug and canned the whole project. So I printed up a ten foot long “Mission Accomplished” banner (courtesy of George W Bush on the aircraft carrier), used Zuck’s credit card to buy $800 of top-shelf whiskey delivered straight to my desk (and cupcakes), and we threw an angry, ranty party until we all got it out of our systems.

Blue Hair

I honestly don’t remember what this one was about, but I have extensive photographic evidence to prove that I shaved the heads of and/or dyed the hair blue of at least seven members of engineering. I wish I could remember why! but all I remember is that it was fucking hilarious.

In Conclusion

Coincidentally (or not), I have no memories of participating in any rituals at the jobs I didn’t like, only the jobs I loved. Huh.

One thing that stands out in my mind is that all the fun rituals tend to come bottoms-up. A ritual that comes from your VP can run the risk of feeling like forced fun, in a way it doesn’t if it’s coming from your peer or even your manager. I actually had the MOST fun with this shit as a line manager, because 1) I had budget and 2) it was my job to care about teaminess.

There are other rituals that it does make sense for executives to create, but they are less about hilarious fun and more about reinforcing values. Like Amazon’s infamous door desks are basically just a ritual to remind people to be frugal.

Rituals tend to accrue mutations and layers of meaning as time goes on. Great rituals often make no sense to anybody who isn’t in the know — that’s part of the magic of belonging. 🥰

Now, go tell me about yours!

charity

The (Real) 11 Reasons I Don’t Hire You

October 18, 2019July 14, 2023 mipsytipsyculture, interviews, management, startups, tech culture28 Comments

(With 🙏 to Joe Beda, whose brilliant idea for a blog post this was. Thanks for letting me borrow it!)

Interviewing is hard and it sucks.

In theory, it really shouldn’t be. You’re a highly paid professional and your skills are in high demand. This ought to be a meeting between equals to mutually explore what a longer-term relationship might look like. Why take the outcome personally? There are at least as many reasons for you to decide not to join a company as for the company to decide not to hire you, right?

In reality, of course, all the situational cues and incentives line up to make you feel like the whole thing is a referendum on whether or not you personally are Good Enough (smart enough, senior enough, skilled enough, cool enough) to join their fancy club.

People stay at shitty jobs far, far longer than they ought to, just because interviews can be so genuinely crushing to your spirit and sense of self. Even when they aren’t the worst, it can leave a lasting sting when they decline to hire you.

But there is an important asymmetry here. By not hiring someone, I very rarely mean it as a rejection of that person. (Not unless they were, like, mean to the office manager, or directed all their technical questions to the male interviewers.) On the contrary, I generally hold the people we decline to hire — or have had to let go! — in extremely high opinion.

So if someone interviews at Honeycomb, I do not want them to walk away feeling stung, hurt, or bad about themselves. I would like them to walk away feeling good about themselves and our interactions, even if one or both of us are disappointed by the outcome. I want them to feel the same way about themselves as I feel about them, especially since there’s a high likelihood that I may want to work with them in the future.

So here are the real, honest-to-god most common reasons why I don’t hire someone.

1. Scarcity

If you’ve worked at a Google or Facebook before, you may have a certain mental model of how hiring works. You ask the candidate a bunch of questions, and if they do well enough, you hire them. This could not be more different from early stage startup hiring, which is defined in every way by scarcity.

I only have a few precious slots to fill this year, and every single one of them is tied to one or more key company initiatives or goals, without which we may fail as a company. Emily and I spend hours obsessively discussing what the profile we are looking for is, what the smallest possible set of key strengths and skills that this hire must have, inter-team and intra-team dynamics and what elements are missing or need to be bolstered from the team as it stands. And at the end of the day, there are not nearly as many slots to fill as there are awesome people we’d like to hire. Not even close. Having to choose between several differently wonderful people can be *excruciating*.

2. Diversity.

No, not that kind. (Yes, we care about cultivating a diverse team and support that goal through our recruiting and hiring processes, but it’s not a factor in our hiring decisions.) I mean your level, stage in your career, educational background, professional background, trajectory, areas of focus and strengths. We are trying to build radical new tools for sociotechnical systems; tools that are friendly, intuitive, and accessible to every engineer (and engineering-adjacent profession) in the world.

How well do you think we’re going to do at our goal if the people building it are all ex-Facebook, ex-MIT senior engineers? If everyone has the exact same reference points and professional training, we will all have the same blind spots. Even if our team looks like a fucking Benetton ad.

3. We are assembling a team, not hiring individuals.

We spend at least as much time hashing out what the subtle needs of the team are right now as talking about the individual candidate. Maybe what we need is a senior candidate who loves mentoring with her whole heart, or a language polyglot who can help unify the look and feel of our integrations across ten different languages and platforms. Or maybe we have plenty of accomplished mentors, but the team is really lacking someone with expertise in query profiling and db tuning, and we expect this to be a big source of pain in the coming year. Maybe we realize we have nobody on the team who is interested in management, and we are definitely going to need someone to grow into or be hired on as a manager a year or two from now.

There is no value judgment or hierarchy attached to any of these skills or particulars. We simply need what we need, and you are who you are.

4. I am not confident that we can make you successful in this role at this time.

We rarely turn people down for purely technical reasons, because technical skills can be learned. But there can be some combination of your skills, past experience, geographical location, time zone, experience with working remotely, etc — that just gives us pause. If we cast forward a year, do we think you are going to be joyfully humming along and enjoying yourself, working more-or-less independently and collaboratively? If we can’t convince ourselves this is true, for whatever reasons, we are unlikely to hire you. (But we would love to talk with you again someday.)

5. The team needs someone operating at a different level.

Don’t assume this always means “you aren’t senior enough”. We have had to turn down people at least as often for being too senior as not senior enough. An organization can only absorb so many principal and senior engineers; there just isn’t enough high-level strategic work to go around. I believe happy, healthy teams are comprised of a range of levels — you need more junior folks asking naive questions that give senior folks the opportunity to explain themselves and catch their dumb mistakes. You need there to be at least one sweet child who is just so completely stoked to build their very first login page.

A team staffed with nothing but extremely senior developers will be a dysfunctional, bored and contentious team where no one is really growing up or being challenged as they should.

6. We don’t have the kind of work you need or want.

The first time we tried hiring junior developers, we ran into this problem hardcore. We simply didn’t have enough entry-level work for them to do. Everything was frustratingly complex and hard for them, so they weren’t able to operate independently, and we couldn’t spare an engineer to pair with them full time.

This also manifests in other ways. Like, lots of SREs and data engineers would LOVE to work at honeycomb. But we don’t have enough ops engineering work or data problems to keep them busy full time. (Well — that’s not precisely true. They could probably keep busy. But it wouldn’t be aligned with our core needs as a business, which makes them premature optimizations we cannot afford.)

7. Communication skills.

We select highly for communication skills. The core of our technical interview involves improving and extending a piece of code, then bringing it in the next day to discuss it with your peers. We believe that if you can explain what you did and why, you can definitely do the work, and the reverse is not necessarily true. We also believe that communication skills are at the foundation of a team’s ability to learn from its mistakes and improve as a unit. We value high-performing teams, therefore we select for those skills.

There are many excellent engineers who are not good communicators, or who do not value communication the way we do, and while we may respect you very much, it’s not a great fit for our team.

8. You don’t actually want to work at a startup.

“I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really important to me are: work/life balance, predictability, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, knowing what i’ll be working on for the next month, not having things change unexpectedly, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of hours …”

To be clear, it is not a red flag if you care about work/life balance. We care about that too — who the hell doesn’t? But startups are inherently more chaotic and unpredictable, and roles are more fluid and dynamic, and I want to make sure your expectations are aligned with reality.

9. You just want to work for women.

I hate it when I’m interviewing someone and I ask why they’re interested in Honeycomb, and they enthusiastically say “Because it was founded by women!”, and I wait for the rest of it, but that’s all there is. That’s it? Nothing interests you about the problem, the competitive space, the people, the customers … nothing?? It’s fine if the leadership team is what first caught your eye. But it’s kind of insulting to just stop there. Just imagine if somebody asked you out on a date “because you’re a woman”. Low. Fucking. Bar.

10. I truly want you to be happy.

I have no interest in making a hard sell to people who are dubious about Honeycomb. I don’t want to hire people who can capably do the job, but whose hearts are really elsewhere doing other things, or who barely tolerate going to work every day. I want to join with people who see their labor as an extension of themselves, who see work as an important part of their life’s project. I only want you to work here if it’s what’s best for you.

11. I’m not perfect.

We have made the wrong decision before, and will do so again. >_<

In conclusion…

As a candidate, it is tempting to feel like you will get the job if you are awesome enough, therefore if you do not get the job it must be because you were insufficiently awesome. But that is not how hiring works — not for highly constrained startups, anyway.

If we brought you in for an interview, we already think you’re awesome. Period. Now we’re just trying to figure out if you narrowly intersect the skill sets we are lacking that we need to succeed this year.

If you could be a fly on the wall, listening to us talk about you, the phrase you would hear over and over is not “how good are they?”, but “what will they need to be successful? can we provide the support they need?” We know this is as much of a referendum on us as it is on you. And we are not perfect.

But we are hiring. ☺️

charity.