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Geeks Who Lead Podcast — Software How-To
Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Hear the inside stories of the “geeks who lead at scale” – Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.

I’m your host – Peter Bell, I’ve been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!

This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!

Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that’s before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.

Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/

Copyright: © 2020 CTO Connection, LLC

Latest Episodes:

AI, Automation, Jobs & The Economy w. Jeff Rose of ThinkTopic Jun 08, 2017

Show notes

Jeff Rose presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. Artificial intelligence is undergoing a renaissance, with the number of relevant research papers, startups, applications, and new ideas expanding rapidly. These new capabilities will enable people and result in greater aggregate productivity, analogous to the invention of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution. At the same time, many laborers, drivers, assembly line workers, and even some more skilled roles in society will be made redundant. This shift will have both positive and negative consequences for individuals’ lives, society, and the economy, which is why it is important to start understanding the trends and preparing now.
Join Jeff Rose, CEO of Boulder AI company ThinkTopic, to discuss the technology, economic and political landscape of our automated future.

Programmable Money w. Piper Merriam Jun 01, 2017

Show notes

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to be TCP/IP of money. What does the future look like if they do to money, what the internet did for information? Learn about Ethereum, one of the top cryptocurrencies of 2017. Piper Merriam, Ethereum developer, presenting at Boulder Startup Week.

Video of this talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoaMC1qNFY and embedded below:

Crypto and the Law with EFA Colorado May 25, 2017

Show notes

EFA Colorado presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. What is Cryptography, and why does it matter? What is the history of cryptography, and where is it going in the future? Join this joint presentation of the Future of Tech + Legal tracks at Boulder Startup Week to learn more about the civil rights battles of the 21st century.

Video of this talk is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RN0F2CmXPU and embeded below:

Understanding People is a Superpower; @rands, VP Engineering at Slack May 18, 2017

Show notes

Today's episode is from the archives. Michael Lopp (also known as @rands) is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. He works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.
Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike.Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.

Engineering Values Roundup May 11, 2017

Show notes

Today's episode is from the archives.
We ask each of our guests what their engineering values are. What we love about this question is that the answers boil down the brass tacks of leadership into 2-3 minutes of fundamentals.
We’ve got a fun little thematic episode this week, with 5 answers to this question “What are your engineering values?” jammed packed into a 15-minute episode.
In order of appearance:

Nader Akhnoukh– CTO of Kapost
Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime
Julia Austin — CTO of Digital Ocean
Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education
Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.

Great Engineering War Stories May 04, 2017

Show notes

Today's episode is from the archives. Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites.
These four stories are ordered by scale. We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.
In order of appearance:

Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime. A story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello. The story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter. A story about screening your customers for success

Enjoy!

Your Startup is a Pirate Ship w. Jack Dietrich & Ryan VanMiddlesworth Apr 27, 2017

Show notes

Our guests this week are Jack Dietrich and Ryan VanMiddlesworth of Fount Studio. Join the partners of Fount as they explain The Pirate Code Of Startups how Pirates were doing workplace democracy before it was cool. Awesome.

Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy Apr 20, 2017

Show notes

Today's episode is from the archives.
We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great chess; It’s not about having a great strategy; It’s about playing positional chess so that you have all of your pieces in place so when an opportunity presents itself you can take advantage of it.
Chris is a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software, and architecture. He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.

Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io Apr 13, 2017

Show notes

Today's episode is from the archives.
Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io. He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for analytics via APIs (among a million other things) at Keen — a leader in the analytics space. Join us to learn about the growth of Keen.io at 3, 10, 30, and (soon) 100 team members; and Dan & his co-founders' journey to building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliver great analytics software.

Optimize Your Learning Velocity w. Scott Carleton, Andela Apr 06, 2017

Show notes

Our guest today is Scott Carleton.
Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at Andela, a global engineering organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of elite tech talent across Africa. Previously, Scott co-founded Artsicle as CTO, building a global community of visual artists now featuring over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, which was able to create a personalized experience for passive users, earned NYER’s “Best Use of Technology” award in 2013.
This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship.
Favorite Quotes

You hear a lot that “it's all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins.
I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works it’s way through the organization.
In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldn't provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit.
I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”.
We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They *really* care about its usability.
Friction rises in communication when information doesn't have a place to settle.
Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behavior you want, but you need a cultural change or a behavior/belief change to use the tool effectively.
Chat allows us an always-on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asynchronous tool to keep everyone in sync.
On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels”
The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration?
Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important.
When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know.
If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper.
When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems.
I have a passion for developing peoples potential.
How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills?
The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just *so* hard to do remotely.
Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direction.
What's really incredible about software development is that the people who are building the applications have a lot more information about the problems they're solving than you do. You really want most solutions coming from the bottom up.
I focus on how I can expose business problems to the team. I tell them what we’re solving that quarter, and

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