The Engineering Leadership Podcast

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Building a Diverse Hiring Pipeline with Ragini Holloway & Gabe Westmaas #51 Jul 27, 2021

Show notes

This ELC Hiring Summit special feature covers building a diverse hiring pipeline! You’ll hear how to approach DE&I holistically & what success looks like beyond the metrics. Plus how to balance headcount demand with DE&I goals, hold execs/managers accountable & ideas for effective DEI programs & partnerships with Ragini Holloway (SVP People @ Affirm) and Gabe Westmaas (VPE @ Checkr).

RAGINI HOLLOWAY, SVP PEOPLE @ AFFIRM

Ragini is currently Senior Vice President of People at Affirm and is an advisor for PeopleTech Partners and tech startups, including Shift.org and Pinkaloo Technologies.

Ragini helps high-growth startups scale recruitment and People processes, often from scratch. She took Credit Karma from 40 to just over 500, and has similar ambitious hiring goals now, already taking Affirm from 100 to nearly 1,000.

Ragini advocates for collaborative hiring practices and facilitates organic and authentic work cultures where people come together and discover common goals. Ragini is heavily focused in building diverse teams and designing employee engagement programs that drive ongoing workplace satisfaction and high retention rates.

GABE WESTMAAS, VPE @ CHECKR

Gabe is VP of Engineering at Checkr, building a fairer future through a better understanding of the past. The team is bringing automation, consistency, and fairness to the manual processes behind background checks. Gabe has led several teams through high growth periods, most recently at Airbnb, and prior to that in the crowdfunding space at Tilt, and the Cloud Servers team at Rackspace.

SHOWNOTES

How to think about diversity, equity & inclusion holistically (1:37)
Why authenticity matters & how it impacts your hiring process and funnel (4:48)
Balancing headcount demands & hiring diverse teams (8:53)
How to hold executives & hiring managers accountable for DEI goals (14:53)
What a successful DE&I program looks like (beyond the metrics) (20:12)
Aligning hiring managers & hiring processes with DE&I goals (22:57)
Effective programs & partnerships to create hiring opportunities for URGs (25:51)

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Optimizing & Scaling Your Hiring Process w/ Vinithra Varadharajan, Cat Miller & Keng He #50 Jul 27, 2021

Show notes

This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit covers optimizing and scaling your hiring process! You’ll learn signs that indicate it’s time to optimize/scale, tactics to create a consistent hiring bar, key metrics to measure efficiency, feedback loops & more with Catherine Miller (VPE @ Flatiron Health) Vinithra Varadharajan (Head of Platform Eng @ Airtable) & Keng He (Sr. Director of Eng @ LiveRamp).

SHOWNOTES

The current size and scale of Cat/Vinithra’s engineering teams + their current hiring process (1:55)
Early signs indicating it’s time to optimize or scale your current hiring process (3:34)
Tactics to ensure you have a consistent hiring bar (5:28)
Why engineering rubrics are essential to your hiring process (7:48)
How to encourage engineers to become interviewers (when resistant to interviewing candidates) (9:41)
Interview panel structures (17:13)
Key metrics to measure efficiency in your hiring process (21:24)
How many recruiters, sourcers or coordinators do you need? (22:33)
How has remote work changed your hiring process? (24:11)
Who owns the top of the funnel in your hiring process? (25:48)
What are the feedback loops you have in your hiring process? (27:17)
How do you mitigate concerns candidates have about their potential managers in your hiring process? (28:30)

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Sourcing Engineering Candidates in a Remote World w/ Kah Seng Tay, Shauna Geraghty & Mike Pinkowish #49 Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit covers everything sourcing engineering candidates! You’ll hear the latest sourcing trends, most effective sourcing tactics, how to get candidates attention, increase response rates to your outreach, & source senior engineers with Kah Seng Tay (GM & Eng @ Airtable) Shauna Geraghty (SVP, Head People & Ops @ Talkdesk) & Mike Pinkowsky (Head of Eng @ Gem)

KAH SENG TAY - GM & Engineering @ Airtable

SHAUNA GERAGHTY - SVP, Head People & Operations @ Talkdesk

MIKE PINKOWISH - Head of Engineering @ Gem

SHOWNOTES

Sourcing Trends (2:26)
Shauna, Kah Seng & Mike’s most effective sourcing tactics (5:37)
How to change your outreach to get attention and increase response rates (10:11)
Where are you sourcing candidates from? (17:59)
Strategies to source senior engineers (22:29)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The State of Hiring w/ Maia Josebachvili, Bret Reckard & Erica Lockheimer #48 Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit explores the current state of hiring and how the rise of remote work will affect sourcing engineering candidates, the interview process, and compensation with Bret Reckard (Talent Partner @ Sequoia), Maia Josebachvili (former Head of People @ Stripe), and Erica Lockheimer (VPE @ LinkedIn)

BRET RECKARD - Talent Partner @ Sequoia Capital

MAIA JOSEBACHVILI - Head of M&A and Investing (interim), former Head of People @ Stripe

ERICA LOCKHEIMER - VP of Engineering, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Learning & Glint @ LinkedIn

SHOWNOTES

Introduction to Maia, Bret & Erica’s & their experience with the hiring ecosystem (1:08)
The current state of hiring for engineering leaders in 2021 (2:58)
Sourcing Trends (8:10)
How platforms like LinkedIn are evolving with sourcing trends (17:05)
Interviewing tactics (21:26)
How the priorities of job seekers are changing (27:42)
How to uncover values & priorities during the interview process (29:57)
Compensation predictions (34:30)
Final Advice on hiring in 2021 (39:55)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Building technology that endures with Melissa Binde #47 Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

Melissa Binde, VP Engineering, Cloud @ Splunk, shares lessons from her time building Amazon Apollo. You’ll hear the origin story of Amazon Apollo, how to define the right problem, identify the right solution, and what makes technology endure 20+ years. Plus how to improve your engineering storytelling and pitch the right product features to the right stakeholders!

"We were heavily influenced by an early project manager I worked with who called it, the 'JEDI principle' - You make just enough decisions to implement! And so anytime we hit something. We would actually stop, if we were arguing, we'd stop and go, 'Well, wait, hang on. Do we actually have to decide this now? Or can we kick this down the road?' And so that helped us avoid getting too tied up in philosophical arguments."

ABOUT MELISSA BINDE

Melissa Binde previously served as Splunk’s VP of Platform and Observability. Prior to joining the company, Melissa led Google’s GCP Site Reliability organization for almost five years, supporting GCP’s growth from 250M revenue in 2015 to almost 9B in 2019. Before that she led engineering teams at Nordstrom, helping them transition to online and cloud, a cloud startup providing business continuity as a service to SMBs, and several other startups. Ms. Binde began her career as one of Amazon’s first 1000 employees, spending almost ten years there developing tools and technologies that are still part of the company’s core AWS stack. Ms. Binde holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College.

LINKS

Check out Melissa's hand-made pens: https://motleywoods.com/

SHOWNOTES

The origin story behind Amazon Apollo (2:44)
Pitching the right features to the right audience (10:48)
Solving the right problem vs. what you were asked & the value of owning outdated projects (12:15)
Selling, pitching and building buy-in for new projects (16:21)
How do you know the problem defined isn't the problem you should solve? (20:56)
How to determine if you need a technical, process or organizational solution (27:35)
Building enduring tools & technology (30:23)
How to become a better storyteller (32:44)
Other examples of determining the right type of solution (36:08)
Lessons on project naming (38:44)
Rapid Fire Questions (40:10)
Takeaways (44:50)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Becoming a site lead, bootstrapping new teams & re-thinking vacation in a pandemic w/ Sarah Clatterbuck #46 Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

Sarah Clatterbuck, Sr. Director of Engineering, YouTube & Google Zurich Site Lead @ Google, shares the story of her transition as a site lead during the covid-19 pandemic. We cover her past experiences that helped prepare her for the role, what it was like bootstrapping a new team during a pandemic, re-introducing teams to in-person work, AND the story behind her 18-day staycation & its impact on team burnout.

"You can't worry about pleasing everyone because there are many thousands of people that I'm trying to represent. But you can try to think about what kind of decisions optimize for the most good."

ABOUT SARAH CLATTERBUCK

Sarah joined Google in 2018. She is leading engineering teams working on the Creator Economy at YouTube. Prior to joining Google, she was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Linkedin focused on Application Infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, she was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Linkedin focused on Application Infrastructure.

She previously held roles at Yahoo! and Apple while progressing in leadership ranks. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of San Francisco and her graduate degree from San Jose State University. She is passionate about getting girls interested in technology and from 2013 until 2018, she served on the board of Girl Scouts of Northern California, leading the board STEM task group.

SHOWNOTES

What is a site lead and the reporting structure? (2:28)
Why Sarah became a site lead for Google Zurich and what the transition was like (6:57)
How is the tech industry, community & culture in Zurich different from Silicon Valley? (10:52)
Sarah’s past experiences that helped prepare her to be a site lead (13:16)
Possible career paths & surprise lessons after becoming a site lead (19:00)
Bootstrapping a new team during the COVID-19 pandemic (22:15)
Integrating remote hires to in-person office culture (25:19)
How to help your team feel included (27:07)
About Sarah’s YouTube Channel (29:41)
Sarah's 18-day staycation & combating burnout in your team (31:34)
Rapid Fire Questions (35:20)
Takeaways (41:32)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Non-Incremental Career Transitions with Asif Makhani #45 Jun 29, 2021

Show notes

Asif Makhani, CTO @ Handshake shares about making non-incremental career transitions, unique opportunities at startups, and exercising influence at mid-stage companies. Plus Asif shares questions to help you gain clarity before your next transitions AND how to attract & retain senior engineers at smaller companies.

"When you have the ability to take a step back, you begin to think a little bit more philosophically about your journey. And it's not just incremental thinking. When it's incremental thinking it's about, 'what's next in my career.'

But when you are able to take a step back, it's about... 'What impact do you want to leave behind? When I look back 10 years from now, will I be happy? Will I feel a sense of fulfillment?'

I think that line of questioning really gives you the courage to be able to break away from an incremental way of looking at next steps."

ABOUT ASIF MAKHANI

Asif has over 20 years of engineering experience with a focus on search engines and edtech. He is currently the CTO of Handshake, the largest career platform for college students and recent graduates. Most recently, Asif was the head of Google Image Search and prior to that, he was the Sr. Director of Engineering for Learning Solutions at LinkedIn, leading the Lynda.com online learning technology organization and launching LinkedIn Learning.

Asif was the founding member and engineer of A9.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com), creator and GM of Amazon CloudSearch, and the Head of Search at LinkedIn. Asif is passionate about scaling high performance organizations, developing leaders and coaching early talent

SHOW NOTES

What Asif learned from starting A9.com at Amazon (2:45)
The unique opportunity of early stage companies & lessons from Amazon Cloud Search (6:26)
How do you exercise influence at a mid-stage startup? (9:02)
Successful transitions, why it’s essential to capture your early perspectives, & Asif’s favorite relationship building question (13:25)
Asif’s lessons from taking time off & how that gave him clarity with his next career transition (17:56)
Why Asif made the transition to Handshake (22:47)
Questions you should ask to help you gain clarity before your next transition (25:39)
How to attract and retain senior engineers at a smaller company (30:03)
Rapid Fire Questions (39:49)
Takeaways (43:29)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“Just Work” with Kim Scott & Trier Bryant #44 Jun 08, 2021

Show notes

We cover practical tools to eliminate workplace injustice and help your team “get sh*t done fast and fair” with Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor & Just Work + Trier Bryant, CEO @ Just Work! We discuss the root causes of injustice and introduce several strategies to help you interrupt bias, address prejudice & confront bullying in your organization.

"You can't possibly do your best work if you are being harmed by the way you're being treated by your colleagues..." - Kim Scott

"Whatever problem you're solving, whatever OKR you have... your people are the ones that get it done. So we have to optimize for that experience!" - Trier Bryant

ABOUT KIM SCOTT & TRIER BRYANT

KIM SCOTT is the author of Just Work: Get Sh*t Done Fast and Fair as well as Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - (one of our community’s ALL TIME favorite books!) Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google.

TRIER BRYANT is Co-Founder and CEO of Just Work LLC, the implementation counterpart to Just Work, the book. Trier previously held leadership roles at Astra, Twitter, & Goldman Sachs. She proudly served as a combat veteran in the United States Air Force, as a Captain leading engineering teams while spearheading diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for the Air Force Academy, Air Force, and DoD. Trier also advises leading companies like Equinox, Airbnb, SoundCloud, Alto, Rockefeller Foundation, and others on their talent and DEI strategies.

RESOURCES

Read Just Work (The Book): https://www.justworktogether.com/the-book
Contact Just Work (The Company): https://www.justworktogether.com/our-capabilities

SHOW NOTES

Why Kim wrote Just Work after Radical Candor (4:58)
How Trier got involved & became CEO of Just Work (7:23)
The impact of workplace injustice and why it matters (10:33)
The root causes of workplace injustice and the roles we play (13:51)
How to interrupt and stop bias (17:01)
How to use “bias interrupters” and make them a part of your culture (29:55)
Why language matters & how to respond to someone concerned about the “word police” (34:22)
How to address bias using “I Statements” (39:46)
What to do when someone is “mansplaining” during your meeting (44:39)
How to confront prejudice using “It Statements” (47:58)
How to address bullying with “You Statements” (51:05)
Takeaways (54:08)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Managing Up with Jan Chong #43 Jun 01, 2021

Show notes

Jan Chong, VP of Engineering @ Tally shares strategies to manage and navigate relationships with your leadership team, direct reports and peers. We cover the fundamentals of managing up, why you need to align with your peers first when you join a new team, plus ways to communicate your ideas and the priorities of engineering more effectively with your non-technical colleagues.

"Organizations are made up of humans that are making decisions based on the data they have. If you don't think about how that data is being seen and understood, then you're going to have a really hard time getting the outcomes or driving the goals that you want to achieve..."

ABOUT JAN CHONG

Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation company helping people navigate the complex world of consumer finance to save money, pay down their debt and reach their goals sooner. She leads and oversees the company’s client engineering, infrastructure security and technical operations teams. Before joining Tally, Jan was a long-time executive at Twitter where she played a critical role in launching and scaling its core mobile and web products, overseeing a team of more than 300 people in Twitter’s consumer engineering organization. Prior to that, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. She received multiple degrees from Stanford University, including her Ph.D in management science and engineering, and M.S. and B.S in computer science.

SHOW NOTES

What is Managing Up (3:52)
What to do when your manager has different expectations and perception of your performance (6:19)
The fundamentals of managing up (8:42)
Making the world of management visible (10:39)
The three categories of “managing up” and why you should align with your peers first (15:07)
Who you need to “mind-meld” with & how to replicate it remotely (22:29)
How to align & “mind-meld” with your peer leaders (27:22)
Managing up at different levels of seniority (33:28)
What you need to do to “manage up” effectively (39:30)
Unexpected differences of working with non-technical colleagues & Jan’s metaphors to explain engineering (43:23)
Takeaways (51:05)

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Reflections on Incidents & Resilience with Nick Rockwell #42 May 25, 2021

Show notes

Nick Rockwell, SVP of Engineering & Infrastructure @ Fastly shares his recent reflections on incidents, resiliency, blamelessness, and accountability. You’ll hear why the heroic model of incident response is unsustainable, how to improve reliability by closing the long-feedback loop, plus opportunities to maximize post-mortems for process improvement AND emotional processing.

"We started doing a biweekly meeting. We talk about resilience. We revisit everything that has not been closed, whether it's a year old, or it's a day old, , we're forced to keep coming back to it. So how to move away from that incident based post-mortem to something that's more like a continual revisiting of every thread or pathway that's been opened until they're not even open anymore. So that's the lines I'm thinking along."
ABOUT NICK ROCKWELL

Nick Rockwell is SVP of Engineering & Infrastructure @ Fastly helping build the next-generation edge infrastructure for a faster, safer, more resilient Internet. Nick was formerly Chief Technology Officer at The New York Times, overseeing product engineering, infrastructure and R&D. Previously he was Chief Technology Officer of Conde Nast, and Digital CTO at MTV Networks. Throughout his career, Nick has worked at the intersection of media and the Internet, building digital products at scale. Nick graduated from Yale in 1990 with a B.A in Literary Theory.

SHOWNOTES

Nick’s story of why incidents, resiliency, accountability & blamelessness are top of mind (2:20)
The “heroic model” of incident mitigation and it’s emotional impact (6:41)
Building a resilient system & transitioning away from heroics to a more mechanistic incident management model (12:12)
“The long feedback loop” of incidents (15:57)
Grappling with the risks of a more process-driven, mechanistic model of incident management (21:27)
Dedicated vs. distributed incident response teams & how incident management evolves over time (24:43)
Balancing individual accountability and a culture of blamelessness (28:37)
Why you need to talk about incidents and process their residual emotions (33:12)
On maximizing post-mortems for process improvement & emotional processing (37:01)
Takeaways (40:15)

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer!Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody.

To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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