Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.

Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture.
This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days to better align his team.

Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features. 

Drawing on his experience in the Israeli Military (think the Israeli NSA), Aviv shares concrete advice that can allow you to accelerate the growth of your junior engineers so that they can become productive, mid-level developers in just 6-12 months, allowing for a more cost-effective blended team rate, more satisfaction and growth for the engineers, and the ability to invest effectively in growing the next generation of software engineering talent.

As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value. 

In this wide-ranging discussion Rukmini Reddit, SVP of Engineering, Platform at Slack shares five questions she asks throughout her org to support herself and her team when dealing with change and how she leverages models like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous change model to better understand and support her organization through difficult transitions.