In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Pablo Santos of Plastic SCM about what it takes to create a great engineering culture, dealing with skills shortages, engaging remote workers and getting the highest value out of DevOps.
Key Takeaways
- Attracting the right people is a constant challenge in the technology space
- Having interesting and challenging work is important
- Remote workers are common today and it’s important to focus on keeping them engaged
- DevOps is a way to create a continuous flow of stable changes and get them into production quickly
- The art of splitting the work is key to DevOps and it is something that takes significant understanding and careful design
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Show Notes
- 00:50 Introductions
- 02:07 A founder’s story – how Pablo came to launch Plastic SCM
- 03:00 The factors that make a great engineering culture?
- 03:31 The work is super-challenging which spans many aspects of many technology stacks *** Good soundbite ***
- 04:12 Anyone can work on any area of the product which allows them to keep learning
- 04:50 The challenges of attracting the right people
- 05:28 Working with local universities to source skilled people
- 06:09 The value of interesting technical challenges to attract people
- 06:31 Being a small player competing against much larger organisations
- 07:03 Transitioning to having more and more remote workers
- 07:44 Techniques to keep remote workers motivated
- 07:57 It’s easier if the remote person started working in-person with the rest of the team
- 08:22 With new employees who will work remotely they have a one-month kick-off period where they work in the central office to help everyone to get to know each other
- 08:49 If people are within driving distance they are encouraged to get together on a regular basis
- 09:14 The importance of ensuring the potential new person fits well with the team during the hiring process
- 09:45 Defining DevOps as a way to create a continuous flow of stable changes and get them into production quickly
- 10:20 It’s about splitting the work into small chunks that make sense and deliver value
- 10:52 The art of splitting the work is something that takes significant understanding and careful design
- 11:30 The key is to ensure that the tasks being done are really short – less than a day
- 12:15 The story of how Plastic SCM releases their product – moving from one release per week to at least one deployment per day
- 14:16 Customers choose how often they take the releases based on their ability and need to absorb change
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