Ex-Indeedian (Layoff Week 2) 

Layoffs No Comments

I’m blaming myself for this layoff. Let me tell you why by telling you a story. 

In February 2020, I signed up for StitchFix’s Style Pass (one year of unlimited “fixes,” e.g., boxes of clothes to buy or return.) That was just a bit more than a month before Indeed went fully remote for the COVID-19 pandemic. I might have been the only person to get more and more dressy throughout the first year of the pandemic.

Here’s the thing. Last month I signed up for the Style Pass again. I needed some new jeans and a few replacement shirts. I had no idea that a StitchFix subscription could trigger another significant shift in my life, let alone for many others who had no idea it was coming. I’m sorry y’all.

Now, obviously, my purchase of Style Pass didn’t cause the layoff. Still, I tell this story to remind us that our brains will take the easiest path to explain a situation. It’s not healthy to only ruminate on what you did that caused you to be included in the layoff. So let’s look back and learn, look forward at what’s to come, make the time to laugh a little, and make a plan for our next step.

dog in a hoodie staring at a ball on a blue background

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Looking back

At Indeed, we often talked about the flywheel effect. Maybe you’re thinking of the Job Seeker flywheel, the Performance Management flywheel, or some other flywheel within the business. The flywheel effect is one of my biggest takeaways from Indeed. Looking for ways to create flywheels/feedback loops/virtuous cycles to get to where we want to go.  (4 min read)

The same concept applies to your job search right now. Doing the next right thing, even if it’s small but moves the ball forward, builds momentum. Set a routine. Take a call. Practice interviews with peers. Take interviews with a company to get back out there. Whatever it is, a little momentum will help you through this tough time. Even rejections help move you forward. They tell you a place where the door is closed and help you refine your process of explaining the value you bring. 

Looking forward

OK, it’s been over a week since we were laid off. Hopefully, you’ve taken some time to reflect on what you learned and what you want to do next. This week, even without a full-time job, I still found myself very busy. Coffee with old friends and former coworkers. Lunch with potential teams I could interview to join. It all added up to a lot of time on the road and away from my desk. This article on managing your time was a good reminder to pay attention to where my time is going. (8 min read)

In terms of things to get rolling this week, it was time to do a number of boring procedural things too. Investigating and filing for unemployment. Looking for replacement insurance to compare against the COBRA coverage. Making sure I got all the last bits of data (payroll stubs, performance data, legal documents, etc.) from Indeed.

Today’s Tip

Last week I mentioned how important using your network was. This week I’ll share a really tactical tip on using LinkedIn introductions. When you introduce yourself via LinkedIn (or when someone else introduces you), you can remove individuals from that conversation, much like moving someone to BCC when using email. 

screenshot of LinkedIn conversation and the menu to add/remove people

Clicking the … at the top of the conversation gives you the option to leave or remove people from the conversation reducing it to just the people who will be conversing post-introduction.

Fun Stuff

You made it this far. Here are a few fun cracks at the layoff market and one cat gif to cleanse the timeline until next week.

Twitter posting that says "If your boss tells you your team at work is 'like family' that means you can scream 'YOU'RE NOT MY REAL MOM' and storm out every time they ask you to do anything.
(hat tip to Cassie Lebauer for sharing this)
Well, it's been one week... cue the BNL tribute - your welcome. It's been 1 week since I left #indeed, To say "I left"is nice - it was involuntary. 5 days since it really sank in, had to update my resume on #LinkedIn. 3 days since I've put on pants But I used to WFH so that was always hit & miss. And yesterday I smiled again, But it'll still be 2 days till I say I'm okayyy
PIcture of the worlds most interesting man, text says: I don't always think of the perfect answer in an interview but when I do, it's 15 minutes after I've left
Cat in a bowtie and glasses squinting and leaning in towards a computer screen.
Workday job application wants him to re-enter everything from his resume.

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For full transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are just my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences. https://onlynewmistakes.com/

Scaling Innovation (prologue)

Scaling Innovation No Comments

I announced in November of 2021 (with an update in December as well) that I was writing a book about our Incubator and the Scaling Innovation process. After approximately a year of mostly hiatus, I picked back up editing and re-reading that first draft. It’s not perfect. There are several other books out there about similar things. I have about a million other reasons to just delete it…but…it’s written, and now that my time at Indeed has come to an end, sharing a bit of our story feels like a useful ending. So, here’s the prologue to the book. I’ll try to release a new chapter approximately every week or two going forward. I’d love any and all feedback – LinkedIn, the contact form, Twitter (I’m paying less attention to this of late until the hubbub settles down, or Mastodon.

Starting block spaces and lanes on a track, with spaces numbered 1 through 7.
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Prologue

Like any process, this one isn’t perfect, and it isn’t static. However, our strategy for scaling innovation proved successful on several occasions. Over five years, more than four dozen products have been tested using this approach. Many did not work out, but a few survived and thrived, making a significant impact. 

Our team comprised start-up veterans from Product and Engineering, leaders, boot camp graduates, and classically trained Computer Scientists. Before we started the Incubator, the team had honed several vital skills, such as rapidly delivering business value and measuring product success. They learned that shipping a product required acquiring users quickly to demonstrate the value created was something users truly wanted. Adopting the Scaling Innovation approach allowed the team to iterate swiftly on the innovation processes and the platform that powered them.

The team behind this success wasn’t special or unique. What set them apart was their deep-seated desire to improve the business every single day. They were relentlessly focused on helping more people find jobs. We couldn’t have achieved this without their diverse thoughts, opinions, and experiences.

Scaling Innovation is about the process we developed, discovered, and borrowed from various sources, along with the parts that made it work for us. It’s not a static process; it is still evolving today, more than five years later. However, it has been successful, as you’ll see. In this book, we will discuss the following:

  • The importance of the Scaling Innovation process
  • An executive-level introduction and a fictional example project
  • Strategies and techniques to help Engineering and Product teams
  • Meta-level guidance on running a Scaling Innovation program
  • Case studies and anti-patterns for Innovation teams

We hope this book inspires you and your team to overcome challenges in innovation, persevere when your resources seem exhausted, and ultimately grow your business in unexpected and remarkable ways.

Ex-Indeedian (layoff week 1)

Layoffs No Comments

Today starts my first full week of “funemployment” after nearly seven years at Indeed.com due to their recent layoff. I’m starting a weekly newsletter (hat tip to Brendan Sterne for his amazing newsletter when he was at Indeed) for a while to document progress, share tips, and keep my mind a bit busier while I find the right next role. I’m no expert on this space, just sharing my notes in the hope that they help someone out there searching. If I can help your search in any way, please reach out to me. I’ll probably vary the format of this newsletter for the first few weeks, so give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for and I’ll adjust. For full transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I’ll be sharing. These are just my impressions not tainted by any outside influences.

waves crashing on the rocks
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Looking Back

I’ve talked with a number of people who were very hurt by the layoff and I completely understand where they’re coming from. Personally, I’m mostly just feeling disappointed. I’ve definitely had moments where I’m deeply sad that my time in the Incubator is over, and been very upset about the stories of folks who are far more negatively impacted by the layoff timing (those with children on the way in particular.)

The best advice I can give and have seen repeated elsewhere is to spend some time reflecting. I couldn’t sleep the other night and took out my Remarkable (that’s another post for another time, but I highly recommend them for those who are curious) and jotted down a number of things I loved about my role, things I felt could have been better, what I wanted to do next, and people I should reconnect with. Unloading those things from my brain helped a ton and I was able to crash. Well, that and a healthy dose of melatonin. ;)

Forbes had a pretty straightforward article on coping with a layoff that I’d recommend. There are some good tips for getting yourself into a good place, and then taking on the immediate tasks of looking at your finances and healthcare to make sure you’ve got a good stable place to start. (4 min read)

Looking Forward

I’m fortunate to have several opportunities opening up, but I know that’s not the case for everyone. This read by Morgan Luce was a super short one, but very dense with tools and based on their search after their layoff. (2 min read)

This week my goal is to set up a system for tracking my next steps and to start filling it in with various opportunities that have already presented themselves. I’m planning to use Notion. I’ve only ever had a chance to dabble with it and wanted to learn more about it. Additionally, I’ll start looking through my network to see who’s hiring engineering leaders (more on that later.)

Additionally, I’m still trying to live the mission of “I help people get jobs.” I have time, resources, and a network, and I’ll be using them to help my fellow former Indeedians find their next good role. Reach out to me if I can help. My network is deepest here in Austin, but I do have connections across the globe as well.

Today’s Tip

Nothing revolutionary here: use your network. I dug into LinkedIn in earnest this morning and was able to pretty quickly find a number of roles in my network for former Indeedians. Mastering the quite powerful search functionality in LinkedIn is a great skill. I was able to filter to particular roles/titles, in my network, in Austin within just a few clicks and see exactly how I’m connected to those opportunities. (1 min video)

Several people in my network have already reached out to me and I’m looking at a number of opportunities in a number of different industries. It may not be my next “forever” job, but in this challenging market, I’m thankful that there are some great companies looking to pick up the amazing talent that’s being laid off from big tech. I know that’s one of my favorite parts of the job and I look forward to being back in those trenches soon.

Fun Stuff

You made it this far. Here are a few fun cracks at the layoff market and one cat gif to cleanse the timeline until next week.

Congratulations on being justified in your paranoia about being laid off | sketch of two gentlemen drinking in a pub.
Recruiter added me on LinkedIn so I guess things are getting pretty serious. Photo from Napoleon Dynamite.
Cat sliding down wooden stairs head first. Stairs labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
A Macbook, coffee, pen, paper and phone sit on a desk by a window. Seems like a good writing setup. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Writing a book: an update

Scaling Innovation No Comments

I announced that I was writing (or trying to write) a book in November about our experience running the Indeed Incubator over the last 4+ years. (For the uninitiated, the Incubator is our new product innovation group at Indeed. Think of it as an internal venture capital program.) I wanted to give a quick update on that experience. I didn’t end up writing every single day. In fact most days I capped out just a bit over the needed 1,667 words. I missed the 50,000-word target but I did get about half that down on paper (screen?).

Where’s the book, bro?

It’s not in a place where it can be shared yet, sorry. However, having this much down has given me the confidence to share with others close to me about my intention to finish this project. I’ve even had several people volunteer to read the pre-release book when it’s ready. I haven’t even started figuring out whether I’ll self-publish or look for a traditional publisher to help get this out there. I still have quite a bit more work to do to get this ready for publication anyways. Even if I never make a dime off this project, the act of capturing many of our learnings in one place has been incredible. I fully expect this will be a very valuable resource for our team members. It will really help them understand exactly what it is that we do at Indeed.

A Macbook, coffee, pen, paper and phone sit on a desk by a window. Seems like a good writing setup. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
A Macbook, coffee, pen, paper and phone sit on a desk by a window. Seems like a good writing setup. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

A little Christmas present – tips from my November writing excursion

Rather than making this a boring update blog post with no value for you, I also wanted to give you a few (recently learned) tips in case you’ve ever thought about writing. I’m by no means an expert, so take these with a grain of salt.

  1. Planning is invaluable. My preparation in October was just jotting down various notes and topics I might want to capture into a book. Having that made writing in November just a matter of fleshing things out and arranging them in a sensible order.
  2. Setting aside time was key. I tried to write in the evenings after my kids were in bed before my own bedtime or before spending quality time with my wife. This worked so-so. There are a lot of distractions in the evenings. Unfortunately no matter how much I tried I could not rally my brain to write in the mornings. Find a time that works, and be semi-consistent.
  3. A quality tool matters. It took me a bit of time to learn how Scrivener works. However, after a quick tutorial and picking a reasonable template, I was able to use it quite effectively.
  4. Just write – edit later. I think this tip came from my high-school language arts class. Unfortnately for me in this situation that was the last time I took a class specifically on writing. The core is simple. Don’t worry a ton about sentence structure or grammar. Just get the thoughts down. I ended up accidentally writing one whole chapter in more of a memoir format instead of the typical business book approach, so that will have to be edited, but the good news is that the chapter is captured.

New Goal!

I’m looking forward to sharing this with the world. For now, I’ve got to get a bit more written before it would make sense. My new goal is to get the shitty-first draft complete by the end of January. We’ll see how that goes, 2022 is looking to be another year of great change! Happy New Year to you all!

Performance Management Flywheels

Leadership No Comments

Performance management is one of those topics that everyone loves to hate on, but I’ve found that if done right it can produce real value for your team (and everyone will still hate on it.) The key to the most successful performance management process I’ve seen involves the use of flywheels (positive feedback loops, virtuous cycles, etc.) The crux of any performance management system is the evaluation of both the “what” and the “how.”

Three performers stand silhouetted against a red curtain. Photo courtesy of Unsplash, @kyleunderscorehead

The Impact Flywheel

The “what” summarizes the work that was completed in the review cycle. It should include a measure of the impact that work had on the company, team, or product. First, this starts as a simple summary of the work completed, but the focus should be on finding the most important items. You can allow the smaller items to fall away. Second, enumerating how beneficial the work was is a difficult, but very important part. There’s no need to list every single accomplishment in the performance review. Finally, grouping the accomplishments into key areas that align with your career rubrics is a crucial element. For instance, leadership, collaboration, or technical mastery. This creates the first flywheel of performance management, a focus on impact.

By focusing on how the work completed made the company better and rewarding individuals you reinforce a culture of company improvement. Improvements can be making the company faster, more valuable, more profitable, larger, whatever is valuable to your team. Every time you reward someone for making the company better you encourage the team to look for more ways to do it again. As an example: say an engineer on the team created a new feature now used by 90% of new customers. We should congratulate them for that work by noting it in their performance review and reward them appropriately.

The Growth Flywheel

Similarly, the “how” of performance management is also a critical component. “How” looks at the behaviors demonstrated by the individual in accomplishing the work. However, you still only need to hit the highlights. Don’t document every single behavior that was demonstrated in the performance review period. Highlighting those behaviors demonstrating next-level performance will keep the focus on the most impactful work. Note: measuring these is considerably more tricky as the impact from this work is often subjective. Capturing the clearest demonstrations of behaviors your company values will create the second flywheel.

This flywheel of performance management creates a positive feedback loop of individual growth. Individual growth that is rewarded (say with a compensation increase, a promotion, or why not both) encourages even more next-level growth. For example, you notice a more junior team member is starting to show leadership across the team. You should encourage this by recognizing and rewarding that behavior. This encourages them to take on more leadership in the future.

The Partnership Flywheel

The final flywheel is less about the process of documenting the performance. It’s about how the individual and their manager partner in making sure the performance review is representative of their work. I’ve found that doing performance reviews in a collaborative (the manager and the individual working together) and progressive (writing down the accomplishments and behaviors throughout the review period) manner makes the work required at the end of each cycle considerably less onerous. It also drives good conversations about performance and growth opportunities throughout the review cycle. By creating a partnership between managers and individuals in this way you can create an organization that values performance growth.

This is the third flywheel of performance management. Individuals see growth and are rewarded for it. Managers help individuals grow and are rewarded for it. The company, product, or team improves and morale improves. And the cycle repeats as the company and individuals grow together.

Leveraging Nanowrimo To Scale Innovation – A book?

Scaling Innovation No Comments

I’ve wanted for a few years now to stop and write a book about the amazing innovation team we’ve built over the last five or so years, but the pace of life with the kids and the hectic nature of growing 10+ startups simultaneously have always gotten in the way. This month is no better, and yet, thanks to the Nanowrimo challenge I’m three days into writing a book on Scaling Innovation (title to be determined, but that’s not a bad working title for a book, I think.)

Honestly, I have no idea if this book will ever see the light of day, but the very act of revisiting the early days of creating the Incubator team, hiring, staffing, planning, and with the help of hindsight reverse engineering the work we’ve done has already been an insightful exercise. I’m not ready to share anything more just yet but did want to take a few minutes to procrastinate and put a bit more social pressure out there for myself to accomplish the goal of writing a book. Nanowrimo is mostly about writing novels, but I figure a business book is more my speed. I’ve told several close friends and a good number of my team members that this book is in flight, but this is a bigger stage than any of the rest of that combined.

I did a fair amount of pre-thinking and some organizing of my thoughts for this book for the last month or two in anticipation of Nanowrimo, and then really just started writing on November 1. It’s not any easier to find the time, but thankfully given the five years of lived experience, and the long-winded nature of family members that I’ve clearly inherited, it’s not been too hard to have the words flow. I’m behind on my goal due to missing a day already, but I’m hopeful that between weekends and some extra days off here and there I’ll be able to make up for the missed days and get caught up.

If you’d be interested in reading a book on how to create successful innovation teams and the process we created/adapted/stole that as launched 10+ new ideas into the ecosystem (several of which are multi-million dollar opportunities) drop me a line via the about page, or on Twitter. I’m not doing this for the dozens and dozens of dollars, I truly have enjoyed this experience and look forward to sharing it with you all.

Getting started.

Leadership No Comments
A small child starting up a set of steps.
Atami, Japan by Jukan Tateisi (Unsplash)

I have 17 posts in draft form for this blog right now. This post would be number 18, however, the purpose of this post is to clear out the cobwebs. I could just post a simple, “whoops, I’m sorry,” post and say I’ll do better. That would not be starting again. That would just be apologizing for the long pause between posts. That post would not provide any positive feedback on starting again. It also would not be of any value to the people reading this.

I needed to start writing again. A post on the theme for this blog. “Getting started” is a perfect post for that!

The energy involved to start is always more than the energy involved to maintain momentum. This is one of those fun places where you can use physics to explain human behavior. In the physical world, we have to provide all of the energy to accelerate an object to a particular speed. Once we’ve attained speed we only need to provide enough energy to overcome the drag (friction, air resistance, etc.). I often default to inaction due to procrastination, feeling too busy, or a number of other excuses. Here are four reasons to get started.

Starting builds momentum.

There’s documentation in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that dedicating five minutes to start will help with procrastination. Starting helps determine if this is a thing worth doing and gives a gentle nudge to push through to completion.

I don’t often stop at the five-minute mark. Telling myself that I can stop after five minutes gives me the freedom to start. Even when I feel I may not be able to dedicate the full time needed to complete.

Starting determines what to do.

By tackling the first phase of a task, the remaining steps are more clear and the remaining work is estimable. It will also help you size the work and determine the return on investment.

The first step I take on a major project is often to map out the phases I can see. Planning the work can often expose information I need, people I need to consult, meetings I need to schedule with busy people, or something else I can do quickly to continue to build the momentum on this project.

Starting is getting done.

Recently coming back from the Thanksgiving break I looked at my to-do list and I realized that a number of the items were simple emails, meetings, or other simple tasks. These items should never have sat on my to-do list as long as they had (embarrassingly long.) I used the “get things done” (GTD) method and completed a half-dozen items before lunch.

Starting starts getting better.

We use the phrase “get started and then get better” regularly on our engineering teams. It is useful to get something that provides value to a customer first and then we will take the time to refine the application to be of even more value to customers. If you never start, you never have anything to improve. There’s a lot of power in being able to look at something and decide that there’s a simple way to improve it.

That’s it.

Not a monumental post, but I’m back to posting again and that has value. Maybe not for you, but it has value for me. It’s good to be back.

The Innovation Toolbelt

Leadership Scaling Innovation No Comments

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Chicago CTO Summit on building a new product innovation team and I wanted to share the first few tools I’ve begun to formulate for the Innovator’s Tool Belt.

First, for those who prefer, here’s the 20 minute presentation on this topic.

 

What Toolbelt?

For those who prefer to read, first, let me explain what I mean by the Innovators Tool Belt. I’ve often used the tool belt analogy with engineers on my team. For example, when explaining some of the ways we build software I have referenced how carpenters will select their hammer and nails for some types of work. Or, alternatively, their screwdriver and screws for other types of fastening. We have talked about how there are established industry patterns for how walls, floors, stairs and more are built.

Similarly, software teams have similar concepts. Hash Maps, Linked Lists, Tries are the hammer, saw, and screwdriver of Software Engineering. Design Patterns and Microservices Architecture for instance, are established industry best practices for solving real world software problems.

But the truth is that most people aren’t carpenters, and I have no idea if wood shop is still class offered in schools. I know most people have not raised a barn, so maybe these analogies aren’t useful. So, I’ve decided it’s time to innovate on the tool belt analogy as well as the tool belt itself.

Thus the Innovator’s Tool Belt, the Swiss Army Knife of gadgets, lifting heavily from the Batman canon in the presentation above. What is the batarang of Innovation? The shark-repellent of rapid software development?

Innovation on the tool belt. Batman's utility belt - courtesy of Unspash and @serge_k
Batman’s utility belt – courtesy of Unsplash & @serge_k

The Innovation System Works If You Work The Innovation System.

A bit about the innovation program we built. While we launched about six months before “The Startup Way” by Eric Ries was released, our program has a lot of similarities. His book was a great validation that we were onto something. A few components of the program we built which helped shape innovation:

Incremental Investment – Our projects only received increased investment when they had proven they had “legs.” Constraint breeds innovation. Constraining on time and budget helps us stay lean and sets a clear deadline to show progress on business alignment or other key metrics.

Radically cross-functional teams – UX, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Program and more all acting as owners. Sitting together. Brainstorming. Everyone having a say in the product direction and when a feature could be simplified.

Innovation Economics – Being ruthlessly honest about what the costs of innovation have been and investing in innovation with a portfolio mindset. Thinking of the Three Horizons of Innovation: we can’t have 100% of projects in horizon one (incremental innovation of current products,) and horizon two (disruptive innovation of current products). That’s just playing it safe. Even though the big bets are out in horizon three (disruptive innovation of the company/industry) and we should be swinging for the fences, putting 100% of our efforts here would be overly risky.

Scaffolding – Having a tried and true framework for how we build applications has given us flexibility in staffing and a rapid innovation stack for every application. The quick start of a new Django application coupled with some custom built components makes learning how a new product would be adopted in less than three months possible.

Mistakes Were Made.

First, the bad news. We made mistakes building the new product innovation team we refer to as the Incubator and had to learn and move on But, then again, that is the theme of this blog. Here’s a few key mistakes and what we learned from them:

Hiring – We had to learn how to hire for Innovation. Flexibility. Passion. Ownership. Most importantly, a strong desire to deliver business value. These are some of the keys to an innovation team that works. Finding the leaders who possess these qualities is hard and takes time.

Globalization – We also expanded to too many sites and too many teams too quickly with too little leadership. In retrospect, we should have worked to constrain the locations and time-zones we took on in the first year (or two) in order to really pressure test the process before trying to replicate it.

Over-constraint – Finally, we used our new found process of innovation to restrict successful teams. We had great successes on our hands and ran them with teams of two engineers. Learning when and how to grow successful teams was a key differentiator in our success.

Tools That Work.

Now for the good news. There are some tools that we tried that worked and made the team even more effective at innovating.

Exits – Expect the project to fail. Work to learn as much as possible until it does. While it can lead to a nihilistic outlook at times, reminding ourselves that we’re searching for new business value often counters that attitude. Thinking with the end in mind helps keep perspective on technical debt.

Culture – An innovation team isn’t a counter-cultural team, it’s a sub-cultural team. Influence the rest of the organization. Inspire them. Take the company culture and evolve it. We emphasized parts of the broader team’s culture where it helped us, and redefined other parts to suit us better. This way our team was a partner with the broader organization, not a cancer.

Double-down – When something is working, don’t just keep funding at the same level. Invest more. More time. More money. If reasonable amounts of money can make a problem go away, do it.

The Innovation Tool Belt.

This is just the first set of tools we’ve discovered and the first attempt to publish them. There are more tools and it’s my goal this year to share even more of the tips and tricks of building a great innovation team.

DevOps vs NoOps

General Leadership No Comments

DevOps Days Austin 2016 Logo

DevOps Days Austin 2016 Logo

Speaking at DevOps Days Austin a few months back on the topic of “DevOps vs NoOps,” led to this post. Ignite presentations are great conversation starters, but can’t convey much substance. It’s a great incendiary title, however I wanted to offer a bit more context on the two “NoOps” applications I’ve been a part of the last few years.

Example #1: DevOps for a Ruby on Rails application deployed to Heroku

The facts:
This application managed the user experience for tens of thousands of customers at WP Engine. It scaled horizontally with the help of HireFire. We managed the log files with Papertrail. It had a Postgres database as the backend data store. As well as a caching layer. Everything managed directly through the Heroku Portal & CLI.

The pros:
Heroku handled much of the security. HireFire was there for horizontal scalability. Easily turn on and scale up services at the push of a button.

The cons:
Obviously, cost. You get what you pay for. Additionally, having a UI for management instead of CLI/scripts for some things. It was difficult for on-call to do more than “restart the dyno’s” due to visibility.

Example #2: DevOps for PHP & Laravel deployed on EC2 directly

The facts:
These applications supported more than a thousand customers. Laravel, Forge & Envoyer gave the team the ability to easily manage deploys and various environments. It provided us with turn-key configuration management of our application servers.

The pros:
Configuration management for initial server setup comes out of the box. It is easy to set up commit/webhook based deploys.

The cons:
Unfortunately, it did not give a true security blanket like Heroku does. Patch management was a required add-on. Additionally, much of the Envoyer/Forge configuration is not tracked by default in the version control system, so configuration drift was common. No built-in or suggested solution for monitoring.

So, do I still need DevOps?

Obviously, both of these applications still required some amount of operations support, but for the most part it was manageable by the existing team of developers as opposed to needing a specialist in monitoring, security, patching or other core DevOps structures.

I truly love DevOps for what it has done to bring development into the operations camp, and operations experience into the development side of things. Anytime we’re talking about breaking down the walls between development, operations, quality, product, or any other collaborator, I’m all for it. I’ll still be hiring DevOps engineers, and looking to build resilient platforms that make every engineer that much more effective.

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome

Leadership No Comments

Speaking at SXSW is always an honor and a privilege. This year, I got the opportunity to speak at a co-branded event between SXSW & General Assembly, on “Overcoming Impostor Syndrome.” Impostor Syndrome is often encountered purely internal feelings of inadequacy in high performers. There are a number of great resources out there on Impostor Syndrome, that I won’t even try to duplicate, but this post is an anchor providing my slides and resources for those researching Impostor Syndrome.

Impostor Syndrome Takeaways

  1. Impostor Syndrome explained visuallyYou’ve got to name and claim the Impostor Syndrome feelings you’re having. By knowing what you’re dealing with, you can begin to explore the way out.
  2. Document your successes and return to them when you feel vulnerable. This list of success will help you remember the value you provide.
  3. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Create a virtuous cycle of successes, instead of a downward spiral of fear and feelings of inadequacy.
  4. Use the GROW model to get moving and documenting your progress. Mapping out your goal, realities, options and the way forward will help you figure out the next first step to getting unstuck.
  5. Reference your personal board of directors to gather great advice. Collecting some mentors who’ll listen to your fears and speak truth in love to you.

My Impostor Story

Because it’s not covered well in the slides, I’m taking a moment and being vulnerable that I’ve experienced Impostor Syndrome many times.

  • Driving home in 2007 with a newborn, feeling like I couldn’t possibly be qualified to remove him from the safety of the hospital.
  • Moving into engineering management in 2010 and suddenly being thrust into managing people who were my peers the day before. I was immediately terrified that I wasn’t the right person to lead them forward.
  • Moving my family to NYC in 2011 to start the Bazaarvoice NYC office from scratch with no connections. Feeling like I couldn’t be the right person to start this team.
  • Even speaking at SXSW on Impostor Syndrome itself I felt wholly unqualified.

Resources

 

http://startupbros.com/21-ways-overcome-impostor-syndrome/

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/10/new-research-on-the-impostor-cycle.htmlhttps://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm

http://elyseholladay.github.io/tigers/

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