The Pragmatic Engineer
00:05:37 · Gergely Orosz, Maude Lemaire
[00:05:37] S2: Computer science, yep. [00:05:38] S1: And I told my mom I swapped it out for a computer science class. Please do not tell dad. Please do not tell him that I swapped it out for a computer science. Like, I don't. I'm scared I'm not going to like it. And then he's going to be sad because he loves [00:05:51] S2: this so much. [00:05:52] S1: This is like true love for him. And she was like, sure. OK, I'm pretty sure she told him like two minutes later because that's what my mom does. I love her. But like, man. I think she knew that it was not going to be, you know, a wreck. And sure enough, eventually, like I tell them I'm taking this class and three weeks and I'm like, oh, I really like this. Complete opposite from the molecular biology class where I was like, I really liked it. It was like, oh, with the power, I'm sure you've had this feeling. It's like, I only have a computer and I type into it and then it does things. I feel like a god. [00:06:33] S2: And then your first job, you did internships, but your first job, which followed the internship, was at Rent the Runway. [00:06:39] S1: It was, yeah. [00:06:40] S2: It's a pretty well-known company. Thanks to anyone who's entering management will probably know of the book, The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier, and she was at Rent the Runway.
00:06:40 · Gergely Orosz, Maude Lemaire
[00:06:40] S2: It's a pretty well-known company. Thanks to anyone who's entering management will probably know of the book, The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier, and she was at Rent the Runway. [00:06:50] S1: She was, yeah. And actually, that was a big part of why I wanted to go back after my internship there was because I was You didn't see very many women in those CTO type positions at the time. Also, like, I mean, I, my mom very nearly became a fashion designer. And so we grew up watching Project Runway from the very beginning. That was like the one thing I was allowed to like stay up late to watch was Project Runway. And so it combined two things that I loved, combined, you know, programming, computer science. I was mostly doing front end stuff at the time and in fashion, I could just like Rent stuff for dirt cheap and like walk around in a Monique Olivier like ball gown if I wanted to. It was it was so cool. I think the there were so many women on the team in general, I think partly because of the space that the company was in. But I also just for folks who've had the opportunity to be in a room with Camille, she just commands this presence. And I had so much respect for that. And I mean, even if I was many levels removed from her, I was like, I want to learn from this woman. I really admire this presence that she has and this confidence. And so it was an easy sell. It was a very easy sell to go back. But then she left a couple of months [00:08:12] S2: after I came [00:08:13] S1: back. But she was still instrumental in helping me land a job at Slack a year later.
00:08:13 · Maude Lemaire, Gergely Orosz, Gergely Orosz
[00:08:13] S1: back. But she was still instrumental in helping me land a job at Slack a year later. [00:08:20] S2: This is Slack in 2016. [00:08:21] S0: So at the time, I vividly remember because in 2016, I joined Uber. We still had HipChat, which was Atlassian's Slack offering [00:08:31] S2: or like Slack competitor. It was used by a lot of companies. And then they suffered two terrible and undefensible data leaks. Uber almost immediately migrated off to a product. And I remember that they evaluated Slack and Slack would not scale. [00:08:46] S0: I'm surprised. [00:08:48] S2: I thought this was later in 2019, Uber would move to Slack, but I wrote a thread about this on Twitter, and I said, well, we built something called uChat, which was built on top of Mattermost. [00:09:01] S1: Yes, yes, yes, yes. [00:09:04] S2: Did our in-house team just want to build something? And did they just say that Slack didn't scale? But one of the engineers who built uChat, because they were working hand-to-hand with Mattermost, they were actually expanding it, the open source offering. He actually said that they sat down with Slack, and Slack said that they cannot support 50,000 or 40,000 people in one company. I think 30,000 was Comcast, 30,000. But they can do 40,000. So this is the state of Slack. This is early Slack. It was already wildly popular. People loved The onboarding teams was in infancy. I'm not even sure if it was born at the time. Yeah, [00:09:56] S1: I don't think it was. [00:09:57] S2: You get to Slack. [00:09:58] S1: Yeah, yeah.
00:09:58 · Maude Lemaire, Gergely Orosz
[00:09:58] S1: Yeah, yeah. [00:09:59] S2: And... What were the problems you had to work on that you got to work? [00:10:04] S1: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I very much got the performance itch from Runway. It just wasn't. I just had to work on it, you know, on my own time, but I still enjoyed doing it. And then when I showed up at Slack, I my onboarding buddy was just like very senior engineer who was working on performance issues specifically at the time. And I burned through some of my starter stuff. And I was like, what are you working on? What are you working on over there, Moisha? And he was like, oh, let me send you some tickets. Like, do you want to work on performance? [00:10:34] S2: I was like, yes, yes, I do. [00:10:37] S1: So he sent me a couple things, like relatively easy stuff. In startup land, when you... Need to get to the next place and just get that next customer or build that next feature that you think is going to capture. Like you make a lot of short term decisions that, you know, probably inside your soul you will revisit at some point. And a lot of the performance work that we were doing at the time was just a lot of revisiting of shortcuts. I mean, like well calculated shortcuts, but like shortcuts that we knew were going to like bite us in the butt eventually down the line. So a lot of that work I was doing. And this was before the like enterprise, the Slack enterprise product was launched. But it started a couple months before GA. IBM was already trialing the product. They were sort of on beta there. They are a large company. Lots of people work there.
00:10:37 · Maude Lemaire, Gergely Orosz
[00:10:37] S1: So he sent me a couple things, like relatively easy stuff. In startup land, when you... Need to get to the next place and just get that next customer or build that next feature that you think is going to capture. Like you make a lot of short term decisions that, you know, probably inside your soul you will revisit at some point. And a lot of the performance work that we were doing at the time was just a lot of revisiting of shortcuts. I mean, like well calculated shortcuts, but like shortcuts that we knew were going to like bite us in the butt eventually down the line. So a lot of that work I was doing. And this was before the like enterprise, the Slack enterprise product was launched. But it started a couple months before GA. IBM was already trialing the product. They were sort of on beta there. They are a large company. Lots of people work there. [00:11:33] S2: That's 100k plus people, if I recall.
00:11:33 · Gergely Orosz, Maude Lemaire
[00:11:33] S2: That's 100k plus people, if I recall. [00:11:36] S1: Yeah. So one of the distinctions actually was it was sort of fine to have. Tens of thousands of folks in one channel at one time. And we were sort of spreading them out across different teams within the same Slack organization. Obviously, they could DM each other among some other things, but that sort of worked. But IBM was sort of falling over on a regular basis. And I think... I was not part of these conversations, but I get the impression in hindsight that when we agreed to GA, then they agreed that they would start scaling and adding more users to Slack. Once we reach GA, we can't hold the reins on you adding more people as much. So we hit GA and they started adding more people pretty aggressively. We ended up having to spin an actual team up that was just the enterprise performance team. I ended up being able to join that team because I just hadn't to be working on odd random performance things. I was definitely the most junior person on the team. But I love that. I feel like I've spent so much of my career to date being the most junior person ever. I mean, less so in the last couple of years, but I that's how I've learned the most. And it's really just like pushed me out of my comfort zone over and over again. And it's just like it's the most it's the most fun.