The Pragmatic Engineer
00:52:26 · Titus Winters, Gergely Orosz
[00:52:26] S1: Yeah. Hat here. Yeah. We should know our thing. Sure. So I would say... And it's been a little hard to, like, root this stat, but from talking with people in DORA, the the research... The one thing that I love was we can explain 30% of the variance in whether or not you... Your team will hit its goals based on how you score on psych culture questions. Right? Like, we could give you a 15 question true false or maybe Likert scale, like, but like a 15 question assessment for the team and predict 30% of whether or not you will hit whatever your goals are. That's insanity. Right? That is more powerful than any other signal. Like, okay. So you think that we're all engineers, and this is all just computers and tech and emotions have nothing to do with it. Find me anything that's even remotely that powerful predictor of success. It's a people problem. Like, period. Right? And going back to... Right? It's it's not a single shot game. It's an iterated game. I regularly cite Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month essays. Right? And in the surgical team... Like, the surgical team is my least favorite chapter in that book because it's structured as if we're only ever gonna do one project. Get the best person to do this. Get... Have everyone else build the tools and do the documentation. Under them. It's very [00:53:53] S0: hierarchical.
00:53:53 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[00:53:53] S0: hierarchical. [00:53:54] S1: Right. And it's very, like, power dynamics mad. Yeah. Right? But it might make sense if you're only ever going to do one task. Instead, we're playing, like, in a game theory sense. It's not prisoner's dilemma. It's iterated prisoner's dilemma. There's a different strategy. And the strategy is find the most junior person that can do it with supervision so that they learn and grow, and you still get a decent outcome. And that next, the higher level people can solve something that they don't know how to do yet or that no one else can tackle. Right? This is the only way to structure it so that growth happens. But in order for that growth to happen, people have to be willing to admit that they don't know a thing. And that brings you straight back to psychological safety and learning culture. Right? If it is a culture that highlights information sharing, learning, and growth, you will succeed. [00:54:52] S0: And and you mentioned that the AI labs probably take this for granted, and I'm gonna Because [00:54:56] S1: they don't know what they're like.
00:54:57 · Gergely Orosz
[00:54:57] S0: Well, I'm gonna paraphrase it. Like, with the AI Labs, a few things going. First of all, business is booming. They are growing. Revenue goes up. Customers goes up. Funding goes up. Headcount goes up. Their teams are only ever expanding. They're on hypergrowth. Like, we... We've seen companies like Netflix and Uber in hyper growth. This is even faster. Your equity also goes up. So you you don't need to worry about things like performance reviews because performance reviews are typically important where, like, how much bonus I'm gonna get, how much. But when you're at a place that goes like this and your equity goes up, your your financial part is taken care of just by focusing on helping the company succeed regardless of your titles. Second of all, because they're building new technology and they know no one knows, so they just tell, okay, I don't know. I'm learning from you. Here's what I learned. So it's just all natural. Whereas compared to a company that might not grow like this, they might still be using, let's say, AI, but now there's less of an incentive to say, I don't know because there's a performance review coming up. You wanna look like the smartest. You don't want people to say like, well, this person says I don't know a lot. Your bonus will be lower. You might be put on a performance improvement plan because you're now at a company that every year lets go of 6% of people. Right. And your goal is suddenly going from like, I just don't wanna be there. I wanna hang on to this job, but it's now hanging on. It's now... Uh-huh. And you also... You're now very of maybe your teammates because now there's an internal competition. You wanna hog that project. Yep. And so this is a huge difference.
00:56:25 · Titus Winters, Gergely Orosz
[00:56:25] S1: Yeah. It's huge. Like, if you get into the mode of believing that the team outcomes are what matter for your own success, then it is much easier for you to realize, like, okay, I don't have to have this one shiny task. Like, the team will be successful by virtue of someone doing this, and it might be my turn next. If when it breaks down into that individualism and, like, I don't trust the guy across the way from me or right shoulder to shoulder to me, even though we're on the same team, we're scraping by and fighting for attention and success, And that's not a recipe for innovation and growth. Like, that is a recipe for stagnation and and just bad. One of the obvious things that I assume, you [00:57:14] S0: know, is is is is... Does not do good for psychological growth or it's terrible for it is layoffs. Can you tell me based on your observation? And and we've seen. Right? Like, you... We've all been part of it. And in 2022, 2023, there has been a series of layoffs. Right right now, companies are doing it again. Back then, it was to do with honest interest rates and and over hiring during zero interest rates and and growth kind of going down. Now some companies are are actually openly saying that it's AI, some are not as openly, but we find out that Meta, for example, wanted to reduce scene sizes because they thought that I will be there. From your observations, at a company where a layoff happens, how does it change how software engineers show up, work, think, speaking both about your experience, the people you talk with?
00:58:03 · Titus Winters
[00:58:03] S1: I mean, it's stressful. Like, I've had experiences of there being layoffs in the area, and just... It... It'll be weeks or months of every one on one starts with, so how are you doing? Like, how are you coping? Like, there's this huge amount of, you know, negative performance influence of like, okay. We gotta, like, emotionally support each other first before we actually even get back to doing the work. And I'm very skeptical that in the executive accounting on all of this, that they're taking into consideration just the sheer amount of lost productivity and lost time from like, yeah, people are stressed. People are spending time brushing up their resume in case they're next on the chopping block. People are spending that one on one time, like, in therapy instead of in planning. It's... It is a huge hidden cost to all of that, and it's really demotivating. It drives home... Like, it is a reminder that, okay, this is just a business obligation. This is not a lifestyle choice. And if me putting in extra doesn't give me extra safety on this, then what's the point? You know? And, like, it... There's a lot of cultural baggage that happens for that. And it's one of the things that I actually really liked about Adobe was Adobe's had the same CEO for a long time. He just stepped down. He has a replacement now. But he was there for the great recession crash. And they did some layoffs at that era, and he saw how much it hurt morale and company productivity and all of the rest of that. And he learned, like, it... We thought it made numeric sense at the time, but it was not good for the soul of the company, and that's not the company that we wanna be. And so Adobe didn't have the the layoffs in the last few years. Like, there's group by group, like, local things as things get reprioritized, but it's not the sweeping all of those. Yeah. But we...
01:00:11 · Gergely Orosz, Titus Winters
[01:00:11] S0: We've seen that. Most of Big Tech has had it, especially in 2023. Yeah. And speaking of Adobe, so you've moved to Adobe a few years ago. What are you focused on at Adobe? [01:00:22] S1: So there, I'm very senior IC focused on developer experience. I happen to say this is a polite fiction. Developer experience is the business of productivity. We just know enough not to say that we can measure productivity. It does not give [01:00:37] S0: everyone Unlike McKinsey who me and Kendra have bonded over. [01:00:41] S1: Oh. Yeah. Yes. Like, that was... That's horrible. [01:00:45] S0: But but we will link it in show notes below. [01:00:47] S1: Yeah. So it's it's what do we need for, you know, tools and culture and, you know, all of the things to improve the experience of being a developer and make you more productive and efficient because most companies spend more on engineering comp than anything else. [01:01:04] S0: So today, you've been focused on this thinking about it and working on it for both at Adobe but also to some extent at Google. What do you know today about developer productivity? How does this relate to AI, coding tool, output, metrics, all of that things? What is it that we can measure? What is it worth measuring? And what are things that are hard to know?