Today I'll be live-tweeting "Building and nurturing resilient engineering teams" with Charity Majors, James Turnbull, and Juan Pablo Buriticá

The panel is hosted by @stripe

My job at @honeycombio allows me to take the time to live-tweet panels and talks. Hmu if you're interested in discussing your team's observability journey

Go here if you want to watch: https://stripe.events/resilientteams 

How do you define resililence? @mipsytipsy cites the @devops_research metrics and adds: how frequently people are paged outside of business hours

. @buritica mentions engagement metrics, particularly: Do people have a clear idea of what their goals are?

Are there any other risks that you all have come across this your career that you just didn't anticipate that you would advise a new CTO starting out should think about?

@kartar: "Pandemics spring to mind"

When you think about building a software infrastructure how do you anticipate and score risks that you might encounter?

@mipsytipsy: I like to think of risk as Raid for humans, you should think of the work...assume it will get done

. @kartar: People tend to make technology decisions in isolation of people. So they choose like okay, we're going to choose to build on Scala...how many software engineers can write Scala and how easy is it to onboard new software engineer?

What would you say to a new CTO who asked, what are the most critical aspects of my infrastructure that I should think about building?

@kartar: I think that if your road map doesn't include people, things, like comp reviews and performance, then it's probably not right.

. @mipsytipsy: Get yourself an ops cofounder! Also, remember that you're building teams, not hiring people

What are some of the most effective communication systems and techniques to improve agility, resilience, trust?

@buritica: Focus on communication practices that don't depend on presence, whether it's time, physical, or even cultural

. @buritica: When designing your communication protocols for systems, everything is very deliberate. But when we're architecting our teams we just throw a bunch of people in conference rooms and hope they get it together. You have to be deliberate about it.

. @kartar: [for lack of a system that's] perfect for your organization, is overcommunicate. So if you have Slack, then use Slack. If you use Slack and e-mail, then use that. People will consume information in different ways, different time zones, people in different cultures.

How do you get quick feedback?

@buritica: I don't think in management you do. I don't think in management you get good feedback.

. @buritica: People joining Startups believe that they really like change, until change starts happening. And then they realize they don't like change.

How do you encourage ownership in taking responsibility when things go wrong? Is there systems you would use or is it cultural?

@mipsytipsy: Put them on call.

. @mipsytipsy: Especially if your customers are developers, the more grounded you could be just in their daily experience, like it breathes through your product.

. @kartar: In large orgs, a lot of cultural things are based on the fact that people don't feel empowered and don't feel accountable for things.

. @mipsytipsy: What's the replacement for the feedback loop if you don't have any on-call or support rotations?

@kartar: In DevRel, there was no infrastructure to support in a job fairly recently, and the feedback loop for us was the material we produced to the outside world.

. @buritica: It really comes down to ownership. If you feel like you have control over your goals, you can actually drive them. If you give me a goal of signing up 1,000 customers and I have no opportunity of like even contacting customers, then I'm just not engaged.

. @mglukhovsky: I heard one engineering leader say that the definition of happiness in a role is autonomy and impact.

@mipsytipsy references @danielpink's research: autonomy, impact, meaning

. @buritica: I think there is a positive thing about this whole change...but it's also helping like challenge objections over like look, really the only thing you can learn in person is someone's height. And you can still ask someone, right?

. @buritica: For example, if everything is happening on Slack and you depend on people paying attention in Slack and then there's an incident, filtering through the noise is going to be really, really, really hard.

. @mipsytipsy: Before the pandemic, @honeycombio did quarterly wfh weeks, no exceptions. If you have to come into the office for some reason, you're not allowed to talk to anybody. Because if execs don't fucking do it, nobody will believe you really mean it.

. @mglukhovsky How do you approach the question of burnout in your teams?

@mipsytipsy: Rituals, honestly, team cleansing, purging, with fire.

@buritica: Sustainable pace, measuring cycle time. At Splice we accelerated delivery in engineering without putting more hours.

. @mipsytipsy: You have to be really careful with this because you get more of the things you praise people for doing, especially publicly. Deliver some acknowledgment and recognition privately, like thank you but I need to make sure you're taking care of yourself.

. @kartar: Organizations where people aren't perceived as resources or fungible commodities and so you don't really care if the team burns out because you can always replace them. That impacts things like diversity if you start seeing everybody as a fungible resource.

What's one book that you would recommend either fiction or nonfiction to any engineering leader that significantly influenced you?

@kartar: @skamille's The Manager's Path is one of the best engineering leadership books I've read in years.

. @buritica: Accelerate by @nicolefv, @RealGeneKim, @jezhumble

. @mipsytipsy: Pathologies in Power by Paul Farmer, and Dancing in the Streets by @B_Ehrenreich

Alright, that's a wrap. Thank you @mglukhovsky, @kartar, @buritica, @mipsytipsy for being awesome leaders and for letting me blow up your mentions