BUILD STUFF’14: Randy Shoup - Building and Sustaining Effective Engineering Organizations

Randy Shoup is the Chief Technology Officer at KIXEYE, making awesome games scalabler and reliabler. Previously, he was Director of Engineering at Google, leading several teams building Google App Engine, the world’s largest Platform as a Service. Prior to Google, he spent 6 1/2 years as Chief Engineer at eBay, building several successive generations of eBay’s real-time search engine. Randy speaks regularly at conferences on distributed computing and large-scale infrastructure, and is particularly interested in how organizations move rapidly at scale.
Through the lens of his personal experience from hands-on engineer to Architect to CTO, at organizations ranging from tiny startups to global giants including eBay, Google and Oracle, Randy discussed several important aspects of engineering cultures, which both support and hinder the ability to innovate: hiring and retention, ownership and collaboration, quality and discipline, and learning and experimentation.

Randy suggested some learnings about what has worked well – and what has not – in creating and sustaining an effective engineering culture. He offered some concrete suggestions on how other organizations – both large and small – can evolve their cultures as well.