Building Engineering Teams Under Pressure - Julia Grace | The Lead Developer Austin 2018

Julia Grace has built teams at IBM Research, small startups, and now currently at Slack. She has done due diligence for venture capitalists to determine how well a startup’s engineering team is working together. Drawing on this knowledge, Julia attempts to answer the question: Why do some teams ship features rapidly, support each other, and effectively communicate while others struggle?

[daniellizik]

Would like to hear her present this one more time in the context of remote work and distributed teams

[originalmianos]

Good talk but a lot of anecdotal stuff. If something happens once it may not ever happen again. This said, slack is sure kicking goals so they must be doing a lot better than others.

[ayaan_eu]

Talk is about working under pressure but then it gets into more generic stuff e.g. team lunch, channel to chit chat. Is it really working under pressure? Well, I feel content is pretty random and all over the place.

[MaxPaint-cm]

Wow how did she get her job? Does she know anything beyond this mambo jumbo?

[mortenthorpe]

A really poor goal, as often imposed (another issue) by management… “make it work, using the least amount of resources”… developer-translation … “use all of your knowledge, knowing that some of it are bad habits, and just do the task”… so really destructive at all levels… developers don’t develop, the end product becomes full of errors, before it’s even begun, and multiple developers’ choices will conflict and just lead to heightened frustrations, and longer time to complete for upcoming tasks.