Pretty much everybody understands when and why you should “choose boring technology,” in Dan McKinley’s memorable phrase. But when it comes to building engineering orgs, too many of us keep chasing the same small slice of “top engineering talent” and relying on them to move the business forward. I actually think we have this exactly backward.
It's a huge competitive advantage if you can build an engineering org where perfectly normal software engineers, with a normal amount of experience and skill, can consistently move fast, ship code, understand their software, respond to users, and push the business forward a little more every day.
P.S. – A sociotechnical system like this also mints world-class engineers like no one’s business.
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly). She loves free speech, free...