Labs: Inside the Top 10% of Engineering Orgs

**Nathan Harvey** (0:00)
Hi, this is Nathan Harvey. I'm a lead developer advocate for Dora and Google Cloud. Dora is the DevOps research and assessment group. And as you may have seen in the Dev Interrupted newsletter, we need your help this year with the Accelerate State of DevOps survey. This survey is brought to you by Dora, Google Cloud and LinearB. The survey itself takes just 15 minutes to fill out and your anonymous input helps the entire industry understand how to make the software world better. There are no right or wrong answers. We just want to hear about how you and your team develop and deliver software. And you know, considering some of the questions might just help your team identify some areas to improve starting tomorrow.
You can fill out the survey at bit.ly slash 2023 Sodor Sponsors. We'll put a link in the show notes.
Really appreciate you taking those 15 minutes to share your insights with the entire industry.

**Dan** (1:08)
Welcome to our latest LinearB Labs episode. So these are episodes where we dive into the latest data, we look at our research and thought leadership in engineering, and then we see how we can apply that more tangibly to our own dev organizations.
This episode is actually a follow up to one of our first labs episodes where we took a look under the hood, we had about 2000 dev teams, and we wanted to find out what metrics the top 10%, so kind of thinking about the elite portion of those dev teams achieved. So today, we're going to look at the most recent data we have on what makes an engineering team elite with help from a new voice on Dev Interrupted, Ben Lloyd Pearson, LinearB's director of Dev Relations, Ben, welcome to the show.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:09)
Thanks, Dan. It's really great to be here.

**Dan** (2:12)
Yeah, it's awesome to have you here, man. Ben, could you let our listeners know a bit about your background and why you love doing this stuff and talking about this stuff?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:24)
Yeah, so I've worked in DevRel for nearly 10 years now, and my career has been split pretty equally between engineering and marketing teams. So I've always kind of had this innate affinity for technology, like my entire life. And I love this career choice because it really lets me merge my creative and my technical sides to produce persuasive and informative content for software developers. So before I got into DevRel, I was a bit of a technology jack of all trades. I bounced between various roles in web development, systems administration, network management, IT support.
And that was where I sort of built this technical foundation that I draw from today to produce all of this DevRel content.
And over the years, I've worked with some of the largest and smallest engineering organizations in the world, from massive companies like Samsung and Verizon to small startups like LinearB. And a lot of my work is focused on helping these teams achieve high-impact goals in an efficient way and tracking those impacts via metrics. So I've also been involved in a lot of open-source community metrics in the past. And I really just love getting to apply that expertise to evaluating top-performing engineering teams. And every team has its unique nuances, but there are also practices that I've seen over time that are pretty consistent from team to team. And the fact that LinearB can evaluate such a large volume of engineering metrics puts us in a pretty unique position to quantify software development best practices. And I think that's really neat.

**Dan** (3:58)
Yeah, that's awesome, man. I wanted to ask you, actually, I was gonna ask you this before the show, and I forgot, but the role that you have with this director of Dev Relations, we won't get into the specific numbers, but it's a pretty lucrative career path, and I think a really fun career path.
And for the people that are listening, and that maybe are developers, but want to try something new, or how do I get into this DevRel mode, do you have any advice of how to transition into that, or how you got your first job, or if I am a developer saying I really like this stuff, I want to enable communities, and it seems like there's a cool path there, any tips for the audience?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:48)
Yeah, communication is probably one of the skills that I think a lot of people, particularly people coming from technical backgrounds, can struggle with the most. So learning how to do things like write blogs, get comfortable speaking to people about technical subjects, practice breaking down really complicated things into simple concepts that people can understand.