Stupid Things Orgs Do That Kill Productivity | A Conversation With Netflix, FloSports & Refactoring.club

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Conor Bronsdon, executive producer and sometimes host of Dev Interrupted. We've seen spectacular growth in the past couple of months, and we couldn't be happier. To make sure we continue delivering awesome content, we're humbly asking that our listeners fill out a brief 90-second survey that we're leaking in the show notes. We really want to hear from you.
Making this podcast week in and week out is the best part of our jobs, and it would mean the world to us if you let us know what you think, what you hate about it, what you love about it, and what you want to see more of. We want to keep making it better and delivering engineering leadership content to you every week.
At LinearB, we like to think we spend all our time figuring out how to unlock developer potential, to find ways to let devs do more of the work they love and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with needless hurdles, idling and churn. It's part of the reason we create this podcast.
But we're not the only ones thinking about how to do this. At our recent Interact panel, we assembled amazing engineering leaders from Netflix, FloSports and refactoring.club to give us their inside knowledge on how they increase productivity and promote creativity in their own organizations. If you love the conversation as much as we did, you can head over to the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel and check out our playlist of every piece of content from Interact. But if you're gonna do that or if you're gonna listen to this episode, please do me a huge favor. Just take that 90 second survey, it's in the show notes. We'd really appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed the episode.

**Dan Lines** (1:25)
Hey, everyone, I'm your panel moderator, Dan Lines. I'm the host of the Dev Interrupted Podcast and the co-founder of LinearB. And I get the pleasure of introducing our three amazing panelists. So we have Katherine Kohler, Director of Engineering Productivity at Netflix. We have Luca Rossi, Founder of Refactoring.Club. And we have Trong Thai, VP of Engineering at Movesports.
Super happy to have all of you on here.

**Luca Rossi** (1:57)
Thank you, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (1:57)
Excellent. All right. So we're going to dive deep into improving engineering productivity. We're going to be focusing in on developer productivity, metrics, organizational health, growth in scale and more. So Katherine, I want to start off with you.
First of all, it's great to have you back. I was just saying before we started, you're a legend now, so awesome to have you back.

**Katherine Kohler** (2:21)
Oh no, the bar's been set too high, guys.

**Dan Lines** (2:25)
For those of you who don't know, Katherine was a guest on the Dev Interrupted Podcast last year, and also part of an incredible Dev Interrupted continuous improvement panel event.
But probably most excitingly, Katherine, you are the director of engineering productivity at Netflix, obviously a famous company, maybe sometimes infamous for its ruthless independence, high impact, high performance dev culture. So can you define what developer productivity means for you and what you think makes the Netflix approach to development so successful?

**Katherine Kohler** (3:02)
Yeah, thank you for that question. Developer productivity at Netflix is a very interesting concept because Netflix, you've mentioned the ruthless independence, the autonomy. We have to build things that people actually want to use because there's no top-down mandate. You must use everything that we build. We have to create things that really separate out those Netflixisms so that developers can get on their day-to-day activities much faster. And so shielding folks from sort of the security implications, from performance implications, optimizations, all of those Netflixisms that go along with very complex ecosystems. So we're paving that road for folks, but people got to want to be on the road, right? The road has to be nice. It has to be smooth. There has to be a good way to get on to that road, and it has to take you to the place that you want to be. Otherwise, folks can opt out and they can use whatever they want. So for us, the carrot has to be pretty remarkable for people to use what we're building. Otherwise, we're dead in the water, and there's no reason for people to want to use the productivity offering. So, you know, we have two primary languages that we use in Netflix, heavy reliance on Node, heavy reliance on Java, and those two application frameworks are very, very paved. But there are a lot of languages out there that we haven't paved, you know, Scala, Kotlin, Go, Rust, et cetera. And for those types of things, can we create tooling that enables people to be able to work in a polyglot environment? That's super important, too. And what makes Netflix so successful?