The Promise of Platform Engineering w/ Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb

**Charity Majors** (0:00)
In the beginning, ops careers should never have existed, right? I love them, they're my people, but in the beginning, there were engineers who wrote code and managed it, right?
And then we're like, ah, it's getting too complicated. We need to split up these responsibilities somehow. And instead of splitting them up the right way, we split them up the wrong way. And we're like, the people who write the code are not going to run the code. And that was a disaster for our industry, and it has taken us decades. The DevOps movement started to repair it, started to bring the worlds back together, but people are shutting down ops teams like left and right, and they're replacing them with platform teams.
This is a good thing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
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**Dan Lines** (1:25)
Hey, what's up, everyone? I'm your host, Dan Lines.
And today we have a special episode of Dev Interrupted. We're live at Interact 3 with an incredible guest, Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO at honeycomb.io. Charity, thanks for joining us today.

**Charity Majors** (1:47)
Wow, that rhymed. I loved the way you delivered that line. It was great.

**Dan Lines** (1:52)
I'm becoming a professional now.
I'm flowing, I'm flowing with it. And of course, Charity, you are a Dev Interrupted legend.

**Charity Majors** (2:03)
I thought you were gonna say you are a Dev Interrupted, and I was gonna go, yes, that too.

**Dan Lines** (2:09)
You're both a Dev Interrupted and a Dev Interrupted legend, both in parallel.
And of course, what does that mean? This is not your first appearance on the pod. In fact, the first pod I did with you is an all-time favorite, I think for myself and for the audience, and you've also done some panels and really cool stuff with us. You have this amazing way of explaining things that's super inspiring, like everyone can feel your passion, you know, down to earth, real talk, that type of thing.

**Charity Majors** (2:45)
She swears a lot.

**Dan Lines** (2:48)
Subtext, she swears and we like it. So feel free to do that if you want to do that.
But if there is anyone that's listening that doesn't know you yet, let's start out just like, you know, a couple of minutes about you. Let's start out with your career journey. You know, how did you get to where, how did you become a Dev Interrupted? How did you get to where you are today?

**Charity Majors** (3:14)
You know, it's, I was never one of those kids who had a career plan or who even had goals really, you know, I just kept stumbling into one cool thing after and some lots of cool things. But, you know, I think that the one thing that, the thing that I developed fairly early on that served me well was always, as soon as I felt comfortable, I would like panic and move on, you know. So I started out as a music major, I had a dropout. I never really went to high school, I was homeschooled, I was a very weird child.
But when I went to college, I saw that all of the music majors were still at the music department, and they're like 30s and 40s, and they had jobs, and I was just like, I don't want to keep being poor for the rest of my life. And I switched to computers, and then I came down to Silicon Valley, and there were just so many cool things happening, you know, and I kind of went from one job to the next. And, but I was never ever also one of those kids who was like, I'm going to be a founder when I grow up, because I always kind of hated those people.

**Dan Lines** (4:16)
Yeah, it's a little play then, or it can be a little stereotypical now these days, yeah.

**Charity Majors** (4:22)
Yeah, and it's just in the same way that, and like, I get this, from a marketing perspective, you always want to be aspirational. So if you want to give advice, you're going to be like, oh, founders should think about this. All CEOs should think about this. All CTOs should, because then you'll get everyone's attention. If you're just like, well, every engineer should know this, you don't get all the attention. But it just kind of rubs me the wrong way, the way all this glorification was like, and especially because, it really, to my mind, it sort of reflects the outsize, I feel like founders get way too much equity compared to the early engineers, especially.