Why Great Money Doesn’t Retain Great Devs w/ Stack Overflow, DataStax & Reprise

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
Hi, this is Conor Bronsdon, executive producer of Dev Interrupted and your host for this episode. What do the teams at Stack Overflow, DataStax and Reprise have in common?
First, they've all built amazing organizations powered by fantastic devs.
Second, they've managed to build while retaining their stellar dev teams in an ultra competitive hiring market. Third, they all took the time at our recent internet conference to discuss how they created engineering organizations that are productive, successful, and best of all, happy. And we couldn't be more excited to share their insights, wisdom, and advice to the community at large. A quick note, if you notice a tiny fluctuation in the audio quality for each speaker, because this was recorded live and interact, enjoy. This episode is sponsored by Linear B. Accelerate your development pipeline with data-driven engineering metrics, continuous improvement automation, and project visibility while cutting your software development cycle time in half. Sign up for your free demo at linearb.io and mention the Dev Interrupted Podcast discount for a one-month free when you sign up for an annual Pro membership. Hey, everyone, welcome to our panel on how to build a successful engineering organization. I'm Conor Bronsdon, one of your Dev Interrupted community leaders, and I'm delighted to be here with three incredible engineering leaders. We've got Jenny McDougall, Director of Engineering at Reprise, Shankar Ramaswamy, Head of Engineering at DataStax, and Ben Matthews, Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow. Welcome to the panel, everyone.

**Ben Matthews** (1:25)
Thank you.

**Jenny McDougall** (1:26)
Thanks so much, excited to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:28)
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think there's gonna be some great back and forth. And I know we're gonna talk more in depth on communication and processes, technology, and how to keep your engineers productive, plus topics like culture and building trust. But I wanna start this conversation by kind of posing a hypothetical question to help warm everyone up and get to know one another. Let's say that all of us have to start an engineering organization from scratch with the leaders here on this panel.
And the three of you only get to bring one thing to the table, one process or piece of culture.
What is that piece that you're bringing to the table? Maybe Jenny, if you wanna start?

**Jenny McDougall** (2:05)
Sure, I would say that one process we have is we do engineering round tables weekly. And that is essentially a meeting that is run by one of our engineers, really any subject matter expert.
And it's really a technical deep dive into a new piece of code, a new epic, a new feature, really anything that they wanna share with the rest of the team. We share why we chose it, how it's implemented and how it's intended to be used. We identify any new patterns, any changes to existing patterns that folks should be aware of, and really any gotchas that engineers might run into when they start using it. Leads to great discussions and allows engineers to ask questions and really kind of dig into it. Helps to create a more consistent code base and allows engineers to really better understand the architecture and kind of the vision of the company from different points of view.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:02)
I really like that.
Ben, what about you? What are you bringing to the table here?

**Ben Matthews** (3:07)
Not as a cop out, but for a lot of these things, it all starts with like, it depends, right? But if there was gonna be like my blanket statement of what I wanna bring back, a lot of my successful organizations, one thing they have in common is, and maybe kind of in a sense of what Jenny was mentioning, like ways to facilitate collaboration, open communication channels and a positive feedback structure.
Like receiving feedback is just as much of a skill as giving feedback. And just places where we've been able to have that open line of communication and collaboration, it really just kind of organically grows into everyone just getting better at what they do.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:43)
Shankar, what's your contribution here?

**Shankar Ramaswamy** (3:46)
Yeah, so I bring sort of my three guiding principles to the table in terms of how the team works and makes decisions.
I call them accountability, autonomy and alignment.
So the idea is that everybody's clear on what problems they're accountable for and they own. And then everybody is empowered to make the decisions that they think are the best decisions to solve those problems and deliver on that accountability. That's the autonomy. And then the alignment is folks understand and have enough shared context. So when they are making independent decisions, they're coherent and consistent with other folks who might be making similar independent decisions, right? And so that I think for me sets up teams, with the right structure so that you can scale and go fast and yet continue to work together effectively.