Why engineering sucks, with Eli Schleifer (Trunk) - S04E07

Console DevTools

In this episode, we speak with Eli Schleifer, Co-CEO of Trunk. We discuss why engineering sucks, what developers can learn from how software gets built at Google and Uber, how individual developers can improve their coding experience, and why Git commit messages are useless.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

• Mythical Man-Month
• Google
• Uber
• BitTorrent
• "Git commit messages are useless"
• Warp
• Slack
• Linear
• Visual Studio Code
• MacBook Pro M1
  

ABOUT ELI SCHLEIFER

Eli Schleifer is the founder and co-CEO of Trunk, an all-in-one solution for scalably checking, testing, merging, and monitoring code. It helps developers write more secure code and ship faster to redefine software engineering at scale. He was previously a technical lead manager and a systems architect at Uber ATG, where he led the architecture and engineering of its self-driving platform. He also lead a team of engineers and technical leads in the development of multiple products under the YouTube Director umbrella and was a lead senior software development engineer at Microsoft.

Highlights:

[Eli Schleifer]: We should trust our engineers and also understand that code is constantly – it's a living document. It's changing all the time. If something gets in that's imperfect but not terrible, that's also okay. So if you have an engineer put up a pull request, you have feedback, leave that feedback and stamp the pull request. Assuming there's trust, then the engineer is going to follow up, fix up your comments, and then land that. There's no additional cycle. If you don't stamp it, that means you're going to— you’re basically saying to this person, “I'm going to hold up your work until you show me that you can actually follow through on the things I'm asking about.” That's a level of distrust that, I think, is not good in a highly collaborative working environment.

— [0:15:48 - 0:16:28]

[Eli Schleifer]: I think this is the biggest thing between a smaller startup and a giant tech company: At a giant tech company, at the end of the year, the giant tech company comes to the employee and is like, “Tell me what you did this year and why you have this job. Tell me all the good stuff you did for us.” At a smaller company, all management knows what all the people are actually doing for you. There’s a clear visibility into what those engineers are adding and contributing to the actual company's efforts. I think the biggest thing to focus on when it gets to 200 engineers or 2,000 is: what are these people actually working on? Who's making sure that there's a director of engineering for each of these smaller groups of 30, 40 people to make sure they're actually pushing towards something that matters, that matters to the company, that's going to move the needle? And that those engineers can still feel pride in and feel like they have impact?

— [0:27:22 - 0:28:09]

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