 Just calling this thoughts on leading software teams. So it's a pretty low bar It's gonna be thoughts. That's all You're getting promised Definitely will be some So my name is Jody Hamilton I work at Renaissance electronics, which is a large semiconductor company We're running a really large Drupal 9 site And I previously was the CTO of ZipTech Since 2008 And this is my 12th bad camp so when I think about getting into leadership in tech I kind of think of it as starting as a developer and You are constantly trying to expand your stack when you first get started, right? So you first thing you learn is like HTML and CSS Then for most of us we learn PHP my sequel JavaScript, maybe other languages and then you start to You know you have maybe a moment where you think you know something But then you start to realize there's this all this other stuff that you don't know you start to learn about Linux and you start to learn about running infrastructure and You learn Vim and then you have to learn Git and obviously you learn everything about Drupal and Then people start to get interested in other things. Well, maybe I should learn more about design strategy and accessibility and then for me I started to get into site architecture giving Site audits for projects. I got into business. I started a business. I got into All kinds of things running that business doing sales team building mentorship staff development these were just all kind of For me, I was just trying to build a good website, but to do that You start to realize that the problems are not just Writing PHP the problems are bigger and bigger and bigger. How do you have if you want to do a good website? You need a good team if you want a good team now You have to learn how to do recruiting and how to retain that team how to motivate that team so the problems just kind of like get broader and broader and broader if you're really interested in Trying to solve the the hard problems So this has kind of been my my journey I became a product owner Currently working on a team transformation and Throughout like these 12 times that I've been to bad camp. I think I've been here you know speaking on each of these different topics over you know as I've kind of Try to become an expert on one thing after another. I feel like I've I've Come here, and I've talked about the Drupal development. I've talked about code quality I've talked about site architecture, and it's just kind of like one after another and Ultimately, I Feel like the most important problem that you can solve In your in your team is really being the leader of the team It's not the the technical problems like the code problems are much easier So So I sort of accidentally Became a leader of a team mainly because I Wanted to do bigger projects, and I also I just wanted to do something Good for other people so I kind of as I kind of got into Drupal became a web developer I Felt like I was making all this good money, and I had such a good job doing interesting things I just kind of felt bad for the people like my friends were working at coffee shops and I thought you know, maybe I can try to Teach them this stuff and like help other people to get into this. I also Ended up starting a business because I felt like I was sort of had been Underestimated in the market. I never I'd always had different jobs where I was sort of treated like a lot less Capable than I really was and I thought starting my own business was kind of the only way that I Was going to be able to Have the type of role that I felt that I should have So I just kind of jumped into that had really no idea how to do it and then for many years Just wondered like, you know, am I actually a Successful leader or am I you know actually a terrible leader? I think that's what most leaders are thinking, you know Are you is there something about leadership that you don't know? That you haven't been taught because almost no one has actually been taught leadership. So This past year I finished my MBA and I thought that One of the things I would learn from that would be finally like what are the actual tricks to be a leader? Like what is what are the rules like what is I'm missing isn't that where you go is to go get your MBA And then they're gonna tell you this Well, guess how much of their curriculum actually has to do with being a leader Yeah, pretty much none. It's all they just teach you how to like how to add up the inventory of your like manufacturing business and Like and then like run some crunch some numbers about it. They don't actually teach you how to be a leader and part of that is That you can't actually teach people how to be a leader perhaps So maybe it's not a terrible thing that no one actually Tries to teach you how because you can't really it's not really something you can be taught The only kind of part of like American life where there really is any leadership training that I have found is the military So the military like takes leadership training like super seriously But like nowhere else do is there actually like leadership training die that I found but that's okay It turns out it's actually very easy to become a leader. It's a self-proclaimed thing So it's kind of similar to like being like a vegetarian or something You know, you don't have to like actually do anything You just if you have the courage to say that you are one you've qualified If you can't say that you are one without him in and hauling and say well, maybe I could maybe be a Little leader maybe you're not one you it takes a little bit of courage to just say the words If you say the words, you're in the club. So that's pretty easy It's a lot of people I think believe That it takes a certain personality type to be a leader and that therefore because they don't have that personality type They would never be able to be a leader unless they somehow like faked having that personality type That's actually not true at all The personalities can make things easier or harder for you But they don't they almost never make something impossible for you. So there is no like personality type being a leader is Very much like you're taking a walk in the woods with your friends Who do you want to go in the front and be the leader the person who knows which way to go? They don't have to have a certain personality They didn't have to be certified that they were a leader if they knew which way to go put them in the front of the group That's all there is to it. So if it's pretty easy to become a leader Then why does it seem like we have such bad leadership in tech and I don't have like any like Vaccine figures or even though if you could have any to kind of show that There is a leadership crisis in tech But it definitely feels to me that there is because when you talk to people If you're interviewing someone to try to hire someone They tell you all the time though. Well, they work where they work like there's there's bad leadership They don't have they don't have a good direction the people in charge don't know what they're doing um You see Not only entire teams that have barely any leadership, but whole companies in tech Well, I won't name any perhaps Since I'm being recorded, but some large Drupal companies do seem like they have like no one actually like running the show at all It's just like a whole bunch of engineers just kind of working on different things And it and it never really comes together or makes any sense My boyfriend's company is like that they have like they have like a hundred engineers and No leadership whatsoever. They all just kind of work on different things. They can never get it together and have a product It doesn't matter how good the engineers are they don't have anyone to to bring it together and tell them what they're even Should be doing So It's a it's I think a huge problem So I think about like why do we not have better leaders in tech? I Think it has to do with the fact that The people that we need to be the leaders Are the are the top developers? We can't just have we can't just like get our leaders from some totally separate place and then they're gonna come in and Tell the developers what to do like if you're gonna lead the developers you're gonna need to be a developer so in order to Talk a developer into being a leader is not that easy typically when you talk to developers about leadership They'll say that they want to be mentors Like to mentor people. They like to help out the junior developers Maybe do some knowledge sharing or something like that Rarely do they say they want to like officially manage the entire team And I think the reason for that is It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of emotional energy Most developers are introverts who are guarding their energy. They don't have Extra energy where they're gonna be like why I really I really like have all this extra energy that I want to like have this extra eight hours of meetings every day and Have to have all this emotional responsibility and all of this stuff weighing me down all the time When you're a developer One of the great things about it is you can just turn off your emotions for the entire day Dig into like some serious crazy problems the hours fly by and It's it's like playing a video game. It's just like an escape if you have problems in your life You don't have them while you're programming You forget about them completely. It's great. You can just like turn off All of the difficult parts of being a human But to be a leader you're gonna have to go in completely the other direction And you're going to have to use all of that emotional energy instead of shutting it out and Most of our developers who are the top developers who are the ones that we really want to be the leaders These people are usually burned out already Because when you're a good problem solver and you're in an industry that's full of problems The problems just keep coming at you faster and faster and faster You keep trying to do them and you there's never a break. You're just like on this treadmill Doing these problems faster and faster and faster Until you're super burned out and most developers are pretty burned out So when you ask them like hey, can you take on these additional responsibilities It's gonna be like 20 hours a week of meetings Plus like dealing with everything else. You're already dealing with it's not a very attractive offer Especially considering the developers are already paid pretty well so It's not like they they need the raise that they're gonna get by becoming a manager So for most people it just seems like it's not worth it. It's better to Just write the code all day and not become a leader So as a result teams try to bring in these like non-technical leaders and That rarely goes well I don't know if anyone's like ever had an experience where they had like a leader as a developer who wasn't at all Technical and if it's ever gone well, I think it can go well It's not impossible for it to go well if that person has Really good leadership skills in terms of all kinds of soft skills with how they're working with others and getting Motivating others and getting others to collaborate with each other that could work Most of the most of the people that I think of who are like non-technical leaders of software teams They normally like if you dig into it, they are pretty technical, right? Like they might be they might not be a back-end developer, but then you dig into like oh well They're actually like a pretty good UX designer or they're actually like a very serious project manager But like they actually you know, they they typically always have some expertise in something that was relevant It's usually not that they're just like complete outsiders that just kind of wandered in and And succeeded at running this software team But much more often when you have not technical leadership You get these kinds of guys and it's like usually guys they Their whole kind of thing is that they're gonna get some resources Right, so that's like how they're gonna like run their software team We're gonna like go out there like get some more resources put the resources on it and then Then something's gonna happen and that work's gonna get done and you're like is that actually how software is made because Doesn't seem right so to try to inspire anyone to actually want to be a leader considering that it's not Perhaps always feel like the the best job compared to just getting to sit there and write code all day. I Think the the main reason That's worth doing is if you kind of think about your How you're gonna feel about your career At the end of your career and your old age and you're looking back You're not gonna care about all of the bugs that you fixed and all of the websites that you made Like they're gonna just all Be immediately forgotten. I can't even remember the bug that I fixed two days ago If you just forget it as soon as you do it doesn't mean anything to you. There's just another one It's just like a puzzle that you're solving but when you look back on your life and you remember like the people who You were able to help by leading them That's something that you'll have your entire life and that's something that at the end of the day Just matters a lot more than the actual websites so for me One of the things that I was able to do at Ziv Tech was like Bring a lot of people into tech careers. So a lot of people who had like no experience had never written code. I was able to train them up and Get them started in their first Tech job and once they had a tech job, they're set. You know, you always talk to the people who are just Still trying to break into their first tech job If you can break into your first tech job, you are you're fine. You're set. Your whole life is going to be different. You see them Buying houses getting married having families like things that they would have never been able to do When they were working at Best Buy or you know at the coffee shop or at the Trader Joe's and so it's like you are able to Change people's lives and the lives of their families in a major way. It's might be kind of like And even and even if you're not even if it's not as extreme as that even if it's not as like Oh, you're able to like find someone who had no experience and train them up even if it's just You already have a team. They already have professional jobs. You can still help them to learn things and move forward in their careers and to like elevate them to a higher role and Just everything that you're that you're doing as a leader that is elevating other people It ultimately I think just something that you can feel a lot better about yourself than just like Being like a code monkey your whole life So One of the kind of corny but true things about leadership is it's it's all based on values So it's it is very corny people always tell you this it's completely true that to to have To be a leader you have to be values based You have to think about what your values are They're typically going to be human based values because as leaders what we are leading is other humans So for me some of the values that I think about a lot are trying to elevate others Cultivating compassion Authenticity transparency vulnerability and overall just to place a high premium on the individual talent of people and They are creative potential because I know for myself in my experience when I have passion and and I and I apply myself to it. I can do things that you know a hundred unmotivated people would never be able to do and I think we all know that like one person who's creative and talented and Has passion for what they're doing is Capable of doing so much more than Then you could that you could ever imagine so it's not like so that's why it makes no sense to talk about people's resources It's that there's they're not like a resource. We'll get another resource. They get another resource Okay, we have three resources if we get one more then we'll be you know That'll be 33% more resources people don't are not like linear commodities You can sort of activate someone's creativity in some way and all of a sudden that person becomes a hundred times more valuable They have some breakthrough ideas. They start to Collaborate with each other and be able to figure out things that they would have never been able to figure out so it's like if You you have it's it's I mean It's a it's a talent base. It's a creative pursuit. It's sort of like Professional sports or or music where it's where one person might be incredible But people are not you know all the same and so Yeah, to me, I think that's like the biggest My biggest value that I try to hold on to now the great thing about values is that they're not the same as your personality So it makes it sounds like oh, these are my values. Wow. You must be like a really a nice great person Not all my personality is like the complete opposite of the values. That's okay These are more aspirational. That's okay. Like you can embrace the hypocrisy. You know to be a leader you don't have to be like Perfect or like even like a great person or have a great personality You want to be it's you need to have these values that you're going for but you don't need to beat yourself up every day That you haven't achieved these values that your value is elevating others But you're pissed off and tired and miserable so you didn't say hello to anyone in any meetings today Whatever, you know, that doesn't that doesn't make you a failure you still have your values and You know, you're a person with limited energy and you're just gonna have to do your best so the other side of values is culture so Culture on a team is Incredibly important and when you interview people who are looking for a new job They talk about this all the time that the reason that they're unhappy at their current job is the culture They don't come and say hey, they're applying for a new job because they're not paid well enough and they want to like come And get paid more they don't come and say they don't usually come and say like oh, I I don't like the The tech stack that we're working on I want to work on some different problems. That's what's gonna motivate me to find a new job No, they're leaving companies because the culture of the company sucks and They want to work with good people in a better culture so if culture is that important that it's like What gets you to be able to attract employees or lose employees? and retain employees, but it's also Like their energy level and their passion and their ability to to work together so it's actually incredibly important but It's you know, it's one of those kind of like soft things and as developers We tend to like hard logical problems and it kind of is hard for us to say like Okay, we need to like get into like this squishy emotional stuff, but it is really the heart of of the problem so in terms of culture I think You can often as a leader Not you can underestimate how much you influence the culture when you are Having a bad day or a good day It rubs off on the entire team in ways that aren't totally obvious all the time But you should try to remember that Everything that you're doing is is influencing the culture, but you know again try not to beat yourself up about it So for setting the tone to me, I think a Successful culture of a software team Needs to be respectful, which means you can't have someone on your team who's like this arrogant ass Who makes fun of people when they write bad code no matter how bad the code is? You can't make fun of people you got to you know be direct that this is you know Needs work and how we're gonna change it But if you shut people down They'll never open back up again and the whole goal with a team culture is that the team works together very closely when you have a team that's like Collaborating very closely they act like a single brain with like all of these different Parts to the brain connected They know when and who to ask at every time they have an issue and that person is right there With the information that they needed and to teach them something and they know well This guy is the expert on this and she's really great at this and they're right there Like at your fingertips in slack and they're telling you what you need to know You might be the kind of developer that can solve any problem yourself That's fine, but if you're the kind of developer That could probably solve any problem themselves, but you work with the rest of the team to solve your problems as quickly as possible That's much more effective. You can solve any problem yourself given infinite time but your goal is to Get through the problems as quickly and efficiently as possible, which means calling on your teammates And working well together to do that you have to trust each other that no one's ever gonna make fun of each other for making a mistake and that You know everyone is going to be like support each other and it's okay to ask a Stupid question and not know things and that you don't have to ever be concerned That someone's gonna mistreat you because of that if you have someone like that on your team Who mistreats people no matter how good of a developer they are that you have to get them off the team If you can't get them to change their behavior because that'll ruin your entire culture Most cases You don't have to fire them most cases If you let them know it's unacceptable they can adjust their behavior So another sort of important part of Culture is to have a teaching culture where everyone on the team understands that Taking that moment to teach one another is Always a good thing and it doesn't matter how busy you are and How much is going on that? Nothing's really more valuable than taking that extra moment with your colleague To teach them about the problem that they're trying to solve right at that moment If you get your team to start to value teaching and mentoring each other the team Just just grows in their quality and how much they can do and you can have and you can get to the point where you can bring in junior developers and The senior developers can mentor that person up Just through day-to-day interactions until that person is very quickly a senior developer too, and that's the ideal Another kind of important part of the culture is to always try to share successes Elevate people thank people You know just throw them some thumbs up emojis. It only takes like a second It's corny, but you know it makes a difference to people's day and if you do these things To take care of your people you will Not only have them collaborating better and be more motivated But but you'll retain them and they'll be loyal to you and Listen to you and be able to work together with you. So I'm actually really Lucky to have had people that That I led at zip-tech that are coming to my new team Because you know because no matter You know the bad days that we had over the years That they know that I'll always have their back that I'll always take the blame and share the success with them that it's there's never gonna be a time when they sent a bug to prod and They get yelled at because I decided that they're an idiot and they should have never did that So It it it pays off Breaking down class system. This is this is an issue everywhere. I think it's especially true on the corporate level so in every tech team There are naturally Forming class system. Well, I don't know if they're naturally forming, but they tend to form So some of the class systems that form are like around Like your employment status, so in most teams like there can be a mixture of people who are full-time Contractor and and vendor people and it's what happens a lot is that turns into a class system, right? Where the the contractors or the people who are working for a vendor for a staff log are treated poorly and the full-time people are treated much better That is not Because of malicious reasons, I don't think I think it happens that way Because people have limited energy and they think to themselves like okay. Well this group of people works for a vendor So the vendor can worry about being nice to them and supporting them and taking care of them We already have all these other people that to deal with so we don't have time for them. We're not even gonna like Talk to them or try to get to know them really or treat them like human beings Well, that's a missed opportunity. It's not just it's not that it's not just that it's wrong to Treat some people better than others which it is I believe it's not just that it's wrong It's it's an enormous missed opportunity. It's a talent-based industry. So if you if you if you don't put the effort into supporting and nourishing and Recognizing people's talents and trying to elevate them You will miss out on the opportunity of them being able to do much bigger things Then when you treat them like there's some kind of a tool So it's actually your loss to kind of treat people like less than Full human being that can that can do is same as anyone else Some of the other class systems that you run into are like this. There's like a weird class struggle between technical and non-technical people Especially in the corporate world. So there's So and that's it kind of like it works and from both sides a lot of technical people don't respect non-technical people and think that they are just these sort of like mindless stakeholders who are just have like random whims that they're like coming at us with And are just really ultimately not very smart people if because they're unable to write code So there's like a bit of like that that side of the bias and then from the other side a Lot of people who are non-technical people How treat technical people like they are a resource or a tool or just somehow less than a fully human person And that is like for me pretty unbearable and And it's also crazy because Sometimes it will extend to you even when you even when you like Are doing the the strategy work and you're and you're doing non-technical work with these non-technical people Sometimes they will still see you because the because you know how to write code That makes you less than that because a coder is some type of like a interchangeable laborer that does some sort of like dirty work of some sort and so like they if they know if once they classify you as a technical person You're now like in a lower status not everyone and not everywhere Acts like that, but for some reason Some people do act like that and that's like the culture of their of their companies like treat developers like that It doesn't really make any sense considering that developers are smart people and they actually are People who are capable of everything else that the other people are doing It's they're not like Weird robots that are like missing something that the other people have in my only theory For for why that happens is that it's just like a type of way to Protect themselves and to like make them feel Like they must feel in some way threatened By people that can write code so they must just have to come up with some rationale What they're better than those people But it's it's all kind of the The a big Problem because when your whole thing that you're trying to accomplish with with these teams as a leader It's to get people to work together and so that means they need to work together with like the technical people and the non-technical people and Every one of these different Systems that separates people It is an obstacle to you actually having a high performing team So a lot of times your role as a leader in a large organization is just continuously trying to Connect people break down barriers between people get rid of walls that are separating groups and Get them to be able to communicate with each other and treat each other well because as Soon as you as soon as you kind of like break down one wall you find somewhere else that a wall is going up So it's just like an ongoing thing that you need to do one of the terrible parts of being a leader is that you have to fire people and Just that I would mention that because It's It's a it's one of the reasons people don't want to be a leader It's something that no one wants to do and there are a lot of leaders who Just can't handle it and that it's easier to just kind of keep people then to fire them So that happens all the time that there's like teams where a lot of people should have gotten cut and they have not gotten cut Because people are just afraid to To be the bad guy and and have to do that so I Would say it's extremely valuable if you are able to assess the performance people in your team and You have enough courage to be able to cut them you will be able to have a much better team The One of the problems with non-technical leaders of teams is that they have no idea how to assess the performance of the people on the team So they can have people on the team that are very bad low performers and they easily be fooled that those people are are doing fine and The other team is never able to be successful Because they're not able to figure it out Okay, so What it yeah So one of the things that I'm doing now in the past. I I was able to Start a team from the beginning And I had to grow that team and I had to Maintain that team and bring in people but it was always the same team. I didn't have to Um Build multiple teams. I just had one team. I had the same people stuck around for ten years Now I've taken on a team that is an already existing team and My challenge is to transform it Into being a high-performing team so I Think that a really good way to approach that problem is to follow the agile principles There's a few things That are good about that first of all when you're trying to like change Change a team It's a lot better to be able to like point to some widely accepted principles then to kind of come in with your own principles that you then have to like defend and Are just kind of people can easily kind of say well, that's just her wacky weird shit that she's into nobody can like Nobody's gonna say I'm into wacky weird shit if what I'm arguing is just the principles from the agile manifesto Right. So so the agile manifesto and the principles that go along with that are very well respected across the entire software industry So as you and these are the principles that are a part of the agile manifesto, so it's not like all the Kind of rules of like scrum. It's just the wider just like agile philosophy So when you're transforming a team, there's a million things that you have to do because You need to change the culture. You need to improve the processes. You need to do hiring You need to do firing. You need to change the structures of the teams. You need to Find your leaders and empower your leaders you need to have You need to like start knowledge sharing sessions You there's just like a million things you have to do and to figure out Which things you should do first and how to think about those things. I think these principles are really useful So you can kind of go through each one of these and then reflect on your team What is the next step that we could take to do better with this principle, right? So you can kind of find like an actionable step for each of these so For example Number three deliver working software frequently, right? So you reflect on that, okay? well, we deliver working software every two weeks and it's not really Frequently enough and it's not very automated so one of the things that we need to do on our team is to automate those deployments and Shift a lot of parts of our process left so that we can start to deliver working software more frequently So that's one of like our process changes in our and our infrastructure changes that we need to make number four Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project So that's another wall that you need to break down if you have if your business people and your developers are Not interacting directly which is common You need to figure out what are the steps that we can take to improve that Do we need to schedule some meetings? Do we need to get people to know each other? Do we need to invite some different people into slack? Do we need to ask the business to do some presentations to the development team? Or do we just need to like make sure that the development team Knows that they're empowered to reach out to the business and that's valued and that you know The business isn't like someone that you should be ignoring because because you know don't bother them. They're they're too busy or whatever So yeah, I think these are these are very useful to kind of just each one of these Each one of these principles if you really dig into it reflect on it Can lead to all sorts of different projects and ways that you can improve your team So they're they look like they're just like a short sentence, but when you like really dig into them There's a lot in in each one And I really like I really like a lot of them like this one simplicity The art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential So how are you going to apply that to your team or get them to understand that? But it's not about writing more code more code more code, but like figuring out how to Perhaps get rid of a bunch of code and and do less so that is all I have got I think I had some thoughts and My Call to action is hit me up unlinked in if you would like a job we have a Opening for a senior Drupal developer and for a DevOps lead and we are making a very awesome team. So if you know anyone Or you're interested, please find my LinkedIn. That's my advertisement portion Thanks a lot everybody