Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Balancing Coding and Management with Dhruba Borthakur
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Dhruba Borthakur is the Co-founder and CTO at Rockset but still manages to write code, on a good week, 50% of the time. In today's interview, Dhruba explained his ethos, namely that he likes to code to add value to other developers’ lives, and discussed how it is essential to create a culture where every person on the team feels empowered to make decisions that bring the organization to the next level.
As one of the founding architects of Hadoop software, Dhruba also shares his insights on how and why Hadoop was created as well as the difference between putting together teams for shipping software externally versus SaaS (software as a service) products. Tune in!
- [00:25] - How Dhruba became a CTO
- [02:06] - Transitioning to team management
- [04:59] - Building a supportive culture
- [07:50] - Solving tomorrow's problems
- [10:34] - Creation of the Hadoop file system
- [16:21] - Recruiting for an open-source project
- [19:34] - Finding rock star engineers at Rockset
- [27:36] - Team geography
- [30:15] - Fail fast and learn quickly
- [32:12] - Pulling the plug
- [36:17] - Fast-moving teams
- [41:25] - Finding time to write code
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
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