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
Staying Immersed in Technology as a Tech Leader with Hector Aguilar
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According to Hector Aguilar, President of Technology at Okta, if you get too far away from technology, you can’t be an effective leader of technology. But when your day-to-day job is focused more on managing individuals, it can be hard to find the time to code.
On today’s episode, Hector and Peter discuss how making coding mandatory for all managers can help instill company values and culture. Hector also shares how he prioritizes personal projects and learning to ensure he stays on top of the technology at work.
- [00:53] - Hector's origin story
- [02:42] - Stay close to the technology
- [04:02] - The challenge of keeping up
- [06:52] - Prioritizing what to learn and how
- [09:09] - The importance of credibility
- [09:49] - Interview code testing
- [16:38] - Measuring managers
- [19:23] - Clear expectations
- [21:41] - What does Okta do?
- [23:27] - Scaling an organization
- [25:52] - Keeping the quality bar high
- [27:49] - Culture of commitment
- [29:46] - Automate yourself and become a power mobile user
This episode of the CTO Connection Podcast was sponsored by Velocity by Code Climate. Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. In a few weeks, they're releasing Velocity 3.0 with Jira, which will combine Git and PR data with Issue data for the first time to give engineering executives a complete understanding of how their team works. You can now see the status of every initiative, without manual reporting, and know exactly which engineering projects get off track and why. You can request early access by going to https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/
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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