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
Building a truly global engineering team with Rebecca Parsons, CTO @ ThoughtWorks
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In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Rebecca Parsons, CTO of Thoughtworks, to discuss managing a large, truly global engineering team, the implications for current advancements in architecture and the importance of supporting diversity and inclusion.
- [00:28] Path to CTO
- [01:58] Leading a 1200-person engineering team
- [04:08] Deciding on team size and structure
- [05:22] Managing geographically distributed teams; hiring locally
- [07:49] Career development for individual contributors and managers
- [11:00] Keeping up with new technologies
- [12:19] ThoughtWorks University
- [15:43] Looking forward to the next 3-5 years
- [18:58] Advancements in how we think about architecture
- [25:29] What makes a great engineer
- [26:42] Attracting talent
- [29:17] Bias in AI and the science of diversity
You can hear more at The 2019 San Francisco CTO Summit, coming up May 21, 2019, where Rebecca will be presenting her talk on Bias in AI and the Science of Diversity. You can also find Rebecca on LinkedIn or Twitter and her latest book, Building Evolutionary Architectures, is out now.
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Podcast episode production by Dante32.