Episode 212: Randy Shoup on Company Culture
Tobias Kaatz talks to former Kixeye CTO Randy Shoup about company culture in the software industry in this sequel to the show on hiring in the software industry (Episode 208). Prior to Kixeye, Randy worked as director of engineering at Google for the Google App Engine and as chief engineer and distinguished architect at eBay. He has spoken on various occasions about how to build great teams and establish a company culture that supports teams in what they need to deliver.
In this interview, Randy talks about what a healthy company culture should look like and who is responsible for its development. He also shares his opinion on how teams should work and what they should look like. He then discusses key performance indicators (KPIs) that can measure success and show when managers and employees are on track.
Based on his experience working at various small and large companies, Randy presents examples of healthy and toxic company cultures and their effect on teams and products. He and Tobias also discuss whether multinational companies can still get their teams to be productive even when they’re located around the world.
Recording venue: Internet
Related Links
- Randy Shoup on Hiring in the Software Industry: https://www.se-radio.net/2014/08/episode-208-randy-shoup-on-hiring-in-the-software-industry/
- Randy Shoup on “The Virtuous Cycle of Velocity”: http://youtu.be/EwLBoRyXTOI
- Randy Shoup on “Scalability at KIXEYE” (also on how to scale teams): http://www.infoq.com/presentations/kixeye-scalability
- KIXEYE “Chassis” on Github: https://github.com/Kixeye/chassis
- Netflix on Github: https://github.com/Netflix
- Randy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/randyshoup
- QCon San Francisco: http://qconsf.com/
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It was rather sad that the matter of diversity in hiring wasn’t addressed at all when you were discussing cultural fit. Especially since that’s one of the major weaknesses in many tech companies.
Thank you for this great discussion. Like Jonathan I would have also liked to hear about diversity. I’m also very interested in learning how many small teams can coordinate to build one big thing. For example, how can you build a seamless user experience with twenty small teams? Especially if this involves specialists who are not found in each team – e.g. usability gurus and domain experts.
One of the best episodes I have listened to on SER. I thought Randy covered all the real world issues very well and gave very informative and valuable tips for the job searcher. I liked that he even made appropriate references like refer to the FIFA World Cup as a “football” competition and not a soccer competition as this is pretty much how it is referred to every where else apart from North America 🙂
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