Podcast profile
By Athenian
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Follow Jason Warner (MD at Redpoint Ventures and former CTO of GitHub) and Eiso Kant (Founder of Athenian) as they chat about the biggest lessons they’ve learned about Engineering Leadership throughout the years.
Latest episode
36 min
Topics
Managing engineering organizations, teams, delivery, architecture, and technical leadership.
Hiring, career development, skills, workplace practice, and professional progression in technology.
Formats
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Audience level
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
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From the feed
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
Jason and Eiso explore the implications of Mark Zuckerberg's plan to flatten Meta's management layers and examine the current ratio of engineers to managers, questioning if this balance is truly efficient or if it's simply a byproduct of Silicon Valley culture.
Eiso and Jason discuss how engineering leaders can fall into the trap of midwit thinking (the infamous bell curve meme) where they have a surface level understanding of complex topics and use buzzwords to sound knowledgeable. Why do managers become overly obsessed with specific tools?
Former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath shares his lessons on engineering leadership, such as aligning goals, handling difficult situations, and optimizing team metrics. Jason, Eiso and Sri talk about their experiences with system failures and the importance of technical mentors and CTOs in promoting better leadership.
Jason and Eiso share their love-hate relationship with OKRs and discuss the pedantic nature of setting objectives and how they ultimately help to align and empower organizations.
Jason and Eiso explore the intersection between finance and engineering leadership and discuss the importance of position sizing in engineering orgs. From promotions to product initiatives and technology choices, leaders are constantly making bets.
Jason and Eiso get real about censorship culture in the tech industry. From free speech to the rights of employees and the role of companies in society. They chat about privilege in tech, whether we need democracy within tech companies, the role of culture stewards, and more.
Jason and Eiso deep dive into corporate politics, hierarchies, and the sociopaths that often sit at the top as they analyze the behaviors of famous C-Level leaders, such as Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, and pick apart what Engineering Leaders can learn from them.
Phil Calçado is the Global CTO at PicPay, one the largest engineering orgs in Latin America. He joins the podcast to re-tell his war stories as an engineering leader at SoundCloud, Digital Ocean, SeatGeek, MeetUp, and more celebrity-tier tech companies.
Happy 2023! or is it? … Jason and Eiso talk about the economic recession and share their predictions for the year ahead. They chat about what happened in 2022 that set the stage for 2023, what the hiring halt means for software engineers, what will happen to those that didn't prepare, and more!
Allison McMillan, VP of Engineering at Quota Path, joins us to talk about the transformation engineering leaders go through when they become parents and the lessons we can take parenting to our day-to-day as managers.