Choose Boring Technology Culture

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Honeycomb recently announced our $50M Series D funding round. We aren’t the type to hype this a lot; Emily summed it up crisply as, “Living another day on someone else’s money isn’t business success, even though it is a lovely vote of confidence.”

Agreed. The vote of confidence does mean more than usual, given the dire state of VC funding these days, but…raising money is not success. Building a viable, sustainable company is success.

Whenever we are talking to investors, something that inevitably comes up is what a bomb ass team 🌈 we have. They have always been impressed by our ability to recruit and retain marquee names, people we “shouldn’t have been able to get” at our stage; honestly it’s even better than they realize, because we have heavy hitters all up and down the company, most of whom simply aren’t as well known. 😉 (Fame, and this may shock you, is not a function of talent.)

People join Honeycomb for many reasons, but “culture” is one of the most commonly cited. We have never been shy about talking about the ways we think tech culture sucks, or the experiments we are running. But this has given rise to the occasional impression that we are primarily cultural innovators who occasionally write software. We really aren’t.

In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. We try to choose boring culture.

What The Fuck Does “Culture” Even Mean?

Ok, so this is where the problem starts. This is why it grates on my nerves any time someone starts making pronouncements about how “your culture is bad”, “culture is the problem”, “fix your broken culture”… AUUGGGHHH. Those sentences are MEANINGLESS.

What does “culture” even mean?? Let’s consult the interwebs:

  • Culture: “An umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions and norms for a group; knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of those individuals”
  • Culture: “The shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterize an organization; working environment, company policies and employee behavior”
  • Culture: “Maintain tissue cells, bacteria, etc in conditions suitable for growth”

Well, at least that last one makes sense. 😛 But if culture means everything, then culture means nothing. That’s just not helpful!

Instead, let’s disambiguate company culture into two categories. There is the formal culture of the organization (meetings, mission/vision, management, job ladders, hiring practices, strategy, organizational structure, team dynamics, and so on), and there is the informal culture of the people, the ways that humor, playfulness, and practices manifest in groups and individuals.

Organizational culture is professional, formal, structural, institutional. Managerial responsibilities, promotions, compensation plans, and fiduciary duties are just a few of the .many aspects of organizational culture.

Informal culture is chaotic, joyful, free-spirited, and fun, individualized, inherently anarchic and bottoms-up. It’s things like writing release notes in limerick form, bringing banana bread to work after an outage, long pun threads, slack channels dedicated to pets, competing on the number of employees named “Jess”* vs “Chris”*.

Organizational culture is the cake; informal culture is the frosting. Organizational culture is what leaders are hired to build, informal culture is what bubbles up irrepressibly in the gaps. (I wish I had better names for these!) And when it comes to formal, organizational culture, you don’t want to be in the business of innovating.

Culture Serves The Business

As a leader, you should absolutely care about your culture, but your primary responsibility is the health of the business. The purpose of your culture is to make your business succeed. It does not serve you, and it does not serve the people you care about, to be unclear on this front.

I don’t mean to make it sound like this is simple or easy. It is not. You are dealing with people’s lives and livelihoods, and it is all about tradeoffs. What might be best for an individual in the long run (for example, leaving your company to pursue another opportunity) might harm your business in the near term. Yet you might decide to celebrate them in leaving and not pressure them to stay, because you believe that what’s best for your business in the longer term is for employees to be able to trust their managers when they say, “I believe that working here is the best thing you can do for your career right now.”

The transactional nature of work relationships is how they differ from e.g. family relationships. You can form intense bonds and deep friendships with the people you work with — you may even form bonds that transcend your work relationship — but your relationship at work comes with terms and conditions.

Your company culture can’t be everything to everyone. Nor should you try.

You HAVE to care more about the health of the business than about culture for culture’s own sake. Even if — especially if — you have lots of strong opinions about culture, and there are lots of ways you want to deviate from common wisdom. Doing well at business is what earns you more innovation tokens to invest.

“Choose Boring Technology Culture”

Dan McKinley coined the phrase “choose boring technology” and the concept of innovation tokens nearly a decade ago.

“Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad [2]. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough….The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. — @mcfunley

The moral of the story is that innovation is costly, so you should choose standard, well-understood, rock-solid technologies insofar as you possibly can. You only get a few innovation tokens to spend, so you should spend them on technologies that can give you a true competitive advantage — not on, like, reinventing memcache for the hell of it.

The same goes for running a business, and the same goes for organizational culture. We have collectively inherited a set of default practices that work pretty well, like the 40 hour work week and having 1x1s with your manager. You CAN choose to do something different, but you should probably have a good reason. To the extent that you can learn from other people’s experience, you probably should, whether in business or in tech; innovation is expensive, and you only get so many tokens. Do you really want to spend one on a radical reinvention of your PTO policy? How does that serve you?

Innovation gets all the headlines, but I would posit that what most companies need is actually much simpler: organizational health.

Great Culture begins with Organizational Health

There’s this book by Patrick Lencione called “The Advantage: How Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.” (He is best known for writing “Five Dysfunctions of a Team“.) This guy is to organizational health what James Madison was to constitutional government: a very specific kind of genius.

I picked up “The Advantage” in 2020, around the time Honeycomb stopped teetering on the brink of failure, once it became clear we were likely to be around for a while. It made a huge impression on me. He makes the case that most businesses spend a ton of energy on trying to be “smart”, and relatively little on being “healthy”.

Healthy orgs are characterized by minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover. Health begets — and trumps — intelligence.

As Lencione says, an organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. People in a healthy organization will learn from each other, identify problems, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusion, they will cycle through problems and rally much faster than dysfunctional rivals will. And they create an environment in which everyone else can do the same, which creates a multiplier effect.

The healthier an org is, the more of its collective intelligence it is able to tap into and use. Most orgs exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital available to them, but the healthy ones can tap into almost all of it.

Organizational Health Is Too Boring

No one would disagree with any of this, in principle. ☺️ EVERYBODY wants to work at a place where the mission, vision, and values are clear, meaningful and inspiring; where everyone is rallied around the same winning strategy; and where it’s crystal clear how your role specifically will contribute to that success. Everybody agrees that a healthy organizational culture leads to better outcomes.

So why isn’t every company like that?

Well, it is much easier said than done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It is unglamorous work, difficult to measure, and at the end of the day we are always making risky decisions between conflicting tradeoffs based on partial information. We are imperfect meat sacks who lack self awareness, struggle to understand each other, and get hangry and snap. And the job is never done. You never “get there”, any more than you are ever perfectly healthy with perfect relationships.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We don’t have to be perfect to be a meaningfully better presence in people’s lives. We just have to be healthy enough to achieve our goals.

Nobody Wants An “Exciting” Company Culture

When you tell your partner you had an exciting day at work, do they respond with “uh oh 😬🔥🧯”?

All too often, excitement at work comes from strategic swerves, projects getting canceled, lack of focus, missteps or conflicts, anxiety and passive aggression, outages or downtime, outrageous demands coming from out of left field, or getting information at the last minute that you should have had ages ago. Living on the edge of your seat can be very stimulating! Firefighting is a huge rush, and if you’re part of the essential glue holding this creaky vessel together, you can get hooked on feeling desperately needed.

But this isn’t good for your cortisol levels, and it doesn’t move the company forward. When so much of your energy goes to bailing water and staying afloat, you don’t have much left over for rowing the oars. You want energy going to the oars.

Should work be exciting? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s not the adjective I would reach for. Emotional rollercoaster rides don’t provide the kind of circumstances that tend to unlock great design or engineering, or collaboration or focus. I would rather reach for words like achievement, fulfillment, pride, comradeship, or the joy of being part of something greater than yourself, not “exciting” or “fun”.

Leaders Worry Too Much About Making Work Fun

As a leader, your job is not to “make work fun”. You are not here to entertain your employees. Your responsibility is to build a formal culture that works, that supports the success of the business.

So what, am I dooming you to a life of bureaucratic beige and meetings without puns? Fuck no.

If formal organizational culture is like the architecture, then informal culture is furnishings, light displays, murals and banners — whatever you do on the inside. You don’t want someone getting overly creative with the load-bearing beams. Save that for when it’s time to paint “Frozen” murals on the walls and hang the matching icicle curtains.

You want formal culture to be boring, stable, reliable, load-bearing…because this creates a safe structure for people to bring the humor, the fun, the joy, the delight, without any fear of building collapse. The company doesn’t have to bring the fun; people bring the fun. Have you met people? People are fucking weirdos. 🥰 If you create an emotionally safe zone and the conditions for success, informal culture will thrive. 🪅People bring the fun🪅 — they always do.

The best informal culture is almost always bottoms up. But managers, execs, HR/People teams, etc can encourage informal culture. One of the most powerful things you can do is just participate. Show up for drinks, play the board games, keep the puns rolling, get silly with your team! Your participation gives people permission and shows that you value their creative cultural labor at work.

Of course there are no bright lines — companies can throw great parties! — but that’s not the job; building a healthy org is the job. Doing that right frees people up to have joy at work. It makes the celebrations that much bigger, the fun that much funnier.

Success Is Rocket Fuel For Fun

Think back to the most corporate fun you’ve ever had at work — the biggest parties, celebrations, blowouts, etc. Were they holiday parties and random occasions, or were they actually linked to great achievements? I bet they were the latter.

You don’t gather at work for the fun of it, you come together to do great things. It stands to reason the peak moments of joy and bonding are fueled by a sense of accomplishment.

Even on a smaller scale, levity and joy are inextricably linked to doing great work and making customers happy. For example, ops/SRE teams are notorious for their gallows humor around outages (ops is ALWAYS the funniest engineering team, in my experience ☺️). But dark humor is only funny when you are also taking your work seriously. Joking about the inevitability of data loss stops being funny real fast if you are actually playing fast and loose with customer backups.

In the absence of success, progress, and high performance, the kind of “frosting” behaviors that bring so much hilarity to work — joking and teasing, puns and stories — actually stop being fun and start making people feel distracted, irritated and on edge. You don’t want to hear a steady stream of jokes from somebody who keeps letting you down.

Side note: unhealthy orgs may have pockets of humor, but it often comes at the expense of other, less prestigious teams. Lots of people may feel too anxious, powerless or threatened to participate. Your experience of whether those companies are “fun” or not is likely to depend heavily on where you sit in the hierarchy. But a healthy org creates the level conditions for humor, playfulness and creativity throughout the org.

Investing Your Innovation Tokens

So yeah. Despite our reputation for cultural innovation, I’d say we’re actually pretty conservative when it comes to operating a company.

Not only are we not revolutionaries, we are actually trying to do as little differently as possible, because innovation is costly!! Instead, we (as a leadership team) are more focused on trying to execute well and improve upon our organizational health. For the past year, we have been laboring especially hard over strategy — the diagnosis, guiding policy, and set of coherent actions we need to win. Our first responsibility is to make the business succeed, after all.

Which brings us back to the topic of innovation tokens.

I started writing down some of the innovation tokens I feel like we’ve spent. But it dawned on me that when I look at most of the cultural experiments we run, and the things we talk about and write about publicly — stuff like the dangers of hierarchy, hiring, interviewing, high-leverage teams, engineering levels, rituals for engineering teams, etc — it doesn’t feel like innovation at all. It’s all just about trying to have a healthier organization. Hierarchy sucks because visible hierarchy has been shown to dampen people’s creativity, motivation and problem-solving skills. Engineering levels are important because they bring clarity. And so on.

What makes something rise to the level of an innovation token is the amount of time we end up asking other people to invest lots of their time into.

  • Like, we are 1.5 years into a 4 year experiment having an employee on our board of directors. We are about to spin up an internal Advisory Panel to more broadly distribute the impact of our employee board member around the company.
  • In the past, we have experimented with regular ethics discussion groups.
  • Last year we did a deep dive into company values with small breakout groups.
  • Some internal decisions around things like values are handled, not by estaff, but by a group of six people; one employee representative of each org, nominated by their VP; who do a deep dive into the material together and come back with a decision or recommendation.
  • We are about to start the process of developing our own leadership curriculum. We know that we need to equip our managers with better tools, and culturally indoctrinate new employees, so I am excited to build something with our cultural fingerprints all over it.

We run a lot of experiments around transparency, like, the agenda for exec staff meetings can be viewed by the whole company. After every board meeting, we present the same thing we showed to the board to the whole company during all-hands. We are transparent on salary bands. Stuff like that.

We are far from perfect; we have a long ways to go, and when I look around the org it’s hard not to only see all the work left to be done. But we are a lot healthier and better off than we were a year ago, which was better off than we were two years ago, let alone three.

The Experience Of Making This Will Be With Us Forever

A few months ago I was reading this lengthy profile of Sarah Polley in the New Yorker, as she was doing a bunch of press for her new movie, “Women Talking”. (The movie itself sounds incredibly intense; I am still trying to find time and emotional energy to watch it. Someday!)

One thing she said got lodged in my brain, and I’ve been unable to forget it ever since. She’s talking about the experience of having been a child actor, and how intensely it informs the experience she strives to create for everybody working on the set of one of her movies; where parents get to go home and have dinner with their kids, etc.

[He] told her, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect a few people for a little while, in a way that is out of our control. The only thing that’s certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us—it will become part of us—forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience.”

Making a movie that lots of people want to see, one that was a good financial return on investment, buys you the ability to make even more movies, employ more people, take even bigger creative risks. If all you want to do is be a niche indie player, working on a shoestring budget, more power to you. But if you really believe in your ideas, and you want to see them go mainstream … you need mainstream success.

Sarah Polley makes movies. We make developer tools. ☺️ But the same thing is true of working at Honeycomb.

If we are very lucky, and work very hard, our work may help teams build better software and spend fewer, more meaningful hours at work, for a long time to come. I love our mission. But the only certain thing is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, become part of us, forever.

So we should try our best to make it a good experience. ☺️

charity.

Footnotes

(1) Inherited Defaults

How to access these inherited defaults can be a bit more complicated than I make it sound. Working as a manager at Facebook for two years taught me more about these defaults than anything else I’ve ever done in my career. Big companies have had to figure a lot of shit out in order to function at scale, which is why I often advise anyone who plans on starting a company or being a director/VP to do a stint at one. Will Larson’s book “An Elegant Puzzle” does a great job of laying out defaults and best practices for engineering orgs, and his blog has even more useful bits.. Otherwise, you might wanna get yourself an advisor or two with a lot of operator experience, and get used to asking questions like “how does this normally get done?”

(2) Corporate Fun

There’s plenty of stuff in the grey area between formal, organizational culture and informal, individual culture. Companies often stray into fun-like adjacencies like holiday parties, offsites, etc. Fostering a sense of “play” and informality is actually really important for making teams click with each other, and obviously the company should foot the bill if it’s a work function. Just be mindful of what you’re doing and what your goals are when you veer into the rocky shoals of Forced Corporate Fun. 😆

Choose Boring Technology Culture

Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”

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I recently got a plaintive text message from my magnificent friend Abby Bangser, asking about a conversation we had several years ago:

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you. A long time ago I remember you talking about what an adjustment it was becoming a vendor, how all of a sudden people would just discard your opinion and your expertise without even listening. And that it was SUPER ANNOYING.

I’m now experiencing something similar. Did you ever find any good reading/listening/watching to help you adjust to being on the vendor side without being either a terrible human or constantly disregarded?”

Oh my.. This brings back memories. ☺️🙈

Like Abby, I’ve spent most of my career as an engineer in the trenches. I have also spent a lot of time cheerfully talking smack about software. I’ve never really had anyone question my experience[1] or my authority as an expert, hardened as I was in the flames of a thousand tire fires.

Then I started a software company. And all of a sudden this bullshit starts popping up. Someone brushing me off because I was “selling something”, or dismissing my work like I was fatally compromised. I shrugged it off, but if I stopped to think, it really bothered me. Sometimes I felt like yelling “HEY FUCKERS, I am one of your kind! I’m trying to HELP YOU. Stop making this so hard!” 😡 (And sometimes I actually did yell, lol.)

That’s what I remember complaining to Abby about, five or six years ago. It was all very fresh and raw at the time.

We’ll get to that. First let’s dial the clock back a few more years, so you can fully appreciate the rich irony of my situation. (Or skip the story and jump straight to “Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to“.)

The first time I encountered “software for sale”

My earliest interaction with software vendors was at Linden Lab. Like most infrastructure teams, most of the software we used was open source. But somewhere around 2009? 2010? Linden’s data engineering team began auditioning vendors like Splunk, Greenplum, Vertica[2], etc for our data warehouse solution, and I tagged along as the sysinfra/ops delegate.

For two full days we sat around this enormous table as vendor after vendor came by to demo and plump their wares, then opened the floor for questions.

One of the very first sales guys did something that pissed me off me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — maybe he was ignoring my questions or talking down to me. (I’m certain I didn’t come across like a seasoned engineering professional; in my mid twenties, face buried in my laptop, probably wearing pajamas and/or pigtails.) But I do remember becoming very irritated, then settling in to a stance of, shall we say, oppositional defiance.

I peppered every sales team aggressively with questions about the operational burden of running their software, their architectural decisions, and how canned or cherry-picked their demos were. Any time they let slip a sign of weakness or betrayed uncertainty, I bore down harder and twisted the knife. I was a ✨royal asshole✨. My coworkers on the data team found this extremely entertaining, which only egged me on.

What the fuck?? 🫢😧🫠 I’m not usually an asshole to strangers.. where did that come from?

What open source culture taught me about sales

I came from open source, where contempt for software vendors was apparently de rigueur. (is it still this way?? seems like it might have gotten better? 😦) It is fascinating now to look back and realize how much attitude I soaked up before coming face to face with my first software vendor. According to my worldview at the time,

  1. Vendors are liars
  2. They will say anything to get you to buy
  3. Open source software is always the safest and best code
  4. Software written for profit is inherently inferior, and will ultimately be replaced by the inevitable rise of better, faster, more democratic open source solutions
  5. Sales exists to create needs that ought never to have existed, then take you to the cleaners
  6. Engineers who go work for software vendors have either sold out, or they aren’t good enough to hack it writing real (consumer facing) software.

I’m remembering Richard Stallman trailing around behind me, up and down the rows of vendor booths at USENIX in his St IGNUcious robes, silver disk platter halo atop his head, offering (begging?) to lay his hands on my laptop and bless it, to “free it from the demons of proprietary software.” Huh. (Remember THIS song? 🎶 😱)

Given all that, it’s not hugely surprising that my first encounter with software vendors devolved into hostile questioning.

(It’s fun to speculate on the origin of some of these beliefs. Like, I bet 3) and 4) came from working on databases, particularly Oracle and MySQL/Postgres. As for 5) that sounds an awful lot like the beauty industry and other products sold to women. 🤭)

Behind every software vendor lies a recovering open source zealot(???)

I’ve had many, many experiences since then that slowly helped me dismantle this worldview, brick by brick. Working at Facebook made me realize that open source successes like Apache, Haproxy, Nginx etc are exceptions, not the norm; that this model is only viable for certain types of general-purpose infrastructure software; that governance and roadmaps are a huge issue for open source projects too; and that if steady progress is being made, at the end of the day, somewhere somebody is probably paying those developers.

I learned that the overwhelming majority of production-caliber code is written by somebody who was paid to write it — not by volunteers. I learned about coordination costs and overhead, how expensive it is to organize an army of volunteers, and the pains of decentralized quality control. I learned that you really really want the person who wrote the code to stick around and own it for a long time, and not just on alternate weekends when they don’t have the kids (and/or they happen to feel like it).

I learned about game theory, and I learned that sales is about relationships. Yes, there are unscrupulous sellers out there, just like there are shady developers, but good sales people don’t want you to walk away feeling tricked or disappointed any more than you want to be tricked or disappointed. They want to exceed your expectations and deliver more value than expected, so you’ll keep coming back. In game theory terms, it’s a “repeated game”.

I learned SO MUCH from interviewing sales candidates at Honeycomb.[3] Early on, when nobody knew who we were, I began to notice how much our sales candidates were obsessed with value. They were constantly trying to puzzle out out how much value Honeycomb actually brought to the companies we were selling to. I was not used to talking or thinking about software in terms of “value”, and initially I found this incredibly offputting (can you believe it?? 😳).

Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you

Ultimately, this was the biggest (if dumbest) lesson of all: I learned that good software has tremendous value. It unlocks value and creates value, it pays enormous ongoing dividends in dollars and productivity, and the people who build it, support it, and bring it to market fully deserve to recoup a slice of the value they created for others.

There was a time when I would have bristled indignantly and said, “we didn’t start honeycomb to make money!” I would have said that the reason we built honeycomb because we knew as engineers what a radical shift it had wrought in how we built and understood software, and we didn’t want to live without it, ever again.

But that’s not quite true. Right from the start, Christine and I were intent on building not just great software, but a great software business. It wasn’t personal wealth we were chasing, it was independence and autonomy — the freedom to build and run a company the way we thought it should be run, building software to radically empower other engineers like ourselves.

Guess what you have to do if you care about freedom and autonomy?

Make money. 🙄☺️

I also realized, belatedly, that most people who start software companies do so for the same damn reasons Christine and I did… to solve hard problems, share solutions, and help other engineers like ourselves. If all you want to do is get rich, this is actually a pretty stupid way to do that. Over 90% of startups fail, and even the so-called “success stories” aren’t as predictably lucrative as RSUs. And then there’s the wear and tear on relationships, the loss of social life, the vicissitudes of the financial system, the ever-looming spectre of failure … 👻☠️🪦 Startups are brutal, my friend.

Karma is a bitch

None of these are particularly novel insights, but there was a time when they were definitely news to me. ☺️ It was a pretty big shock to my system when I first became a software vendor and found myself sitting on the other side of the table, the freshly minted target of hostile questioning.

These days I am far less likely to be cited as an objective expert than I used to be. I see people on Hacker News dismissing me with the same scornful wave of the hand as I used to dismiss other vendors. Karma’s a bitch, as they say. What goes around comes around. 🥰

I used to get very bent out of shape by this. “You act like I only care because I’m trying to sell you something,” I would hotly protest, “but it’s exactly the opposite. I built something because I cared.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that vested interests can create blind spots, ones I might not even be aware of.

And that’s ok! My arguments/my solutions should be sturdy enough to withstand any disclosure of personal interest. ☺️

Some people are jerks; I can’t control that. But there are a few things I can do to acknowledge my biases up front, play fair, and just generally be the kind of vendor that I personally would be happy to work with.

Five easy ways to make yourself a vendor worth listening to

So I gave Abby a short list of a few things I do to try and signal that I am a trustworthy voice, a vendor worth listening to. (What do you think, did I miss anything?)

🌸 Lead with your bias.🌸
I always try to disclose my own vested interest up front, and sometimes I exaggerate for effect: “As a vendor, I’m contractually obligated to say this”, or “Take it for what you will, obviously I have religious convictions here”. Everyone has biases; I prefer to talk to people who are aware of theirs.

🌸 Avoid cheap shots.🌸
Try to engage with the most powerful arguments for your competitors’ solutions. Don’t waste your time against straw men or slam dunks; go up against whatever ideal scenarios or “steel man” arguments they would muster in their own favor. Comparing your strengths vs  their strengths results in a way more interesting, relevant and USEFUL discussion for all involved.

🌸 Be your own biggest critic.🌸
Be forthcoming about the flaws of your own solution. People love it when you are unafraid to list your own product’s shortcomings or where the competition shines, or describe the scenarios where other tools are genuinely superior or more cost-effective. It makes you look strong and confident, not weak.

What would you say about your own product as an engineer, or a customer? Say that.

🌸 You can still talk shit about software, just not your competitors‘ software. 🌸
I try not to gratuitously snipe at our competitors. It’s fine to speak at length about technical problems, differentiation and tradeoffs, and to address how specifically your product compares with theirs. But confine your shit talking to categories of software where you don’t have a personal conflict of interest.

Like, I’m not going to get on twitter and take a swipe at a monitoring vendor (anymore 😇), but I might say rude things about a language, a framework, or a database I have no stake in, if I’m feeling punchy. ☺️ (This particular gem of advice comes by way of Adam Jacob.)

🌸 Be generous with your expertise.🌸
If you have spent years going deep on one gnarly problem, you might very well know that problem and its solution space more thoroughly than almost anyone else in the world. Do you know how many people you can help with that kind of mastery?! A few minutes from you could potentially spare someone days or weeks of floundering. This is a gift few can give.

It feels good, and it’s a nice break from battering your head against unsolvable problems. Don’t restrict your help to paying customers, and, obviously, don’t give self-serving advice. Maybe they can’t buy/don’t need your solution today, but maybe someday they will.

In conclusion

There’s a time and place for being oppositional. Sometimes a vendor gets all high on their own supply, or starts making claims that aren’t just an “optimistic” spin on the facts but are provably untrue. If any vendor is operating in poor faith they deserve to to be corrected.

But it’s a shitty, self-limiting stance to take as a default. We are all here to build things, not tear things down. No one builds software alone. The code you write that defines your business is just the wee tippy top of a colossal iceberg of code written by other people — device drivers, libraries, databases, graphics cards, routers, emacs. All of this value was created by other people, yet we collectively benefit.

Think of how many gazillion lines of code are required for you to run just one AWS Lambda function! Think of how much cooperation and trust that represents. And think of all the deals that brokered that trust and established that value, compensating the makers and allowing them to keep building and improving the software we all rely on.

We build software together. Vendors exist to help you. We do what we do best, so you can spend your engineering cycles doing what you do best, working on your core product. Good sales deals don’t leave anyone feeling robbed or cheated, they leave both sides feeling happy and excited to collaborate.[4]

🐝💜Charity.

[1] Yes, I know this experience is far from universal; LOTS of people in tech have not felt like their voices are heard or their expertise acknowledged. This happens disproportionately to women and other under-represented groups, but it also happens to plenty of members of the dominant groups. It’s just a really common thing! However that has not really been my experience — or if it has, I haven’t noticed — nor Abby’s, as far as I’m aware.

[2] My first brush with columnar storage systems! Which is what makes Honeycomb possible today.

[3] I have learned SO MUCH from watching the world class sales professionals we have at Honeycomb. Sales is a tough gig, and doing it well involves many disciplines — empathy, creativity, business acumen, technical expertise, and so much more. Selling to software engineers in particular means you are often dealing with cocky little shits who think they could do your job with a few lines of code. On behalf of my fellow little shits engineers, I am sorry. 🙈

[4] Like our sales team says: “Never do a deal unless you’d do both sides of the deal.” I fucking love that.

Questionable Advice: “People Used To Take Me Seriously. Then I Became A Software Vendor”

Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery

mipsytipsy, , 5 Comments

I recently wrote a twitter thread on the proper role of architects, or as I put it, tongue-in-cheek-ily, whether or not architect is a “bullshit role”.

It got a LOT of reactions (2.5 weeks later, the thread is still going!!), which I would sort into roughly three camps:

  1. “OMG this resonates; this matches my experiences working with architects SO MUCH”,
  2. “I’m an architect, and you’re not wrong”, and
  3. “I’m an architect and I hate you.”

Some of your responses (in all three categories!) were truly excellent and thought-provoking. THANK YOU — I learned a ton. I figured I should write up a longer, more readable, somewhat less bombastic version of my original thread, featuring some of my favorite responses.

Where I’m Coming From

Just to be clear, I don’t hate architects! Many of the most brilliant engineers I have ever met are architects.

Nor do I categorically believe that architects should not exist, especially after reading all of your replies. I received some interesting and compelling arguments for the architect role at larger enterprises, and I have no reason to believe they are not true.

Also, please note that I personally have never worked at a company with “architect” as a role. I have also never worked anywhere but Silicon Valley, or at any company larger than Facebook. My experiences are far from universal. I know this.

Let me get suuuuuper specific here about what I’m reacting to:

  • When I meet a new “architect”, they tend toward the extremes: either world class and amazing or useless and out of touch, with precious little middle ground.
  • When I am interviewing someone whose last job title was “architect”, they often come from long tenured positions, and their engineering skills are usually very, very rusty. They often have a lot of detailed expertise about how their last company worked, but not a lot of relevant, up-to-date experience.
  • Because of 👆, when I see “architect” on a job ladder, I tend to feel dubious about that org in a way I do not when I see “staff engineer” or “principal engineer” on the ladder.

What I have observed is that the architect role tends to be the locus of a whole mess of antipatterns and organizational fuckery. The role itself can also be one that does not set up the people who hold it for a successful career in the long run, if they are not careful. It can be a one-way street to being obsolete.

I think that a lot of companies are using some of their best, most brilliant senior engineers as glorified project manager/politicians to paper over a huge amount of organizational dysfunction, while bribing them with money and prestige, and that honestly makes me pretty angry. 😡

But title is not destiny. And if you are feeling mad because none of what I’ve written applies to you, then I’m not writing about you! Live long and prosper. 🖖

Architect Anti-patterns and fuckery

There is no one right way to structure your org and configure your titles, any more than there is any one right way to architect your systems and deploy your services. And there is an eternal tension between centralization and specialization, in roles as well as in systems.

Most of the pathologies associated with architects seem to flow from one of two originating causes:

  1. unbundling decision-making authority from responsibility for results, and
  2. design becoming too untethered from execution (the “Frank Gehry” syndrome)

But it’s only when being an architect brings more money and prestige than engineering that these problems really tend to solidify and become entrenched.

Skin In The Game

When that happens, you often run into the same fucking problem with architects and devs as we have traditionally seen with devs and ops. Only instead of “No, I can’t be on call or get woken up, my time is far too valuable, too busy writing important software”, the refrain is, “No, I can’t write software or review code, my time is far too valuable, I’m much too busy telling other people how to do their jobs.”

This is also why I think calling the role “architect” instead of “staff engineer” or “principal engineer” may itself be kind of an anti-pattern. A completely different title implies that it’s a completely different job, when what you really want, at least most of the time, is an engineer performing a slightly different (but substantially overlapping) set of functions as a senior engineer.

My core principle here is simple: only the people responsible for building software systems get to make decisions about how those systems get built. I can opine all I want on your architecture or ours, but if I’m not carrying a pager for you, you should probably just smile politely and move along.

Technical decisions should be ultimately be made by the people who have to live with the consequences. But good architects will listen to those people, and help co-create architectural decisions that take into account local, domain, and enterprise perspectives (a Katy Allred quote).

Architecture is a core engineering skill

When you make architecture “someone else’s problem” and scrap the expectation that it is a core skill, you get weaker engineers and worse systems.

Learning to see the forest as well as the trees, and factor in security, maintainability, data integrity and scale, performance, etc is a *critical* part of growing up as an engineer into senior roles.

The story of QA is relevant here. Once upon a time, every technical company had a QA department to test their code and ensure quality. Software engineers weren’t expected to write tests for their code — that was QA’s job. Eventually we realized that we wrote better software when engineers were held responsible for writing their own tests and testing their own code.

Developers howled and complained: they didn’t have time! they would never get anything built! But it gradually became clear that while it may take more time up front to write and test code, it saved immensely more time and pain in the longer run because the code got so much better and problems got found so much earlier.

It’s not like we got rid of QA  — QA departments still exist, especially in some industries, but they are more like consulting experts. They write test suites and test software, but more importantly they are a resource to make sure that everybody is writing good tests and shipping quality software.

This was long enough ago that most people writing code today probably don’t remember this. (It was mostly before my own time as well.) But you hear echoes of the same arguments today when engineers are complaining about having to be on call for their code, or write instrumentation and operate their code in production.

The point is not that every engineer has to do everything. It’s that there are elements of testing, operations, and architecture that every software engineer needs to know in order to write quality code — in order to not make mistakes that will cost you dearly down the line.

Specialists are not here to do the job for you, they’re to help you do the job better.

“Architect” Done Right

If you must have architects at all, I suggest:

  1. Grow your architects from within. The best high-level thinkers are the ones with a thorough grounding in the context and the particulars.
  2. Be clear about who gets to have opinions vs who gets to make decisions. Having architects who consult, educate, and support is terrific. Having “pigeon architects” who “swoop and poop” — er, make technical decisions for engineers to implement — is a recipe for resentment and weak architectures.
  3. Pay them the same as your staff or principal engineers, not dramatically more. Create an org structure that encourages pendulum swings between (eng, mgr, arch) roles, not one with major barriers in form of pay or level disparities.
  4. Consider adopting one of the following patterns, which do a decent job of evading the two main traps we described above.

If your architects don’t have the technical skills, street cred, or time to spend growing baby engineers into great engineers, or mentoring senior engineers in architecture, they are probably also crappy architects. (another Katy Allred quote)

The “Embedded Architect” (aka Staff+ Engineer)

The most reliable way I know to align architecture and engineering goals is for them to be done by the same team. When one team is responsible for designing, developing, maintaining, and operating a service, you tend to have short, tight, feedback loops that let you ship products and iterate swiftly.

Here is one useful measure of your system’s complexity and the overhead involved in making changes:

“How long does it take you to ship a one-character fix?”

There are many other measures, of course, but this is one of the most important. It gets to the heart of why so many engineers get fed up with working at big companies, where the overhead for change is SO high, and the threshold for having an impact is SO long and laborious.

The more teams have to be involved in designing, reviewing, and making changes, the slower you will grind. People seem to accept this as an inevitability of working in large and complex systems far more than I think they should.

Embedding architecture and operations expertise in every engineering team is a good way to show that these are skills and responsibilities we expect every engineer to develop.

This is the model that Facebook had. It is often paired with,

The “Architecture Group” of Practicing Engineers

Every company eventually needs a certain amount of standardization and coordination work. Sometimes this means building out a “Golden Path” of supported software for the organization. Sometimes this looks like a platform engineering team. Sometimes it looks like capacity planning years worth of hardware requirements across hundreds of teams.

I’ve seen this function fulfilled by super-senior engineers who come together informally to discuss upcoming projects at a very high level. I’ve seen it fulfilled by teams that are spun up by leadership to address a specific problem, then spun down again. I’ve seen it fulfilled by guilds and other formal meetings.

These conversations need to happen, absolutely no question about it. The question is whether it’s some people’s full time job, or one of many part-time roles played by your most senior engineers.

I’m more accustomed to the latter. Pro: it keeps the conversations grounded in reality. Con: engineers don’t have a lot of time to spend interfacing with other groups and doing “project management” or “stakeholder management”, which may be a sizable amount of work at some companies.

The “architect-engineer” pendulum

The architect-to-engineer pendulum seems like the only strategy short of embedded architects / shared ownership that seems likely to yield consistently good results, in my opinion.

The reasoning behind this is similar to the reasons for saying that engineering managers should probably spend some time doing hands-on work every few years. You need to be a pretty good engineer before you can be a good engineering manager or a good architect, and 5+ years after doing any hands-on work, you probably aren’t one anymore.

If you’re the type of architect that is part of an engineering team, partly responsible for a product, shipping code for that product, or on call for that product, this may not apply to you. But if you’re the type of architect that spends little if any time debugging/understanding or building the systems you architect, you should probably make a point of swinging back and forth every few years.

The “Time-Share Architect”

This one has aspects of both the “Architecture Working Group” and the “Architect-Engineer Pendulum”. It treats architecture is a job to be done, not a role to be occupied. Thinking of it like a “really extended pager rotation” is an interesting idea.

Somewhat relatedly — at Honeycomb, “lead engineer” is a title attached to a particular project, and refers to a set of actions and responsibilities for that project. It isn’t a title that’s attached to a particular person. Every engineer gets the opportunity to lead projects (if they want to), and everybody gets a break from doing the project management stuff from time to time. The beautiful thing about this is that everybody develops key leadership skills, instead of embodying them in a single person.

The important thing is that someone is performing the coordination activities, but the people building the system have final say on architecture decisions.

The “Advisor Architect”

I honestly have no problem with architects who are not seen as senior to, and do not have opinions overriding those of, the senior engineers who are building and maintaining the system.

Engineers who are making architectural decisions should consult lots of sources and get lots of opinions. If architects provide educated opinions and a high level view of the systems, and the engineers make use of their expertise, well  that’s fan fucking tastic.

If architects are handing them assignments, or overriding their technical decisions and walking off, leaving a mess behind … fuck that shit. That’s the opposite of empowerment and ownership.

The “skin in the game” rule of thumb still holds, though. The less an architect is exposed to the maintenance and operational consequences of decisions, the less sway their opinion should hold with the group. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t bring value. But the limitations of opinions at a distance should be made clear.

The Threat to Architects’ Careers

It’s super flattering to be told you are just too important, your time is too valuable for you to fritter it away on the mundane acts of debugging and reviewing PRs. (I know! It feels great!!!) But I don’t think it serves you well. Not you, or your team, your company, customers, or the tech itself.

And not *every* architect role falls into this trap. But there’s a definite correlation between orgs that stop calling you “engineers” and orgs that encourage (or outright expect) you to stop engineering at that level. In my experience.

But your credibility, your expertise, your moral authority to impose costs on the team are all grounded in your fluency and expertise with this codebase and this production system — and your willingness to shoulder those costs alongside them. (All the baby engineers want to grow up to be a principal engineer like this.)

But if you aren’t grounded in the tech, if you don’t share the burden, your direction is going to be received with some (or a LOT of) cynicism and resentment. Your technical work will also be lower quality.

Furthermore, you’re only hurting yourself in the long run. Some of the most useless people I’ve ever met were engineers who were “promoted” to architect many, many years ago, and have barely touched an editor or production shell since. They can’t get a job anywhere else, certainly not with comparable status or pay, and they know it. 🤒

They may know EVERYTHING about the company where they work, but those aren’t transferable skills. They have become a super highly paid project manager.

And as a result … they often become the single biggest obstacle to progress. They are just plain terrified of being automated out of a job. It is frustrating to work with, and heartbreaking to watch. 💔

Don’t become that sad architect. Be an engineer. Own your own code in production. This is the way.

Coda: On “Solutions Architects”

You might note that I didn’t include solutions architects in this thread. There is absolutely a real and vibrant use for architects who advise. The distinction in my mind is: who has the last word, the engineers or the architect? Good engineering teams will seek advice from all kinds of expert sources, be they managers or architects or vendors.

My complaint is only with “architects” who are perceived to be superior to, and are capable of overruling the judgments of, the engineering team.

Exceptions abound; the title is not the person. My observations do not obviate your existence as a skilled technologist.  You obviously know your own role better than I do. 🙃

charity

Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery

Deploys Are The ✨WRONG✨ Way To Change User Experience

mipsytipsyLeave a comment

This piece was first published on the honeycomb.io blog on 2023-03-08.

….

I’m no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there’s one thing I haven’t sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way to go about the process of changing user-facing code.

It sucks even if you have excellent, fast, fully automated deploys (which most of you do not). Relying on deploys to change user experience is a problem because it fundamentally confuses and scrambles up two very different actions: Deploys and releases.

Deploy

“Deploying” refers to the process of building, testing, and rolling out changes to your production software. Deploying should happen very often, ideally several times a day. Perhaps even triggered every time an engineer lands a change.

Everything we know about building and changing software safely points to the fact that speed is safety and smaller changes make for safer deploys. Every deploy should apply a small diff to your software, and deploys should generally be invisible to users (other than minor bug fixes).

Release

“Releasing” refers to the process of changing user experience in a meaningful way. This might mean anything from adding functionality to adding entire product lines. Most orgs have some concept of above or below the fold where this matters. For example, bug fixes and small requests can ship continuously, but larger changes call for a more involved process that could mean anything from release notes to coordinating a major press release.

A tale of cascading failures

Have you ever experienced anything like this?

Your company has been working on a major new piece of functionality for six months now. You have tested it extensively in staging and dev environments, even running load tests to simulate production. You have a marketing site ready to go live, and embargoed articles on TechCrunch and The New Stack that will be published at 10:00 a.m. PST. All you need to do now is time your deploy so the new product goes live at the same time.

It takes about three hours to do a full build, test, and deploy of your entire system. You’ve deployed as much as possible in advance, and you’ve already built and tested the artifacts, so all you have to do is a streamlined subset of the deploy process in the morning. You’ve gotten it down to just about an hour. You are paranoid, so you decide to start an hour early. So you kick off the deploy script at 8:00 a.m. PST… and sit there biting your nails, waiting for it to finish.

SHIT! 20 minutes through the deploy, there’s a random flaky SSH timeout that causes the whole thing to cancel and roll back. You realize that by running a non-standard subset of the deploy process, some of your error handling got bypassed. You frantically fix it and restart the whole process.

Your software finishes deploying at 9:30 a.m., 30 minutes before the embargoed articles go live. Visitors to your website might be confused in the meantime, but better to finish early than to finish late, right? 😬

Except… as 10:00 a.m. rolls around, and new users excitedly begin hitting your new service, you suddenly find that a path got mistyped, and many requests are returning 500. You hurriedly merge a fix and begin the whole 3-hour long build/test/deploy process from scratch. How embarrassing! 🙈

Deploys are a terrible way to change user experience

The build/release/deploy process generally has a lot of safeguards and checks baked in to make sure it completes correctly. But as a result…

  • It’s slow
  • It’s often flaky
  • It’s unreliable
  • It’s staggered
  • The process itself is untestable
  • It can be nearly impossible to time it right
  • It’s very all or nothing—the norm is to roll back completely upon any error
  • Fixing a single character mistake takes the same amount of time as doubling the feature set!

Changing user-visible behaviors and feature sets using the deploy process is a great way to get egg on your face. Because the process is built for distributing large code distributions or artifacts; user experience gets changed only as a side effect.

So how should you change user experience?

By using feature flags.

Feature flags: the solution to many of life’s software’s problems

You should deploy your code continuously throughout the day or week. But you should wrap any large, user-visible behavior changes behind a feature flag, so you can release that code by flipping a flag.

This enables you to develop safely without worrying about what your users see. It also means that turning a feature on and off no longer requires a diff, a code review, or a deploy. Changing user experience is no longer an engineering task at all.

Deploys are an engineering task, but releases can be done by product managers—even marketing teams. Instead of trying to calculate when to begin deploying by working backwards from 10:00 a.m., you simply flip the switch at 10:00 a.m.

Testing in production, progressive delivery

The benefits of decoupling deploys and releases extend far beyond timely launches. Feature flags are a critical tool for apostles of testing in production (spoiler alert: everybody tests in production, whether they admit it or not; good teams are aware of this and build tools to do it safely). You can use feature flags to do things like:

  • Enable the code for internal users only
  • Show it to a defined subset of alpha testers, or a randomized few
  • Slowly ramp up the percentage of users who see the new code gradually. This is super helpful when you aren’t sure how much load it will place on a backend component
  • Build a new feature, but only turning it on for a couple “early access” customers who are willing to deal with bugs
  • Make a perf improvement that should be bulletproof logically (and invisible to the end user), but safely. Roll it out flagged off, and do progressive delivery starting with users/customers/segments that are low risk if something’s fucked up
  • Doing something timezone-related in a batch process, and testing it out on New Zealand (small audience, timezone far away from your engineers in PST) first

Allowing beta testing, early adoption, etc. is a terrific way to prove out concepts, involve development partners, and have some customers feel special and extra engaged. And feature flags are a veritable Swiss Army Knife for practicing progressive delivery.

It becomes a downright superpower when combined with an observability tool (a real one that supports high cardinality, etc.), because you can:

  • Break down and group by flag name plus build id, user id, app id, etc.
  • Compare performance, behavior, or return code between identical requests with different flags enabled
  • For example, “requests to /export with flag “USE_CACHING” enabled are 3x slower than requests to /export without that flag, and 10% of them now return ‘402’”

It’s hard to emphasize enough just how powerful it is when you have the ability to break down by build ID and feature flag value and see exactly what the difference is between requests where a given flag is enabled vs. requests where it is not.

It’s very challenging to test in production safely without feature flags; the possibilities for doing so with them are endless. Feature flags are a scalpel, where deploys are a chainsaw. Both complement each other, and both have their place.

“But what about long-lived feature branches?”

Long-lived branches are the traditional way that teams develop features, and do so without deploying or releasing code to users. This is a familiar workflow to most developers.

But there is much to be said for continuously deploying code to production, even if you aren’t exposing new surface area to the world. There are lots of subterranean dependencies and interactions that you can test and validate all along.

There’s also something very psychologically different between working with branches. As one of our engineering directors, Jess Mink, says:

There’s something very different, stress and motivation-wise. It’s either, ‘my code is in a branch, or staging env. We’re releasing, I really hope it works, I’ll be up and watching the graphs and ready to respond,’ or ‘oh look! A development customer started using my code. This is so cool! Now we know what to fix, and oh look at the observability. I’ll fix that latency issue now and by the time we scale it up to everyone it’s a super quiet deploy.’

Which brings me to another related point. I know I just said that you should use feature flags for shipping user-facing stuff, but being able to fix things quickly makes you much more willing to ship smaller user-facing fixes. As our designer, Sarah Voegeli, said:

With frequent deploys, we feel a lot better about shipping user-facing changes via deploy (without necessarily needing a feature flag), because we know we can fix small issues and bugs easily in the next one. We’re much more willing to push something out with a deploy if we know we can fix it an hour or two later if there’s an issue.

Everything gets faster, which instills more confidence, which means everything gets faster. It’s an accelerating feedback loop at the heart of your sociotechnical system.

“Great idea, but this sounds like a huge project. Maybe next year.”

I think some people have the idea that this has to be a huge, heavyweight project that involves signing up for a SaaS, forking over a small fortune, and changing everything about the way they build software. While you can do that—and we’re big fans/users of LaunchDarkly in particular—you don’t have to, and you certainly don’t have to start there.

As Mike Terhar from our customer success team says, “When I build them in my own apps, it’s usually just something in a ‘configuration’ database table. You can make a config that can enable/disable, or set a scope by team, user, region, etc.”

You don’t have to get super fancy to decouple deploys from releases. You can start small. Eliminate some pain today.

In conclusion

Decoupling your deploys and releases frees your engineering teams to ship small changes continuously, instead of sitting on branches for a dangerous length of time. It empowers other teams to own their own roadmaps and move at their own pace. It is better, faster, safer, and more reliable than trying to use deploys to manage user-facing changes.

If you don’t have feature flags, you should embrace them. Do it today! 🌈

Deploys Are The ✨WRONG✨ Way To Change User Experience

How to Throw A Company Offsite In A “Post-COVID” World

mipsytipsy5 Comments

Earlier this month we had our first Honeycomb all-hands offsite in three years … our first one since February of 2020, before the plague. It was wonderful and glorious and silly and energizing and so, so SO much fun. It was a potent reminder of the reality that no virtual activity can compare with the energy of being physically present with people you care about.

I was talking with Paul Biggar last month, telling him about all the things we were doing both to create a safe environment and to ease the pangs of re-entry for a bunch of people who haven’t done this in years. Paul observed that it seemed like most companies are either 1) not gathering at all or 2) barreling forward as though COVID didn’t exist, and that there aren’t many stories about groups assembling safely.

So I said I would write one, if we pulled it off. And now that it’s been long enough that we can confidently say nobody came down with COVID at our offsite, here it is.

Offsites: luxury or necessity?

Honeycomb has always been proud to be a distributed company, even before the plague hit. It’s part of our belief system that this is just a better way of doing business.

But being distributed doesn’t mean that in-person connection doesn’t matter. It matters even more when you are all remote most of the time.

Getting together in human meatspace is expensive, it’s annoying, it’s awkward and uncomfortable and inconvenient … and it is necessary. It’s not optional or a “nice-to-have,” it is a ✨critical ingredient✨ of the recipe that makes high-performing distributed teams work. Spending time together face to face is the yeast in our bread, the bitters in our Old Fashioneds.

By the end of 2022, it had become clear that we are stuck with COVID for the long-haul. It was long past time to gather and get to know each other in person. But if we were going to do it, we had to do our best to mitigate the risks and adapt to the world we live in now. What precautions to take? Where to even start?

When and where, and why??

COVID concerns were part of the planning from day one. There were several constraints where to hold the event, which we immediately dubbed “Swarm” (of course). 🙃

  • Moderate weather. We wanted to be able to let people congregate outdoors as much as possible, as an additional insurance policy for the extra-anxious.
  • “Centrally located” was the original goal, but most of the country is just too cold in February. We settled for a destination that everyone could fly to direct.
  • Legal safety. We needed to go to a state w/  here all of our employees felt safe, not targeted by various legal jurisdictions.
  • We did NOT care about glamorous locations. We knew we were going to spend our time at the hotel, focused on each other, not the locale.

In the end we chose Los Angeles — the the oh-so-glamorous LAX Airport Marriott, to be precise. 🌴🐠\\🍹

We originally scheduled the event for mid-January, to kick off the new year, but ended up witthlizadelaying five weeks into 2023 in case there was a wave of post-holiday COVID infections.

Preparing for the event

Our COVID safety plans are designed to maximize attendance, give people enough information to properly manage their own risk, and provide an extra-safe outdoor alternative for as many activities as possible.

We tapped Liz Fong-Jones to take point on COVID policy. (As a globe-trotting extrovert who goes to lots of events, she is our resident expert.) Having one czar in charge of policy turned out to be great; she didn’t have to ask permission from anyone or get consensus from a committee to update policies and make requests on the spot.

Leading into the event, our plans and preparations included:

  1. Adjacent outdoors space.
    We looked for a venue with extra capacity (plenty of space for social distancing and proper airflow) and a large outdoor area — covered, heated space for people to eat and socialize, even if it was rainy or cold.
  2. On site testing for everyone.
    Everyone was given a rapid nucleic test on checking in, and asked to take onesubsequently every 48 hours.

    • Testing was mandatory for everyone, including vendors, guests, and visiting dignitaries.
    • Positive first-line tests should confirmatory test with a PCR or second nucleic test and isolate until a negative comes back.
    • If anyone confirms positive, their instructions are to stay in their room until they test negative. Honeycomb pays for hotel and rebooking.
  3. Carbon dioxide monitors.
    Every conference room was supposed be set up with a mounted CO2 monitor where people can see it. (Carbon dioxide monitors are a good proxy measurement for air circulation and thus transmission risk.) We said, “if the number is above 650, masks will be required in the room”, but this didn’t quite play out (see “Retro” section).
  4. Social distancing.
    We had stickers for badges, color coded by the traffic light system. (This was for individuals to exercise control based on risk tolerance, not a universal rule):

    • Red — please keep your distance
    • Yellow — please ask before physical touch
    • Green — I’m comfortable with talking and physical touch
  5. Masks.
    Masks were available throughout the event, but not required. People were welcome to wear their own masks regardless, of course, and everyone kept one in their pocket, so they could put it on if anyone asked. (This happened a few times in my vicinity, and everybody cheerfully complied.)

    • We booked a shuttle to haul everyone into LA for dinner, and masks were required on the shuttle. People were also told to call an uber/lyft if they felt uncomfortable with the shuttle.
  6. Outdoor seating at restaurants.
    One of our most popular sessions was “small group dinners”, where we sent people out to LA restaurants in small cross-functional groups of 8 people (including at least one member of senior leadership per group). People could request an outdoor group.
  7. If a new variant or outbreak emerged…
    We wouldn’t be able to call the event off or reschedule without forfeiting the entire cost. Our contingency plan was to move the entire event outdoors to the pool area, if necessary.

Pacing ourselves: naps and snacks and breaks

We knew this trip was going to be intense and overwhelming for many if not most of us — even more so than most company offsites. Many people hadn’t traveled or spent time in large groups since the pandemic, all of us are used to working solo from home. Only a tenth of us (18 of 180) were working at Honeycomb in February of 2020, at our last offsite. So mental health and social overload were just as important to consider.

We told people, repeatedly:

Take care of yourselves. Do what you need to do to be fully present while you’re here, rather than here 100% of the time.

We scheduled only three sessions per day, plus lunch and dinner. We neither started very early or scheduled things very late. We left lots of padding in between sessions for snacks  and naps and breaks.

We set aside a “Recharge Room” with doors that closed, with nail polish, coloring books and markers, and board games. We set aside cubbies with signs marked “Introvert Corners — no talking please!”, and stocked them up with USB hubs and charging cables, so you could recharge your devices while recharging your soul (lol).

In retrospect

Over 86% of the company came (!!!) and we had a riotously good time — way, way more than I think any of us even expected or hoped to have. It was a memorable, sparkly reminder of the incomparable magic of what it’s like being together with people you care about.

We ran a survey afterwards. 50% of respondents said they felt safe, but their standards are low; 48% said they felt safe due to the testing, masking, and reminders; 8% said they felt safe because they spent as much time as possible outdoors. 10% (11 people, out of 109 responding) said they “did not feel very safe.”

However, I would note that 5 of those 11 people didn’t actually attend Swarm. And one person pointed out afterwards that you had to choose “I did not feel very safe” if you wanted to enter any feedback at all about safety, so it was possible if not probable that some people would have chosen another option if they could.

 

I think we did pretty well. However, things can always be better!

What worked well:

  1. Outdoor spaces for eating, temperate climate, extra-spacious rooms for circulatory purposes.
  2. The rapid-nucleic tests we used were made by Lucira. (Liz says: “The tests were far more reliable than we thought they’d be — the brand has a reputation for false positives but we saw none, and only 3 invalid tests out of several hundred performed.”)
  3. Testing. We were hyper-diligent about testing. We actually ran out of tests on Wednesday, despite provisioning two for each attendee and a bunch of extras, and had to emergency lift in more, which is a great sign.
  4. Taking a layered approach to COVID safety. Not relying on any single prevention method meant that if one didn’t work well, we still had a safety net.
  5. Having a knowledgeable COVID czar.
  6. The Recharge Room with nail polish, art supplies and games worked really well, although designating other areas as “Quiet Zones” was ineffective and unnecessary.

What we can improve on:

  1. The 30-60 minute breaks sprinkled throughout the day were well-intentioned, but ineffective. Everybody was fucking wiped by late afternoon. Next time, I would replace all those breaks with one solid “Nap Break” from 4-6pm.
    • I think it’s important to acknowledge that we were all going to be flattened no matter what though. We aren’t used to this! It is HARD to leave the party to take care of yourself!
  2. We should have a team of COVID safety marshals, in addition to the Code of Conduct team.
  3. Next time we will ask people to submit their COVID test results — even if it’s just dropping a pic in a slack channel. Trust but verify.
  4. The CO2 monitors were confusing. They were hard to find, and most of them got installed in the wrong place. Also, the 650 ppm rule would have essentially meant everyone had to wear a mask in any closed room, which was not the goal. Our error here was not in failing to stick to the 650 ppm rule, but in making a rule we couldn’t keep.
  5. Next year, we will be explicit about the fact that CO2 monitors are for informational purposes, so individuals can factor it into their own masking choices and/or decide whether to move outside.
  6. Next year we will also emphasize that it is okay to ask the people around you to mask up so you can participate.
    • If you aren’t comfortable asking those around you to put on a mask, you can DM a safety marshal who will ask on your behalf.
  7. One session in particular had external facilitators come in and roam around the (closed) rooms shouting stuff. They tested clear for COVID, but in retrospect I really wish we had asked them to mask up, as it generated a lot of anxiety. This was our biggest covid safety lapse, in my opinion.

Offsites are necessary. Human connection feeds your soul.

What I learned from this event is just how much we were all craving connection. I was a firm believer in how much in-person connection matters to start with, and it still blew me away just how special, how irreplaceably precious the experience was. There is no possible way we could have made the kind of connections, learned the same lessons, and formed the kind of bonds we did if we had tried to do this as a remote event. If anything, it just made me even more intent on creating an event safe enough that everyone can join.

On the last night we had a party, with karaoke and a dress theme: “Wear something you wouldn’t wear to work.” By that point, it enough intimacy had been established that people seemed to feel safe letting their inner freak flag fly a bit, and it was just fucking incredible getting a glimpse into everybody’s inner selves and stories.

It seemed like others felt the same way, too. In the anonymous post-event survey, 100% of attendees said it was valuable to them. Representative feedback:

“I didn’t know how much I needed this, and I can’t wait for next year.”

Reintroducing a practice of spending time together is not only possible, I feel like we were able to do it in ways that adapt to the realities of the world we live in today.

That matters. I know I’ve said this like five times now, but for a distributed company, gathering together in person isn’t a nice-to-have, it is an absolute necessity. After meeting all of my coworkers, I feel this more strongly than ever. 💜🐝

P.S. None of us got COVID in the wake of our offsite. A handful of us did, however, manage to catch a common cold. 🦠

How to Throw A Company Offsite In A “Post-COVID” World

Every Achievement Has A Denominator

mipsytipsy, 5 Comments

One of the classic failure modes of management is the empire-builder — the managers who measure their own status, rank or value by the number of teams and people “under” them.

Everyone knows you aren’t supposed to do this, but most of us secretly, sheepishly do it anyway to some extent. After all, it’s not untrue — the more teams and people that roll up to you, the wider your influence and the more impact you have on more people, by definition.

The other reason is, well, it’s what we’ve got. How else are we supposed to gauge our influence and impact, or our skill as a leader? We don’t really have any other language, metrics or metaphors readily available to us. 😖

Well… Here’s one:

✨Every achievement has a denominator✨

Organization size can be a liability

Let’s say you have 1,000 people in your org and you collectively achieve something remarkable. Good for you!

What if you achieved the same thing with 10,000 people, instead? What would that say about your leadership?

What if you achieved the same thing with 100 people?

Or even 10 people?

Lots of people take pride in their ability to manage large organizations. And with thousands of people in your org, you kinda better do something fucking great. But what if you instead took pride in your ability to deliver outsize results with a small denominator?

What if comp didn’t automatically bloat with the size of your org, but rather the impact of your work divided by the number of contributors — rewarding leaders for leaner teams, not larger ones?

Bigness itself is costly. There’s the cost of the engineers, managers, product and designers etc, of course. But the bigger it gets, the more coordination costs are incurred, which are the worst costs of all because they do not accrue to any user benefit — and often lead to lack of focus and product surface sprawl.

Constraints fuel creativity. Having “enough” engineers for a project is usually a terrible idea; you want to be constrained, you want to have to make hard decisions about where to spend your time and where to invest development cycles.

More often than not, scope is the enemy

As Ben Darfler wrote earlier this year about our approach to engineering levels at Honeycomb:

There are times when broad scope may be unavoidable, but at Honeycomb, we try to cultivate a healthy skepticism toward scope. More often than not, scope is the enemy. We would rather reward engineers who find clever ways to limit scope by decomposing problems in both time and size. We also want to reward engineers who work on the most important problems for the business, regardless of the size of the project. We don’t want to reward people for gaming out their work based on what will get them promoted.

The same is true for engineering managers, directors and VPs. We would rather reward them for getting things done with small, nimble teams, not for empire building and team sprawl. We want to reward them for working on the most important problems for the business, regardless of what size their teams are.

What was the denominator of the last big project you landed? Could you have done it with fewer people? How will you apply those learnings to the next big initiative?

Can we find more language and ways to talk about, or take pride in how efficiently we do big things? At the very least, perhaps we can start paying attention to the denominator of our achievements, and factor that into how we level and reward our leaders.

charity.

P.S. I did not invent this phrase, but I am unfortunately unable to credit the person I heard it from (a senior Googler). I simply think it’s brilliant, and so helpful.

Every Achievement Has A Denominator

The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering

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First published on 2022-09-30 at https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/future-ops-platform-engineering.

Two years ago I wrote a piece in The New Stack about the Future of Ops Careers. Towards the end, I wrote:

The reality is that jack-of-all-trades systems infrastructure jobs are slowly vanishing: the world doesn’t need thousands of people who can expertly tune postfix, SpamAssassin, and ClamAV—the world has Gmail. (…)

Building infrastructure and operational expertise used to be bundled together into a single role. But the industry is now bifurcating along an infrastructure fault line, and the overlap between infrastructure-oriented engineers and operationally-minded engineers is swiftly eroding. Engineers who love this work increasingly have a choice to make. Either you can 1) go deep on infrastructure by joining a company that does infrastructure as a service, or 2) go broad on operability by joining a company to help them do as little infrastructure as possible.

I described the second category as “operations engineering minus the infrastructure,” dedicated to evaluating and assembling a production stack of third-party platform providers, enabling software engineers to self-serve their services and own their own code in production. I said:

  • Your job will be to aggressively minimize the cycles your org devotes to infrastructure by finding effective ways to outsource or minimize infra labor. Your job is to NOT go deep if there is any workable alternative.
  • Your job will be to work cross-functionally with all the other software engineering teams, looking for ways to speed up their time to value and helping them own their own code in production.
  • Your job will be to move past the kludgey old models of “outsourcing” to sophisticated understandings of how and where to leverage abstractions that can radically accelerate development.

That second category I was describing now has a name. We call those teams “platform engineering.”

The fifty-year arc of software careers

In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different professions, but that turned out to be a ginormous mistake, so along came DevOps to reunify them. Nowadays, ops as an independent profession is in the process of fading out. Companies are spinning down their ops teams left and right. Engineers who formerly identified as sysadmins or operations have turned into DevOps engineers, and soon there will just be “software people” again. This is the way of things.

Please note that this is NOT the same thing as saying “ops is dead,” or “ops skills are no longer valuable or needed1.” Our systems are only getting more complex, more difficult to operate, and simultaneously more critical to life on earth, which means that operational excellence has never been more desperately needed (and if you don’t respect that, 🌈 you deserve to suffer 🌈).

The industry story of the past three to five years has been us trying to figure out how to help software engineers own their own code in production2, phasing out dedicated ops teams, and aggressively outsourcing as much infrastructure as possible.

As we should. Developer cycles are the scarcest resource in your company, and you want to spend as many of those as possible on your core product: the crown jewel, the code that makes you a business. Money is cheaper than engineering cycles, and teams that are focused on their core business will always outperform teams whose focus is spread across dozens of non-revenue-generating projects. Let someone else build and run all the dependencies and adjacencies.

Before: some engineers wrote code, and some engineers ran code.

Now: all engineers write code, and all engineers run the code they write.

Platform engineering is what stands between you and darkness

When you start talking about putting software engineers on call for their own code, and generally being more involved in production, some percentage of the time you will hear back a guttural wail of despair: “You can’t expect me to know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING!”

Quite right; we can’t. Platform engineering teams are part of the answer to this perfectly reasonable complaint. It’s not that you’re being asked to do or understand more in toto, but the distribution of labor and responsibility is shifting:

Before: some engineers wrote code, and some engineers ran code.

Now: all engineers write code, and all engineers run the code they write—but we divide the areas of responsibility by layer or function.

The emergence of a minimum viable self-serve tier

In the earliest days of a company, your first few engineers end up bootstrapping an infrastructure by reading AWS docs or blog posts, or asking a friend for recommendations to get started. They might start by setting up a managed container service, or configuring Terraform, and for a while everybody deploys and owns their own code, just as god intended.

But cognitive limits kick in pretty quickly. The maze of APIs and SDKs and components out there is simply bewildering, even for an experienced ops hand. Before long, it becomes someone’s job to make good decisions, pick a suite of compute and storage options that serve the team’s needs, and write some tooling that pulls everything into a coherent whole—which, at a minimum, lets you:

  1. Run tests and generate new artifacts
  2. Deploy artifacts, version them, and roll back
  3. Instrument, monitor, and debug
  4. Store data somewhere, manage schemas and migrations
  5. Adjust capacity as needed
  6. Define and commit all components (and their relationships) as code

Once these are built, it should be trivial for an engineer to come along and spin up a new service using templates and components from existing services. It should be much simpler and easier to use the blessed paths than anything else, and there should be friction if you go off the beaten path.

Congratulations! You’ve just been platformed 🎉. One of the key principles of any developer platform is that it should be easy to do the right things, and hard to do the wrong things.

The differences between platform engineering and traditional ops

Platform teams are typically staffed by engineers who are comfortable writing software. Not just scripting and automation, but writing tests and doing code reviews. Platform teams also operate much more like product development teams do, with product managers (and occasionally, designers, developer advocates, or UX researchers).

This doesn’t mean that everybody on a platform team has to have originally been a software engineer; in fact, a super common failure condition for platform teams is simply thinking all they need to do is hire software engineers to build developer tools. A strong platform team has an equally deep grounding in operations experience and software development. Individuals who are experts in both areas are fairly rare, but you can pull together a strong, well-rounded team by assembling a mix of SWEs (with some ops experience) and ops or DevOps engineers (with some software experience) and having them learn and grow from each other.

Platform teams are decidedly cloud-native; they actually mostly involve platforms built atop the cloud itself—PaaS, IaaS, everything-aaS, serverless, and so forth.

Ops/DevOps teams are oriented around managing infrastructure, often several generations of infrastructure. Their turf is everything from data centers and bare metal up through virtualization, containers, and the cloud (they aren’t so much cloud-native as cloud-enabled). They measure themselves on things like SLOs and the DORA metrics. You know they’re doing a good job if the system is up/available and users are happy.

Platform teams are oriented around providing a good experience for developers to self-serve and self-manage their code. The more swiftly and easily developers can move, the better your platform team. Operational excellence, in the platform model, is actually more the responsibility of the other engineering teams (and/or an adjacent SRE team) than that of the platform team.

Platform teams typically work higher up the stack than operations, DevOps, or SRE teams do, and they involve a great deal less infrastructure. On the contrary, platform teams are bent on paying other people to run as much shit as possible, preserving their own scarce development cycles for their core product.

Here is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek table of the similarities and differences between the archetypes.

Platform engineers vs. DevOps engineers

Platform Engineer Ops (or DevOps) Engineer
% of job spent writing code > 50% < 50%
Rest of time spent Gathering product requirements, doing user research, architecture discussions, optimizing internal workflows, researching new tools and developer productivity ideas, reviewing other teams’ diffs for impact, performance tuning, helping other engineers own & scale their code, fixing CI/CD pipelines. Fixing cron jobs, automating old setup docs, converting PXE/rsync to Chef/Puppet, converting Chef/Puppet to Terraform, converting VMs to containers, deploying software, debugging broken deploys, writing monitoring checks, doing retros, building out new services, pairing with software engineers to understand and debug their code, investigating weird shit, documentation, etc.
Responsible for Enabling internal teams to self-serve their ability to run and own their code in production. Creating standard, reusable components and processes. Defining golden paths. Infrastructure capacity planning, scaling, performance tuning, upgrading. Reliability and resiliency, SLOs and monitoring/alerting. Delivering quality experience to customers.
Builds for Internal developer teams Customers
Development style Infrastructure as a product Infrastructure as code
Works with product managers Yes No
Works with UX researchers or designers Sometimes No
Dashboards & graphs Uses APM, observability, tracing. Cares a lot about instrumentation and OpenTelemetry. Uses metrics, logs, dashboards; monitoring, alerting, and agent/sidecar/blackbox telemetry.
What ‘coding’ means to them Developing new features & services, writing tests. These are (primarily) software people who do systems. Automation, configuration, DSLs, extending and debugging existing code. These are systems people who do software.
Preferred language Go, Rust Python, Ruby
Time spent in Linux Hardly any A lot
Succeeds when Developers can easily choose good defaults, self-serve their infra, and own their own code in production. Infrastructure is scalable, secure, cost-effective, reliable, and customers are happy.
Native terrain Serverless, *aaS, APIs for everything (cloud-native and above). Instances, VMs, containers, regions, multi-cloud (everything “below,” but up to and including the cloud).
Databases Uses hosted DBs Runs their own, blending automation & DBA expertise
SSH No Yes
Shell REPL bash/zsh
Mantra “Run Less Software” “Cattle, Not Pets”

What about DevOps vs. SRE?

Countless words have been spilled on the difference between DevOps and SRE3, which I won’t rehash.

Here’s what I’ll say: DevOps, to me, feels like a relevant concept for companies that have a lot of infrastructure to wrangle. Companies that do in fact have dev teams and ops teams, or dev teams and DevOps teams (🙄), tend to have a lot of operational shit to automate, test, and run. They use config management, virtualization, and containers, often managing several generations worth of technology, possibly even down to data centers and bare metal. DevOps is for companies that have some combination of bare metal, VMs, regions, AZs, multi-cloud, networking devices, self-managed databases, etc.

DevOps is capacious. It contains multitudes. DevOps writes code, and DevOps has a fuckload of code to manage.

It is also on its way to becoming irrelevant. We are swiftly entering a post-DevOps world.

SRE, to me, feels different. I associate SRE with very large companies, where they mostly have software engineers owning their own code in production, but maybe still struggle with it a bit. SREs are often embedded within software engineering teams or product groups, and they focus a lot on, well, reliability, as the name suggests.

This means they do less infrastructure jockeying or automating (although they still do some coding). They typically have a lot to say about instrumentation, monitoring and observability, and cross-functional coordination. They run incident response and do blameless retros, and they tend to be experts at scaling.

If a company has both a DevOps team and SRE, typically I expect to see the SRE team more on the frontlines, involved with incidents, telemetry, etc., and DevOps teams more on the backburner, slinging pipes and plumbing.

Observability engineering as a case study

In the same piece I referenced earlier, I also wrote about the role of observability teams. I said they should largely no longer be running their own monitoring and graphing software in-house. Yet there is still a place for observability teams to exist: they remain a critical link between outsourced solutions and internal developer needs.

That team should write libraries, generate examples, and drive standardization; ushering in consistency, predictability, and usability. They should partner with internal teams to evaluate use cases. They should partner with your vendors as roadmap stakeholders. They might also write glue code and helper modules to connect disparate data sources and create cohesive visualizations. Basically, that team becomes an integration point between your organization and the outsourced work.

I originally wrote this about observability, but it could just as easily be used to describe platform engineering as a whole. This is the role—being the bridge between other vendors and your own core software. It’s a very high-leverage place to sit.

Ops is dead, long live ops

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this because we’ve had such a hard time nailing down exactly who the Honeycomb customer is. Sometimes our buyer is an ops team buying it for their SWEs, sometimes it’s SREs in the midst of an outage, sometimes it’s a VP or director of engineering, or an architect, or a CTO, or a “full stack” engineering team, or even a product manager. It is hard to form a snappy answer out of that list.

The first couple questions every new go-to-market candidate asks us are “who is your buyer?” and “how do we help them?” To which I respond with a five minute ramble where I list every above persona and each of their pain points. Hardly the concrete answer they would like to receive.

As it goes, sociotechnical trends come and go. A year ago, Christine and I were speculating that platform engineering might be on the verge of consolidating the necessary ingredients that makes up our ideal buyer:

  1. Writing and shipping code, and needing to understand their own code
  2. Positioned to help other teams with their instrumentation patterns and tooling
  3. Firmly cloud-native+ and untethered to hardware or traditional infrastructure

To my delight, since that conversation, these trends have only accelerated—and I, for one, welcome our new platform engineering overlords to the observability table. ☺️

If you’d like to learn more about platform engineering, we’ll be running a Twitter space on ✨ October 20th ✨ at 12:00 p.m. PT. Come join us! I’ll be there along with two colleagues and we’ll be answering your questions and shedding more light on the topic.

1  I do hear people saying that, and it used to make me fucking furious, but now I just smugly remind myself how much self-inflicted suffering they are in for. Disrespecting operational expertise is the shortest path to never again sleeping through the night.

2 It is rather incredible how rapidly this idea has taken off. When we started talking about putting developers on call for their code in 2016, people got seriously angry with us. Before that, the only twitter mention I could find of putting devs on call was one by (of course) Adrian Cockcroft, but by 2019-2020 it had stopped being controversial and soon became common wisdom.

3 I actually wrote one of those myself: DevOps vs SRE: Delayed Coverage of the Dumbest War). LMAO. I think Liz had the final word on this back in … 2017? 2018? … when she said something like class SRE implements DevOps. And yes, DevOps is a philosophy or a methodology and not a job title, etc.

The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering

The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)

mipsytipsy, 15 Comments

My friend Molly has had an impressive career. She got a job as a software engineer after graduating from college, and after kicking ass for a year or so she was offered a promotion to management, which she accepted with relish. Molly was smart, driven, and fiercely ambitious, so she swiftly clambered up the ranks to hold director, VP, and other shiny leadership roles. It took two decades, an IPO and a vicious case of burnout before she allowed herself to admit how much she hated her work, and how desperately she envied (guess who??) the software engineers she worked alongside. Turns out, all she ever really wanted to do was write code every day. And now, to her dismay, it felt too late.

Why did it take Molly so long to realize what made her happy? I personally blame the fucking hierarchy.

The Hierarchy Lie

The “Big Lie” of hierarchy is that your organizational structure is a vertical tree from the CEO on down, where higher up is always better.

Of course any new grad is going to feel that way, on the heels of 15-20 years spent going through school year by year, grade by grade, measuring success via good grades and teacher approval. The early years of professional life are a similar blend of hard work, leveling up and basic skills acquisition. (They got Molly hopped on the leveling treadmill before she even had a chance to become a real adult, in other words. 😍)

But by the time you are fully baked as a senior contributor, maybe 7-8 years in, your relationship to levels and ladders should undergo a dramatic shift. At some point you have to learn to tune in to your own inner compass. What draws you in to your work? What fuels your growth and success?

Being an adult means not measuring yourself entirely on other people’s definition of success. Personal growth might come in the guise of a big promotion, but it also might look like a new job, a different role, a swing to management or back, becoming well-known as a subject matter expert, mentoring others, running an affinity group, picking up new skill sets, starting a company, trying your hand at consulting, speaking at conferences, taking a sabbatical, having a family, working part time, etc. No one gets to define that but you.

You have a thirty- or forty-year adult life and career in front of you. What the hell are you going to do with all that time and space??

Your career is not one mad sprint to the finish line

Literally nobody’s career looks like a straight line, going up, up up and to the right, from intern to CEO (to a coffin).

One of the most exhausting things about working at Facebook was the way engineering levels feltLiterally no one's career, ever. like a hamster wheel, where every single quarter you were expected to go go go go go, do more do more, scrape up ever more of your mortal soul to pour in more than you could last quarter — and the quarter before that, and before that, in ever-escalating intensity.

It was fucking exhausting, yo. Life does not work that way. Shit gets hilly.

The strategy for a fulfilling, lifelong career in tech is not to up the ante every interval. Nor is it to amass more and more power over others until you explode. Instead:

  1. Train yourself to love the feeling of constantly learning and pushing your boundaries. Feeling comfortable is the system blinking orange, and it should make you uneasy.
  2. Follow your nose into work that lights you up in the morning, work you can’t stop thinking about. If you’re bored, do something else.
  3. Say yes to opportunities!! Intensity is nothing to be afraid of. Instead of trying to cap your speed or your growth, learn to alternate it with recovery periods.
  4. If you aren’t sure what to do, make the choice that preserves or expands future optionality. Remember: Most startups fail. Will you be okay with your choices if (& when) this one does too?

Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other animating goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.

But if you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..

The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have never been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least. Or when I felt the least needed.📈📉💔

A disturbing number of companies would rather feel in control than unclench and perform better

But hey! Lack of inner drive isn’t the ONLY thing that drives people to climb the ladder. Plenty of companies fuck this up too, all on their lonesome. Let’s talk about more of the ways that companies mess up the workplace! Like by disempowering the people doing the work and giving all the power to managers, thereby forcing anyone who wants a say in their own job become one.

The way we talk about work is riddled with hierarchical, authoritarian phrases: “She was my superior”, “My boss made me do it”, “I got promoted into management”, and so on.

There are plenty of industries where line workers are still disempowered cogs and power structures are hierarchical and absolute (like flipping burgers at McDonalds, or factory line work). There are even software companies still trying to make it work in command-and-control mode, to whom engineers are interchangeable monkeys that ship story points and close JIRA tasks.

But if there’s one thing we know, it’s that for industries that are fueled by creativity and innovation, command-and-control leadership is poison. It stifles innovation, it saps initiative, it siphons away creativity and motivation and caring.

Studies also show that the more visible someone’s power is, the less likely anyone is to give them honest feedback.[2]

Companies that don’t learn this lesson are unlikely to win over the long run. Engineering is a deeply creative occupation, and authoritarian environments are toxic for creativity and people’s willingness to share information.

Hierarchy is just a data structure

The basic function of a hierarchy is to help us make sense of the world, simplify information, and make decisions. Hierarchy lets us break down enormous projects — like “let’s build a rocket!”, or “let’s invade the moon!” — into millions of bite size decisions and tasks, and this is how progress gets made.

A certain amount of authority is invested into the hierarchy model. If you are responsible for delivering a unit of work, the company needs to make sure you have enough resources and decision-making ability to do so. This is what we think of as the formal power structure [1], and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s what makes the system work.

The problem starts when we stop thinking of hierarchy as a neutral data structure — a utilitarian device for organizing groups and making decisions — and start projecting all kinds of social status and dominance onto it.

A sensitivity to social dominance is wired deep, deep into our little monkey brains. It’s what tells us we deserve more power, leverage, pride, influence, and autonomy — and simply have more value — than those below us. It’s what tells us those above us are better, stronger and more deserving than we are, and that we owe them our respect and deference.

It also tells us “if you lose status, YOU MIGHT DIE” 😱😱😱 which is why we may react to a perceived loss of status with a sting that seems astonishingly extreme and overwrought, even to ourselves, yet somehow impossible to shrug off.

hierarchies tend to get mixed up with social dominance

In general, it is better to pursue roles and growth based on the affirmative (what it is you want to learn, grow or do more of) than the negative (what you want to avoid, evade or stop doing). Your motivation systems don’t kick in to gear when you are feeling “lack of pain” — the system doesn’t work that way. They kick in when you get interested.

And if you are sick of doing something or being treated a certain way, chances are everyone else will hate it, too. Who wants to work at a company where all the shit rolls downhill?

Hierarchies have stuck around for one very good reason: because they work. Hierarchies are simple, intuitive, and allow large numbers to collaborate with low cognitive overhead. Unfortunately, most hierarchies become entwined with status and dominance markers, which can bring enormous downsides. At their worst, they can suck the literal life out of work, reducing us all to glum little cogs obeying orders.

We aren’t getting rid of hierarchy anytime soon. But we can use culture and ritual to gently untangle them from dominance, and we can choose to interpret formal power as a service function instead of a dictatorship. This frees people up to choose their work based on what makes them feel fulfilled, instead of their perceived status. (Also helpful? Flatter pay bands. 😛)

Good managers do not dictate and demand, they nurture, develop, and inspire. The most important roles in the company aren’t held by managers; they are all the little leaf nodes  busily building the product, supporting users, identifying markets, writing copy, etc. The people doing the work are why we exist as a company; all the rest is, with considerable due respect, overhead.

How to drain your hierarchy of social dominance

When it comes to hierarchy and team structure, there are the functional, organizational aspects (mostly good) and the social dominance parts (mostly bad). With that in mind, there are plenty of smaller things we can do as a team to remind people that we are equal colleagues, simply with different roles.

  • Be conscious of the language you use. Does it reinforce dominance and hierarchy? (Step one: stop calling management “a promotion”🥰)
  • De-emphasize trappings of power. The more you refer to someone’s formal power, the less likely anyone is to give them critical feedback or question them.
  • Push back against common but unhelpful practices, like “a manager should always make more money than the people who report to them.” Really? Why??
  • Are there opportunities for career advancement as an IC, or only as a manager? Everyone should have the ability to advance in their career.
  • Do your own dishes, everyone.
  • Practice visualizing the org chart upside down, where managers and execs support their teams from below rather than topping them from above. (I was going to write a whole post about this, then discovered other people have been doing that for the past decade. 🤣)

And then there is the big(ger) thing we can (and must!) do, in order to 1) make people go into management for the right reasons, 2) help senior IC roles remain attractive to highly skilled creative and technical contributors, and 3) encourage everybody to make career decisions based on curiosity, growth, and what’s best for the business, instead of turf and power grabs. Which is:

Practice transparency, from top to bottom

Share authority, decision-making and power

Technical contributors own technical decisions

Most people who go in to management don’t do it out of a burning desire to write performance reviews. They do it because they are fed the fuck up with being out of the loop, or not having a say in decisions over their own work. All they want is to be in the room where it happens, and management tends to be the only way you get an invite.

EVERY company says they believe in transparency, but hardly any of them are, by my count. Transparency doesn’t mean flooding people with every trivial detail, or freaking them out with constant fire drills. It does mean being actively forthcoming about important questions and matters which are happening or on the horizon…often before you are fully comfortable with it. Honestly, if you never feel any discomfort about your level of transparency, you probably aren’t transparent enough.

People do better work with more context! You’re equipping them with information to better understand the business problems and technical objectives, and thereby unleashing them and their creativity to help solve them. You’re also opening yourself up to questioning and sanity checks — which may feel uncomfortable, but 🌞sunlight is sanitizing🌞 — it is worth it.

Some practical tips for transparency

At Honeycomb, we present the full board deck after every board meeting in our all hands, and take questions. When we’re facing financial uncertainty, we say so, along with our working plan for dealing with it. We also do org-level updates in all hands, once per quarter per org. Each org presents a snapshot to the company of how they are doing, but we ask that no more than 2/3 of the presentation be about their successes and triumphs, and 1/3 of their material be about their failures and misses. Normalize talking about failure.

Being transparent isn’t about putting everyone on blast; it’s about cultivating a habit of awareness about what might be relevant to other people. It’s about building systems of feedback, updates and open questioning into your culture. This can be scary, so it’s also about training yourselves as a team to handle hard news without overreacting or shooting the messenger. If you always tell people what they want to hear, they’ll never trust you. You can’t trust someone’s ‘yes’ until you hear their ‘no’.

Transparency is always a balance between information and distraction, but I think these are healthy internal rules of thumb for management:

  1. If anyone has further questions or wants to know more details than what was shared, they are free to ask any manager or exec, who will willingly answer more fully, up to the boundaries of privacy or legal reasons. As employees, they have a right to know about the business they are part of. A right — not a privilege, which can be revoked on a whim.
  2. When making internal decisions about e.g. salary bands, individual exceptions to formal policy, etc, ask each other … if this decision were to leak, could we justify our reasoning with head held high? If you would feel ashamed, or if you really don’t want people to find out about it, it’s probably the wrong decision.

Some practical tips for distributing power

Power flows to managers by default, just like water flows downhill. Managers have to actively push back on this tendency by explicitly allocating powers and responsibilities to tech leads and engineers. Don’t hoard information, share context generously, and make sure you know when they would want to tap in to a discussion. Your job is not to “shield” them from the rest of the org; your job is to help them determine where they can add outsize value, and include them. Only if they trust you to loop them in will they feel free to go heads down and focus.

Wrap your senior ICs into planning and other leadership activities. Decisions about sociotechnical processes (code reviews, escalation points, SLI/SLOs, ownership etc) are usually better owned by staff+ engineers than anyone on the management track. Invite a couple of your seniormost engineers to join calibrations — they bring a valuable perspective to performance discussions that managers lack.

Demystify management. Blur the lines between people managers and engineers; delegate ownership and accountability for some important projects to ICs. Ask every engineer about their career interests, and if management is on the list, find opportunities for them to practice and improve at managerial skills — mentoring, interviewing, onboarding, etc.

Adults don’t like being told what to do

People do phenomenal work when they want to do it, when they are creatively and emotionally engaged at the level of optimum challenge, and when they know their work matters. That’s where you’ll find your state of flow. That is where you’ll do your best work, which is also the best way to get promoted and make durable advances in your career.

Not, ironically, by chasing levels and titles for their own sake. ☺️

People want to be challenged. They want you to ask them to step up and take responsibility for something hard. They want to be needed, and they want to have agency in the doing of it. Just like you do.

Oh yeah, back to Molly …

Molly, who I mentioned at the beginning, joined Honeycomb five years ago as a customer success exec. After realizing she wanted to go back to engineering, she switched to working our support desk to build up her technical chops while she practiced writing code on the side. She has now been working as a software engineer on the product team for over two years, and she is ✨rocking it.✨ It is NEVER too late. 🙌

<3 charity

p.s. Molly also says, “don’t waste time at bad companies, whether you’re climbing the ladder or not!” 🥂

 

[1] Formal power is only one kind of power, and in some ways it is the weakest, because it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the company and is only loaned out for you to wield on its behalf. (You don’t carry the innate ability to fire people along with you after you stop being an engineering manager, for example.) Formal powers are limited, enumerated, and functional. You don’t get to use them for any reason other than furthering the goals of the org, or else it is literally an abuse of power.

Formal power is fascinating in another way, too: which is that your formal power is seen as legitimate only if you ~basically always wield it in the ways everyone already expects you to. You can make a surprising call only so often; you can straight up overrule the wishes of your constituents extremely rarely. If you use your formal power to do things that people disagree with or don’t support, without taking the time to persuade them or create real consensus, you will squander your credibility and good faith unbelievably fast.

[2] I am not going to bother rustling up lots of links and citations, because I expect most of this falls into the voluminous category of “shit you already knew”. But if any of it sounds surprising to you, here are some classic reference works:

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Drive, by Dan Pink
The Culture Code: Secrets of Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle
A Lapsed Anarchist’s Guide to Being a Better Leader, by Ari Weinzweig

[3] The scientific literature suggests that dominating instincts tend to emerge in more overtly hostile environments. Make of that what you will, I guess.

 

Some other writing I have done on this topic, or topics adjacent …

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
The Pendulum or the Ladder
If Management Isn’t a Promotion, then Engineering isn’t a Demotion
Twin Anxieties of the Engineer Manager Pendulum
Things to Know About Engineering Levels
Advice for Engineering Managers who want to Climb the Ladder
On Engineers and Influence
Is There a Path Back from CTO to Engineer?

The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)

Rituals for Engineering Teams

mipsytipsy13 Comments

Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.

It got me thinking about the many rituals I have initiated and/or participated in over the course of my career. Of course, I never thought of them as such — I thought of them as “having fun at work” 🙃 — but now I realize these rituals disproportionately contribute to my favorite moments and the most precious memories of my career.

Rituals (a definition): Actions that a person or group does repeatedly, following a similar pattern or script, in which they’ve imbued symbolism and meaning.

I think it is extremely worth reading the first 27 pages of the book — the Introduction and Part One. To briefly sum up the first couple chapters: the power of creative rituals comes from their ability to link the physical with the psychological and emotional, all with the benefit of “regulation” and intentionality. Physically going through the process of a ritual helps people feel satisfied and in control, with better emotional regulation and the ability to act in a steadier and more focused way. Rituals also powerfully increase people’s sense of belonging, giving them a stable feeling of social connection. (p. 5-6)

The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging. You show that you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. You feel like you belong to the group by participating in the ritual. This is powerful shit!

It seems especially relevant these days when so many of us are atomized and physically separated from our teammates. That ineffable sense of belonging can make all the difference between a job that you do and a role that feeds your soul. Rituals are a way to create that sense of belonging. Hot damn.

So I thought I’d write up some of the rituals for engineering teams I remember from jobs past. I would love to hear about your favorite rituals, or your experience with them (good or bad). Tell me your stories at @mipsytipsy. 🙃

Rituals at Linden Lab

Feature Fish Freeze

At Linden Lab, in the ancient era of SVN, we had something called the “Feature Fish”. It was a rubber fish that we kept in the freezer, frozen in a block of ice. We would periodically cut a branch for testing and deployment and call a feature freeze. Merging code into the branch was painful and time consuming, so If you wanted to get a feature in after the code freeze, you had to first take the fish out of the freezer and unfreeze it.

This took a while, so you would have to sit there and consider your sins as it slowly thawed. Subtext: Do you really need to break code freeze?

Stuffy the Code Reviewer

You were supposed to pair with another engineer for code review. In your commit message, you had to include the name of your reviewer or your merge would be rejected. But the template would also accept the name “Stuffy”, to confess that your only reviewer had been…Stuffy, the stuffed animal.

However if your review partner was Stuffy, you would have to narrate the full explanation of Stuffy’s code review (i.e., what questions Stuffy asked, what changes he suggested and what he thought of your code) at the next engineering meeting. Out loud.

Shrek Ears

We had a matted green felt headband with ogre ears on it, called the Shrek Ears. The first time an engineer broke production, they would put on the Ears for a day. This might sound unpleasant, like a dunce cap, but no — it was a rite of passage. It was a badge of honor! Everyone breaks production eventually, if they’re working on something meaningful.

If you were wearing the Shrek Ears, people would stop you throughout the day and excitedly ask what happened, and reminisce about the first time they broke production. It became a way for 1) new engineers to meet lots of their teammates, 2) to socialize lots of production wisdom and risk factors, and 3) to normalize the fact that yes, things break sometimes, and it’s okay — nobody is going to yell at you. ☺️

This is probably the number one ritual that everybody remembers about Linden Lab. “Congratulations on breaking production — you’re really one of us now!”

Vorpal Bunny

vorpal bunny

We had a stuffed Vorpal Bunny, duct taped to a 3″ high speaker stand, and the operations engineer on call would put the bunny on their desk so people knew who it was safe to interrupt with questions or problems.

At some point we lost the bunny (and added more offices), but it lingered on in company lore since the engineers kept on changing their IRC nick to “$name-bunny” when they went on call.

There was also a monstrous, 4-foot-long stuffed rainbow trout that was the source of endless IRC bot humor… I am just now noticing what a large number of Linden memories involve stuffed animals. Perhaps not surprising, given how many furries were on our platform ☺️

Rituals at Parse

The Tiara of Technical Debt

Whenever an engineer really took one for the team and dove headfirst into a spaghetti mess of tech debt, we would award them the “Tiara of Technical Debt” at the weekly all hands. (It was a very sparkly rhinestone wedding tiara, and every engineer looked simply gorgeous in it.)

Examples included refactoring our golang rewrite code to support injection, converting our entire jenkins fleet from AWS instances to containers, and writing a new log parser for the gnarliest logs anyone had ever seen (for the MongoDB pluggable storage engine update).

Bonfire of the Unicorns

We spent nearly 2.5 years rewriting our entire ruby/rails API codebase to golang. Then there was an extremely long tail of getting rid of everything that used the ruby unicorn HTTP server, endpoint by endpoint, site by site, service by service.

When we finally spun down the last unicorn workers, I brought in a bunch of rainbow unicorn paper sculptures and a jug of lighter fluid, and we ceremonially set fire to them in the Facebook courtyard, while many of the engineers in attendance gave their own (short but profane) eulogies.

Mission Accomplished

This one requires a bit of backstory.

For two solid years after the acquisiton, Facebook leadership kept pressuring us to move off of AWS and on to FB infra. We kept saying “no, this is a bad idea; you have a flat network, and we allow developers all over the world to upload and execute random snippets of javascript,” and “no, this isn’t cost effective, because we run large multi-terabyte MongoDB replica sets by RAIDing together multiple EBS volumes, and you only have 2.5TB FusionIO (for extremely high-perf mysql/RocksDB) and 40 TB spinning rust volumes (for Hadoop), and also it’s impossible to shrink or slice up replsets”, and so forth. But they were adamant. “You don’t understand. We’re Facebook. We can do anything.” (Literal quote)

Finally we caved and got on board. We were excited! I announced the migration and started providing biweekly updates to the infra leadership groups. Four months later, when the  migration was half done, I get a ping from the same exact members of Facebook leadership:

“What are you doing?!?”
“Migrating!”
“You can’t do that, there are security issues!”
“No it’s fine, we have a fix for it.”
“There are hardware issues!”
“No it’s cool, we got it.”
“You can’t do this!!!”

ANYWAY. To make an EXTREMELY long and infuriating story short, they pulled the plug and canned the whole project. So I printed up a ten foot long “Mission Accomplished” banner (courtesy of George W Bush on the aircraft carrier), used Zuck’s credit card to buy $800 of top-shelf whiskey delivered straight to my desk (and cupcakes), and we threw an angry, ranty party until we all got it out of our systems.

Blue Hair

I honestly don’t remember what this one was about, but I have extensive photographic evidence to prove that I shaved the heads of and/or dyed the hair blue of at least seven members of engineering. I wish I could remember why! but all I remember is that it was fucking hilarious.

In Conclusion

Coincidentally (or not), I have no memories of participating in any rituals at the jobs I didn’t like, only the jobs I loved. Huh.

One thing that stands out in my mind is that all the fun rituals tend to come bottoms-up. A ritual that comes from your VP can run the risk of feeling like forced fun, in a way it doesn’t if it’s coming from your peer or even your manager. I actually had the MOST fun with this shit as a line manager, because 1) I had budget and 2) it was my job to care about teaminess.

There are other rituals that it does make sense for executives to create, but they are less about hilarious fun and more about reinforcing values. Like Amazon’s infamous door desks are basically just a ritual to remind people to be frugal.

Rituals tend to accrue mutations and layers of meaning as time goes on. Great rituals often make no sense to anybody who isn’t in the know — that’s part of the magic of belonging. 🥰

Now, go tell me about yours!

charity

Rituals for Engineering Teams

Live Your Best Life With Structured Events

mipsytipsy6 Comments

If you’re like most of us, you learned to debug as a baby engineer by way of printf(3). By the time you were shipping code to production you had probably learned to instrument your code with a real metrics library. Maybe a tenth of us learned to use gdb and still step through functions on the regular. (I said maybe.)

Printing stuff to stdout is still the Swiss Army knife of tools. Always there when you reach for it, usually helps more than it does harm. (I said usually.)

And then! In case you’ve been living under a rock, we recently went and blew up ye aulde monolythe, and in the process we … lost most of our single-process tools and techniques for debugging. Forget gdb; even printf doesn’t work when you’re hopping the network between functions.

If your tool set no longer works for you, friend, it’s time to go all in. Maybe what you wanted was a faster horse, but it’s time for a car, and the sooner you turn in your oats for gas cans and a spare tire, the better.

Exercising Good Technical Judgment (When You Don’t Have Any)

If you’re stuck trying to debug modern problems with pre-modern tooling, the first thing to do is stop digging the hole. Stop pushing good data after bad into formats and stores that aren’t going to help you answer the right questions.

0893d048d8361fe632b090b0429ad78b-rainbow-dash-rainbows-e1542789580565.jpgIn brief: if you aren’t rolling out a solution based on arbitrarily wide, structured raw events that are unique and ordered and trace-aware and without any aggregation at write time, you are going to regret it. (If you aren’t using OpenTelemetry, you are going to regret that, too.)

So just make the leap as soon as possible.

But let’s rewind a bit.  Let’s start with observability.

 

Observability: an introduction

Observability is not a new word or concept, but the definition of observability as a specific technical term applied to software engineering is relatively new — about four years old. Before that, if you heard the term in softwareland it was only as a generic synonym for telemetry (“there are three pillars of observability”, in one annoying formulation) or team names (twitter, for example, has long had an “observability team”).

The term itself originates with control theory:

“In control theory, observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. The observability and controllability of a system are mathematical duals. The concept of observability was introduced by Hungarian-American engineer Rudolf E. Kálmán for linear dynamic systems.[1][2]”

But when applied to a software context, observability refers to how well you can understand and reason about your systems, just by interrogating them and inspecting their outputs with your tools. How well can you understand the inside of the system from the outside?

Achieving this relies your ability to ask brand new questions, questions you have never encountered and never anticipated — without shipping new code. Shipping new code is cheating, because it means that you knew in advance what the problem was in order to instrument it.

But what about monitoring?

Monitoring has a long and robust history, but it has always been about watching your systems for failures you can define and expect. Monitoring is for known-unknowns, and setting thresholds and running checks against the system. Observability is about the unknown-unknowns. Which requires a fundamentally different mindset and toolchain.

“Monitoring is the action of observing and checking the behavior and outputs of a system and its components over time.” — @grepory, in his talk “Monitoring is Dead“.

Monitoring is a third-person perspective on your software. It’s not software explaining itself from the inside out, it’s one piece of software checking up on another.

Observability is for understanding complex, ephemeral, dynamic systems (not for debugging code)

You don’t use observability for stepping through functions; it’s not a debugger.  Observability is for swiftly identifying where in your system the error or problem is coming from, so you can debug it — by reproducing it, or seeing what it has in common with other erroring requests.  You can think of observability as being like B.I. (business intelligence) tooling for software applications, in the way you engage in a lot of exploratory, open-ended data sifting to detect novel patterns and behaviors.

rainbow_dash___no_by_cptofthefriendship-d4erd69Observability is often about swiftly isolating or tracking down the problem in your large, sprawling, far-flung, dynamic system. Because the hard part of distributed systems is rarely debugging the code, it’s figuring out where the code you need to debug is.

The need for observability is often associated with microservices adoption, because they are prohibitively difficult to debug without service-level event oriented tooling — the kind you can get from Honeycomb and Lightstep.. and soon, I hope, many other vendors.

Events are the building blocks of observability

Ergh, another overloaded data term. What even is an “event”?

An observability “event” is a hop in the lifecycle of an end-to-end request. If a request executes code on three services separated by network hops before returning to the user, that request generated three observability “events”, each packed with context and details about that code running in that environment. These are also sometimes called “canonical log lines“. If you implemented tracing, each event may be a span in your trace.

If request ID #A897BEDC hits your edge, then your API service, then four more internal services, and twice connects to a db and runs a query, then request ID #A897BEDC generated 8 observability events … assuming you are in fact gathering observability data from the edge, the API, the internal services and the databases.ponyfm-i7812-original

This is an important caveat. We only gather observability events from services that we can and do introspect. If it’s a black box to us, that hop cannot generate an observability event. So if request ID #A897BEDC also performed 20 cache lookups and called out to 8 external HTTP services and 2 managed databases, those 30 hops do not generate observability events (assuming you haven’t instrumented the memcache service and have no instrumentation from those external services/dbs). Each request generates one event per request per service hop.**

(I also wrote about logs vs structured events here.)

Observability is a first-person narrative.

We care primarily about self-reported status from the code as it executes the request path.

Instrumentation is your eyes and ears, explaining the software and its environment from the perspective of your code. Monitoring, on the other hand, is traditionally a third-person narrative — it’s one piece of software checking up on another piece of software, with no internal knowledge of its hopes and dreams.

First-person narrative reports have the best potential for telling a reliable narrative.  And more importantly, they map directly to user experience in a way that third-party monitoring does not and cannot.

Events … must be structured.

First, structure your goddamn data.  You’re a computer scientist, you’ve got no business using text search to plow through terabytes of text.

Events …  are not just structured logs.

Now, part of the reason people seem to think structured data is cost-prohibitive is that they’re doing it wrong.  They’re still thinking about these like log lines.  And while you can look at events like they’re just really wide structured log lines that aren’t flushed to disk, here’s why you shouldn’t: logs have decades of abhorrent associations and absolutely ghastly practices.

Instead of bundling up and passing along one neat little pile of context, they’re spewing log lines inside loops in their code and DDoS’ing their own logging clusters.They’re shitting out “log lines” with hardly any dimensions so they’re information-sparse and just straight up wasting the writes. And then to compensate for the sparseness and repetitiveness they just start logging the same exact nouns tens or hundreds of times over the course of the request, just so they can correlate or reconstruct some lousy request that they never should have blown up in the first place!

But they keep hearing they should be structuring their logs, so they pile structure on to their horrendous little strings, which pads every log line by a few bytes, so their bill goes up but they aren’t getting any benefit! just paying more! What the hell, structuring is bull shit!giphy

Kittens. You need a fundamentally different approach to reap the considerable benefits of structuring your data.

But the difference between strings and structured data is ~basically the difference between grep and all of computer science. 😛

Events … must be arbitrarily wide and dense with context.

So the most effective way to structure your instrumentation, to get the absolute most bang for your buck, is to emit a single arbitrarily wide event per request per service hop. At Honeycomb, the maturely instrumented datasets that we see are often 200-500 dimensions wide.  Here’s an event that’s just 20 dimensions wide:

{ 

   "timestamp":"2018-11-20 19:11:56.910",
   "az":"us-west-1",
   "build_id":"3150",
   "customer_id":"2310",
   "durationMs":167,
   "endpoint":"/api/v2/search",
   "endpoint_shape":"/api/v2/search",
   "fraud_dur":131,
   "hostname":"app14",
   "id":"f46691dfeda9ede4",
   "mysql_dur":"",
   "name":"/api/v2/search",
   "parent_id":"",
   "platform":"android",
   "query":"",
   "serviceName":"api",
   "status_code":200,
   "traceId":"f46691dfeda9ede4",
   "user_id":"344310",
   "error_rate":0,
   "is_root":"true"
}

So a well-instrumented service should have hundreds of these dimensions, all bundled around the context of each request. And yet — and here’s why events blow the pants off of metrics — even with hundreds of dimensions, it’s still just one write. Adding more dimensions to your event is effectively free, it’s still one write plus a few more bits.

Compare this to a metric-based systems, where you are often in the position of trying to predict whether a metric will be valuable enough to justify the extra write, because every single metric or tag you add contributes linearly to write amplification. Ever gotten billed tens of thousands of dollars for your custom metrics, or had to prune your list of useful custom metrics down to something affordable? (“BUT THOSE ARE THE ONLY USEFUL ONES!”, as every ops team wails)

Events … must pass along the blob of context as the request executes

As you can imagine, it can be a pain in the ass to keep passing this blob of information along the life of the request as it hits many services and databases. So at Honeycomb we do all the annoying parts for you with our integrations. You just install the go pkg or ruby gem or whatever, and under the hood we:

  1. initialize an empty debug event when the request enters that service
  2. prepopulate the empty debug event with any and all interesting information that we already know or can guess.  language type, version, environment, etc.
  3. create a framework so you can just stuff any other details in there as easily as if you were printing it out to stdout
  4. pass the event along and maintain its state until you are ready to error or exit
  5. write the extremely wide event out to honeycomb

Easy!

(Check out this killer talk from @lyddonb on … well everything you need to know about life, love and distributed systems is in here, but around the 12:00 mark he describes why this approach is mandatory. WATCH IT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy3w2hGijhE&feature=youtu.be)

Events … should collect context like sticky buns collect dust

Other stuff you’ll want to track in these structured blobs includes:

1225287_1370081029072_full

  1. Metadata like src, dst headers
  2. The timing stats and contents of every network call (our beelines wrap all outgoing http calls and db queries automatically)
  3. Every raw db query, normalized query family, execution time etc
  4. Infra details like AZ, instance type, provider
  5. Language/environment context like $lang version, build flags, $ENV variables
  6. Any and all unique identifying bits you can get your grubby little paws on — request ID, shopping cart ID, user ID, request ID, transaction ID, any other ID … these are always the highest value data for debugging.
  7. Any other useful application context.  Service name, build id, ordering info, error rates, cache hit rate, counters, whatever.
  8. Possibly the system resource state at this point in time.  e.g. values from /proc/net/ipv4 stats

Capture all of it. Anything that ever occurs to you (“this MIGHT be handy someday”) — don’t even hesitate, just throw it on the pile. Collect it up in one rich fat structured blob.

Events … must be unique, ordered, and traceable

You need a unique request ID, and you need to propagate it through your stack in some way that preserves sequence. Once you have that, traces are just a beautiful visualization layer on top of your shiny event data.

Events … must be stored raw.

Because observability means you need to be able to ask any arbitrary new question of Rainbow-Dash-is-not-amused-my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic-31088082-900-622your system without shipping new code, and aggregation is a one-way trip. Once you have aggregated your data and discarded the raw requests, you have destroyed your ability to ask new questions of that data forever. For Ever.

Aggregation is a one-way trip.  You can always, always derive your pretty metrics and dashboards and aggregates from structured events, and you can never go in reverse. Same for traces, same for logs. The structured event is the gold standard. Invest in it now, save your ass in the future.

It’s only observability if you can ask new questions. And that means storing raw events.

Events…are richer than metrics

There’s always tradeoffs when it comes to data. Metrics choose to sacrifice context and connective tissue, and sometimes high cardinality support, which you need to correlate anomalies or track down outliers. They have a very small, efficient data format, but they sacrifice everything else by discarding all but the counter, gauge, etc.

A metric looks like this, by the way.

{ metric: "db.query.time", value: 0.502, tags: Array(), type: set }

That’s it. It’s just a name, a number and maybe some tags. You can’t dig into the event and see what else was happening when that query was strangely slow. You can never get that information back after discarding it at write time.

But because they’re so cheap, you can keep every metric for every request! Maybe. (Sometimes.) More often, what happens is they aggregate at write time. So you never actually get a value written out for an individual event, it smushes everything together that happens in the 1 second interval and calculates some aggregate values to write out. And that’s all you can ever get back to.

With events, and their relative explosion of richness, we sacrifice our ability to store every single observability event about every request. At FB, every request generated hundreds of observability events as it made its way through the stack. Nobody, NOBODY is going to pay for an o11y stack that is hundreds of times as large as production. The solution to that problem is sampling.

Events…should be sampled.rainbow_dash___no_by_cptofthefriendship-d4erd69

But not dumb, blunt sampling at server side. Control it on the client side.

Then sample heavily for events that are known to be common and useless, but keep the events that have interesting signal. For example: health checks that return 200 OK usually represent a significant chunk of your traffic and are basically useless, while 500s are almost always interesting. So are all requests to /login or /payment endpoints, so keep all of them. For database traffic: SELECTs for health checks are useless, DELETEs and all other mutations are rare but you should keep all of them. Etc.

You don’t need to treat your observability metadata with the same care as you treat your billing data. That’s just dumb.

… To be continued.

I hope it’s now blazingly obvious why observability requires — REQUIRES — that you have access to raw structured events with no pre-aggregation or write-time rollups. Metrics don’t count. Just traces don’t count. Unstructured logs sure as fuck don’t count.

Structured, arbitrarily wide events, with dynamic sampling of the boring parts to control costs. There is no substitute.

For more about the technical requirements for observability, read this, this, or this.

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**The deep fine print: it’s one observability event per request per service hop … because we gather observability detail organized by request id.  Databases may be different.  For example, with MongoDB or MySQL, we can’t instrument them to talk to honeycomb directly, so we gather information about its internal perspective by 1) tailing the slow query log (and turning it up to log all queries if perf allows), 2) streaming tcp over the wire and reconstructing transactions, 3) connecting to the mysql port as root every couple seconds from cron, then dumping all mysql stats and streaming them in to honeycomb as an event.  SO.  Database traffic is not organized around connection length or unique request id, it is organized around transaction id or query id.  Therefore it generates one observability event per query or transaction. 
In other words: if your request hit the edge, API, four internal services, two databases … but ran 1 query on one db and 10 queries on the second db … you would generate a total of *19 observability events* for this request.
For more on observability for databases and other black boxes, try this blog post.
Live Your Best Life With Structured Events