Eiffel's tower - Nickolas Means | #LeadDevAustin 2018

there we go good afternoon everybody here we are the end of lead developer Austin hope you've all had a wonderful day and gotten a ton of value out of all of the amazing content so far I know that I have as a native Austinite I have to call Brad out on his comment about brisket there is one BBQ pitmaster in the world that has a James Beard Award and he's right here in Austin and the reason is because anybody can throw a pork shoulder and a smoker and get good results but brisket is an art so like Mary said I am an engineering manager at github and I'm incredible great I'm incredibly grateful for the time to be here with you today if you've gotten an alert about a vulnerable knurled appendant see any of any of the repositories that you manage that's the work of my team if you have thoughts on that functionality I would love to hear them we're also actively looking for engineering managers so if you're looking for a place that you can grow in the craft of engineering management and have a huge impact on how people build software come talk to me so I marry said I love to tell stories we'll get to some practical stuff at the end I promise but for now I'd invite you to just sit back and enjoy so if you've ever been to Paris you probably remember the moment that you first spotted the Eiffel Tower maybe it was out your plane window maybe like me it was from the jardin des tuileries peeking up over the buildings in the distance and it probably gave you chills that said oh my gosh I'm really here I'm in Paris even if you haven't been to Paris you likely still recognize the Eiffel Tower immediately whenever you see it in print or on film it's the emblem of Paris and of France and it's almost universally recognized this summer I had the amazingly good fortune of to find myself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with my family now I'm not normally one to foist a vacation photos on a room full of strangers but this picture of my then seven-year-old son Holden is one of my favorite pictures in the whole world we just finished a picnic on the shop Tamar's Pizza and champagne as you do and my son pulled out his trip notebook and he started to sketch and you can see how captivated he is by the tower you can see how hard he's working to get every detail right I mean I felt Howard does this to you it pulls you in makes you pay attention now I knew a little bit of the history of the Eiffel Tower already but as I sat there watching my son draw I find myself wondering about the circumstances that brought the tower into existence when it was completed in 1889 the Eiffel Tower at a thousand feet tall became the tallest structure in the world by almost doubling the height of the just completed Washington Monument how did Gustav II fell build something so tall using late 18-hundreds technology why built such an ostentatious statement piece in the first place well answer those questions we need to know a little bit about French history just a little I promise this is Napoleon the third he is the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte the famous Napoleon he was elected as the president of France in 1848 and at the end of his four-year term he decided that he wasn't quite done and wasn't really ready to not be president anymore so he threw himself a coup and declared himself the Emperor of France now the French people weren't exactly thrilled about being under an emperor but the previous four years had been a period of vast prosperity for France and the people just couldn't be bothered to revolt against the Emperor so they just lived with it for a while now prosperity ended with the franco-prussian war in 1870 Napoleon picked a fight with Prussia which is one of the the states of modern-day Germany to the north to counter their growing influence in power in the region now Napoleon bit off more than he could chew though and he was captured in a massive defeat at the Battle of sedan on senator September 4th 1870 and you can see our friend Napoleon here handing over his sword after losing the battle it was an embarrassment for him and an embarrassment for France now after the capture of Napoleon the French set up a new Republican government and that governments first job was to get the Prussians to go home and not annex all of northern France and the way that they did that was by offering to pay huge reparations to Prussia for all of the trouble that they had caused them through this war the prosperity was gone and not only were they broke but their defeat in the franco-prussian war was a huge blow to the collective French ego well fast-forward 10 years by the early 1880s France was nearly back on its feet and had largely recovered from the defeat at the Battle of sedan and subsequent reparations they had to pay from the war the Republican government enacted at the end of the franco-prussian war at the end of Napoleon the thirds Empire had held its own against plenty of challenges and it was guiding France slowly but surely back into prosperity on top of that the thirty-year renovation of Paris by Georgia Jeanne Hoffman replacing narrow medieval streets with broad tree-lined avenues like this one that's named after him was nearing completion and Paris was ready to show off and what better day a way to do that than to put on another World's Fair Prince Albert the husband of Britain's Queen Victoria had the idea in 1851 to invite all of the nations of the world to come to London and show off their industrial progress well France liked this idea so much that they hosted one of their own for years later in 1855 and then again in 1867 and then again in 1878 eight years after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of sedan now this one eight years after the defeat was meant to mark French recovery from the war but the French were still so embroiled in domestic political turmoil that they didn't really begin preparing for this exhibition until about six months before so it was a bit of a shambles and so in the early 1880s a movement to host yet another World's Fair was picking up steam in Paris an organ organizing committee was formed to start making preparations and the first thing they did was to pick a date and what better date than the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille now the storming of the Bastille is the symbolic start of the French Revolution that overthrew the French monarchy and it's celebrated as a Bastille Day in France to this day much like Independence Day in America each of the exhibitions held in Paris had been more grandiose than the last and this was going to be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution so they needed to make this one special so the organising committee started thinking about how they could do that and they decided to host a design competition to see who could build the best monument to be the centerpiece for this exhibition well that competition got the attention of these two gentlemen maurice Coquelin and emile noogie a two structural engineers at la compagnie the atados monte fell now the two of them had just finished working together on the beautiful Guerra beat viaduct at four hundred and seven feet above the tree or river below it it was the highest bridge in the world when it opened in 1884 they had the idea of using the exact same engineering principles to build a giant Tower as the centerpiece of the exhibition and so they got to work in this sketch by Maurice Koch lien is what they came up with you can see sketches of a few famous objects on the right to kind of show the scale here there's no Dom Statue of Liberty the Arc de Triomphe they were proposing to build a tower 300 meters tall a thousand feet the tallest structure in the world co cleanin Oogie excitedly took this the sketch to their boss to pitch their bosses you may have guessed from the name of the company was none other than Gustave II fell now if L had been a bit lukewarm on the whole competition already his firm had just finished the Garry beat viaduct and he was really looking forward to a break not another big project to take on and what's more he wasn't terribly fond of these big exhibitions in the first place his country kept building these these exhibitions they'd spent a ton of money on beautiful buildings that occupy him for six months while the exhibition was open and they would tear them all back down he felt like to build things of significance things that were practical things that would last like a bridge over the tria River the design competition requirement that the centrepiece monument be easy to disassemble was a complete non-starter free-fell he wasn't interested Cokely no new gay had hoped to change his mind by the sheer grandiose nosov their idea but it wasn't enough absolutely brought in this man Stephen so vast he was a fellow chief architect and he suggested several modifications to the design to make it more useful and aesthetically pleasing and if you look at Co cleans drawing you can see the modifications that saw ves sketched in and pencil there's a glass observation pavilion on the first deck and then up at the very top there's a cupola with another observation deck and a spot for the French flag up on top and the final design you can see that these made made it in there's three observation decks as well as the lace like decorative arches at the bottom that the Eiffel Tower is known for those are all suggested by saw vest now this this got he felt more excited at our were people can view all of Paris from Heights previously reserved for balloonists it would be possible to do weather observations maybe even radio transmissions from such a high point and so he quickly bought the patent for the design from Coconino VA and saw vest and began the hard work of getting the design selected for the competition the idea was immediately popular with the French public who loved the idea of dwarfing the just completed Washington Monument and besting the upstart Americans it was not however immediately popular with the architects artists and most importantly the politicians around Paris and so he fell went on the offensive this was his first writing on the subject the tour on fire Dutoit sont method how to our destiny elects posición did the sweet scent quattro vent enough which roughly translates to 300 mija 300 meter high iron tower for the 1889 exhibition and if any of you speak french i profoundly apologize this particular copy which sold at auction in 2015 for just shy of ten thousand dollars was addressed to general George Boleyn J a prominent politician who would go on to be the French war minister but he felt was giving these things out to anybody that would give him an audience he also went before the socio Teta aunjanue seville the Society of Civil Engineers to present his idea and to stand for questioning and boy were they happy to ask him questions one of you fellows chief critics was Paul planet I'm the founder and editor of the arc future the architectural journal Locke construction modern planet was not impressed with the fells design and he felt it was counter to the work that Hoffman had done to beautify Paris and the great renovation specifically in the May 1st 1886 issue of his journal he said if Elle's design is nothing more than an in artistic scaffolding of crossbars an angled iron it looks hideously unfinished Peter art a powerful politician who would go on to become the Prime Minister of France decried it as anti artistic contrary to French genius it's a project more in character with America where taste is not yet very developed then Europe much less France but he fells chief critic was charles garnier a prominent french architect he led the most famous protests of all forming the committee of three hundred one member for each meter of height of the proposed tower and it was made up of some of the most prominent figures in arts and architecture in paris their protests published in the prominent Parisian paper that tom said in part imagine for a moment a giddy ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack crushing under its barbaric ball no-trade dom the tour son Jacques the Louvre the dough Moses in Valley the Arc de Triomphe all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream Garnier had a flair for the dramatic but as around this time that Edouard Lacroix was named Minister of Trade and put in charge of the whole exhibition this meant that he was in charge of wrapping up the design competition as well he had been among those that he fell had lobbied with his design he had a copy of he fells manuscript on the project and he and the rest of the political class had quite come to likey fells design and calling for final proposals Lacroix had amended the guidelines to call for a tower of at least 300 meters in height and he suggested that it might be built of iron and an obvious nod to a fells design now some of the other entrants to the competition included a 300 metre tall lighthouse to signify the knowledge of Paris this lighthouse was to be built of granite which meant that it would be too heavy to ever be built another was a 300 metre tall water sprinkler in case Paris ever entered drought and they needed to water all of the gardens that Hofmann had just installed all over the city the best was a 300 metre tall guillotine in honor of the French Revolution and there were other designs as well most of them more serious but in the end he fell to the sign was the only one that had any significant engineering behind it it was the only one that was practical or even possible to build and so on June 12th 1886 Lacroix gave an over joyed he fell the news that his design had been selected that joy was short-lived however as the government balked did he fells estimate of 6 million francs around 1 million u.s. at the time for building the tower now the government had originally committed to fund the full tower but they quickly backtracked to an offer of 1.5 million francs 1/4 the cost of the tower he felt would need to secure investors for the remaining 4 and a half million francs and to do that he needed to make money from the tower and so he requested to provisions in the contract number one that he be allowed to charge admission for going up the tower in addition to what people had already paid to get into the fair and number two that the tower remain intact for 20 years not the one year as originally slated for so that he'd have more time to make his money back well the government agreed in principle to this but this created another problem you see the exhibition was to be held on the shop DeMars in the 7th arrondissement just south of the Sen River the shop de Mars was the French Army's primary drilling ground and he fell had proposed to put his thousand foot tower right in the middle now the army was already resigned to losing their drilling ground for the year it would take to assemble and host the exposition couldn't be avoided happened every time the crazy French government decided that they wanted to have one of these exhibitions but having a giant tower in the middle of their drilling ground for 19 years after the exhibition closed just wouldn't do and so after much negotiating it was agreed that the tower would instead be located in the northwest portion of the shop de Mars near the bank of the cen leaving most of the field opened for military drilling once the rest of the exhibition was dismantled now he fell knew this would complicate the foundation but he had little choice but to compromise if he wanted to get the tower built French bureaucracy being what it was it took another six anxious months for the contract to be finalized in the funding put in place but finally On January 8 1887 he fell had a signed contract in his hand he immediately began gathering supplies and hiring workers and on January 28 1887 he fells workers began work on the foundation they had a little over two years until the planned opening of the exposition now I mentioned that moving the tower closer to the Sen complicated foundation work and here's what I mean by that each leg of the tower rested on for six and a half foot thick slabs of concrete one for each of the principal girders for each leg the east and south legs of the tower rested on solid ground on the shop damar side of the construction site the west and north legs though were far more complicated because they were on the side of the site closest to the cen the ground here was made of millions of years of sediment deposit from the rivers much less stable and so in each of the four legs for each slab required to piles to be driven 72 feet down to reach the bedrock below the sediment and what's more it required the six and a half foot thick foundation slabs to be dug out and poured below the water table of the Sen water infiltration was a huge problem for them and so they usually giant 50 by 20 foot cast-iron caissons to do their work the way this worked is they would dig out in the foundation pit and slowly this case on would sink into the ground as they dug they injected with compressed air and that compressed air kept the water out of the foundation so that they could actually pour the concrete and get it to cure five months later on June 30th 1887 the foundations were finally finished and this is what the foundation for each of the four legs looked like when it was completed each foundation pier had two bolts embedded into it to bolt the shoe of the primary girder and to give you a sense of scale here those bolts look kind of small right but they're actually four inches in diameter and 25 feet long and so what the foundations in place II Phil's team quickly began the iron work you can see here how the primary girders attached to the foundation piers and the reason for the angle here is twofold it allows some of the weight to be borne vertically and some of it to be borne horizontally as as the weight of the tower pushes down at an angle and this is very important when you have silty sediment ground that's not very stable it gives you much more stability but it also made the tower more resilient to the horizontal forces at the top when the wind hit the tower remember nobody did ever build and built anything this tall nobody'd ever contended with wins a thousand feet in the air work progressed on the tower quickly in large part due to the precision of the drawings Bruce Bayou Phil's office in all there were 1700 general drawings made and a further three thousand six hundred and twenty-nine drawings of specific pieces the position of the rivet holes was calculated down to the nearest tenth of a millimeter and angles were calculated down to one second of Arc which is one thirty six hundredth of a degree these precisely drawn parts were then forged and drilled in a fills factory and level whopper a one of the suburbs of Paris and brought to the site via horse-drawn carriage Henry Ford wouldn't admit his Model T for a few decades yet early in 1888 they had reached a critical juncture in the first phase of construction because the rest of the tower would rise from the first platform it was absolutely critical that the four legs of the tower be level the tower was so tall that even a few millimeters out of true here could result in a significant lean at the top of the tower and he felt a plan for dealing with this was ingenious each leg was built at a slightly steeper angle than it needed to be talking a centimeter or two here not much and then you can't see it in this picture but at the very top of the scaffolding where the tower rests on the scaffolding they're not directly connected there's actually a largest sandbox there and the reason for the sandbox is that it allowed millimeter precise adjustments in height and angle of the leg what they would do is there was a cork at the bottom of the sandbox so they'd pull the cork out let some of the sand run out cork measure and when they finally got it to the level that they wanted they were done when they got all four legs to be exactly the same height all they had to do was join them together with the platform and they were locked in place and so on March 20th 1888 the first and most complicated portion of the tower was completed they still had 800 feet to go though and only a year to do it as they built up from the first level it became increasingly complicated to get the parts they needed up to the area where they were actually working on the tower and to solve this they used the first level as a staging area a large steam crane again knowing Dustin ternal combustion engines would lift parts from the ground level up to the first level and on the first level platform they built a small circular railroad and they would use this railroad to carry the parts around to the leg of the tower that they were to be raised up and to do that work they had smaller steam cranes which you can see at the top of the picture here these were actually mounted on the elevator tracks so they moved up the tower as it inched further these are really the first tower cranes my July the tower complete up to the second level and if you look in the background here you can see the other buildings for the exposition starting to take form as well the exhibition was slated to start in about eight months they still had 600 feet to go another issue he fells team had to solve was how to rivet pieces together so far off the ground the Eiffel Tower was assembled almost entirely by riveting the prefabricated parts were brought to the tower hauled up and put into place once the crew were certain they had the assembly right they would begin the tedious process of driving rivets through all of the the precisely aligned holds the problem is that before they could drive the rivets they had to be heated up until they were red-hot if you've never seen a rivet it looks essentially like a screw with no threads it's got a head on one end and it's a smooth shaft and you had to heat them red-hot in order to form the head on the other side of the rivet they did it on the ground the rivets would be too cold to Hammer by the time they got up the tower typically in construction of this day you'd have a small Forge somewhere on site and a rivet boy who would run with red-hot rivets in a 10 pail to where the rivets were actually being driven but that wasn't an option here so instead they invented a portable Forge and you can see what's going on in this picture there's a worker in the foreground here who's heating rivets up in the Forge up on the work level of the tower there's a worker behind the girder that's holding the head of the rivet in place with a pair of tongs there's a worker in front of the girder who has a tool for shaping a head into the end of the rivet and then a fourth worker swimming swinging a hammer there were 24 man crews working all over the tower at the peak of construction and the reason for this is that the Eiffel Tower has 2.5 million rivets these forges would go with them all the way up to the very top of the tower well the really complicated stuff behind them other than sheer height the top part of the tower went up quite smoothly they added about a thousand feet each month until they topped the tower out on March 15th 1889 when the tower was structurally complete well ahead of the exhibition's opening he fell marked the occasion by inviting 15 reporters and Parisian dignitaries to scale the 1710 steps to the very top to raise the French flag up on top he fell you can see in the center here is said to have remarked at the time gentlemen the French flag is the only flag in the world with a 300 metre tall flagpole the reason they had to climb the stairs is because the elevators were not yet ready this might have had something to do with the fact that they were the most complex passenger elevators that had been built to the state I don't have time to tell you about him here if you want to hear more find me after its fascinating story but despite the fact that the first 30,000 visitors to the tower after the exhibition opened had to climb the stairs including ma cherie fell here on the left the tower was a huge success he felt was figuratively and literally on top of the world when it was completed in 1889 the Eiffel Tower at 1063 feet was the tallest structure on earth more than 500 feet taller than the previous record-holder the Washington Monument that's approximately equivalent to an 81 story building the Eiffel Tower would hold the height record until the Chrysler Building in New York was topped out 41 years later it held this record for 41 years no subsequent building has held the record for longer it's a remarkable achievement that broke all kinds of new ground and it's the kind of work that we all say we want to be doing right we want to push the envelope we want to solve hard problems that no one else has solved we want to ship amazing stuff so what can we learn from Gustave you fell to help us do that well to start I want to try something I'm about to put a word up on the screen and I want you without thinking about it too give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down to show me your general feelings about the subject all right hope you got your thumb ready okay here's your word a few thumbs up mostly thumbs down I'm glad because I don't know what we would do with the rest of our time together if you'd all been like yeah I love politics it's my favorite most of us would prefer to just keep our heads down and write code and lead our teams right a study published in The Wall Street Journal back in 2011 asked participants about their approach to office politics giving them these three options number one it's best to know what's going on but not participate directly number two it's best to stay out of office politics completely or number three it's best to participate so you can get ahead now getting people answered between the group that wanted to stay informed but not participate and the group that stayed out of things altogether fully 83 percent of participants picked an answer saying they did not participate in office politics at all so you're not alone I bet some of us have even left jobs because our companies were too political I know I have but here's the thing and it took me way too long to come to terms with this every organization is political you can't escape politics by just moving around enough until you find the right manager or the right company any time you have more than one person working together on something you're gonna have politics because politics is nothing more than how humans share power and make decisions together that's all it is that means that doing anything meaningful in your company whether it's as simple as getting to do work you wanted to or as complex is completely overhauling your company's hiring practices to improve diversity and representation requires you to understand and participate in the politics of your company I know what a positive and uplifting message to end the day on but stay with me politics doesn't have to be negative and gross there's a couple of things that he fell does that give us a great example to follow in doing politics the right way let's rewind back to the work he fell did before the tower was even built remember this paper with the really long french name that he felt put together to promote his plan for the tower he went around from official to official handing out autographed copies and talking about what he wanted to build and what he felt was a doing was really pretty simple it's just networking and self-promotion now we all love networking and self-promotion right but they're kind of like politics they get a bad rap that they don't entirely deserve so let me reframe him a little bit for him and I'm gonna change these terms all this isn't what is is making friends and telling stories that's all it is that's all he was doing he felt would invite someone to lunch or more likely he would spend an afternoon on the terrace of a Parisian cafe polishing off a bottle of wine together and he tells stories maybe talk about the Guerra beat viaduct he might even tell them that when a train past the bridge was displaced by precisely eight millimeters exactly as his mathematic Moll mathematical models had predicted before construction ever started then he'd show them the final drawing of the tower and maybe even talk about how amazing it would be when a tower on French soil past the height of the great obelisk the Americans had been working on off and on for 40 years he listened to their stories - and by the end of the conversation he'd have made a friend now importantly he didn't just do this with people on the exhibition committee the fact that this document was autograph to Jorge Boulanger tells us that blonde Shea was in government and would go on to be the war minister but he had absolutely no decision-making power for the exhibition nothing to do with it and that's what networking is all about it's just making friends maybe you'll be in position to help one another at some point but that's not an immediate focus so what does that mean for you grab coffee with your product manager so they're a human - you're not just someone who drops things in the top of your backlog and sets unrealistic dates get lunch with someone in sales because they're the ones hearing the questions that your customers are asking and most of them have absolutely no idea what all of us how all of us do what we do and they're fascinated to hear it the second part self-promotion is about making sure others know what you've been working on not in a braggin way in an informative way in a perfect world doing good work would be enough but your manager isn't paying nearly as much attention to you attention to you as you think they are they're juggling so many priorities so you have to tell them what you've been up to you have to feed them that information showing what you've been working on and what you've accomplished is a big part of how you build your reputation at work with your manager and with other folks if you want a promotion or to build more influence so that you can effect big changes this is a big part of how you go about doing it if you want something to help you learn to do this more effectively I can't recommend Dale Carnegie's classic how to win friends and influence people highly enough it's full of timeless advice on how to do this well in a productive and non scumming way that benefits you and the people that you're talking to but the other thing you feel has to teach us let's go back to the contract he sign on January 28 1887 if you'll remember the French government had initially proposed to cover the entire cost of the tower but that last minute balked and only agreed to cover a quarter of the cost now at that point we've been pretty easy free failed to play hardball and demand that the government live up to its original proposal or he would just take his ball and go home but that's not what he did instead he did a bit of negotiation now that word probably makes you think of buying a hust car and trying not to get screwed so let me reframe it a little bit for you as well cooperation that's really all good faith negotiation as working together to find an outcome that works for everyone if L understood the French government's position and he had empathy for the government representatives he was talking to putting on an exhibition is expensive and they frankly didn't have the six million francs to give him so instead of walking away he worked with him to find a way to satisfy his need for six million francs to build the tower and their need to not give him six million francs to build the tower he found that mutually beneficial solution and being able to charge admission for 20 years by the way that turned out to be a phenomenal deal free fell an amazing 1.8 million people ascended the tower during the exposition they paid an average of 3 francs for the privilege and so the tower had actually paid for itself by the end of the fair and he had 19 more years to profit from it when working for something that we want there's a temptation to see that process as a zero-sum game someone has to win and someone has to lose but that's not usually the case they fell needed six million francs to build the tower so is that her bust your executive team wants a piece of functionality delivered by an absurd date so you need to tell them in no uncertain terms that it's absolutely impossible in reality there's almost always a middle ground where everyone gets most of what they want the trick is figuring out what it actually is that everyone in situation wants and why they want it it requires you to exercise empathy and compassion and to ask probing up and ended questions that let you build understanding so when your product manager starts pushing for that unrealistic date try to understand why look to see if there's a smaller piece of functionality you can deliver early that will meet whatever need is driving the push if you want to learn how to negotiate well grab a copy of herb Cohen's classic you can negotiate anything the title a little cheesy but this book changed the course of my career when one of my mentors recommended it to me years ago Cohen teaches a style of negotiation that revolves around understanding everyone's needs especially your own and getting to agreement by finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill them what about bad politics are there organizations and managers that are overly political course there are if you find yourself in an organization that regularly promotes those that play the game instead of those that do good work you might have to leave or if you find yourself working for a manager that always takes credit for your good work there might not be enough networking in self-promotion for you to get around that but if Gustav Excel didn't find the French government too political to navigate and negotiate with there's a pretty good chance that bar is higher than you think it is but there's another layer we need to consider here everything I've shared so far has been for us as individuals but this is lead developer right what does this have to do with how we lead our teams well what's the conventional wisdom around politics for TuneIn leaders who care about their teams it's this right now I try not to use profanity on stage but this is such a common term that I don't think umbrella is even profanity at this point there was a tweet that Jason frite sent out not long ago that kind of got into what this common wisdom is for for leaders I'll give you a second to read that kind of the takeaway from this tweet is that you might have to engage in organizational politics to get your job done but you should shield your teams from politics which Jason calls here so they can keep their heads down and stay productive now there is some truth to this constant disruption and getting jerked around from priority to priority or counterproductive for your team and helping them stay heads down in writing code eight hours a day will probably feel really productive to them and to you too but the full reality is more nuanced the downside of being an impervious shut umbrella is that you become a choke point of information for your team over time you'll also disconnect your team from the mission of your organization and since we know that sense of purpose is an important motivator for most humans and that disconnection can quickly lead to dissatisfaction and even leaving your company putting yourself in that spot as a leader is also all but guaranteed to burn you out none of us are built to carry that kind of load so what do you do instead well one of the engineers on my team actually introduced me to a new analogy I like a lot better than umbrella in my interview process for github Steve Richert said that instead of using the term umbrella he really liked heat shield better and I agree with him now we get the term heat shield from the world of space travel an orbital reentry because it wouldn't be one of my talks without an aviation reference of some kind unlike an umbrella a heat shield isn't designed to be impervious an umbrella will block all of the rain that hits it but a heat shield blocks just enough heat to make re-entry survivable it's a carefully calculated compromise if it blocked all the heat it would be too heavy to reach orbit in the first place not enough though and reentry isn't survivable this is your job as a leader you need to block enough organizational noise so that your team has consistent direction and big blocks of time to get work done but not so much that they lose context in connection blocking all the noise might make them feel more comfortable but it will ultimately keep them from delivering the value that they're capable of they'll also stunt their career growth because as I said earlier all organizations are political if the folks on your team never have the opportunity to see organizational politics and to watch you work with organizational politics they'll never learn to build their influence and sell their ideas or to negotiate for the things that they think are important as a leader you have an obligation to help your teams learn how to navigate your organization it's a skill that will serve them well for the rest of their careers so by the end of 20 years if L had been promised the tower was too much a part of Paris's global identity to do anything but leave it right where it was so he felt tower is still standing a hundred and twenty nine years later and while hasn't been the tallest structure on the planet for a while it remains the most visited paid monument in the world with nearly seven million visitors a year waiting in line for hours to take in the breathtaking views of Paris that it provides had he fell not been willing to participate in the politics involved we wouldn't have the Eiffel Tower the same is true for you you can you can choose to keep your head down and hop from job to job every time you get a whiff of politics that'll stunt your career even if you are the people on your team want to stay on the individual contributor track and become a senior technical contributor you'll need to understand politics to develop the influence you need to drive technical decisions if instead of running you accept that politics is a reality neither good nor bad in and of itself and you learn to participate in organizational politics in a way that remains true to you and the things that you value you can find ways to have a huge impact in your organization and maybe even the world you can help your teams have the same impact it may seem intimidating but you can do it I know you can good luck [Applause]

Channel: LeadDev

Views: 192,341

Rating: 4.898201 out of 5

Keywords: White October Events, the lead developer, the lead dev, the lead developer austin, lead dev, Lead Dev Austin 2018, Lead Dev Austin, #LeadDevAustin, the lead developer conference, white october events, engineering management, engineering leadership

Id: dLPi4lfk8is

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018