Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…a series of anti-patterns kludged into a launch. But we got it partially up, but we had to restart it every 12 months. Every 12 hours, every server had to be restarted even with the caching mechanism. And then about three weeks after that, I finally figured out what the core bug was, that was bringing us down every 12 hours. It was this incredibly simple issue that had just been hard to debug, basically related to the way that Python initiates variables used as default parameters. It's something super silly and we just had someone who hadn't written Python before who was working on the API code, so they didn't realize it's gotcha. Then no one else caught it when it was reviewed and it just took a long time to debug. It was such a non-obvious. It didn't break anything, it was just doing a lot of extra load on the servers. We finally figured it out and it was just really remarkable experience pulling through. And you know what? The company still went to zero. So we had this at launch. I think we did this heroic, heroic stretch to get it working. A couple weeks after that, a new CEO came in, did a round of layoffs. This is back I think 2012. The team nine months after I started was down to 30 people from about a hundred and it went downhill from there, from a business perspective. But we launched a lot of functionality, has really learned just a tremendous amount. And it kind of shaped what I think about in terms of early in your career, getting learning and going into a company that is maybe having a rough time. I became a manager two and a half years into my career. Basically running the entire engineering team there because everyone who had a lick of sense quit or got laid off, and it was just complete idiot me trying to be the manager for the engineering org, wasn't qualified and no one would've given me that job, but I was the only one dumb enough to take it at that point. I learned so much and I really the kernel that turned into my entire career where it was that opportunity, even though at the time it was pretty grim. That's an amazing story. I feel like a lot of these experiences were in the moment, it's just like, "What is going on? This is so bad and hard," end up being the most interesting and looking back end up being the most biggest teaching experiences. The ones you like bond over with people you work with like Apple. It always comes to mind where it's just like Steve Jobs's joke, people like crazy and then they look back and that was the best moment in my career. You would never voluntarily take on a lot of these really challenging things, but sometimes when they show up, you're with a group of people you really respect, you love working with and you want to overcome together. And that's really powerful experience. Even if Uber China was similar where if someone had been like, "Hey, do you want to go work on this Uber China migration?" I would've been like, "Absolutely not." But no one asked. They're just like, "Get this done," and so we did. I think these things are pretty remarkable.…

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