David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, he's like a well known sports nut, has this basement tricked out as a sports bar, and almost took that career path. We're not talking about a distinguished engineer at Amazon who's taking this technical advisor role, because they're this technical luminary. It's a really smart guy who's just a very malleable, facile person. It was just an excuse to keep Andy in the company and give him a job. This is now the biggest problem in the company that Jeff has focused on and that Andy's focused on. This is where all these threads come together. I'm just in awe thinking about this. If I were looking at this problem of my technical, infrastructure to grind to a halt, we can't ship anything, communication is so hard in the company, the natural thing to do, and I think what most companies would do and did try to do at this point in time, is, okay, we got to improve our communication. We need better coordination loops, more communication, tighter communication, more coordination between teams. We need to build out our engineering management discipline here. We need to build out our processes. We're going to get really efficient to be able to solve this complexity challenge. At Microsoft, when they encountered this problem a decade or two earlier, they invented the program management role. That was basically the responsibility. It was twofold. There are not enough unicorn people out there who are 10X developers and also unbelievable communicators, so we'll just hire communication mouthpieces for the 10X developers. We can recruit these four sigma, IQ engineer type people, typically terrible communicators. Let's just attach a PM to every dev or a PM to every 2–5 devs. That way, they'll have communication associated with what they're doing. All the PMs can talk to each other, they can figure out what's happening between these two teams, then they both go write specs, the engineers write their engineering documents, and then boom, we're off to the races. The PMs can just keep talking it out to make sure that we're all on the same page.…

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