Nicole Forsgren: commitment

Transcript context

…I'm excited to have you here. I actually skip this question usually with guests, but I thought it'd be actually really valuable to spend a little time on your background. You have such a unique role and unique set of experiences. Could you just talk briefly about the things you've been up to in your career, where you've worked, and then what you're up to now and what you focus on these days? Sure, and I appreciate the question because you're right. I sort of had this choose your own adventure background. So I started as a software engineer at IBM. I was writing software for large enterprise systems, which meant I ended up running them. So I was also a CIS admin. I was racking the stacking. I was running these really, really large labs, and then I kind of stumbled into this seven-day march for several years, and I was like, "There has to be a better way." And we're hearing rumors of it, but management was not buying in. And so I decided to win this battle with data, and I was like, "I should go do a Ph.D." And so ended up kind of taking a slight pivot into Ph.D. and management information systems, which some people are less familiar with, but it's basically a cross between tech and business. And I ended up getting a fairly technical Ph.D. So I went to a school, I went to University of Arizona, which has a very, very technical degree, but I liked that it crossed with business because then I had the ability to make these strong business case statements, right. So it was like, how is or is the way that we develop and deliver software tied to outcomes at the individual level, right? Can I be more productive? Can I have better work-life balance? And the team level, is the team more productive? Is the team more efficient? And the organizational level, right. This is what I was really interested in originally. Do I see better ROI? Do I see better efficiency because then I could sell it to people, right? And so that was really kind of what I originally went into. And then I was a professor for a handful of years because if you're doing research, traditionally, that's the job in academia. I also had a master's in accounting because that really helped me make that kind of financial tie and understanding financial statements. And then, after a handful of years kind of walked away from tenure because academia was not convinced that DevOps was a thing, right, that DevOps wasn't real, and State of DevOps Report who I was doing with DORA, DevOps research and assessment in collaboration with Jez Humble and Gene Kim. And we started that work with Puppet. So shout out to Alanna Brown for starting that, and Nigel Kersten and the team there. We kind of pivoted away. And Chef, that little configuration management startup at the time, hired me, and they're like, "We'll give you halftime to do research and halftime to help our engineering practices improve." That's cool.…

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