Decoding Duolingo: Returning to the Office, Enabling First-Time Managers & More
Plus, inside Datadog’s $5M outage, how Harvard recommends you handle change on your team, your opportunity to contribute to DORA, and how the best platform engineers work.
Remote, hybrid, or in-office? Opinions are divided on what has quickly become one of the most controversial topics in tech: Should we return to the office and if so, how and when?
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Duolingo’s Sr. Director of Engineering Fabio Lessa, to discuss how to successfully transition your engineering org back to the office - and why Duolingo has done it so successfully. [Hint: it all starts with culture.]
Fabio also discusses Duolingo’s training program for first-time managers, the transition from IC to team lead, and tips to roll out a training program at your company.
"It's not black and white. Right? You can't really replace the acceleration that you get of everyone in the room. Like even whiteboarding together, doing ideas, laughing, joking, good ideas, bad ideas. Now you don't need to do that every day of the week, but there's certain situations that you can really accelerate."
Episode Highlights:
(3:03) Returning to the office
(6:10) Balancing hybrid work
(15:28) What makes Duolingo's culture great
(18:38) Platform engineering
(21:28) New manager training program
(26:30) How to roll out your own training program
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. Inside Datadog’s $5M Outage
’s does great deep dives into some of the industry’s most important events. This one is a standout.2. To Implement Change, You Don’t Need to Convince Everyone at Once
If your engineering team is operating the same way it was a year ago, you’re doing it wrong. Change, evolution and continuous improvement are key to happy developers and healthy companies.
Here's how Harvard says you should handle change properly.
This week’s Download is sponsored by the Benchmark → Automate → Improve Summer Workshop Series.
Benchmark. Automate. Improve. These are the most important themes that drive elite engineering organizations. That’s why we’ve set up three workshops over the summer on how to practically apply each of these to your own development teams.
Benchmarks focuses on how elite engineering teams use metrics. Automate looks at how automation has been used at elite orgs to improve developer workflows. Improve is a guide on how the top 10% of teams allocate developer resources.
3. Contribute To DORA
We need your help for this year’s 2023 DORA State of DevOps survey with DORA, Google Cloud, and LinearB.
Click here to take the 2023 State of DevOps survey. It just takes 15 minutes. Tell the research team about how you develop and deliver software - and you could help us all understand how to make the (software) world better! There are no right or wrong answers; we just want to hear about how you develop and deliver software in your teams.
4. How The Best Platform Engineers Work
With the platform-engineering playbook still being written every day, this piece chips in with the best insights on being a successful leader and platform engineer from the best minds in our industry - including Netflix’s Kathryn Koehler, Spot AI’s
, and many more.