What CTOs Say vs. What Their Developers Hear w/ DataStax's Shankar Ramaswamy
From the archives: As we progress through Season 3, we thought it would be nice to look back at some of our best episodes that haven’t been posted to our Substack page. This episode was originally published on February 5th, 2022. Enjoy!
Anyone who’s been in a rapidly scaling company with an ever-expanding engineering team knows that communication is never as simple as it seems.
That’s why we were so excited when Shankar Ramaswamy decided to sit down with Dev Interrupted's Conor Bronsdon
Shankar is a veteran leader in the engineering space, having helped recruit, build and guide developer teams at companies like Amazon, eBay, Paypal and Google - where before leaving he managed a team of 300+ people.
Now the Head of Engineering at Datastax, Shankar took the time to talk to us about some of the practical lessons he’s learned managing teams of several hundred people, and why something he calls the “intent perception gap” is so tricky for managers to get right.
We also took the time to talk about Shankar’s views on the future of cloud computing, what healthy conflict looks like at unicorn companies and why you might want to rethink your single-vendor strategy.
Episode Highlights Include:
(2:54) Shankar’s career from product management at eBay to eng at PayPal
(5:35) Why Amazon is the only place where junior devs argue about customer experience
(11:52) What is the intent perception gap?
(19:06) Future of cloud computing
(21:07) Why single vendor strategies are a bad idea
(32:19) Devs have no formal training to handle people problems
While you’re here, check out this video from our YouTube channel, and be sure to like and subscribe when you do!
Live from New York it's... Dev Interrupted!
Join the Dev Interrupted community to discuss the Silicon Valley Bank crash, how Uber's engineering team lost its way, the challenge of AI self-driving, and Kyte’s experimental product innovation playbook in this special live-streamed episode of Dev Interrupted, filmed in front of a live audience at NYC LeadDev.
Kyte’s Head of Product and Engineering, Nick Cobb, joins co-host Conor Bronsdon for this in-depth podcast streaming April 4th and 5th.
