Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Updated: 27 Oct 2023 • 204 episodes
www.ctoconnection.com

Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively. I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010! This podcast is designed for  engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book! Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams. Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/

Show episodes

Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.

35 min
00:00
35:13
No file found

In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience - on top of their day j

42 min
00:00
42:04
No file found

Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture. This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days t

41 min
00:00
41:04
No file found

Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features.  Drawing on his experience in the Israeli Milita

38 min
00:00
38:59
No file found

As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value.  In this wide-rangin

33 min
00:00
33:57
No file found

Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit’s progression from junior IC to seni

43 min
00:00
43:14
No file found

Show participants