2025-05-02 –, Ballroom (track sponsored by Checkmarx)
The vibes are off in tech right now. The job market being what it is, there’s little incentive for companies to compete on how work “feels.” So it mostly feels bad. This talk makes the case that even in isolation this is a dumb business decision. A team that’s executing well is a team that’s fun to work on, therefore misery is a bad proxy metric for execution.
This talk draws on stories from the early days of the devops revolution and applies them to life in tech in 2024. Where should we draw organizational boundaries? Who gets a ticket queue? Will GraphQL help me avoid ever talking to my DBA again? These questions and more will be analyzed, occasionally with real math and graphs.
Dan McKinley is a freelance raconteur and engineer. He was in the first 20 employees at Etsy, and worked at Stripe, Mailchimp, and his own startups. His talk “Choose Boring Technology” is fairly popular online. Most recently he was a VP of Engineering at Mozilla.