Carly Richmond
Carly is a Principal Developer Advocate and Manager at Elastic, based in London, UK. Before joining Elastic in 2022, she spent over 10 years working as a technologist at a large investment bank, specialising in front-end web development and agility. She is a UI developer, who occasionally dabbles in writing backend services, a speaker and a regular blogger.
She enjoys cooking, photography, drinking tea, and chasing after her young son in her spare time.
How to Destroy a Software Engineer
Session Type: 20 Minute Session
Retention of Software Engineers is a difficult challenge for teams. In 2023, 37.5% of the Infragistics Reveal Survey said they expect to find it difficult to find developers in 2023. To keep Software Engineers happy, we need to know how to make them unhappy.
Join me as I talk about antipatterns in management, development, testing and monitoring patterns that can stop you from retaining awesome Software Engineers. Specifically I'll cover:
1. Alert volume evaluation, and how we alert bombardment leads to burnout and alert fatigue. I'll also cover best practices for on-call rotation and BYOD usage to stop engineer burnout even when they're not on call.
2. SLO and metric comparison across teams, and how comparing team metrics rather than improving metrics such as DORA over time for a single team breeds animosity and demoralises engineers.
3. Code reviews with jerkish or unhelpful comments, and the difference between radical candour through constructive feedback and pulling people down.
4. Tool overload, and how selecting a common toolbox reduces the need for context switching.
5. Flaky or poor testing, and how it builds mistrust and apathy in platform quality.
6. Constant work items and a lack of learning time, and how a lack of training opportunities and space to grow leaves engineers feeling stuck.
7. Lack of support for conference attendance and speaking, and how community connections help engineers grow and learn.
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