Intze Overhead Water Tank Design by Working Stress - IS Method.pdf
How to Find High-Impact Work and Make People Pay Attention
1. How to find high-impact
work and make people
pay attention
#GHC19
Sam Carow
Engineering Manager @ Reddit
@samcarow
2. Agenda
#GHC19
• Who am I?
• The Matthew Effect
• My quest to achieve professional
advancement
• All the ways I have failed
• One way I didn’t fail
• How you can not fail, too!
@samcarow
4. #GHC19
2011
• Graduated with Marketing degree
• Started selling life insurance
• Turns out, I suck at selling life
insurance!!!
• Started waitressing
@samcarow
5. #GHC19
2012
• Grey’s Anatomy
• Missed all the application
deadlines for med school
• Moved to California
• Chris Pine’s ‘Learn to Program’ (Ruby)
@samcarow
6. #GHC19
2013
• Still waitressing
• Learning to code on my own isn’t
moving quickly enough
• Apply & get in to Dev Bootcamp
• Moved to a hostel in SF
• Bootcamp was really hard
• I cried a lot
@samcarow
7. #GHC19
November 2013: Landed first engineering
job!!!
You might be tempted to think this is
where my success began. But no.
@samcarow
8. #GHC19@samcarow
• Only had $80 in the bank
• Couldn’t afford an apartment
• Freaked out that I would get fired
• Had to ask my brand new employers if I
could live in the office for a week with my
dog
• They said yes!
10. #GHC19
2016
• Landed my job at Reddit
• Was able to start thinking strategically
about my career
@samcarow
11. #GHC19
The Matthew Effect
Those who already have status are
often placed in situations where they
gain more, and those that do not have
status typically struggle to achieve
more.
@samcarow
12. #GHC19@samcarow
How does this affect my career
trajectory?
• Once you are recognized, all of your future work is more likely
to get recognized
• Better opportunities present themselves
13. #GHC19
Life at Reddit (2016 - 2018)
• Lead engineer on mobile web moderator tooling
• Core contributor to reddit redesign
• Lead a team of 10 to build April Fools experiment
• Mentored four women (and hired two of them)
@samcarow
17. #GHC19@samcarow
My mindset up until this point
• If I do good work, I will get rewarded
• Isn’t it my manager’s job to make sure I get to the next level?
18. #GHC19@samcarow
• Immediately available for code reviews
• Proactively ticketing bugs
• Fixed bugs in the backlog
• Refactored
First, I tried doing more work
20. #GHC19@samcarow
Why?
• Important bugs don’t sit in the backlog
• Ticketing does not make you stand out
• Over-availability shows you don’t value your own time (and
trains others to do the same)
21. #GHC19@samcarow
Next, I tried flashy work
• Asked to tackle the biggest features for my team
• Built 4 new features that were very important for my team
• Presented team updates at engineering meetings
22. #GHC19@samcarow
This didn’t work either.
• Limited opportunities
• Does not always have org-wide impact
• Not as important to higher-ups
• Team updates amounted to busy work
23. #GHC19@samcarow
Then, I got lucky
• Javascript was unexpectedly caching data,
causing a massive memory leak
• My change ended up reducing the size of our
server pool by half
• That’s a lot of money (and it turns out, people care
about money)
24. #GHC19@samcarow
This was my “mini”
Matthew Effect
But I didn’t like how my results were
based on luck.
So I starting
wondering…
25. #GHC19@samcarow
How do I manufacture
this type of “luck”?
Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum
valuable fix
Create a
framework
26. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
What is a current
pain point in my
workflow that affects
the org as a whole?
@samcarow
27. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
For us at Reddit, a huge pain point was our error logging.
• Monitoring deploy health
• Alerting
• Catching errant bugs
Pain Point
28. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
• 1.8k lines per second, or 155 million lines per day
• Roll backs were much slower (3x slower than legacy site)
• Running out of storage space, causing Infra to get pinged
every other day
How painful was it? Hint:
very
30. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
What is the minimum
valuable fix that
needs to be
addressed right
now?
31. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
The word ‘minimum’ is important
• Defines first bite-sized chunk of the problem
• Serves as a proof of concept
• Prevents you from getting stuck or overwhelmed
• Helps your project gain momentum
32. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
In this case, I decided that the MVF
was fixing the error that was causing
our Infra team to get pinged.
33. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
My MVF, in code
This flag prints one line following each garbage collection, and we weren’t using
it at all.
34. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
This 10 character change
reduced our error logs by 72%
That’s a reduction of 110 million lines per day.
35. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
Talk about it
• Engineering Slack channels
• Manager & director (mention stats specifically)
• Engineering all-hands
• CTO
36. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
This is where most people get
stuck.
“What do I say?”
37. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
How do I talk about it without
sounding arrogant?
• Talk about how this work positively affected the company
• “This bad thing was happening, and I fixed it so everyone can
work more efficiently”
• Do not focus on yourself as the hero
39. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
I also presented a version of this
talk at an Engineering All Hands.
43. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
OK, last reminder:
Do not skip this step!
44. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
Create a framework
• How can I allow others to jump in easily?
• What is the best way to communicate the rest of the work that
needs to get done?
• How can I prevent myself from becoming the bottleneck?
45. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
My framework was
simple.
I created 20 tickets outlining the logs with the highest volume.
46. #GHC19Talk about itIdentify pain point Find minimum valuable fix Create a framework
@samcarow
The results
5 tickets were completed over the course of a week.
This resulted in a total reduction of 149 million lines per day.
That is a reduction of 96%.
47. #GHC19@samcarow
And people paid attention.
And the best part? They are still paying attention.
My work continues to get recognized more frequently.
48. #GHC19@samcarow
The aftermath
• Got invited to new, important meetings
• My opinion suddenly seemed to matter more
• Put in the ‘Top Performers’ tier
• Won an internal award
• Became tech lead for a new team
• Accepted a position as a manager
50. #GHC19@samcarow
Key Takeaways
• Your professional development is your responsibility
• Getting recognized early is a major advantage
• Be strategic about which projects you choose to pursue
And of course, use the framework.
