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2023-12-04
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Nick Eggleston (free radical)11:12:51

Super excited for GeneCon!!

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Use other profile14:12:47

<!here> We’re thrilled to kick off the first-ever GeneCon in under 1 hour! There’s still time to join us by registering here: https://itrevolution.com/genecon/ December 4 & 5, 2023 7:30am - 11:30am PT / 10:30am - 2:30pm ET

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair14:12:17

I wrote an article describing why I’m so excited about the next two days here — all the amazing presenters and panelists! https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7136229303897243648/ Catch y’all shortly!

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Slackbot15:12:09

Reminder: Get yourself into Zoom for the kickoff of GeneCon in 15 minutes at 7:30am PST! https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/UATE4LJ94/F05UG4ZGTLN/timer.png

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Slackbot15:12:29

Reminder: Get into Zoom because we’re kicking off GeneCon now!

Kareen Kircher15:12:52

I'm in the zoom!

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:53

Hello! Wow, got locked out of Zoom Webinar until 2m ago!!! 😂

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Margueritte Kim (CEO, IT Revolution)15:12:40

Good morning everyone and welcome!

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Luke Rettig - Target, Sr Director-Global Inventory Mangement15:12:45

@jeff.gallimore's office looks like he is a Target employee 😎

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Brian Scott15:12:27

👋:skin-tone-3: Hi Everyone from Adobe

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:38

Hooray for Slack! 🙂

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Julia Harrison15:12:04

I feel bad for folks who don’t join the Slack. They miss out on so much fun 😁

Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)15:12:00

Hi all, greetings from Nike!

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Slackbot15:12:07

Reminder: Please update your Slack profile to include more information about yourself. Name, image, organization, title, pronouns… whatever you feel comfortable sharing with this community to help us learn a little more about you. Here’s an example… https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/UATE4LJ94/F05UNSKJC6N/slackprofile.png

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Brent Hoch15:12:10

Hey! Let's DO THIS!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:28

Good morning everyone!! 😁

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:50

Old memory muscles from pandemic virtual event days coming back — setting up iPad Pro to monitor Slack!

Brett Gagnon15:12:50

Good morning from Pennsylvania!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:07

Timer, iPad, script, timer.

Slackbot15:12:26

Reminder: GeneCon has a Code of Conduct because we want everyone to have an amazing time here at the event. Here’s the summary: Listen well when someone else is sharing. Share well when you have something to say. Respect everyone at all times… and speak up if you see something or hear something that isn’t consistent with the environment we want for this community. If you have any issues, email <mailto:help@itrevolution.com|help@itrevolution.com> or direct message @jeff.gallimore. To see the entire Code of Conduct, you can read this post: https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/TASMB716H/FPW51DY5T

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:06

And since we’re in Gather, BOF sessions can be lots more fluid — if you don’t like the topics, make your own!

Kareen Kircher15:12:22

Please post the gather link?

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution15:12:53

Please welcome our first presenters: Jason Cox, Director, Global SRE, and Amy McCain, Sr. Manager, SRE; The Walt Disney Company disney1

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Amy McCain15:12:53

Morning all!

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Brian Scott15:12:59

Hey @jason.cox & @amy.mccain

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:00

C’mon people love submitting tickets and being forced through arcane procedures… right? 😂

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere15:12:43

I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing @nickeggleston! 😉

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:54

LOL! So many shared services teams use ticket queues as a way to buffer/hide/throttle the demand. Removing that barrier has been huge. It doesn't mean we don't track (in fact we need to make work visible) but we don't put that burden on our partner.

Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:28

How many SREs do you embed in each team? How do you size and fund these fine folks?

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Jason Cox - Disney16:12:17

The advantage of being central is that we can "allocate" even a fraction of an SRE (say 25% or 50%) but the business essentially gets a much larger team of SMEs and where appropriate, a full on-call rotation. Our model means that there is one engaged and tightly connected to the business during, but they pull in others from the team (SRE) and the manager works to ensure backup/on-call coverage too. The allocation size is based on need (which translates to funding the business has for the effort). That operates in an ongoing discussion with the business and they can reset/change it each month for the Flex SRE support, but we find many businesses like to put it in their annual operating plan budget over time.

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)15:12:36

1. have empathy 2. understand the business 3. actually help

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)15:12:22

there’s an insight from @amy.mccain: “a lot of people know us and know what we can do”. i’m sure a lot went into creating that reputation over a long period of time.

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:34

No mastering process, no movie!!!!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:13

How had you already established trust with the team? And how do u select and train people for success in the embedded SRE role?

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:58

Great question. Trust with business partners comes from the three things we talked about (listening, empathy and helping). Each is important and TAKES TIME. I can't emphasize that enough. We approach it like a Biz Dev role.. building our brand and our relationships. But in the end, you have a proven track record of actually helping, understanding and being there when they need you. To some degree, it's just being a good human. 🙂

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:16

We look to hire and build SREs with that in mind. We look for EQ strengths, communication skills, and of course, SRE skills. SREs on the team have a level of pride supporting their business partners, often getting to be included in those team's events and celebrations. We even have cases where SREs end up in the credits of movies or as recipients of awards.

Steve Stone15:12:30

How long do your SREs embed with teams? Is there an expected length or end date of the embedded SRE work or are they assigned to the team indefinitely?

Brian Scott15:12:53

I believe it depends on the engagement

Brian Scott15:12:14

I imagine the type of engagement and what the "customer" needs are always different

Steve Stone16:12:41

Yes. Jason mentioned a short-term engagement could be several weeks and a long-term engagement could be over a year in duration. I work on a team who operates in a similar engagement-based model, but we often struggle with ending the engagement, because there is always more work that we could do

Brian Scott16:12:26

Yes that is important, in my time working for Jason, that was often an issue but its key to always set that expectation early on, I hear some organizations include a SOW with the engagement. We do this at Adobe.

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Jason Cox - Disney16:12:19

Even our flex engagements often extend well past the "effort" into other areas. We see most of the flex engagements become more longer term embedded engagements. I have had a few times where SOWs were requested, but we decline to sign more traditional SLA based SOWs as they often tend toward ticket numbers, uptime metrics, etc., and find that they don't promote "partners" but more "service providers" with penalties. Instead, we take ownership of SLOs along with business (we agree on what we want to target, including investments they need to make in time/$, and stay more flexible to pivot to other areas. Example: started building out infra/K8s for a studio for first few years, but it pivoted to building and operating data pipelines at scale for the platform engineering team. Easier to do that in that model vs. some change for the SOW.

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:44

Jedi Engineering Training Academy :thinking_face:

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:33

Here is a doc we share with prospective experts to come to speak at JETA. We are always looking for internal and external experts to join the Order as a Jedi Knight. 😂

Luke Rettig - Target, Sr Director-Global Inventory Mangement15:12:56

I'd love to understand how you think about tradeoffs and resourcing alignment. Magic always happens when you have empathy, work side by side, understand the problem and actually help. Getting the people to swarm on some of these problems is often unplanned. I see a lot of team's works being planned to full capacity so making these nimble pivots being tough, especially in a shared services model.

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)15:12:47

“a bench” so “we can flex”

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)15:12:01

they’ve built slack into the system 💡

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Jason Cox - Disney16:12:17

Having flex in the system is key. It took several years working with our finance team to figure out a way to accomplish that. So much of the time, the discussion is driven around 100% resource allocation. Finance was concerned we would over-recover. I proposed that we hand back any "profit" to the business segments at the end of the FY. That let us proceed. Segment partners mostly comment that we are still well under the external contracting agencies... and our talent knows them, knows Disney, and ultimately doesn't leave at the end of the engagement (can always reengage).

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:28

How do u fund and resource the Flex SRE team? Who decides?

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:32

Hopefully I answered this, but just to sum it up... We compute a blended rate (average) for an SRE hourly/monthly/yearly costs, add a % buffer to fund bench, and use that rate for teams looking for help/engagements. Decision is helped by having funding coming to us in addition to the request. Most of the time, my leaders (like @amy.mccain) and I make the tradeoff decision based on funding, priority and long term SRE and company strategy.

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:12:32

Fascinating — @jason.cox keeps capacity to be able to help people in need!

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:18

lol... Monkey D. Jason

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)15:12:31

what does the flex team work on when they’re not deployed to other teams that need the help?

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Jason Cox - Disney16:12:41

It is super rare... as much as I thought I would have a bench that we could use to focus on more speculative work, innovation, etc., we find that SREs will automatically swarm work or toil reduction, sometimes with engagements that we have ended. I have a set list of "things" that I need the team to prioritize that usually include things like automating gross things (e.g. security related, self-service platforms, tools) that get added to our toolbag for ongoing engagements. Sharing those tools and learnings across the team has a level of overhead that our most senior SREs take on.

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere15:12:44

Jason is the Disney chaos monkey. Somebody get a Disney artist on that!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)15:12:48

Black ops demand development

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:28

Challenging eh? Devil’s advocate?

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:50

Challenge—>growth

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:27

How long did it take Disney to change the culture to look at the SRE practice as an enabler. It requires the right culture from all the teams to reach out for help (being vulnerable) to the SRE team, instead of afraid to ask for help.

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:31

Good question... It takes time, but ultimately our success is based on our proof. When we drop in help teams onboard even basic things like SCM, CI/CD and SLOs... doing cloud migration of workloads while helping re-factor apps (vs lift/shift)... soon word gets around that you can get things done so they seek you. Disney is like a lot of other companies, in that we are very relationship driven. Like other enterprises, we have a spectrum of cultures (pathological, bureaucratic, and generative) that can be in play... The generative cultures are were we spend the most of our energy, though the other two would demand more. It is one of those tough decisions you have to make. It's hard to change a bad culture without the support of the leader.

Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:50

Interesting. Thx Jason. Focusing on that part of the organisational will surely help with your team/org job satisfaction I guess. Happy "customers", Happy "team"

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:01

Agency model … double-click

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:58

Cost center… overcharge…resourcing…overhead to flex…

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Julia Harrison16:12:59

Insurance built in to pricing 💡

Patrick Lanza (Lockheed Martin)16:12:28

Our challenge is working in Defense with our funding being contracted. So standing up SRE and getting funding for it becomes challenging.

Julia Harrison16:12:56

I’m used to funding being tight most places I’ve worked. Anything else has been a blip, IME [Edit: a blip or an exception, anyway]

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:42

Not just a problem in Defense... but yes! 🙂 I made the case that we are inside "contracted" and can bill to any cost center / project to remove some of the friction.

Patrick Lanza (Lockheed Martin)16:12:36

spreading the cost across funding sources seems to be the "easiest" way to do it. But there is constant need to "prove and justify" what we are trying to do.

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:51

Yeah, that is soul killing for sure. In hindsight, learned not to boil the ocean and be everything to everyone, and focused on just niche engagements where partners believe in our vision. I find that evangelism vs accounting is more fun anyway. I don't optimize for team size or even being "everywhere" in the company (we aren't by the way).. I optimize for making real impact (clear line of sight into deliverable) and happiness (by our partners and ourselves). It works out for us, but may not work in all cultures.

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:47

Andon cord pull for deeper dive

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Brian Scott16:12:54

Building a bench is key, in any organization. Always be willing to jump in a help, now that's empathy

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Amy McCain16:12:27

Empathy-driven engineering!

Jason Cox - Disney16:12:50

^^ That... and Brian helped introduce that. 🙂

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:12:06

Please welcome the team from John Deere: Amy Willard, IT Director, Global IT Strategy &amp; Transformation and Matt Ring, Sr. Product &amp; Engineering Coach

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Alex Kalinovsky - Idea Harbor16:12:51

HR as part of Transformation!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:53

HR is under IT transformation/strategy?

Amy Willard - John Deere16:12:41

The HR Tech I support is a sister organization to my IT Transformation org, so separate but also sharing of our journey all the time. We have a People Transformation under way at Deere as well that I support, but don’t own in the way I do for IT. Our Chief People Officer is the awesome leader driving that vision. That said we do have an IT focused People strategy that I co-own as a part of the transformation, so they are closely partnered. We can’t do great tech without a solid people strategy.

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:40

@willardamyl thanks for joining from India!

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Amy Willard - John Deere16:12:07

Best of both worlds today!!! 😀

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:44

End to end product model

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:49

understand the outcome we’re trying to deliver with the work we’re doing… that’s crazy talk 🤪 :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:19

So excited that @willardamyl is able to share this story!

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:05

@mring Another "solution" to the bottleneck team is to democratise/shift left the API building to the dependent value aligned teams. Removing the bottleneck/dependency and making prioritisation less mandatory. Did you think of this option? What was the reason that the option to remove the dependency wasn't chosen?

Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere16:12:39

It's a good question Stijn. In this situation, the bottleneck team owned the platform for which they were building the APIs on top of, for other consuming value stream teams to consume. The desired architecture was for the platform team to own the APIs out of their platform system ultimately. There was some collaboration happening with the consuming value stream teams; the problem was that the team was getting pulled to collaborate with several consuming teams at the same time (a problem of WIP in the overall value stream). No single team / no single PM could say to limit the WIP in the value stream, which is where our product hierarchy helped.

Amy Willard - John Deere16:12:24

We have a lot of APIs 😀 The above path is one we are taking often, but just not the path forward in this example at that time.

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:27

Interesting, what if your project deadline pushes you to increase WIP (Very bad practice, i know)? Something our organisation faced and created multiple delays of the program. Due to organisational complexity it was very hard to influence leadership on the foundational reason of the delays. (Multiple handoffs across value stream aligned teams)

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:50

eliminating handoffs leads to better outcomes! 🙌

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:50

@willardamyl: “We love shared services, but maybe not here.” Brilliant! “They can actually reduce value.” (thru long lead lead times, gold-plating, etc.)

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:56

“our platform should be a value accelerant — not a value anchor.”

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:01

Fascinating, right? SAP role security changes: push further to edge; Golden CI: push closer to center. Different places of balance based on the two domains!

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:29

Would love to understand better how to decide when to centralize and when to decentralize

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:13

And even more how to "Sell" the benefits to Senior Leaders less acquainted with the hidden cost/benefit

Amy Willard - John Deere16:12:15

It a constant conversation where an answer is never “forever.” Are we better, faster, safer, more efficient, etc centralized or decentralized? Are we trying to drive innovation or convergence in this particular space at this point in the lifecycle? Is the work to be done closest to the people with the ability to best do the work and make decisions on priorities and value? There is no standard formula, but there are common questions

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere16:12:22

☝️ This! Focusing first on the desired outcomes so that, when you get into the weeds of the implementation details, you can go back to those outcomes as anchors. In terms of "selling" to sr. leaders... Lean less into convincing, more into aligning to their incentives. What outcomes are those leaders trying to achieve? How would we know we're successful? Then, see how (or whether) any given solution / architecture / topology further enables or hinders those outcomes.

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:49

this discussion reminds me of this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1205/

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:36

“No regret skills” — how much can u share about this?

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Amy Willard - John Deere16:12:06

Some 😀 what are you most interested in @nickeggleston ?

Sean E. Martin16:12:47

Servant Leader...very cool!

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:59

“letting teams determine their own ‘how’” i like that phrasing

Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:12:50

Let's welcome Adam Traina, Founder of TrainaThought LLC, who will share insights into the story of the MIT Sloan Sailing Team

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Bradley McGeary16:12:04

As a fellow sailor I've experienced teams running quick stand-ups during a race . Adams sailing story was great.

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:51

insider insight: we look for “boundary spanner” talks that highlight principles, concepts, and practices from other domains outside technology.

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Margueritte Kim (CEO, IT Revolution)16:12:04

Happy Birthday @jason.cox!!!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:06

Didn't hit Enter! And the opportunity cost! ("Labor costs just tip of iceberg")

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:51

Time crunch and fast feedback to reduce latency and increase learning

Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)16:12:53

Links a lot to Intent Based Leadership from L. David Marquet

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:28

david marquet: instead of pushing information to authority, push authority to information

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Tim Heller16:12:31

Exactly Jeff...was just looking up his quote.

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:17

i love the similarities from this story to the world of tech. cutting off options, tech debt, agile environment, …

Tim Heller16:12:44

It also demonstrates that quality is important and safe

Alex Kalinovsky - Idea Harbor16:12:08

I like the analogy to being stuck with going fast in one direction without ability to change as analogy for technical debt

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:13

Initial centralized communication period before transition to decentralized … note: thats the current model with the system speakers with Gene as the central role we communicate through… :thinking_face:

Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:12:25

Please welcome André Martin, Chief Talent & Learning Officer and author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:57

heads up, everyone: get your questions for andre and gene ready to post here!

Brent Hoch16:12:39

this is hitting home, Dang

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:36

They hire a narrative, not just a person.

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:12:55

there is a lot on this slide 😳

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:18

Get good at narrative construction and communication?

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:43

Here are questions that I posed to @drandremartin — please vote for ones most relevant to you! Those will be asked first.

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:49

if I know where I want to go, how do I know if I’m actually making the progress?

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:54

am I actually eligible for the top jobs in the technical leadership jobs in the company? (They seem to all come from outside, from recruiting firms, etc. and I think I could [eventually] do a better job.)

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:56

Be part of small trusted networks

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:00

is there a limit to how high I can go here? if so, how high is it? to what degree does the Venn diagram of “what company wants” and “what I want” sufficiently overlap?

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:12:18

is how technical talent is treated at Google, versus more traditional companies like Nike, Target, and Mars. I suspect that there are things that Google values more than traditional firms — to what extent does that hinder career growth in traditional firms, and to what extent can that be changed?

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Julia Harrison16:12:50

what kind of timeframe is André thinking about here? Are we talking about building reputation etc. over 10+ year careers in one org, or does this also work with people who’ve been more mobile in their careers?

Nick Eggleston (free radical)16:12:52

Where to find a die-on-the-sword advocate? :thinking_face:

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André Martin17:12:36

6 degrees of separation. when you think about your network at work, who is closest to the group that is making the talent decisions…move through them.

Use other profile16:12:41

Vote above with an emoji

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:12:07

“I can’t get my printer to work.”

Luke Rettig - Target, Sr Director-Global Inventory Mangement17:12:11

I'm really digging what Dr Martin is saying here...moving from core Tech to driving a P&L in the business was such a huge learning curve (some told me it was a career staller for me), but its been so rewarding as an Enterprise Leader, not just a "tech leader"

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Luke Rettig - Target, Sr Director-Global Inventory Mangement17:12:25

had a "die-on-the-sword advocate" that threw me in the deep end!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:45

Gave you P+L responsibility and then was s resource to you for learning?

Luke Rettig - Target, Sr Director-Global Inventory Mangement17:12:02

Yes Nick - thats the gist of it. They convinced me that as an enterprise, we needed more Tech Savvy business leaders. This person removed some roadbloacks with our business leadership and positioned me in a rolle that would have historically been ran by an operations/finance leader, then gave me a lot of air cover, coaching and guidance along the way

André Martin17:12:23

Love that Luke. T-Shaped leadership helps everyone. Especially if you stay at a single company for a long time.

Julia Harrison17:12:59

So are you saying my long-ago background in desktop support could come in handy here? 😆

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André Martin17:12:09

Oddly, yes. You are more than the narrowed role you play right now. Unfortunately most people are not aware of your breadth, of what you can do or have done…you are only your current role.

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Julia Harrison17:12:36

Oh for sure. I try to balance being helpful vs ending up doing printer support for the exec team (they have someone for that) at the expense of my actual job 😱

Ajay C17:12:24

I saw Andre using the word "outputs", but I tend use "outcomes" to understand the potential, P&L being a part of it

Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:53

How do you decide what to do next on the career journey to build the narrative?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:12:21

i love this strategy of studying the top leaders i aspire to be. 💡

Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:59

How do you pick the top ten? Selection algorithm?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:12:21

ask chatgpt? :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Julia Harrison17:12:26

I can think of some strong counter-examples right now :thinking_face:

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Julia Harrison17:12:50

Maybe ask ChatGPT who the opposite is 😆

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:45

But chatgpt sometimes has hallucinations 😂

Matthew Pickles17:12:37

Do you suggest ChatGPT or other LLMs as a tool for researching career next steps, are there other tools you use or do you prefer a manual approach?

André Martin17:12:54

Careers are really fluid and advancing quickly. Chat can provide you some strategies, but there is no real shortcut…it is a ground game, a grind, a daily pursuit.

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Matthew Pickles17:12:29

Thank you very much for the response @drandremartin, following your response to @mail832, do you have any tips on maintaining internal company 'career experience' pages and how should they differ from 'external' pages, if you think they should?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:12:37

@drandremartin sharing some truth and honest perspective with us.

Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)17:12:42

Hi @drandremartin if there is one thing you learned at Nike what would it be? And what Nike career advice would you give to somebody working at Nike.

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André Martin17:12:42

Image matters and relationship are currency. You need to be able to speak through the brand, through the strategy, and through other people to get work done.

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:12:23

reeeeeaaaaaaalllllllyyyyy intereted in that research

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:12:32

<mailto:andre@theshiftspace.com|andre@theshiftspace.com>

André Martin17:12:03

Thanks Nick. Means the world.

Tim Heller17:12:57

Great stuff thus far

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:18

Gather rocks as a virtual hangout

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:12:40

By show of emoji, how has the sessions been? TY!!! <!here>

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Eddie Jones17:12:02

My impression thus far is that there is a lean in the concepts and suggestions toward larger organizations (see: having an SRE bench, well defined career path, etc.) Curious how we might tailor some of the sessions to focus on applications in smaller orgs./teams.

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:30

The sessions are great so far

Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:04

Pacing is typical DOES firehose 🔥 (which is great)

Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:52

For questions, maybe Alex can do legit polls or use specific emoji counts to gather feedback

Slackbot17:12:06

Reminder: Don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect with others with similar interests in the Birds of a Feather sessions happening in 10 minutes. • Culture, Leadership, Management, Careers, hosted by @mail832 • Engineering, Architecture, GenAI, Dev, Ops, hosted by @jeff.gallimore Just head to the Birds of a Feather space in Gather to join the discussions. https://itrevolution.com/genecon-gather

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Julia Harrison17:12:51

My avatar is wearing a very natty green fedora, to make it easier to find me :face_with_cowboy_hat:

Nick Eggleston (free radical)17:12:55

Note: while Gather runs okay in a mobile browser, the actual Gather App from the app store appears to be chat-only, lacking the virtual 2d game-like interface…

Nick Eggleston (free radical)18:12:58

Update on the Gather mobile app: the rooms are represented (without the graphical virtual world) for audio/video participation

Cody Lomholt17:12:49

I've been unfortunately unable to join so far today due to an active major incident in our org. Will recordings be available to watch after conclusion?

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Use other profile17:12:53

I think it works best on desktop

Use other profile17:12:43

Enter these rooms to join a group conversation, or simply approach others and camera/voice will be enabled.

Chris Austin17:12:44

It works best on desktop, though when first entering you can get stuck behind people, unable to move. A shame that you don't appear to be able to walk through people. For the next iteration the rooms should be a bit bigger, unless the max size is intended.

Use other profile17:12:46

Hold “G” to pass through people!

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere17:12:56

Hey all -- As requested earlier today, @genek asked me to share what are the leadership qualities I admire most about @willardamyl (aka why Amy is a rock star leader). So, here are my top four: *Vision & Inspirational Communication -- I've learned so much from Amy about (and am still working on) crafting messaging in a more concise, effective and inspiring way. She does a great job of distilling all the anecdotes, stories and facts into succinct, inspirational messaging that makes us as employees want to lean in and follow her on the journey. And she works to communicate that vision frequently and answer any questions along the way. *She appreciates being (constructively) challenged. One of the things I appreciate most is that Amy doesn't like to be told how awesome her idea is. She wants ideas on how it can be made better! In turn, that has allowed me to seek her out to get constructive feedback on my own ideas. *Psych Safety, authenticity and fun -- She models her own fallibility and she makes it safe for us within our org to be our own authentic and imperfect selves. We are encouraged to be creative, experiment and try something that might not work, so long as we are taking smart risks and learning something from it. *Socio-Technological Maestro -- This feels like a high bar, but I'm constantly impressed with how well she understands both the big picture of where our company and digital organization is headed and the technical details about what is being done to get there. As a leader, she is great at joining a conversation and either contributing ideas or asking thought-provoking questions. But also being self-aware to trust and give space for others to figure out the "how." There are others, but these leadership qualities all certainly contributed to the successes (and learnings) we've shared on our transformation journey at John Deere these past few years. 👏 thankyou

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Slackbot18:12:16

Reminder: The talks are starting again in 5 minutes. Start navigating your way back into Zoom. https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/UATE4LJ94/F05UG4ZGTLN/timer.png

Eddie Jones18:12:03

@genek could we add a channel (or another means) for those interested in finding mentor/mentee? The desire came up in our gather session.

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)18:12:08

@eddie.jones @mail832 ask and ye shall receive. #C0684G3LL07

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Julia Harrison18:12:51

If anyone wants a mentor, but for whatever reason it’s difficult to ask here for what you need, feel free to DM me and I can post/matchmake on your behalf

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution18:12:11

Please welcome: John Rauser, Director of Engineering at Cisco and Joseph Enochs, Managing Director: Emerging Technologies at EVT

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Giulio Vian, Unum18:12:36

Zoom updater in progress ... sigh

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Use other profile18:12:03

We’re back!

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Margueritte Kim (CEO, IT Revolution)18:12:56

“Well named GeneCon” thank you @johnarauser!

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Matthew Pickles18:12:19

Have you used generative AI in the feedback to/from the drones in the wildfire example? And if so, how quickly does the model adjust? What have your biggest learning experiences been from that example?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)18:12:39

speaking of security and safety, gene shared a video with me from swyx (a speaker at genecon) of using the chat to interrogate the technical environment the llm was running in. i can’t imagine the creators wanted that to happen 😳

Julia Harrison18:12:22

Reminds me (obliquely) of the Gandalf AI game by Lakera

Julia Harrison18:12:30

It’s very frustrating but very satisfying when you beat it 😆

Nick Eggleston (free radical)18:12:42

Can the video be shared here?

Matthew Pickles18:12:56

@jenochs, many thanks for the answer, I think a per use case basis is best. Although I'd like some tips on how the decision process should be organized.

Joseph Enochs19:12:26

@matt.pickles, absolutely, case-specific evaluation is key. Here’s a streamlined GenAI decision framework with a focus on experimentation: • Objective Definition: Start by defining the GenAI’s goal. Keep it clear and concise. • Stakeholder Engagement: Involve internal and external partners to refine requirements. • Ethical and Legal Compliance: Ensure GenAI meets ethical standards and legal requirements. • Risk Assessment: Identify potential risks and prepare mitigation strategies. • Feasibility Analysis: Check if your technical setup and data can support the GenAI project. Do this before detailed design. • Experimentation Phase: Before full development, conduct small-scale experiments to test concepts and gather early insights. • Development and Testing: Build or Buy/Modify the GenAI use case, focusing on thorough testing for performance and fairness. • Implementation Planning: Plan GenAI’s integration with current systems and manage the change process. • Monitoring and Evaluation: Continuously track performance and get feedback to keep the GenAI relevant. • Ethics and Governance: Set up ongoing monitoring for ethical use and accountability. • Continuous Improvement: Be ready to make ongoing adjustments based on new data and feedback. I can tailor this for you more if you would like to connect. There are many components to navigate along with critical decison points, to share.

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Matthew Pickles19:12:35

@jenochs, thank you very much for response, makes a lot of sense.

Eddie Jones18:12:19

@jenochs/ @johnarauser Our board/c-level are grappling with how to provide guidance on guardrails for the use of LLMs like ChatGPT at work. Unfortunately due to the complexity of solving this and the mob-mentality concerns post OpenAI Q* speculation the board leans toward blocking access to these tools. Is there guidance you would provide to prevent the removal by providing some overarching guardrail policies?

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Joseph Enochs19:12:45

I wouldn’t allow Q* speculation to shake your board. Here is the abstract and link to the paper for Q*: Efficiently solving problems with large action spaces using A* search has been of importance to the artificial intelligence community for decades. This is because the computation and memory requirements of A* search grow linearly with the size of the action space. This burden becomes even more apparent when A* search uses a heuristic function learned by computationally expensive function approximators, such as deep neural networks. To address this problem, we introduce Q* search, a search algorithm that uses deep Q-networks to guide search in order to take advantage of the fact that the sum of the transition costs and heuristic values of the children of a node can be computed with a single forward pass through a deep Q-network without explicitly generating those children. This significantly reduces computation time and requires only one node to be generated per iteration. We use Q* search to solve the Rubik’s cube when formulated with a large action space that includes 1872 meta-actions and find that this 157-fold increase in the size of the action space incurs less than a 4-fold increase in computation time and less than a 3-fold increase in number of nodes generated when performing Q* search. Furthermore, Q* search is up to 129 times faster and generates up to 1288 times fewer nodes than A* search. Finally, although obtaining admissible heuristic functions from deep neural networks is an ongoing area of research, we prove that Q* search is guaranteed to find a shortest path given a heuristic function that neither overestimates the cost of a shortest path nor underestimates the transition cost. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.04518.pdf

Joseph Enochs19:12:57

@eddie.jones Here’s a streamlined GenAI decision framework I shared with @matt.pickles. I believe the Key is to focus on Outcomes and Use Cases. Then apply a structure similar to the one below: • Objective Definition: Start by defining the GenAI’s goal. Keep it clear and concise. • Stakeholder Engagement: Involve internal and external partners to refine requirements. • Ethical and Legal Compliance: Ensure GenAI meets ethical standards and legal requirements. • Risk Assessment: Identify potential risks and prepare mitigation strategies. • Feasibility Analysis: Check if your technical setup and data can support the GenAI project. Do this before detailed design. • Experimentation Phase: Before full development, conduct small-scale experiments to test concepts and gather early insights. • Development and Testing: Build or Buy/Modify the GenAI use case, focusing on thorough testing for performance and fairness. • Implementation Planning: Plan GenAI’s integration with current systems and manage the change process. • Monitoring and Evaluation: Continuously track performance and get feedback to keep the GenAI relevant. • Ethics and Governance: Set up ongoing monitoring for ethical use and accountability. • Continuous Improvement: Be ready to make ongoing adjustments based on new data and feedback. I can tailor this for more for Board level Guardrails if you would like to connect. There are many components to navigate along with critical decision points, to share.

Joseph Enochs20:12:15

Some additional thoughts on Guardrails. Provide safe spaces for experimentation. Select the technology partners you plan to work with OpenAi, Azure, Aws, Anthropic, etc. allow experimentation within those environments. Develop an easy way for teams to provide and share the use cases they’re working on. Unfortunately, this is likely to become the largest wave of shadow IT we’ve seen since cloud.

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)18:12:20

@johnarauser in what ways are ai hackathons and “regular” hackathons different?

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John Rauser00:12:41

@jeff.gallimore I'm planning to write a blog post on this topic. Will let you know when it is posted.

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:12:03

^^ she is one of the researchers who discovered this exploit.

Bradley McGeary18:12:33

Cmmc compliance?

Ann Perry - IT Revolution18:12:21

Joining Gene is his coauthor of Wiring the Winning Organization, Dr. Steven J. Spear, Founder, See to Solve; Sr. Lecturer, MIT

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)18:12:22

Did anyone catch the list of resources mentioned?

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)18:12:30

@jenochs @johnarauser please post your best resources for staying up to date with all this genai stuff 🙏 thankyou

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)18:12:03

Welcome @steve773 !!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)18:12:56

Do the zoom speakers see the Slack chat while they interact with Gene?

Use other profile18:12:05

I think it’s a mix—some check afterward to focus on talking.

Steve Spear19:12:01

Thanks @nickeggleston I so distract myself is I can barely pay attention to @genek. That said, open now to questions and comments. Cheers!

Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:38

Hi @steve773 I am of course now distracted with other things, so it's a huge effort to try to re-enter the mental context surrounding the initial question. I have attended many virtual events and still have the persistent inkling that there is a better way to focus the group attention and interaction(s)...

Sean E. Martin18:12:54

I feel justified for my past procrastination!

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Steve Spear19:12:41

@sean.e.martin64 That’s the beauty. Those guys got a noble prize for saying “Why do today what you can do tomorrow?”

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:12:52

Steve and me with Steve’s long time advisor Dr. Carliss Baldwin

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)18:12:38

@genek would you be able to share that ChatGPT thread?

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:12:01

Lemming like stampede. Cargo cutting.

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Julia Harrison18:12:42

But “[thing] is dead” is so much better clickbait than “you need to put in some effort to understanding your context and what works for you” :woman-facepalming:

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Jesse Quijano - Lockheed18:12:50

What book are we talking about?

Jesse Quijano - Lockheed18:12:31

Thought so, but wanted to make sure. I wanted to read more about this coherence Steve keeps referencing. Thank you!

Steve Spear19:12:48

Thanks @jesse047. Also, you might want to check out the first book, The High Velocity Edge, highly informed by work with you all at LMCO.

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:12:34

Wiring the Winning Organization! The book that just came out over Thanksgiving week by @steve773 and me! 🎉

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Stijn Liesenborghs (Nike)18:12:03

ETA for delivery in Belgium is December 21st 🤓 anxiously waiting for my copy.

Julia Harrison18:12:22

Shocked you don’t have that set up as a Slackbot response 😆

Crystal Larson18:12:59

Started reading my book a few days ago - LOVE it so far! Full of so much and it can be implemented slowly to have an immediate impact in organizations! ❤️👏

Matthew Pickles18:12:12

As a former developer in the logistics industry, I'm very interested in seeing how the UPS Mail Innovations service works in getting me the book to Europe, hahaha!

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution18:12:36

A warm welcome to Shawn @swyx Wang — Writer, Founder, Devtools Startup Advisor and Editor of Latent Space

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:42

Conference: AI Engineering summit…

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:24

“it’s over!” (two weeks later): “it’s back!”

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:24

“AIs will replace all human brains” (that can be easily misinterpreted. 😂 )

Julia Harrison19:12:15

Can we be selective about which ones? 😆

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Matthew Pickles19:12:04

Would a data scientist who works with AI be an AI Engineer or an AI Scientist and does it matter?

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:26

“don’t follow stars or likes; follow the money”

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:29

I’d say “4x improvement in performance” (same as “improvement in percentage”)

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:09

@johnarauser also mentioned how difficult GPUs are to obtain or even rent in his talk: I can only imagine the negotiation power that Cisco can bring to bear to get CPU capacity

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:05

Slack channels -> eventually turn into -> teams in the org chart

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Joseph Enochs19:12:26

Central Problems of the Al Engineer • ALUX • Al Eng Tooling • Prompt Engineering • Structured Responses • Vector DBs o Evals • Al Productivity Devtools • OSS Hosting & Infra • Finetuning & Post-Training • Al Agents

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Bradley McGeary19:12:00

What year did you graduate

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:02

slowify: baseline knowledge that every AI engineer must know

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:20

simplify: (we don’t need to understand last 50 years of AI, only last 5 years!)

Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:54

Firehose 2.0

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Crystal Larson19:12:44

I am not sure if Shawn was even breathing...is he human or a robot? ;)

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:36

Gotta watch this again a few times to grok it… @genek will we have access to the zoom recording?

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Bradley McGeary19:12:50

Where are the papers which predict AI effects 5 -10 years from now on the economy, community

Eddie Jones19:12:48

Here is a link the the AI communities @swyx shared https://github.com/swyxio/ai-notes#communities

Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:46

New zoom link for tomorrow

Alex Kalinovsky - Idea Harbor19:12:47

Thank You, great first day!

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Matthew Pickles19:12:30

Nice to have met you all! See you tomorrow!

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Nick Eggleston (free radical)19:12:59

Gather together in Gather all ye who want to talk

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair19:12:14

THANK YOU, all!!!!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair21:12:22

https://chat.openai.com/share/2aae9219-3fe1-49b1-9c48-0b1dada9e13e ChatGPT session demonstrating how good “moving a couch” is as metaphor for coupling and cohesion, as demonstrated in the session with @steve773 !

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