Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akil and
joining me today is Dario Quiselar, Principal Software
Engineer over at Elastic. And we talk about career
progression in big tech organizations as software
engineer, how to raise the bar, be critical with regards to
feedback and how to deliver as high performer.
So enjoy. There's 2, two moments during
the year where there's a possibility of a promotion.
So it's for the entire company. So every six months, we get what
we call merit increase, so base salary.
And then in November, I think we get our Rs US.
So stock options or whatever you want to call them.
And that is also the point of time where people can get
promoted. And I had no idea how promotion
goes. Like I've never spoken to my
manager about promotion at that point.
What it did know is that every six months, emails go out to the
entire company announcing the promotion.
Oh, OK. It's like a celebratory thing.
Yes, it is a celebratory thing, but it has a flip side, right?
If you feel like you deserve a promotion and you don't get the
promotion, can you see the promotion emails go out?
It stinks. So I didn't know at that point
that your manager is supposed to have a conversation with you the
week before and tell you this is what you're getting.
You're not getting promoted. Or not.
Yeah, because I I didn't ask. I also didn't know that I should
ask about my promotion. So I was kind of anticipating
the e-mail to go out and maybe it would have my name in it.
And then the e-mail came out and didn't have my name on it.
And I remember being so frustrated.
I remember being so frustrated. I felt I deserved it.
And I felt like there were other people in the e-mail, like all
like the toxic bullshit that comes with promotion culture.
I felt it. I spent two days being upset
about it. And then I was like, I pinged my
manager. I was like, hey, sorry, I'm
upset. Doesn't make any sense.
Ridiculous. I love what I'm doing.
I'll get over it. And like we had a good chat and
six months later I did get promoted.
Good for you. Good for me.
And I mean like at that point again, right at that point
again, I was like, Oh my God, I'm a principal engineer.
Elastic does it. But then again, like the same
thing happens. You start to get used to the way
people look at you, what their expectations are of you,
etcetera. And at some point, you start to
feel like, hey, maybe it's just not like the ankle.
From comfort. Yeah.
So I think to put things in perspective like elastic,
elastic, the title Principal Engineer one is it's attainable.
So I think about 20 to 25% of engineers are Principal Engineer
one and then you have Principal Engineer 2.
So that's about let's say 2 to 5% something like that and then
you have distinguished and that's.
Yeah, legendary. Yeah, it's like 5 people in the
company. Yeah, L6 to L7, So senior to
principal is it's doable and you, you can tell like people
expect that to to get promoted. Yeah, but they don't have to add
like actively advocate for themselves.
So that is the thing. That is the thing.
So yes, they should advocate for themselves and not everybody's
doing that. But you really need to like the
classic game that you play is you ask your manager, what do I
need to do to get promoted? And your manager will give you a
list of things that you need to take off.
And if you do those things, then it's going to be really hard for
your manager to not promote you. So to some extent people, some
people, I figured out that game, right?
So they just ask their manager, what do I need to get promoted?
And I think we do try to stay away from checkbox based
promotions. But if your manager is not being
upfront with you and they give you a list of things that they
just give to you because they felt like they needed to give
you an answer, it does create an expectation with the employee
that they're getting promoted if they do those things.
And I think that is that is the worst possible outcome, but it
is what it is. And then I mean, I do always say
to folks like you need to make very clear with your manager
that you want to get promoted and they need to tell you what
you need to do to get promoted. And then it's an easy discussion
for you to have. And I think that works.
And it doesn't really. At some point, it doesn't really
matter anymore if you're doing your job well, if you're making
an impact or whatever. If you have an agreement with
your manager, it's going to be really hard for your manager to
say no. Yeah, it feels like a lot of
this is just setting expectations.
And I don't know if it's Netherlands specifically, that's
always the environment I've worked in.
But salary and like those conversations are like very
crucial with regards to motivation and even energy, how
much you put into a job and how much you get out of it.
Like I joined the CBO six years ago and six years ago I was very
early in career. So I also got an offer which was
likely very early in career. Like, it was no problem here we
have like these yearly ski vacations or like summer
vacations. And if you earn below a certain
threshold, you get a discount. And I got the discount.
But the way this came out and I never thought about my salary, I
was really happy. If you're really happy, I don't
think you think about like, promotion or job, but like,
something has to, at least for me, something had to trigger me.
And so my colleagues were like, yeah, yeah, discount.
Like, it's really nice, but it's not relevant for us.
I was like, what do you mean? I was like, it's definitely
relevant. And then that's how the
conversation started. And like those conversations
happen, at least in this environment yearly.
And it has always been a matter of managing expectations, what
am I doing or whatever I achieved.
And then having a conversation with your manager.
And to a point, I also bumped heads with my previous manager
and he did, he gave me the whole checklist thing.
And then I looked at the chest list and the checklist was like
so generic. That was like, listen, I had the
conversation with him. I said I could bump this out in
two months. Give me two months and I'll have
the checklist. But I say, I don't think you
want to work with this. I don't think I want to work
with this. Like I want to work in an
environment where we have shared understanding and blah, blah.
And in the end, because we didn't see, I tell you, I had to
escalate. I had to go above his head.
And he was not happy with that. But that was the only way for me
to feel vindicated. Yeah.
I also like, before doing that,
I really had thought I fought hard and just hit a wall.
And for me, hitting a wall meant either I accept which I had a
really hard time at the time. It's very early in career.
I'm also very idealistic with regards to growth or I had to
leave because I'm not going to accept, which means I still need
to sit in this, which means there's no place for me here.
Colleague gave me another option.
He said, OK, go to the CEO at the time, managing director.
I was like, OK, we don't have many levels, so it's my manager
and then CEO basically. And I was like, yeah, it took a
bit of convincing. I was like, this seems like a
petty thing to go and have a conversation with.
He's like, yeah. But like, it's either this we
could leave. Like, that's how he read the
situation. And he was completely right.
So I had to go through all of these kind of hoops to at least
few more valued. In the end, it might not even
have been about the money. It might have been about the
whole situation, about the conversation, about this feeling
of being valued. And in the end, I felt like I
deserved that. Yeah.
And in the end, I also got that
forcefully, which was not a nice thing.
And there's a reason why that manager's not my manager
anymore. I think so.
I don't think it's about it. It's, it was never about money
for me getting promoted. It was purely about the
recognition that you feel like you're doing well and you want
to be recognized for doing well. And money money is a way for a
company to show you that you're valued in a for me, a title is
a, an even more visible way of the company telling you, hey,
you're doing really good. So elastic job titles are not
job roles. So I've up until six months ago,
I was never a tech lead. So I was, I was just an engineer
on a team and I got promoted from senior to principal in that
way and I got promoted from principal 1 to principal 2 that
way. I will say like my conversations
were never checklist based, but I did, I did make it very clear
when I got promoted that I felt like I deserved to get promoted
without threatening. Yeah.
Like substantiating also. Yeah.
So like, yeah, basically my manager, my manager at that time
didn't have enough time to prepare my promotion calibration
or whatever. So I escalated to RVP and then
my VP worked with me to, to get my name on the on the table.
And then L7 to L8, there's a, there's a committee that decides
whether you get promoted or not. And I, I, I mean, I don't know
what happens inside of the committee or whatever, but my,
my VP really helped me out there to get me promoted.
But the money, I don't, I don't care about the money anymore.
I mean, I make enough money. Money is only a factor for me if
it's the only way for me to get the feeling that I'm being
valued. So honestly, like I don't
negotiate my salary at all. I just accept my fate and like
that's all I need. I just want to have the feeling
that I'm useful. That's it basically.
It's as simple as that. It's weird that some companies
have this conversation which is about you feeling useful and you
feeling valued. And it only happens once a year.
And even when it happens twice a year, it's like such a build up.
You know, the first three months, no one's going to
remember what you did, which means the last three months
everyone like everything is like on, on thing.
And you remember your whole journey.
And if your manager has many people, then it's very hard to
do that conversation and like do justice to it.
And there's varying levels of ambition and like ideation.
It's, it's, I think it's incredibly challenging.
Something as simple as and I'm, I'm horrible at giving positive
feedback when someone asks for feedback.
When I get a feedback form from people in my team, everything
that pops up is like critical feedback.
It's like, these are the things that, but like I've learned this
is also something I'm trying to work with or trying to work at
at least for myself, that when something happens that I
appreciate that I pause and that in that moment that I give the
feedback, the positive feedback. And I have seen that do wonders.
And it makes me feel like less of an asshole when I am the like
critical person dotting the eyes with the feedback form.
But before that, like I could just not think of a lot of
positive things to say if there were things to work on.
And now that's what maybe it's my the way I was raised.
Maybe it's the mindset that I have this way of giving positive
feedback when it happens, when something did a really good job,
when someone was absent, when someone just gave really good
feedback or had a great idea. I try and say that in the moment
nowadays. Yeah, it takes those wonders.
So this is this is one of the biggest struggles for me
personally because I'm exactly the same.
I don't know why, but it's it's never good enough for me
basically. And I forget that.
I forget that for the person doing the job or whatever, it
was the best that they could have done and it did a pretty
good job given their perspective or whatever.
It's really hard for me to also in that moment that you think,
oh, somebody's doing like a really good job, then tell them.
And I think it, it, it's probably the one thing that I
would like to change about myself to also highlight the,
the positive aspects of whatever is happening.
I am, I am somebody who complaints and it it creates a
relationship with people that they think that you're just a
negative person, right? Yeah.
You don't have. To I have that, yeah.
No, I really recognise that, yeah.
It and I talked to colleagues and some people get pissed off
for me because this labelling of negativity, that is one thing,
but I do think there needs to be room for critical feedback.
Oh, 100. Percent like that's the thing.
But if critical feedback gets labeled as negativity and
there's communication of we cannot have negativity even
though it's like critical feedback, like it's actually
very much here's the facts and this is like the opinion and
these are the effects. Even though you might not want
to hear it, it remains a fact. Then at some point I've also had
the feeling of, OK, if I keep being labeled as negative,
should we say something or then I start second guessing myself
and should I actually speak up now even though I don't agree or
I'm going to be construed as negative and I've caught myself
and be like, well, I don't want to be someone that like doesn't
say what they're thinking even though they think it's
important. And like so I've tried to kind
of grow over that, but it's definitely an ongoing topic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I mean, I think in the last
thing we have a huge problem, right?
We're not direct enough. And I'm, I'm totally on the
opposite side of the spectrum. And I would say I'm, I'm, I'm
too far like I need, I need to you're.
Too direct I'm. I'm too.
Direct. I'm too direct, but to some
extent it's also a reaction to being in a culture where
critical feedback is not the norm and you start seeing
situations where people are not being honest.
So recently a couple, a couple of weeks back, we, I was looking
at a, an RC that somebody put up and it was literally 6065 pages
for a really small security feature.
And it, I mean, it doesn't like, it's not OK.
It's like it's not OK to ask 4050 people to read a 65 page
RFC, which could have been A1 pager.
It's just not OK. But people see somebody's
putting the effort to write a 65 page RFC and they shy away from
telling that person don't write a 65 page RC.
And in the end, I think that hurts everybody because a lot of
people read that document and that RC is not going anywhere,
right? I mean they they killed that RC
or. Sandbag it or like postponed and
like in the end it's not going. To go anywhere and everybody's
waste of time. The person who wrote it is
frustrated and I just feel like that is that is the consequence
of a culture where people are not upfront with what they how
they feel about how somebody approaches things.
Like we, we try to try to tiptoe around the issue and be very
indirect in how we give feedback.
And this is also America, right? Like I have a lot of US based
colleagues. I remember I have AI had AUS, I
had a manager from the US in the beginning.
And I think for American standards, he was already pretty
direct, but I remember being always aware of the fact that if
he gives any kind of indication that maybe I should have done
something slightly differently, I know that that's the only
thing that I should focus on. So there's 50 things that are
that is telling me that I'm doing good.
And there's one thing that he's like, I'm not sure if he should
have. So like anytime, and I still
talk to him every week, anytime he says something to me and he
says something that is can be somewhat interpreted as critical
feedback. I like, I, I lock in because
people in the US are much less direct than US Dutch folks.
And for instance, our founder is from Israel.
So there's a lot of folks from Israel in the, in the company as
well. They're way more direct than
even Dutch people, and that makes it really easy for me to
work with them because I know what they're telling me.
And I just think that leads to more efficient decision making.
I if I talk to somebody and they don't disagree, I want them to
tell me that they disagree and I want them to tell me that I'm
wrong. And what I see happening too
many times is that people are not clear in their feedback and
people go off into another direction because they don't
agree, but they also don't tell you that they don't agree.
And that just leads to waste at work.
And I think waste at work is the worst thing that can happen.
Like if a team works on something for 12 to 18 months
and it gets like what sometimes happens is a team goes off,
product manager goes off, does a certain thing, it goes gets back
to the C level executives and it gets killed.
Like I've been in those meetings, they see it.
They basically tell you, I don't know why you're doing this.
You can stop doing this. You can try to figure something
else out. That team of five to 10 people
or whatever, they spent 12 to 18 months working on something that
gets it just gets shut down in the blink of an eye.
And that misalignment, I think that to some extent is a product
of people not being honest about where they agree or where they
disagree. Yeah, I, I completely agree with
you. It's just, I really don't know
how to solve that. Like in Dutch culture, I don't
know what it is, but when in upbringing, when you hear
feedback like that's just, it's just objective.
It's not you as a person. The feedback is something
separate and it doesn't really impact you.
It's just something that happened and it's not about you
as a person. It's about your behaviour and
something that you can change, you can influence.
And I feel like in other cultures, that is not the case
by default. It's something personal or it's
something that is kind of taboo to say about someone.
Even though it's their behavior and they can act accordingly or
they can grow because of that feedback, it's not really there.
You have to have this, like, base level of trust.
And you, you do that with family, but not with friends and
especially not with colleagues, weirdly enough.
But I do think that maybe when I hear myself speak like that,
it's like, yeah, maybe you need to build a relationship before
that level of trust can be there.
That's also true by the SEC. It's really hard to build that
remotely with everybody so remotely like this is one of the
things I think that we see each other once a year, I would say.
And I remember, so in my first year, I went to Orlando the
second week, I went to San Francisco 2 weeks later for the
like the onboarding week. And then I went to to one O 6
months later and then it was COVID.
And then didn't see anybody for three years.
Yeah. Wow.
And I remember, I remember feeling so much more empathy for
people that I've seen in real life than people that I've never
seen. And it just, it completely
changed us. The way that I work with people,
if I've seen them face to face, I've gotten to know them a
little bit. It just completely changes how I
work with them. And in a company that's fully
remote, it's just really hard to to do that right.
It's really hard to build that relationship.
Yeah, you have to have those touch points in person.
That's the only way I think I haven't seen any.
Or you like what I used to do because I was responsible for
product, but there was no Scrum master.
So I also did like the the Sprint rituals and all that.
I took every beginning of every retrospective and we had them bi
weekly to do an ice breaker and those Ice Breakers were usually
to break the ice. But then I learned that some of
the questions I could do could be a little bit more personal.
Talk to me about your favorite vacation destination.
Talk to me about your favorite food.
We had really funny questions like in what fictional universe
would you want to live and why? So I learned about people's
like, do they like fantasy? Do they like action?
They like anime, like cartoon, stuff like that, and sometimes
it's spiraled a bit too long out of control.
We spent too much time with the icebreaker.
I don't really mind because even though there was a big slice in
person, there were people in Romania, there were people in
Poland, and this was the only moment we had in our work to
learn about each other on a more group level.
People started becoming comfortable, people started
trusting each other more, reaching out for help.
And I attribute a lot of that to the time that we spent as a team
discussing honesty, a lot of personal things.
And that for me together with them meeting each other in
person, created a really strong team, made it incredibly fun to
work in a team like that where I could see people disagree and
then still commit to delivering and delivering over and over
again. It's just really fun to be part
of. And that's the time you spent in
building a team, which you don't really see.
And then the sad part is if you then kind of tear that team
apart because the reshuffling happens or reorg happens, like
all organizational stuff where it takes a long time to form a
team and it takes seconds to destroy one.
Yeah, that's true. I think at my at my last job,
like we had maybe two or three reshuffles in the time and it
was so disruptive. It was so disruptive.
People are so peculiar in the way that they work.
Like every engineer has their own sense of how to write code
and teams establish a culture, standards, whatever that are
very local. And as soon as you start mixing
it up, there's so much friction in people having to adjust the
way that they work, how to communicate what their process
is like. And lastly, we don't really have
it's, I think it's changing, but we like, we were basically
doing, I wouldn't even call it Gumbon.
It's just like gung ho. It's like, OK, like there's a
thing that we need to do over the next six months or whatever.
We'll just do it. Like maybe there's an issue.
Quite often there's there's no issue.
That is, I mean, that that other teams have a different way of
working, right. So maybe they're not doing
combat, maybe they're doing sprints, maybe they have like
monthly retrospectives. Maybe they don't.
And because it's so free for all, any time there's a change,
it has such a dramatic effect. We had a reorg, I think it was
maybe 18 months ago, we had a big reorg.
So one of the problems that we weren't running into was that we
had a siloed product. So you could tell this feature
is made by this team and that feature is made by that team and
they're basically doing things in different ways, etcetera.
So we tried to reshuffle it a bit to get rid of those silos
and it made a lot of things so ineffective.
Like I, I think we still haven't fully resolved that issue.
It's been really hard for teams to find their footing in the new
setup. And it's, I mean, teams just
work on products that projects that don't really materialize.
And before that, when we had the silos, I, I know silos were bad,
like silos were bad for the end user, but silos are really good
for how A-Team performs. And it was a lot easier back
then to, yeah, get things done. Yeah, it's like you can, you can
see it as a silo or it's like this incubator.
There's a lot of stuff happens under the hood.
That's why they all say start up incubators.
Like it's like a yeah, pressure cooker basically.
And a lot of stuff is boiling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's, it's like I had AI had a very different perspective
on this, let's say 2 years back. I mean, I was in one of the
silos and I was always doing, I think everybody in team was
always like will not use this thing that our core team or a
platform team has built. We'll just do it our own way,
etcetera. And now like I have a different
perspective on things, right. So I'm more, I would say my
scope has increased a little bit and they start looking at it
differently. For instance, one of the things
that we have is Kibana is the biggest public TypeScript
prepository in the world, and I was proud of that two years
back, but now I'm like, that is embarrassing.
Oh, really? Yeah.
Like what? What does it mean to have the
the highest amount of code in the world?
It means that you're duplicating things everywhere, right?
It means that every, every team is doing things for themselves.
They do it in slightly different ways or whatever.
And it creates a situation where if you want to make a change,
you can't do it in one place. So it's not a single problem
that you need to solve. It's a dozen problems that you
need to solve, or it's 20 problems that you need to solve.
And that like, I just look at that totally different now.
Like I just wish that looking back, I would have used the like
the platform thing that maybe wasn't the 100% right fit for my
use case, but it was a problem and it is, it was a solution.
And if it's a problem, it's a problem that we can solve in one
place. And I think that's, yeah, my, my
perspective on that completely changed.
Like let's go the better. That's funny, things like this
and I, I've been like, the only experience I've had is some team
leadership, but also some product management.
It's like if you see this, if you would now see a version of
you where you can see a different person kind of
treading on a similar path. Are you going to use this
experience and like advise them no, no, no, use this because XY
and Z and trying to inform them? Or are you going to let them
make their own mistakes? Because you learn from this
experience. You made the mistake.
You now have this perspective, which is a complete 180.
That's something I'm like, I'm juggling with where I can see
someone do it and I'm like, it's not that harmful.
They're going to realize it's a mistake and then they will never
forget. Because I know this person, they
take this responsibility highly. They will never forget for the
rest of their career. That's a good one.
Or if they go this route, it blows up the product that that
we have to prevent because that cannot happen.
Yeah, because I, I, I remember seeing one of the interviews
that you discussed this and I think you said like, I would
like that you'd leave room for people to make those mistakes.
So this is again, like this is one of the things I struggle
with. I would have hated working with
me for sure, because I am, let's say, strong willed, stubborn and
I like to do things my own way. And I, I would have hated to
work with somebody like me. And I, I think that I'm as a
tech lead or whatever you want to call it, like I do think I
micromanage a little. Bit you're going to bump heads.
You and you will bump heads. Yeah, me and me will bump heads
for sure. Yeah, like worst enemies.
But in terms of letting people mistake.
So I think you need to have a system where there's
accountability. So if people pay the price for
their mistakes, by all means let them make mistakes.
If you have like a very mature system or a very modern system,
I would say where you push code, code get shipped to production.
If it goes wrong, you get an alert within like 30 minutes.
I think in that environment it's very healthy to let people roam
free and and make mistakes because like even the most
dramatic things will get fixed within 5 minutes if you have a
platform like we have. So we are essentially a database
or a database platform and we sell to enterprises.
So anything that we ship, it takes about 6 or 12 months to
reach the majority of customers. So if you make a mistake, you
pay that price a year later. And at that point, so many
things will have happened that it might be really hard to
recover from that mistake or the person that made the mistake,
they moved on to a different project.
And at that point, like there's no accountability, there's no
feedback loop, etcetera. So this is one of the things
that I struggle with because I've been here for a while and I
think I have AI think I have a relatively good understanding of
what works and what doesn't work.
And there's a lot of things that I learned.
I mean, the conversations that I'm, I'm in, like if I'm in a
conversation with our CTO or with our distinguished
engineers, they look at me the same way, right?
So it's always a matter of perspective.
But I think I have, I think I have a relatively good sense of
what worked and what doesn't work.
And what works of Elastic is not always the same as what works at
let's say a Datadog like a pure SAS company where they can ship
fixes in no time, they have good telemetry on their users,
etcetera. Like we have customers that
deploy our software software on their own hardware without like
any connection to the outside. World.
We're completely in the dark. And I mean, enterprise software
is weird anyway because there might be 1 customer that runs
into a specific problem and they can dictate your entire road map
just by virtue of them paying you millions a year.
So you cannot do any kind of like quantitative analysis of
user analytics because again, if someone works for 90% of your
customers but not for the 10% that are paying your bills, it
doesn't matter. It's not the right choice.
It's priorities. Yeah.
So it's it, it's, it's very different.
And this is it's hard for me to figure out a balance between
letting somebody run with it with the understanding that they
will not feel that pain. So that kind of like what do you
call it, like the Pavlov reflex conditioning people that if they
do something wrong, that they are responsible for their
health, accountable for it. That is missing.
So then in that environment, how do you approach like how do you
let people grow without impacting the product?
And I'm very focused on how well are we doing as a company, like
how well is our product doing? So sometimes I I think it's hard
for other people to to work with me because I am pretty blunt
about not believing in something.
Yeah. So that is a struggle.
I mean, I, you've also built up a certain level of credibility,
right? And it's, I think it's hard.
If you and I were to work day one and I didn't know you and
you have this kind of opinionated version of you with
regards to something I'm doing, which I think is the right
thing. It'd be hard because then
indeed, it's like this opinion. I do think you have a lot of,
because you've been there for a while, you have a lot of like
political credit, right? Yeah.
You've seen things. You have a virtue of history and
not a lot of people have that. Not many people have that.
And that should also kind of give you a base level of trust.
Yes, but that works very differently for everybody, yeah.
So that's the hard part. Yeah, like sometimes it feels so
weird, right? So like, we were in Las Vegas a
few months back and people come up to you almost as if you're
like a kind of celebrity. I'm exaggerating, but it's
something like like, hey, like, oh, respect, famous, blah, blah,
blah. And people, people, some people
really feel that way and they look up to you a lot.
But some other people don't care about that at all, which is fine
too, but they approach you in your feedback very differently
from the people that look up to you to some extent.
And for me, it's if people don't give me that, let's say, benefit
of the doubt or whatever, based on the fact that they know, OK,
he's had a track record, he's done X&Y.
And then I think it's hard for them to take my feedback.
And that's also something that I need to work on, right?
Like I need to continuously have empathy for people that don't
know me, are not used to how I communicate because because they
will get frustrated with me being that blunt.
Yeah, that's something that works against me for sure.
Yeah, yeah, One of the things you mentioned earlier is this,
like, I like directness. I mean, it's the culture I've
grown up with. So I, I, I relate to you with
that. One of the problems that I had
with my own directnesses and someone shared this with me are
still very valuable. And I was happy that they shared
it with me. But they said your feedback and
like, your directness gave me the feeling that I was bad at my
job. And then I reflected.
I was like, well, that's not really my intent, right?
That was never my intent to a point where he would lie awake
at night and like think about decisions or situations and
stuff like that. I was like, man, like that.
I'd never want to give someone that feeling.
But then it's also I have to really think about what I say.
Does something really matter? Does it not matter?
And then what do I put emphasis on?
Like what is, what do I truly believe in?
And the feeling is from both sides.
Like I cannot give someone a feeling.
Someone also has the interpretation based on how I
communicate. But still I don't want to
contribute to that. That really made me reflect and
be like, OK, I need to focus on sometimes things that matter and
sometimes things that don't matter.
And I feel like you have a lot of similar thoughts in that.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's I, I do like
sometimes focus too much on details and it doesn't matter.
Like maybe maybe it's not the right decision, but it doesn't
matter where they're whether they're making the right
decision or not because the impact on it's so low.
But I think it's interesting that you say you, you would
never want to give somebody the the feeling that they're bad at
your job. Have you ever worked with
somebody where you felt like they were bad at their job?
Yeah, I have. But still, don't you still
wouldn't want to give them the feeling that they're bad at
their job. I don't think I so yeah, that's
a hard 1. So in this case I did not think
it was bad at bad at the job. So then that made me feel bad.
I have worked with people where I was like, we just, there's
something that they're missing, right?
And I don't think they know. I always do think that everyone
thinks what they, but they're doing what they believe is best
for the organization. So then there might be a part of
misinformation. I think I shared with you before
the show, I joined in operations and in that role I joined the
team and they were doing some manual stuff of going into
orders and like fixing orders because it didn't flow
automatically and I was just fresh out of university.
I was like, there's no way I'm going to do this day in day out.
This doesn't make any sense. Why doesn't, why don't these
orders just go? They should be going, it's
automated. So I figured out what the
problem was and it was something very simple.
There were like spaces and telephone numbers and shouldn't
be there in the 1st place. The website had validation.
So that's not the problem. So it turned out to be old
accounts. I I made sure that that was
actually fixed. But yeah, the people that were
doing that day in, day out, even before I was there for months, I
was like, like, I don't bad at their jobs.
Like say, I did think that especially early in career now I
was like, they were just, they didn't know.
Like there was a part of the knowledge that was missing.
Later on with one of the colleagues that did that thing,
I had a kind of a heated argument where I was like, OK,
for XY and Z reason, this is never going to happen again.
Or This is why this is not really valuable and we shouldn't
do anything with this. And he was like, I'm just doing
my job when this comes in, this is the procedure and I'm doing
like this. And this really bumped it.
And I was, I mean, especially back then early 20s, I was like,
there's no way. Like I had, I had this in my
mind that this is my first job. I'm kind of like a wild card.
I can do whatever I want. If it's not going to happen, I'm
going somewhere else. I don't care.
But I'm definitely like, this is what I believe in strongly.
Well, he lashed out. He said, I'm being a bad
colleague. He yelled at me and that.
And I actually, like, took that with me and I was like, man, I
didn't. I don't want to make someone
blow up. And it's probably from both
sides, maybe at a bad week or whatever.
It really sat with me and I made him apologize to my manager.
He thought it was all like childish.
I was like, I don't care for me. This is principally all right.
We work together on a certain level and we meet as humans 1st
and we don't yell at each other and then working separate.
So yeah, I did think it was bad at his job, but I still wouldn't
want him to give him the feeling.
I like people that are open minded, that also want to learn
and that also want to grow. And I don't mind if we bump
heads as long as we then disagree and we commit to
something. And if I need to force your hand
basically by going to your manager and being like, this is
what I believe, do you agree with me or I learned something
new? That's completely fine with me,
yeah. Yeah, no, I get that.
And I think I agree in the sense that I mean, in general, I don't
want to make people feel bad, but I think there's, I think
it's really important to establish a culture of
accountability. I agree.
And that also means managing low performance.
So if people are not performing, that needs to be managed and
that is HR speak for they need to be let go.
Some people just aren't the right fit for the organization.
They might excel in smarter place, but this is not the right
place for them. And I think what at least
elastic, I think what has happened too often is that those
people are they're not being told that they're not
performing. And that I think is detrimental
to everybody. It's personally frustrating for
me. It's really frustrating for me
to see people not performing, not not seeing their
contributions in the right perspective, winging it.
I mean, that's also the downside of a remote culture, right?
Like it's really easy for you to fake work.
Ghost. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think there's there's people that are doing that for
sure. And if you don't want people
accountable for that, I think you.
Create the wrong kind of culture.
I agree. And in that sense, I think it's
OK to make people a little bit uncomfortable sometimes that
you're clear in the fact that they're not doing the thing that
you asked them to or they're not doing the thing that they're not
doing the thing at a level that is expected of them in their
position. And this I, I sometimes think
about like, is this toxic or not?
And I think to some extent it is.
But I also feel like this is software engineering and any
software engineer, especially at a company like Elastic, they can
get a job anywhere else and they will still be handsomely paid.
Like, I don't think we need to treat software engineers as if
they were like lower class of workers that need to be
protected against, you know, like the, the, the waves of
capitalism or whatever. I mean, we're software
engineers, we have it very well. And I think in that, in that
context where you get paid very handsome amount, you are a
remote worker, the company gives you a lot of flexibility and how
you work, where you work from, what kind of work you do and
whatever. I think you can make clear to
people that there is something being expected from them.
And that is, that is one of the reasons I think why I'm
sometimes I'm OK with making people feel a little bit
uncomfortable. I mean, I like the way like my
previous manager IG, he put it, I also invited him to the
podcast. His name is John Mueller.
And especially in the European context, he said that hiring is
one of the biggest jobs you're going to have, choosing your
next colleague who you're going to work with day in, day out.
And especially in Netherlands where you have a big hiring
process. And the reason for this big
hiring process is getting someone out of the organization
is very difficult. You have to go severance.
You have to have evidence. Like if there's a rotten apple,
it might kind of, yeah, create this toxic vibe within the team
and maybe even within a department.
A few people, that's all you need basically.
A few people that you see coasting and then other people
think it's OK. Where behaviour doesn't get
addressed. It can definitely snowball,
especially in and I think Elastic is like one of those
tier one companies, incredibly high engineering culture and
also very well paid with regards to what people get compensated
for what they do and also the problems they solve.
It's hard to get in. It should also be like, this is
what is expected of you. And it might sound harsh, but
yeah, indeed, I am a person. I don't have a house, I don't
have any kids, I don't have any pets.
I like my job. I put a lot of effort in my job
compared to a person that has kids that I then barely see
online that is not necessarily contributing.
I would be like, OK, is this the environment for me?
Because if we're going to be equally valued, even though our
lives are completely different and what our output is and we're
working towards outcomes is also different.
I would definitely reflect and it might be a little bit toxic
like I agree, but it's like it it is for me.
If I see myself as a high performer, I want to be with
people that are like minded on that aspect.
I don't mind anything with regards to diversity, where you
come from, what your education is, what your experience is, but
we are working towards a shared goal.
And I need the person right, right from me to also see that
goal and the person left for me also to be that goal.
And if the person right from me is looking somewhere else, I'm
like, what are we doing here? We need to be on the same line
because otherwise what are we A-Team for also?
That's the difficult part. And I agree with you.
Like, yeah, I've been in situations, and this is in
consultancy where I was responsible for one thing.
My colleague went on holiday, we had a new person come in and
they were just not productive. They just had a kid and I
started doing everything myself. I worked over hours to make sure
we still delivered. And this person, I was like,
he's really good. He's just really not doing
anything. And I could, I did not know how
to manage. And then afterwards, after this
whole process, the other person came back.
He said. I completely understand with
you, but we do have to talk to like the delivery manager for
this because this compromises the project, which would be way
worse. I was trying to solve everything
myself. I could not.
Yeah, because this is always the case, right?
It becomes somebody else's problem if.
Somebody's I made it my own problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's also a pitfall.
Yeah. But I think it's like, I think
you're right in that hiring is really hard.
And I think I think it's really important that you make sure
that you're very critical the 1st 6 to 12 months about whether
somebody's a match. And if you feel any like kind of
doubt or whatever in again, in Europe, where we have different
protections, if there's any kind of doubt, let them go because
there's, there's going to be someone else.
Like it's not that big of a deal.
And after that, it's really hard to get rid of a person who's
ghosting. Like if I say this out loud it
feels so bad because. I mean, I don't think we live in
a dog eat dog world with regards to software engineering.
There's a lot of positions that are open, even though now on the
job market it's a bit harder. I do wish best for everyone, but
it's like, yeah, you're working towards your own interests, the
best interest for the organization.
And if I believe that the best interest for the organization is
not this person and that's in the end what we do, that's also
what you get hired for. It might not be a nice thing
socially, but then in the end, yeah, it's also it compromises
my own motivation. Yeah, yeah, I think, I think if
you like, if you don't have that, if you don't have those
checks and balances, people who are high performance, they will
zone out. Like I, I see that happening.
Like people who are really talented, they see other people
getting promoted because they're they're in, they're in specific
team, they're in specific team or like maybe they complain a
lot to the manager. There's all kinds of reasons why
somebody gets promoted and that, but they see people who get
promoted who are not doing their job well and they zone out and
that that that is the worst. I think that can happen.
People who are really talented and can be really valuable to
your work. They just feel like it doesn't
matter if they perform or not and they zone out.
One of my last thoughts, I wanted to zone in on something
that you said earlier. Very early on, you said I was
responsible as a sole person with regards to the delivery.
And then that changed and the collaboration came into it and
you were like, oh, how do I collaborate in the 1st place?
What's your opinion on collaborating as a team to
create and work towards shared outcomes?
Because me as a person, I, I came into teams.
Teams is all I know. I put a lot of value in teams.
So I'm very interested since you came from this sole contributing
kind of role where you take on collaboration is nowadays.
I will preface this with the fact that I'm just, I think I'm
bad at teamwork. I think I'm not a fan of, let's
say, what do you call it, Holocracy, where you have like,
well, let's say just democracy in the workplace.
I think it's overrated. I think a company is the most
effective if there's clear guidance and a clear
understanding of where you need to work towards.
In an ideal world, this is established to some kind of like
very democratic model where people can contribute towards
defining those goals, etcetera. What I find really refreshing is
working with our CTO, Shy, who's just very direct in what he
wants and what he doesn't want. And I don't always agree.
And then I have a discussion with him and then it takes, it
takes every amount of courage or ego, whatever that I have to
disagree and commit to whatever he's telling me to do.
And I think that's fine. Like I don't always have to
agree if somebody who I know has a has a better understanding of
where the company needs to go, if they're telling me something
that I don't agree with, it's fine for me to just do it their
way as long as we can keep on moving.
And not everybody gets away with that, right?
So shy can tell somebody that in his shy way and people will
accept it. I cannot do that, of course, but
I think in general, I think it's fine to have hierarchy.
Like I think it's it just, it just makes me feel like I don't
always have to have an opinion about everything.
And somebody else will tell me to do it and it's fine and I
will have my opinions on things where my opinion is useful.
I, I, yeah, I like, I'm not a big fan of a model where
everything that comes on the road map needs to be discussed
with the team or everybody needs to have input.
Because I honestly at a company like Elastic where you have
probably like 12 to 1500 engineers, product managers,
designs and whatever. Like it's the company is huge
and it's not possible for somebody who's in one of the 202
hundred 5500 teams or whatever to have a good understanding of
what the impact is of whatever day, whatever opinion they have.
It's much easier to have a much more top down approach to making
road map. And of course, like, I know like
it can be super frustrating if you have your own ideas and
somebody's telling you what to do whatever.
But for me personally, as long as the person who's telling me
to do it, as long as I have respect for them, as long as I
know like they know more than me, they, they know this better,
I'm totally fine with being top down.
And I think and I think that comes back to being direct or
not to some extent. If you, if you give people, if
you give everyone the same amount of space and same amount
of authority, even though they, their contribution to the shared
goal, whatever is, is not the same as somebody else.
I think again, that leads to a culture of maybe everybody feels
like they're heard, but if you're not making an impact as a
team or as a person in your team or whatever, if you like, if you
for instance, if we go back to the example of a team working 12
to 18 months on a on a feature and the feature just being like
the old initiative being killed. Maybe that team was like maybe
they all felt heard and maybe they all felt like their ideas
were being valued in the end. They feel much worse without
their work not being useful. So for me, it's fine for me to
put something in front of the CTO and the CTO shutting it
down. And maybe I've spent a month on
that. Maybe I spent two months on
that, Fine, I'll accept it. Maybe it's a little bit of it
for my ego, but I'll move on because I know I've not spent
six months, I've not spent 12 months on working something that
that was just useless. And I've, I've made those like
I've, I've made like I've, I've try to work on ID is that if I
look back at it, they were just like dumb IDs.
And I I wish somebody would have told me that was that it was a
dumb ID. You might not have listened.
I might not have listened no, because like I, I know, like
I'm, I'm stubborn and to some extent that also got me to the
to the point where I'm at. But he also like, I genuinely
feel totally OK with people telling me it's the wrong ID.
And I think that that is also how I approach teamwork to some
extent. And I think this this is what
tripped me up as well a little bit, because I will just, I will
tell somebody like I don't think this is a good idea and I'm not
even going to tell them don't do it.
I just tell them it's not a good idea.
But then people, people like, people want people want you to
tell them. Yeah, why?
Yeah, or not even. They just want you like they
they want to agree. It's really hard for people to
disagree and and accept that that's totally fine to disagree.
Like any time I I voice my opinion on something, I can
always tell that people are looking for agreement, but I
don't care about agreement. I just told you like, I don't
think that's a good idea. You think they're about a
different OK, like this is not my responsibility.
So do what you want to do. But then I think, I think it's
human right to to want to feel that.
Do you then say that because I've been in situations where
indeed I'm saying I don't think we are going to agree because
there's I, I'm not changing my opinion.
You you've said why and I just don't agree.
Like we understand each other and we still don't agree, which
is fine. Which is fine, but I think a lot
of people, a lot of people find that really hard.
Yeah, it can be. To accept.
I mean, it's like winning an argument, right?
There's no win, there's no loss. Yeah, yeah.
It's just an impasse. Yeah, yeah.
And in the end, doesn't matter. Yeah, I agree.
So you just have to move on, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So like we have, we have like
we, we call this, we bring this up, guide off the right.
So disagree and commit. There's a disagreement, but you
need to commit one way or the other because the worst possible
outcome is you disagree and you kind of like fake agree maybe,
but then you go off. And you do something else.
Do something else. That is the worst, that is the
worst. So this, but this is another
reason why I think creating a situation where people feel
uncomfortable or where it's clear that they disagree is a
really good thing, because then it's clear to everybody what
their position is. And then you can, yeah, you can
commit to a specific option, but everybody's very aware of what
they're actually thinking. So it's much easier to plan
whatever the next step is because you don't have this
situation where somebody's told you, yeah, I think it's a good
idea. And then when push comes to to
shove, they do something else or they kill the project or
whatever that you're working on because they didn't really
agree. I think it's, that's the worst
possible outcome. No, but I, I, no, I hate it.
I hate it, I hate it. I mean, it's, it's really hard.
I think it's really hard to, like you said, like to take it
personal. It's really hard to detach
yourself and your ego from whatever you're being told.
I have it all the time. People tell me this is not
great, that you're doing it. And my instinct is always to
push back and then I need to remember, like I need to take a
breather and then I need to look at the feedback.
For what it's worth, maybe I don't agree with the feedback,
that's fine. But that the immediate reflex of
serving your ego and pushing back, that is something that
isn't really helpful. Yeah.
But there's a few things there. I think the fact that you are so
reflective about what your action is, what your default is,
and how you want to change that or at least try and play around
with it and see what's most effective.
I think you put such emphasis on kind of this.
We need to keep moving. And even though it's not my
idea, or even though I might not agree, as long as I think they
know something I don't, and as long as there's this mutual form
of respect, we can do it. I've been in many situations
where indeed something I didn't necessarily agree with or
something indeed where I thought I might not get the full
picture, but I can, I can kind of see it that I could still do
it where I cannot do it. And I've also told people is
where I fully disagree, where they've said everything they had
to say. And I'm just like, I think this
is bad for the organization. Then I would also say I will not
do it. I've been in those situations.
And then it was like, yeah, what do you do?
Then my product manager would just go to another colleague and
be like, well, this and this and can we do it?
I was like, we should not do it. That's not the point.
We can do everything. Yeah.
Yeah, like, I, I try. I mean, there's, there's
definitely been situations like that, right, where I disagree
with someone who's way above my pay grade.
And I genuinely think that it's bad for the product, but I still
do it. But it really depends on who's
telling me. Yeah, because it really depends
on who's telling. Me, I'll tell you my situation
after I think you operate at a higher level than when I had
those conversations because I can escalate.
I can be. I know the people I need to
reach out to, to tell this person that this is bullshit,
basically. But if you don't have any other
people to go to, then it's a harder conversation.
Then it's like, yeah, like we just have a different vision.
Yeah, I mean this, this is also one of the things that I'm
running into, right? Because I have an opinion about
a lot of things. Again, my scope is it's
increased and I have an opinion about things that are not in my
reporting chain, but they do impact the work that I'm doing.
They're not in my reporting chain.
And if things are not in my reporting chain, it's really
hard for me to escalate. It's really hard for me to get
the grown-ups involved to change the way that we work or
whatever. And this is sometimes like, it's
really hard. And then I, I, I say to people
directly, and then that sometimes also creates fiction.
And then what they tell you to do is they tell you that you
need to escalate, right? So if you're, I, I, I really
don't like this. But what they tell you to do is
like, if you, if you're not happy with the work that
somebody's doing, you need to escalate rather than telling
that person directly. But there needs to be an
escalation path. And honestly, like, I hate that.
Like I, I hate it because I don't like, it's just not how I
want to operate. I don't want to go behind
people's back and complain about them.
Eventually I will, but I guarantee you that everybody
that I complain about, they know what I feel about them.
I mean, escalations are interesting because they're like
different within various organizations.
My first organization, escalation wasn't a bad thing.
Apparently it was needed. It was like a necessary thing.
My last organization, I had this conversation with a vendor and
they came in and they had the specific task to take some
burden off my team. And I told them this is not a
burden. Like transferring this to you is
going to be more effort than what it is now in the team and
it's going to go away anyway. So this problem will self
resolve, but the contract were already signed.
He said like we need this part. And I was like, is there any
other way where we can get this team to be effective?
Like that's the conversation I want to have.
He didn't want to play ball. He somewhere escalate.
I said, well, if if you don't want to like see how we can
collaborate and like, yeah, I'm like, I don't see any other way.
If this is what you feel completely fine.
He did. I never heard back from him
ever, ever again. Like that's fine with me.
I've had to escalate for other people because if you work at
big organizations, you have some approval processes and if you've
got a sandbagging and I need this out right now because of
promises and expectations, then yeah, I will have to say, OK,
I'm going to. I need to escalate and I will
tell the people and I will put them in the CC in the same
escalation to the manager and they're there the whole time.
I don't like this going behind the back.
That's why I just put them there.
I'm like I told you, I was escalating this de escalation.
That's how I handle it because this feeling of going behind,
that's not what I want to do here.
It's this is the outcome we're working towards.
If people are sandbagging or if people don't agree, I know I
should have the right priorities.
Otherwise, I'll be set straight. I don't mind.
I don't mind if I escalate and the people are saying, well,
Patrick, actually this is more important.
So you'll go next. Completely fine.
Honestly, I just need to like you.
I need to keep moving. Basically, if we stand still, I
hate it. Yeah, Yeah, I hate that feeling.
Yeah, yeah. Because I I still genuinely
believe that that is, well, for most people that that that is
the true motivator to keep things moving.
And it it should just be the top priority for everybody.
And even if they have to sacrifice a little bit of their
ego, whatever you got to keep things moving.
It is so satisfying to not just keep moving but to deliver and
like ship features to whatever. If it's enterprise, if it's end
users, consumers or business to keep shaping your software, it's
incredibly gratifying. Yeah, like I always see, I
always see, I always see software engineering, at least
to me, it's just, it's, it's sports like it's, it's high
level competitive sports for me. And I think that just dictates
how I how I handle things. Like everything is just like
the, the like the drive and the motivation and the adrenaline
rush or whatever that you get and the vindication and the
recognition. It's all sports.
Like I don't care about being paid a lot of money and not
doing anything like that. That doesn't motivate me at all
at all. And I just see like, OK, like I
just want to be the best team. I want to be the best player.
Maybe I don't not even want like I want to be the best team.
I do generally believe I want to be the best team, but I want to
win things. And if I'm not winning things
and I've worked, I've worked for a long time at companies that
were not winning, it just burns you out.
It just makes you feel horrible without the work that you're
doing. It's not as fun.
It's it's not fun. It's not fun, like all the
effort that you're putting into whatever and the company is not
winning. It just it kills me.
And I mean, like, I think there are people who don't really
care, like they care about what they're doing.
But I think in general, the main focus for everybody should be
let's get the company moving and then we can talk about how we
make adjustments or whatever to make certain people feel better.
But if the company is not moving, if the company is not
winning, everybody feel feel bad.
And you can have all your processes and recognition and
democracy and whatever, but if the company is not winning,
nobody's feeling good. Yeah, that's it.
Thanks so much man for coming on and sharing.
This was the blast. I I really enjoyed this
conversation. Thank you for your insights with
the rest of the career, your perspective on a lot of things.
I'm going to relisten to this episode because I think I had a.
Lot. I really enjoyed it.
Like I didn't expect. I didn't expect you to be in the
same boat. I think we have a lot of
similarities. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good stuff. Then we're going to round it off
here. If you're still here, leave a
like if you'd like the episode, it's free, it's the best way to
support the episode, and I'll see you next time.