People over computers: engineering leadership | Elliot Murphy | Data Science Hangout

Transcript#

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Hey there, welcome to the Posit Data Science Hangout. I'm Libby Herron, and this is a recording of our weekly community call that happens every Thursday at 12pm US Eastern Time. If you are not joining us live, you miss out on the amazing chat that's going on. So find the link in the description where you can add our call to your calendar and come hang out with the most supportive, friendly, and funny data community you'll ever experience.

Well then let's go ahead and introduce our featured leader today. I am so, so happy to be joined by Elliot Murphy. Elliot is a VP of Engineering here at Posit. Elliot, it's so nice to see you today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us something that you like to do for fun as well?

Yeah, so I'm Elliot. I live in Florida on a little island on the east side of Florida, which is a pretty boring little island except that NASA is on the top half. And so I can actually feel the windows shake when the rockets go up every week. Blue Origin, SpaceX, Boeing, all of those rockets. And something that I like to do for fun is just be by the water. So there's dolphins in the rivers and canals back here, and I just like to be outside with nature.

How often does that happen? How often do rockets go off and the ground rumbles? It's easily every week. Sometimes it's every day depending on the launch schedules. That's really surprising to me. I think of launches as things that happen very, very rarely. There's some big ones that get some press, right? For sending people to the space station. There's a lot of commercial activity as well, putting some more internet satellites into orbit.

Elliot's background and journey

Well, it would be great to get some context about what you do as a VP of engineering, but also a little bit about your journey to where you are. And I'd love to talk about that because you have had a really interesting path. You did not take the traditional go get your undergrad and your master's. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey?

Sure. Yeah. I owe a lot to my mother and grandmother. My grandmother actually got me a computer when I was eight. So I started learning the program when I was eight years old. And my mom wouldn't let us have a TV. And so that was what I did for fun. And I worked at a lot of different software jobs over the years. I tell people that I'm a lifer. I'm going to keep building software for my entire life because I really, really enjoy it. But yeah, I tried and couldn't quite convince myself to finish college. I dropped out several times, but have just spent a whole career building software for different people.

And I've been at Posit now about three and a half years and really, really enjoying the people here and the mission. For a while, I worked on more general purpose systems. I worked on databases at MySQL. I worked on Linux distributions at Canonical. I worked on Ubuntu. And I loved that. But then I wanted to work on tools that were a little closer to people. I've always worked on tools. And so I absolutely love getting to see all the ways people use the data science tools that we produce here at Posit.

Engineering leadership philosophy

What does a VP of engineering do? And what types of things are important to you from a philosophical standpoint for engineering and management?

Yeah. So I think any engineering leader is really responsible for assembling and looking out for the team. And so at Posit about half the company is engineering roughly. We've got that half of the company divided into four groups. And I support one of those groups. So all of our teams, the teams that I'm working with directly are focused on cloud and online services. So Posit Cloud and Connect Cloud and Academy, those kinds of things.

And I have always tried to, I like to say that people are more important than computers. The technical expertise is super important and you have to be fluent there. But every single time that you can try to create a good supportive environment for the people, the rest of it is a lot easier to deal with. A lot of the systems that we are working with, there's some pressure to keep them up, to keep them running. So it can sometimes feel like a high pressure environment.

Focusing on the people relationships, it's weird, like over the years, I feel so old saying this, but like the relationships with people tend to outlast the relationships with a given employer or a company. There's so many companies that I absolutely loved working at that no longer exist, even, but I still have relationships with some of the people that I worked with there. So the human relationships are super, super important. Maybe that's part of working in technology is technology is just fast moving and fast growing and evolving. And sometimes that means that things grow and burn out over time much more quickly than in other industries, right?

And I have always tried to, I like to say that people are more important than computers. The technical expertise is super important and you have to be fluent there. But every single time that you can try to create a good supportive environment for the people, the rest of it is a lot easier to deal with.

And I just love this idea so much that you can not know everything and you can still contribute to progress. And even with like a flawed understanding of the world and incomplete set of knowledge, you can still contribute to progress.

Creating a good environment for the team

I spend as much time as I can talking to the people doing the work every day and trying to experience a little bit of the work for myself. I think of my role as mostly like listening and synthesizing all of the brilliance from other people. So it's less about shaping it and more about like letting the good things that people want to do happen. Right. And endorsing things, making some space for people to take on risk, making some space for people to put forth proposals and ideas. But the team is the one who does all the hard work and like comes up with the good ideas. I'm just here to support.

Engineering basics for data scientists

So the thing that I come back to, and I think this is important for scientists or analysts or business people or designers is to get comfortable with Git and version control. And it sounds so simple and it's definitely got its moments of being annoying to work with, but it's such an incredibly powerful skill that is very relevant, even more relevant with all of the AI stuff happening. It's relevant no matter how sophisticated or how simple your deployment environment is. Even if you only have a single environment, just adding version control to it can still get you a lot of the benefits and make it a lot safer. And even if you're working solo and alone, being able to try a couple of different things and look at the notes you had going back to last week and last year is really, really powerful.

Sunsetting projects and clear communication

Yeah, it's not easy. And I think the reason it's not easy is because of realizing that you're going to disappoint some people. You're going to, and it doesn't matter which decision you make, you're going to disappoint some people if you stop supporting it and turn it off. And you're going to disappoint some people if you keep struggling down this path, which is maybe not worth it. So I think that's what makes it hard.

The only thing I know to do to try and deal with that difficulty is open communication, try to describe why it's hard or try to describe why it's expensive and try to describe what the benefits seem to be or what benefits seem to be missing. And put forth, try and put it in like understandable terms. There's still going to be people who are upset that it's turned off. I had to shut down an entire product line at a previous company. And we were making like $500 a month on this service and we had maybe six or seven companies that were using it and they really liked it. They were happy with it, but we couldn't get more. And so we were losing money on it every month. And I actually grappled with it for about a year before finally just like getting brave enough and confident enough to go like, listen, we're going to shut this down. We're going to shut it down on this timeframe. Here's the best recommendation we can make to you for where to go instead. And some people were still unhappy about it, but just clear communication was the best thing I could think of to do.

Maintenance work and automation

I think it's very valuable to do maintenance work. I think the ability to go into a legacy system or an older system and learn how it works and identify like how to keep it running is incredibly valuable. And then sometimes the gap is in making that visible to the rest of the organization or sharing the knowledge. And you actually do want to be replaced by automation, I think. And so the best way to do that is to be the one who's replacing yourself with automation, identifying ways that automation could be used and documenting what you've learned. So like it comes back to that communication again, right? So like if you understand a legacy system and you're doing some maintenance work, documenting what work is required and what investment would be required in order to reduce the maintenance cost over time makes you an incredibly valuable participant in the business, right?

And there's so many systems out there, right? Like if you look at the lifetime cost of a technical system, including software and people, right? Most of the cost is in the maintenance phase of it. And so being good at that part of it and understanding what it needs to be kept up and running and documenting and sharing it, I think makes you super valuable.

Do you think that part of the advice here is to learn about just how valuable your role is so that you can talk about your value and then also being vocal about what you're doing? Good work does not always speak for itself. You have to speak for your work. For sure. Yeah. You have to let people know what you're doing and remind them why it's valuable, even though you think that they should just kind of implicitly know. They probably don't.

Career transitions and working out loud

I'm involved in a lot of hiring. And I think this is really a question about how hard it is to know about good opportunities and how hard it is for people to hire other folks into those opportunities, right? I know when we posted a job opening recently, within hours, we got a thousand applications. And most of those were spam applications. And it was actually very hard. At Posit, a human reviews every single application. And it was very, very hard. We actually were trying to write some custom software to help us filter applications. And we put annoying questions in the application process, trying to help us filter out bots and AI submitted applications.

Completely made up profiles. So, what you're talking about is being qualified, having a good background, and having trouble getting noticed. So, there's kind of two different phases of the job. Once you get into the interview process, maybe if it's an exhaustive interview process, you've got 10 hours with different people at the company, right, of conversations. And then they have to decide, you know, a significant investment in choosing between a whole bunch of people who've applied based on very minimal information. So, I like this reply of, like, try to become competent in X and show that competency publicly, right? That is so powerful. Because once you get past the problem of, like, getting to the first interview, having something you can show to demonstrate your competency makes the decision so much easier.

These are just other humans who had to talk to, like, 50 applicants for 45 minutes each and try and make a semi-intelligent recommendation on which person to hire. So, showing something publicly is a really, really powerful way to tip the odds a little bit more in your favor. It's not a guarantee. And it's a lot of extra work that is probably not fair that you have to do. But it's a hard problem. It's a mess right now, like hiring on both sides. And I think that is reasonable advice to try and improve your odds a little bit. It doesn't feel fair that you have to do that, but...

It doesn't. But also, the advice, again, that I will navigate us back to is talk to people, right? You said that relationships often outlive companies. I think that that has a really big impact on getting jobs. I've gotten a lot of positions in my life that never, ever saw a job board. They were a conversation. They were a relationship. They were an awareness that I existed. And that would never have happened if I hadn't talked to people and done what I liked to do out loud.

Yeah. So like, that kind of connects back to this question about, so I was actually laid off from the healthcare startup because we ran out of cash. And so I started a consulting company and I started giving talks at conferences because that was the most effective way to demonstrate expertise and would get a lot of work from people coming up to me afterwards going like, oh, can you help us with this problem that you were talking about how to solve, right? I think that is another option for breaking into a different career or to demonstrate competency in public is to like give talks or do consulting work. It kind of lowers the stakes a little bit. You're not asking for like an entire full-time job. You can start working with multiple companies. And I think you'll get a lot of additional information about what it's like inside some of those companies. And maybe you don't want to work at some of them, or maybe you really do, right? Like you'll learn something.

You don't need permission from a conference organizing committee to give a talk. Last night, I was watching a five minute video on YouTube from someone explaining how to like adjust pool chemicals. Cause I'm trying to learn how to do that, right? So, you know, something that other people don't know, regardless of where you are, what your background is, and you can share it without needing to get permission first.

Yeah. As a piece of career advice, I guess, how do you help people or yourself get over that feeling of no one cares about this. Nobody asked me and everyone probably already knows this. I don't think it ever goes away, right? Those feelings are still there for me. You just do it anyway, right? Yeah. Do it anyway. Do it scared.

Posit Cloud, Connect Cloud, and shinyapps.io explained

Um, so there's this like saying that software reflects the shape of the organization that it came out of. I think if we were building everything today, we would just call it Posit Cloud and it would just be the set of data science products that you get in your browser. But they were built over eight or 10 years, a different piece at a time. And so that's why they're still a little bit fragmented. I don't know if I should say this in this forum, but I will, at one point earlier this year, we had six different publishing platforms that Posit was operating. So we're down to five and my goal is to get us down to one or two. It's still going to take another couple of years to get there.

So today just like to actually answer the question, Posit Cloud is where you can get RStudio in your browser. There's free accounts. Students use it. Sometimes there's also some paid accounts. It works pretty well. Connect Cloud is where you can publish your data science products, applications, to a hosted platform that we run. So it's like the cloud version of connect and there's free accounts, there's paid accounts, there's org accounts you can share with other people inside your organization. And then Posit Connect is the older and more feature complete product that is where you can install it on-prem in your own company's private deployment. And so Connect Cloud is the one that we host. shinyapps.io I think is older than all of them. And that's where you can host shiny apps. So it was the very, very first one. Connect Cloud will be the place that sort of like tries to pull together all of those different publishing capabilities together into one place. It's like a super set of all of them.

MVPs and avoiding over-engineering

I think is like, what is the cost? What are the consequences when it fails? And that applies to data, to software projects, to security projects, to a construction project, like what is the cost when it fails? And you don't want to spend more on preventing a failure than you would lose from the failure itself. And that can really help like bring the conversation back into balance. If I'm, if I'm don't want to publish an early version of a product because I'm afraid it'll make me look like I'm not a professional and it's like incomplete and not feature rich, or it has some known things that it can't do. The cost of that is really like what I think other people think of me. But the benefit that I would get from publishing that early version is some people might really like using it. And some other people might point out things that I hadn't thought of. And it's incredibly expensive to get those outside ideas and feedback. And so it's worth a little bit of embarrassment to get some like novel insights on how you could make the thing better.

Career advice: take the risk

Yeah. I think to take on risk is like the thing that to try to do something new, to try to do something hard and to be willing to embarrass yourself, like so many people have so much to offer and oftentimes you're the only one who's stopping you from like trying something new. And so take that risk, take the risk, do it scared.

Yeah. I think to take on risk is like the thing that to try to do something new, to try to do something hard and to be willing to embarrass yourself, like so many people have so much to offer and oftentimes you're the only one who's stopping you from like trying something new. And so take that risk, take the risk, do it scared.

All right. Thank you, Elliot. This was so much fun. This will be on YouTube in a couple of weeks. So you can look out for that. Elliot, thanks so much for hanging out with us. Thank you. This was great. I cannot wait to see you next week where we have a community hero of mine, Tan Ho. He's an engineering manager at Teamworks Intelligence Soccer, but he is also just a community powerhouse. If you are part of the DSLC, formerly known as R for DS, the learning community, then you know Tan. So come hang out with us with Tan next week and ask him all of your burning questions. We cannot wait to see you. Thank you. Have a fantastic rest of your week and weekend.