Podcast appearances and mentions of Jocelyn Goldfein

Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director at Zetta, has been there since the early days of the Internet, even starting as the first summer intern at Netscape. After time at Facebook and VMWare, she entered the venture capital space with the first AI-focused VC firm, Zetta. Now, she and her partners are looking for the biggest opportunities in the startup ecosystem around AI, and she explains what some of those developments mean for the marketing world. For Further Reading:What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)? Zetta Venture PartnersWeaviate Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1715735755

In this episode, we're resharing one of the most popular & exciting sessions from ELC Annual 2023, featuring a panel of experts discussing what software dev will look like in the decades to come! This conversation features Tara Hernandez, VP Developer Productivity @ MongoDB; Erik Meijer, Sr. Director of Engineering @ Meta; and Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director @ Zetta Venture Partners. They debate & dissect how AI is changing what software dev looks like, what capabilities future eng leaders will need to build upon, where AI technology will need to improve moving forward, and more.ABOUT TARA HERNANDEZTara Hernandez has spent nearly thirty years evolving ways for companies to develop and ship software. She helped launch Mozilla.org and has been a firm proponent of open source ever since. She also thinks smart companies understand the business value of having a diverse employee base. Tara currently works at MongoDB, is a member of the board for Women Who Code, and a member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation."What was so amazing about Da Vinci? Da Vinci was an artist, he was a painter, he was a sculptor, he was an engineer. Breadth, more than depth, is increasingly going to be critical.”- Tara Hernandez   ABOUT ERIK MEIJERErik Meijer is a Dutch Computer Scientist, entrepreneur, and AI enthusiast.In his long career, he has democratized many academic concepts such as functional programming, reactive programming, and language-integrated query by introducing these concepts into mainstream languages such as C#, Visual Basic, Dart, and Hack, as well as through his startup Apllied Duality Inc.As an educator, Erik has shared his knowledge through platforms like Channel 9, Coursera, and edX, enlightening learners worldwide with his courses on reactive and functional programming.As the founder of the Probability team at Meta in 2016, he is one of the pioneers in applying AI to programmer productivity and systems efficiency.Most recently, Erik is working on providing every knowledge worker with a personal assistant that supercharges their productivity and boosts job satisfaction."I think the engineer of the future will be more like an English major or a music major. Somebody that can really explain their thoughts very well. If you have kids, I would not send them to do computer science. Send them to a liberal arts.”- Erik Meijer   ABOUT JOCELYN GOLDFEINJocelyn Goldfein (@jgoldfein) is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she invests seed capital in AI-native startups with B2B business models.Jocelyn is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure, and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early-stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware.During her tenure at Facebook, she helped convert News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a ‘mobile first' product organization. As an early engineer at VMware, she built core virtualization technology and ultimately created and led VMware's Desktop Business Unit. Jocelyn also held engineering and leadership roles at startups Datify, MessageOne, and Trilogy/pcOrder.Jocelyn has a passion for STEM Education. She currently lectures at Stanford University where she received her BS in Computer Science."Part of me finds it almost insane to think about what if there's never a new programming language? What if we're at the end of history for new programming languages and the next and last programming language is Hindi?”- Jocelyn Goldfein   This episode is brought to you by testRigor!testRigor is trusted by tens of thousands of companies across the globe, including Netflix, Splunk, BusinessWire, and more to solve three main problems with end-to-end test automation:It's challenging, expensive, and slow to hire QA Automation EngineersLow productivity building your own QA AutomationFragile tests, that cause maintenance to consume enormous amounts of timetestRigor solves all of the above by allowing our users to express test cases in plain EnglishTo learn more, check out a case study on testRigor hereSign up for a free trial today at testrigor.comSHOW NOTES:Introducing Jocelyn, Tara, and Erik & their interest in the future of software dev (2:31)Ensuring AI accuracy / confidence as a key inflection point (5:06)What the next generation of building software will look like (7:09)Why engineers will always be needed for understanding machine capabilities (10:51)Erik & Tara's perspectives on the future of AI & engineer interaction in software dev (13:19)Great engineers of the future need to have well-rounded skills (16:38)Why flow will (or will not) be as necessary in the future (19:06)How AI will augment human creativity & the engineering role (21:06)Will AI replace the need for cross-collaborative teams? (23:30)Jocelyn's theory that today's best QA folks will be the best engineers in 2033 (26:14)Audience Q&A: What logical & cognitive skills will still be needed as AI progresses? (28:24)Challenging the current definition of software development (31:45)What is the potential for a future dialogue system? (34:17)Will the change in eng skills also impact other degrees like mathematics? (36:46)How will the industry navigate workforce loss as AI replaces certain roles? (38:01)LINKS AND RESOURCESVideo Version of EpisodeAll of the Sessions from ELC AnnualThis episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Dealing with data hyperabundance, solving economic problems for businesses and changing lives for the better. Tune-in to Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, Jocelyn Goldfein as she and Sam have a discussion around engineering leadership, organizational graph structures, and productization of AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jocelyn Goldfein is a managing director at Zetta Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in AI-first startups. Jocelyn led engineering teams while at Facebook and VMware during their high-growth years before becoming a venture capital investor. In founders, she looks for real empathy for customers. Jocelyn has backed over 20 startups focused on enterprise infrastructure and artificial intelligence.Real empathy for the customers is critical to a great go-to-market strategy.Throwing a ton of irrelevant data at an AI model doesn't make the model more useful. Data can only create real value if it is relevant and clean.Having the right people around the founding team makes big problems smaller, but the wrong people make small problems bigger.Sustainable innovation requires a combination of user needs and robust business models.Non-profit: CODEPATH.ORG

Host Julia Yoo chats with Zetta Ventures Managing Director Jocelyn Goldfein, previously at VMware and Facebook. Tune in to hear about Goldfein’s own experiences as an entrepreneur, her take on challenges in AI innovation and the must-have soft skills that successful entrepreneurship requires.

Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, joined the Fund81 podcast to share her approach to investing in artificial intelligence (AI). With the cost of creating software continuing to decline, Zetta believes that the companies of the future will need to build more than just great software to thrive. Zetta invests in AI software that learns from data to analyze, predict, and prescribe outcomes. This is what Zetta defines as the fourth era of computing: the computation of huge volumes – zettabytes – of data on distributed systems and the development of software that can learn from this data. This interview combined with Zetta’s other content is the most insightful information I’ve seen on this topic. It’s really worth a look. More Content from Zetta Venture Partners Investing in Artificial Intelligence: http://investorfieldguide.com/ash/ Why SaaS is Not a Fit for VC and How AI Compounds Competitive Advantage: http://fullratchet.net/161-why-saas-is-not-a-fit-for-vc-and-how-ai-compounds-competitive-advantage-ash-fontana/ Growing Up in the Intelligence Era: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/growing-up-in-the-intelligence-era/ Data Is Not the New Oil: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/data-is-not-the-new-oil/ Measuring AI Startups by the Right Yardstick: https://medium.com/zetta-venture-partners/measuring-ai-startups-by-the-right-yardstick-6c5f6745dd22 Sourcing with Zetta’s Jocelyn Goldfein: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/venture-confidential/ep-15-sourcing-with-zettas-jocelyn-goldfein/ Enjoy.

Rob Fitzpatrick on The Art of Product, Joshua Kerievsky on Being Human, Marty Cagan on Build by Drift, Jutta Eckstein and John Buck on Agile Uprising, and Jocelyn Goldfein on Simple Leadership. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 24, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ROB FITZPATRICK ON THE ART OF PRODUCT The Art of Product podcast featured Rob Fitzpatrick with hosts Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer. They talked about Rob’s book, The Mom Test. He wrote it for “super-introverted techies” like himself but found it resonated with a wider audience. He explained that one of the reasons he self-published the book is because, when he took it to a publisher, they wanted him to increase the word count simply because they believed, with no evidence, that business books below 50,000 words don’t sell. The hosts asked Rob to describe “The Mom Test” in his own words. He described how, just as you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea because she’s biased, you need to be careful when asking anyone whether they think your business is a good idea. This, he says, puts the burden on them to tell you the truth. Instead, he says you should put the burden on yourself of coming up with questions that are immune to bias, so immune that even your mom would give you an unbiased answer. Rob talked about how the value of customer conversations is proportional to how well the problem you are trying to solve is defined. For products like Segway or Uber or a video game, asking customers questions about the problems they want solved is not as effective as it would be when the product is enterprise software. Derrick talked about how, when The Lean Startup started becoming big, it led him to what he calls “idea nihilism” where he started to believe the idea doesn’t matter at all, it is one hundred percent the journey, and the future is unpredictable, so just build something. The next few things he built while in this mindset either did not get off the ground or led him to ask himself why he built a business he hated. Eventually, he concluded that the idea matters a lot. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/90-the-mom-test-with-rob-fitzpatrick/id1243627144?i=1000440137442 Website link: https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-90 JOSHUA KERIEVSKY ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Joshua Kerievsky with host Richard Atherton. What I loved about this interview is that Joshua described many of the inspirations behind the Modern Agile principles. The first principle, “make people awesome,” was inspired by Kathy Sierra and her focus on making the user awesome. They originally called it “make users awesome” and realized that there is a whole ecosystem besides the end consumers, including colleagues, management, and even shareholders, to make awesome. He clarified that the word “make” is not coercive, but about asking you what you can do to empower others. Regarding the second principle, “make safety a prerequisite,” he talked about being inspired by a story in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit about Paul O’Neill and his turnaround of the hundred-year-old Alcoa corporation. Just as Amy Edmondson had connected psychological safety to physical safety in a previous podcast, Joshua connected psychological safety to product safety. He clarified that making safety a prerequisite doesn’t mean avoiding risk. Speaking about the third principle, “experiment and learn rapidly,” he told the story of the Gossamer Condor, the human-powered aircraft that was created to win the Kremer prize. The team that built the Condor engineered their work so that they could fail safely. The airplane flew two or three feet from the ground and the materials they used were expected to break and be repaired quickly. This let them do multiple test flights per day while their competitors would go through a waterfall process that led to large times gaps between test flights. Finally, he described the fourth principle, “deliver value continuously,” as finding a way of working where you can get feedback early and learn from it, delivering value each time. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/62-modern-agile-with-joshua-kerievsky/id1369745673?i=1000440221993 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/303a9472-75ef-4e7f-94e5-414a3018750a.mp3 MARTY CAGAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Marty Cagan with host Maggie Crowley. Marty says that when he shows teams the product discovery techniques he described in his book, Inspired,he finds that they understand the value of the techniques but too often they are not allowed to use them. Instead, their leaders hand them a roadmap and tell them to just build features. When he talks to these leaders, he asks, “Why are you doing this? You know this isn’t how good companies work.” The answer, though not always admitted, is that they don’t trust the teams and, as a result, they don’t empower them. They talked about the defining characteristics of an empowered product team. First among them is for the leadership team to give the product team problems to solve rather than features to build. They also need to staff them appropriately because, if they have been running things the old way long enough, they don’t have the appropriate staff to run things the new way. For example, they may have somebody called a product manager, but they are really a project manager with a fancy title or a backlog administrator. Or they may have designers who are just adding the company color scheme and logo or engineers who are just writing code. Maggie asked what a product leader can tell a stakeholder who is used to thinking in tangible features rather than the problem to be solved. Marty says there is nothing wrong with talking about features, but it is when they get etched into a roadmap that we get into trouble because it becomes a commitment and the time spent on the feature could be better spent on figuring out how to solve the problem. They talked about Objectives and Key Results or OKRs and how they are a complete mess at most companies. The concept is simple and easy if you are already in the empowered team model, but otherwise it is theater because you’re still doing roadmaps while simultaneously trying to tell people the problems to solve. Maggie started describing how they do product discovery and development at Drift and Marty immediately pointed out how the language she used makes the work sound like it occurs in phases as it would in a waterfall project. She explained that they use this notion of phases to communicate out and he pointed out that, even if it is not currently waterfall, there is a slippery slope between speaking about phases and landing in a waterfall mindset. He talked about three things he cares about that distinguish his process from waterfall: 1) tackling the risks upfront, 2) product managers, designers, and engineers literally coming up with prototypes side-by-side instead of having hand-offs, and 3) iterating towards achieving your KPIs rather than having a phase where you’ve declared the design done and have started implementing.  Maggie asked him to enumerate what he thinks product leaders should be doing. First, he said that they need to coach their product managers to get them to competence, which he says should take no more than three months. In the case of hiring product managers straight out of school, the product leader needs to commit to multiple-times-a-week or even daily coaching. Second, he said that product leaders need to take an active role in creating product strategy. This comes back to OKRs where product leaders provide business objectives that product teams translate into problems to solve. The more product teams you have, the less you can expect those teams to be able to see the whole picture on their own, which makes it more important for product leaders to connect the dots for them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/we-talked-to-product-management-legend-marty-cagan/id1445050691?i=1000440847157 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/da82dbda JUTTA ECKSTEIN AND JOHN BUCK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jutta Eckstein and John Buck with host Jay Hrcsko. Jay asked Jutta how she and John came together to produce the ideas described in their book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy. Jutta and John met at an Agile conference in Atlanta and got the idea to investigate what Sociocracy could bring to Agile. They soon found themselves thinking, “That’s not really all of it,” and immediately agreed to write a book together about it. Jay started going through the book, beginning with four problem statements: Existing concepts cannot be directly applied to company strategy, structure, or process in the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world. Companies make decisions from the top down but often people at lower levels who are closer to the realities of the product or market have valuable insights that are currently ignored. There is a collision of values underlying shareholder interests in short-term profits and a focus on the needs of the customers. For a company to be agile, all departments must be agile. However, existing agile systems struggle when applied to non-engineering departments. Jutta described Beyond Budgeting. She said that it sounds like it only has relevance to the finance department, but there is a close relationship between how companies deal with finance and how they are managed. In contrast to Agile, which originated from the experiences of consultants, she says, Beyond Budgeting originated in the experiences of CFOs. She gave examples of the problems with traditional budgeting: In the first scenario, a company’s budget is set annually and, at some point during the year, a project team that had been allocated a certain budget determines that the market has changed and they no longer need a budget as large as they originally thought. She’s never seen this situation lead anyone to give the money back. In the second scenario, the market changes such that the budget needed for the company to succeed in the market exceeds the original budget and it’s too late for anything to be done. Jay brought up the distinction made in the book about the three distinct uses of budgets: 1. a target, 2. a forecast, and 3. capacity planning, and the fact that these should not be combined. Next, they discussed Open Space. John talked about the Open Spaces you often see at conferences and how they increase creative thinking and allow people’s passions to emerge. In the same way, Organization Open Space, where you can come up with a project, line up some people, and go to work, gives you passion bounded by responsibility that leads to creative companies.  John pointed out that the combination of the three concepts, as he and Jutta developed the book, started to interact and come together in ways that made it greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why they gave it a name: BOSSA nova.  Jay brought up how he has already benefitted from what he learned about Sociocracy in the book. He was able to help his colleagues learn about the difference between consent and consensus. The participants in a meeting had been locked in an argument over a maturity model when Jay restated the subject of the disagreement in terms of consent, asking if there was anyone who needed to put a stake in the ground for their position or would they all be willing to let an experiment proceed. This quickly unblocked the stalemate. John related a similar story about helping a group of professors make some decisions about forming a professional association. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck/id1163230424?i=1000440982639 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Christian McCarrick. Jocelyn talked about her career, including some time starting her own company, rising in the ranks at VMWare, arriving at Facebook at a critical time in its history, and becoming an angel investor and a venture capitalist. Christian asked about one of Jocelyn’s tweets about motivation as a management superpower. She says that engineers have a lot to offer the discipline of people management because they know how to think about systems problems and most organization problems are systems problems. On the other hand, engineers sometimes lose sight of the fact that human systems are different from programmatic systems in that they have feelings and don’t always behave rationally, but people respond to incentives. Explanations of the importance or urgency of a particular effort and attaching a bonus to it are blunt instruments, but praise and encouragement satisfies people’s needs and engenders long-term loyalty in a way that other incentives don’t. They talked about one of my favorite blog posts of Jocelyn’s on culture. She says that culture is what people do when nobody is looking. It is not people following an order. It is people knowing what to do when they don’t have orders. She says that people often think that culture is a set of traits or qualities and that you can interview for those traits to find someone who is a “culture fit.” She disagrees with this because companies are different from one another and people are obviously portable between companies.  Christian brought up the example of companies that have posters on their walls describing their culture. To Jocelyn, people are less than 10% influenced by the poster on the wall and more than 90% influenced by what successful, powerful people in the company do. When these are in conflict, you get cynicism. She talked about how compensation can be a motivator, but she noted that other people cannot judge your success by your compensation because they don’t know it, so they look for other indicators like title, scope of responsibility, influence, and confidence. So she says you need to be careful when handing out overt status symbols like titles and promotions because people will emulate the recipients of such symbols. The classic example, she says, is the brilliant jerk. When you elevate the brilliant jerk, you’re sending a message that people who succeed in this company and get ahead are jerks. The poster on the wall may not say that, but people will attach more weight to your behavior than what you or the poster say. Jocelyn talked about the undervaluing of soft skills. Engineers are taught early on that their work is fundamentally solo work and she says that is a lie because, if you want to do anything significant, if you’re going to go from rote work to meaningful creative work, the crucial skills are the soft skills we’re taught to disdain or neglect. Regarding recruiting and hiring, she talked about the tendency, at least at Facebook, to treat the phone screen like an on-site interview and create false negative rates that are too high. She did her own test where she brought in for on-site interviews a set of candidates who had previously been rejected at the phone screen stage and found that the same number got hired from her screened-out pool as were hired from the pool of candidates that passed their phone screen. She talked about the benefits and disadvantages of the centralized hiring model. On the plus side, it reduced silos, made teams friendlier to one another, and made employees become citizens of the company first and citizens of the team second. The downside of the centralized model is that there is no hiring manager taking responsibility, so the responsibility passes to the recruiter. Her preference is a blended model that is mostly centralized but with hiring managers taking responsibility and receiving rewards and praise for taking that responsibility. I loved what Jocelyn had to say about diversity and inclusion. She said that when we’re working at these high-growth companies, we’re desperately seeking to hire, we’re interviewing everybody, and we’re hiring everybody who is above our bar. When we look at the result and it is only 5% or 10% female and single digit percentages black or hispanic, some part of us is thinking that must reflect the inputs and to get a different population I would have to lower my bar and accept people who are failing. But this assumes a few things: that your interview bar is fair and that the population who applies to work at your company is the population who could apply to work at your company. If you really value having a more diverse environment, you will go looking for them. If you just sat there and only looked at applicants, you would never have hired that one signal processing engineer you needed or that one esoteric role that is not there in your applicant pool. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-jocelyn-goldfein/id1260241682?i=1000440957474 Website link: http://simpleleadership.libsyn.com/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-with-jocelyn-goldfein FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Jocelyn Goldfein on Software Engineering Daily, Michael Bolton on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Dave Snowden on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Ben Orenstein on Software Developer’s Journey, and Claire Lew on Greater Than Code. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 10, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Jeff Meyerson. Jocelyn talked about joining Facebook after having spent years at VMWare delivering shrink-wrap software that had a release cycle on the order of years. Witnessing the cadence at which Facebook delivered new releases firsthand, it appeared to her like Facebook was defying the laws of physics. The cost of a release had shrunk to nearly zero. She says that companies that start life developing for native, that is, developing shrink-wrap software like that of VMWare, never really shake off the culture of developing for native. These cultures define a good engineer as someone who can estimate precisely and deliver predictably and it is all because the cost of a release in that native software world is so high. She talked about the often unacknowledged tradeoff between productivity and predictability. She also talked about the flexibility the engineers obtained by shipping more frequently. Not having to hit infrequent, high-risk release windows meant that engineers could stay “on the balls of their feet” and, say, have the news feed team help the photos team because they were not going to miss some “huge release date in the sky” by shuffling tasks and reprioritizing. By the way, I love Jocelyn’s colorful metaphors. She said that being able to move people around fungibly to unblock each other ends up being a “turbo button for the entire organization.” She says that the combination of removing deadline pressure and continuously integrating new features behind feature flags into the single branch that all of Facebook ran on allowed the engineers to be agile and to “reserve the right to wake up smarter and make a better decision tomorrow” based on actual usage. This is in contrast to many software teams that spend so much time making a perfect product before they finally get feedback that they become both psychologically committed to their design and physically committed to it (through a hard-to-change code base). At Facebook, the “concrete was still wet” until incredibly “late in the game.” The architecture and the release process at Facebook let them “jettison some sacred cows,” specifically, the notion of deadlines and the idea that you only get feedback at the end. She says that Mark Zuckerberg has many gifts but one of his superpowers is to be able to admit when he was wrong. She says she doesn’t think people can reliably distinguish good innovative ideas from bad ideas without trying them out first and she believes Facebook has been innovative because their architecture, release process, and values system allowed them to take risks. She says, “Facebook’s genius is not that it is right any more than anybody else. It is that it tries experiments at a higher velocity than anybody else and it purges the ones that don’t work faster than anybody else. It is no surprise that, in the end, the deep-seated challenges for the company have been problems that don’t show up immediately — problems where the downsides were incredibly lagging indicators.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/id1019576853?i=1000438147913 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/15/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/ MICHAEL BOLTON ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Michael Bolton with host Shane Hastie. Shane started by asking Michael whether testing is blasé today. Michael said that you can choose to look at it that way but nothing is more fascinating to him than testing, which he defines as evaluating products by learning about them through exploration and experimentation. He also says that testing is focused on a question that nobody else is interested in asking or answering, which is: Are there problems that threaten the on-time successful completion of the project or that threaten the value of the product? Michael sees his job as helping people get comfortable with the process of looking for problems that threaten value so that managers can find out whether the product they have is the product they wanted. In response to a question from Shane, Michael brought up a conversation in which someone said that you often look at a piece of software and think to yourself that it couldn’t have an effect on human life or health or safety. But you don’t know how people are going to use your product. A developer of Microsoft Excel might think, “Nobody’s going to die if there is a bug in Excel.” Somebody could easily lose a mortgage due to a bug in Excel and when a product is used as ubiquitously as Excel, you are not going to see the knock-on effects of the risk. He talked about the problem of needing to maintain a critical distance to spot the problems that arise from complexity. He said that unit tests may demonstrate that the individual units of a program can all be individually reliable, but they would not demonstrate that the overall product is safe. He gave an example from Nancy Leveson’s Engineering a Safer World of a chemical reactor in which the software that controlled the flow of water and catalysts into the reactor was designed to leave all control variables as-is and sound an alarm in response to a fault. This sounds reasonable, but a situation occurred in which a fault was triggered just after the catalyst was added to the reactor. The cooling water flow had not yet ramped up and fault policy meant that it stayed at this low level as the system got hotter and hotter. The reactor overheated, the release valve lifted, and the contents of the reactor were discharged into the atmosphere. This illustrated how putting simple things together into a complex thing creates complex problems we are not great at anticipating. The solution he says is to experiment with the system in the same way Hook, Boyle and their contemporaries in the 1600s were doing: putting the system into conditions that are not normal so as to reveal surprises. It is the tester’s job, Michael says, to be professional skeptics. The problem, he says, is that the critical distance of a good tester is bound together with social distance. Nobody wants to receive bad news and testers are often the people delivering the bad news, creating social distance from the rest of the team. The social challenge for testers is to help people appreciate getting the bad news. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-bolton-on-the-testing-mindset/id1161431874?i=1000438906048 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-michael-bolton DAVE SNOWDEN ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dave Snowden with host Shane Hastie. After asking Dave to introduce himself, Shane asked about the liminal aspects of the Cynefin “model” and Dave made the correction that Cynefin is actually a framework rather than a model because it doesn’t seek to represent the world but to give a perspective on the world. Dave explained that regarding liminality, Cynefin started with five domains and a set of dynamics for moving between domains but this confused people, so they introduced liminal zones to represent this state of transition. He pointed out that the Scrum framework holds things in the liminal state between complicated and complex long enough to get them right and this is a strength of Scrum. They talked about the need to run parallel safe-to-fail experiments when in the complex domain and Dave gave three examples. The first was to break people up into trios and spin off 30 or 40 trios to look at a problem in their spare time over a week. The second example was to create a prototyping team and put them with users for a day to build a prototype and then pass the prototype on to another team charged with improving it without the original user input. The third example was to do continuous mapping of unarticulated needs and, when they get statistically significant clusters, put small prototyping teams on each cluster. Dave told a story about creating a fake infographic about a cybersecurity breach in one industry, giving it to employees in a different industry, and asking them to tell a story about why it couldn’t happen to their company and a story about what they would do if it did. He then analyzed these stories to look for complacency. More generally, he would use this technique and look for outliers because, when you want to create significant change, you need to look to the outlier groups rather than the dominant groups. Shane pointed out the contrast between this technique and common requirements-gathering techniques and Dave responded that requirements-gathering allows bias to creep in after the first few interviews. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-moving-beyond/id1161431874?i=1000438021618 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-and-moving-beyond-agile-to-agility BEN ORENSTEIN ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Timothée Bourguignon. They talked about Ben’s academic challenges, his initial lack of maturity, his discovery of Ruby and then Rails, and his growth as a software developer under the tutelage of his former boss and mentor. Tim asked Ben what he would be looking for in a junior developer to have as a mentee and Ben answered that he would look for something like grit (the ability to push forward and not get too discouraged) because the kinds of problems we face as software developers require grit to get through and this never really goes away as you become more senior and experienced. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/51-ben-orenstein-advises-us-not-to-worry-too-much/id1079113167?i=1000439883363 Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/1195571 CLAIRE LEW ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Claire Lew with hosts Janelle Klein and Sam Livingston-Gray. The panelists asked Claire the standard “What is your superpower?” question and, after answering, she turned the question around to them. They then entered the topic of bad bosses in which Claire told her own story and then got Janelle and Sam to tell their own bad boss stories. Sam told the story of his experience with a command-and-control CEO and this led to a discussion about when motivating through fear is and isn’t effective. Sam related this to a book by Courtenay Hameister called Okay Fine Whatever that describes the negative effects of stress on one’s ability to be creative. This reminded me of the section of the book Switch by the Heath brothers about the burning platform concept and how negative emotions stifle creativity. Claire pointed out another problem with command-and-control leadership is that it disregards the belief that people are ever intrinsically motivated. She says that while there has been a shift to leaders being told they need to inspire people rather than command and control them, there is still an implicit reference to control. People say things like you need to “empower” people. She hates that word. She says people are already empowered. Leaders need to create an environment that lets their people do their best work and then just get out of their way. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/132-distilling-the-hailstorm-with-claire-lew/id1163023878?i=1000440034174 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/distilling-the-hailstorm FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thekguy Website:

What does it take to up your game and improve your management skills? Do you need to read better books or get around the right environment? Here to help us dig in and understand some key aspects of an effective manger is, Jocelyn Goldfein. Jocelyn is a technology executive and investor. She is the managing director and a general partner at venture capital firm Zetta Venture Partners. Previously she was a director of engineering at Facebook and vice president of engineering at VMware. Jocelyn is passionate about scaling products, teams, and companies, and she cares deeply about STEM education. In our conversation, Jocelyn talks about the lessons she learned as a manager, how to create a positive work culture, advice for leaders, how to encourage diversity, and much more. You’ll want to listen closely to the helpful insights that Jocelyn has to share! Outline of This Episode [0:40] I introduce my guest, Jocelyn Goldfein [1:50] Jocelyn talks about her background in tech. [9:00] What lessons did Jocelyn learn from her early years as a manager? [12:00] Motivation is one of management's underused superpowers. [14:30] How to create a healthy work culture. [22:15] What did Jocelyn do at Facebook to streamline their hiring process? [37:00] Advice for engineering leaders at startups. [39:50] What can leaders do to create a more diverse workplace? [48:00] Resource recommendations from Jocelyn. Lessons learned How do you go from zero management or leadership experience and expect to hit the ground running? The truth is - you can’t! Most people thrust into a sudden leadership role will struggle at first; no one is born with solid management skills. It is your responsibility to be flexible and learn as you go. Unfortunately, in most situations, someone won’t come along and hold your hand, showing you exactly what you need to do. If you can find a mentor or a peer who has also been thrust into a new area of responsibility, then learn from them. Leadership is often lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Motivation is a manager’s superpower Did you know that motivation is a manager’s secret superpower? It’s true! While some managers will try to dangle carrots or get their team members to perform with sticks, good managers will search for a deeper motivation. Remember, people are not systems or machines; they don’t always respond in predictable or logical ways. If you want to improve your management skills, you need to focus on praise and encouragement. Don’t be so quick to jump to financial incentives - most people just need to feel like they are moving in a positive direction and accomplishing their goals. How to create a healthy culture What does a healthy culture in an organization look like? Does it all come down to putting the right words on the wall or the right onboarding video? Culture starts from the top. Jocelyn Goldfein’s definition of culture is the behavior you reward and punish. What behavior does your organization reward and punish? If your successful leaders embody the vision and values of the organization, then you are headed in the right direction. You can learn more about Jocelyn’s perspective on building a healthy work culture by reading her blog post located in the resources section at the end of this post. Diversity in the workplace One of the key aspects of improving your management skills is learning to pay attention to the level of diversity in your workplace. Diversity is a critical component, especially when it comes to the technology sector. If you want to see your team’s potential increase - then pay attention to the level of diversity! There is a massive opportunity right now for tech companies to tap into underrepresented groups in the workforce. Don’t be afraid or worried about diversity - embrace it. Start with an assessment - where is your organization at, right now? Is there a sufficient level of diversity and inclusion, or is there room to grow? To learn more about improving your management skills by focusing on diversity and other helpful topics, make sure to catch my full conversation with Jocelyn on this episode of Simple Leadership - you don’t want to miss it! Resources & People Mentioned BOOK: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion BOOK: Debugging the Development Process Connect with Jocelyn Goldfein Jocelyn Goldfein - Los Altos, California | Professional Profile | LinkedIn Jocelyngoldfein Jocelyn Goldfein – Medium Jocelyn Goldfein | AngelList Jocelyn Goldfein (@jgoldfein) · Twitter Jocelyn Goldfein - Forbes Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish Connect With Christian McCarrick and SimpleLeadership http://simpleleadership.io/ Christian on LinkedIn Christian on Twitter: @CMcCarrick Subscribe to SIMPLELEADERHIP onApple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Player FM, TuneIn, iHeart Radio

Facebook engineering is designed to self-assemble. When an engineer joins Facebook, the engineer goes through boot camp, where they are exposed to multiple projects to find a good fit in terms of technical skills and personal preferences. Since there are so many different initiatives within the company at any given moment, a new hire can The post Facebook Management with Jocelyn Goldfein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Jocelyn Goldfein (LinkedIn, Twitter) is a true IT Visionary. Having worked at VMware and Facebook in the early days of both, and now as Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, Jocelyn has been involved in the formative years of the internet and technological innovations. In part two of their interview, Jocelyn and Ian discuss whether A.I. is an industry in and of itself, what companies are worth investing in, how collaboration works between enterprises and start-ups, and much more. IT Visionaries is brought to you by The Lightning Platform by Salesforce. The Lightning Platform is a leading cloud platform that makes building AI-powered apps faster and easier. With Salesforce, now everyone is empowered to build apps for their organization! Learn more at salesforce.com/buildmobileapps. Salesforce and MIT recently teamed up to create a whitepaper exploring what happens when AI meets CRM. Read: AI Meets CRM: An MIT Tech Review Whitepaper

Jocelyn Goldfein (LinkedIn, Twitter)  is a true IT Visionary. Having worked at VMware and Facebook in the early days of both, and now as Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, Jocelyn has been involved in the formative years of the internet and technological innovations. In part one of their interview, Jocelyn and Ian discuss everything from the rise of the computer sciences industry, how to look at investing in start-ups, to the role artificial intelligence will play in businesses moving forward, how the rise of cloud technology could be a precursor to the rise of A.I. and much more. Plus, Jocelyn dives into her years of experience at Facebook working closely with Mark Zuckerberg as well as what it was like riding the VMware rocket ship right as it caught fire. IT Visionaries is brought to you by The Lightning Platform by Salesforce. The Lightning Platform is a leading cloud platform that makes building AI-powered apps faster and easier. With Salesforce, now everyone is empowered to build apps for their organization! Learn more at salesforce.com/buildmobileapps. Salesforce and MIT recently teamed up to create a whitepaper exploring what happens when AI meets CRM. Read: AI Meets CRM: An MIT Tech Review Whitepaper

In episode 15 of Venture Confidential, Peter is joined by Zetta Venture Partner's Jocelyn Goldfein to discuss her past involvement at VMware and Facebook as well as her latest role as investor. The post Ep. #15, Sourcing with Zetta’s Jocelyn Goldfein appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 15 of Venture Confidential, Peter is joined by Zetta Venture Partner's Jocelyn Goldfein to discuss her past involvement at VMware and Facebook as well as her latest role as investor.

In this episode, Edith goes it alone with ex-Facebook & VMware, current angel investor Jocelyn Goldfein. Jocelyn and Edith have a great conversation about Continuous Delivery through the lens of Jocelyn's experiences at both Facebook and VMware.

In this episode, Edith goes it alone with ex-Facebook & VMware, current angel investor Jocelyn Goldfein. Jocelyn and Edith have a great conversation about Continuous Delivery through the lens of Jocelyn's experiences at both Facebook and VMware. The post Ep. #13, Software Development at VMware and Facebook appeared first on Heavybit.

With an abundant passion for technology, we're excited to introduce you to Jocelyn Goldfein, an angel investor and technology company adviser. With a resume that includes tenures as an engineering leader at VMware and engineering director at Facebook, Jocelyn is now using her experience and influence to help technology startups build teams and grow business. In our conversation with her, we discuss her career path, how to tackle the issue of a low percentage of women in tech jobs and her thoughts on how our world could change if that number doubles! We're sure that by the end of this episode you'll want to work for Jocelyn as much as we do!  

As technologists we want to build software that is friendly, fast, beautiful, reliable, secure, and scalable. And we expect ourselves to deliver it on time and under budget, because our ultimate goal is to have lots of happy customers who can do what they want: cue Daft Punk’s Technologic! But time and energy are finite, and we simply cannot deliver it all at once. We need to choose our priorities, and this choice is one we should make consciously. Evaluating our software development priorities while dealing with constraints is known as the tradeoff space. How can you make wise tradeoffs for your product? The choice is based on a balance between your technology stack and business model type. “Move fast and break things!” While this has become a popular motto, it doesn’t apply to every company. For example, enterprise software companies that are building system-level software prioritize reliability because customers need to use them. Each change needs to be rigorously tested, and often approved before it can be released. Meanwhile, consumer internet companies spend time and money on making their UX delightful so that people want to use them. Reliability is something they’re willing to sacrifice. Since many are web-based applications, they can iterate quickly and release changes frequently. So yes, they can move fast and break things. The tradeoff space may seem insurmountable, but you too can become confident about your decisions by learning from a true pro! In the second episode of Femgineer TV, I’ve invited Jocelyn Goldfein, the Former Director of Engineering at Facebook, to talk about: - What the tradeoff space is - How to not get overwhelmed by the tradeoff space - How to make decisions that will help you ship product that your customers will love and help you meet business goals Jocelyn has led engineering teams at early to growth-stage startups like VMWare and enterprise companies like Trilogy, so she’s definitely had her fair share of dealing with constraints and having to make tradeoffs to ship product and meet business goals. We also dig into the cost of a mistake, how to take risks, the BIGGEST mistake Jocelyn sees technical folks making over and over again, and how to avoid making it! Watch the episode to learn how you can make smart tradeoffs when developing software products. Read Jocelyn's blog: http://www.jocelyngoldfein.com Follow Jocelyn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jgoldfein Join the conversation after listening to the episode at: http://femgineer.com/?p=7004

More than you know, your software’s business model and technology stack shape your appetite for risk, creativity and pace. Jocelyn Goldfein, former Engineering Director at Facebook, explains the constraints you face with various kinds of product DNA–and how you can embrace those constraints to build valuable software.

Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein takes us on a trip inside the innovative culture of Facebook. In this illuminating conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, Goldfein explains why code wins arguments, employees must have the right to take risks, and how Facebook strives to remain a hungry, yet humble, company.

Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein takes us on a trip inside the innovative culture of Facebook. In this illuminating conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, Goldfein explains why code wins arguments, employees must have the right to take risks, and how Facebook strives to remain a hungry, yet humble, company.

Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein takes us on a trip inside the innovative culture of Facebook. In this illuminating conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, Goldfein explains why code wins arguments, employees must have the right to take risks, and how Facebook strives to remain a hungry, yet humble, company.