Broadcasting in the blind

I have this habit when I’m working on an engineering team of broadcasting what I’m doing over a team chat or slack channel. It can be as simple as “kicking off a deployment”, “starting migration”, “rolling back migration”, or sharing a document of a design that I’m planning on implementing. I wasn’t always like this. This habit developed intentionally over time.

Years ago, I watched the movie Gravity years ago and was taken by how George Clooney’s character kept broadcasting “in the blind”, describing what he was doing. This struck me, because it was so different from how I had worked. I had only left Microsoft a few years before and it always seemed like we just went into our offices, closed our doors and did our work. Sure, we’d meet with our teams and PMs and decide on what to work on, but then we’d go back to our offices. My last team at Microsoft, StreamInsight, was a bit different. We’d had a shared OneNote notebook where everyone dumped thoughts into and we synced with each other every morning. I brought a couch, a mini-frig full of beer and a dart board into my office to incent others to hang out in my office. But, each engineer still had his or her own office. It will struck me how potentially better it was to broadcast what you were doing all the time when I watch Gravity.

The next event that nudged me was while I was at Remitly. I was building the data infrastructure there in the early days and I was a one person data team. I didn’t broadcast anything, I didn’t share anything, I didn’t write anything down. But, my workload was overwhelming and my leadership “lent” me some help from the engineering team. It was embarrassing. The engineer couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on in the ducktape piece of shit I had built. It was completely unclear how how earth key processes were working. And, in one case, it a key ETL process was still being kicked off me every night and no one knew it. I realized what I was doing was just plain wrong. I needed to engineer and work with far more transparency.

Then, I met Ajit Banerjee at Apple. He’s probably one of the best engineers and engineering managers I’ve ever met. I also never met anyone that communicated as transparently as him either.

Fast forward to my time at Thunk.AI. Broadcasting in the blind, over communcating, and writing down and share my thoughts had just become second nature to me. I couldn’t put into words why I thought that was the right way to do it. Until, today. I just read this amazing post by Steve Yegge (behind Gas Town) and now I have the words for it. It’s an ego-less form of teamwork that is like working around a campfire - a hive mind. The Thunk team has a great practice of demo changes to each other on a daily basis. Tony will go through phases of inspiration and demo amazing changes he had coded up in the last 24 hours. But, now with coding agents, I think the frequency of broadcast for most teams needs to go up - much higher.

But, it requires letting go of ego. There are many things that are going to separate engineers in the AI age. This might be one of the less appreicated dimensions.