Why Devs Break up With Their Bosses W/ Oliver Wyman’s Carolyn Vo

Everyone who manages a team would like to think that their employees admire them as individuals and as leaders. That you make an impact on those employees while they work under you and long after you end up moving to new companies and opportunities.

One such engineering leader who has mastered the mix of manager, friend and mentor is Carolyn Vo. A Partner and Head of Engineering at Oliver Wyman, Carolyn is one of engineering’s leading advocates of the benefits of creating a culture of approachability, tinkering and healthy levity.

In fact, in our conversation, Carolyn makes a strong argument that without honing the art of approachable management, not only does productivity suffer, but engineers are consistently looking for the door.

One of our liveliest pods to date, we hope you can absorb Carolyn’s insights and energy no matter where you are on your leadership journey.

Episode Highlights Include:

• (4:49) Retention isn't important, it's critical
• (7:26) Why asking engineers "Are you happy?" is a garbage question
• (12:13) Misconceptions about what makes engineers happy
• (20:13) Dan & Carolyn's best Easter egg stories
• (29:52) Flat hierarchy culture
• (39:38) How to break the ice with your engineers

Episode Excerpts:

Retention isn't just important, it's critical:

Dan: Why is retention important in the software industry or for engineering leaders?

Carolyn: It's critical, as I'm going to put it. It's critical because if you want to do some substantial things, right? You've got to keep people, especially great people around. You can't get any traction if you are just stopping and starting all the time. Onboarding people takes a long time. I mean, people, I think sometimes make the mistake of assuming, oh, I'll hire some people and then they can pick up where we left off. There's acclimation to your culture. That's a that's another onboarding consideration. There's learning the technologies if they don't happen to know it and keeping good people around also is a testament to your culture. I feel like you can tell that story when you're recruiting people. Like, yeah, like I know the great resignation has been happening, but I haven't lost many people at all. I'm proud of that. And that tells all the people who want to come on, oh wow, something good must be going on here. I'm not going to just flee like rats from a burning ship, right? So retention is just good for so many different reasons. It helps your company get some traction in what you want to do. It helps other people feel like there's not something funky and weird going on too. I know that kind of the average number of years to stay at a company is like 3 to 5 years, but we've had people stay a lot longer, again, people are just happy. And so the trick is to figure out what keeps people happy and motivated.

Why this executive has a made-up title, and you should too:

Dan: Speaking of approachability, you have a story about your title on Slack. What's up with your Slack title?

Carolyn: I love it. I feel like titles are frustrating. Ever since I was growing up in my career, they just cause a distance. Whether or not people intend, it doesn't matter, right? And so a while back early in my career, I was joking with somebody else. We're just making up goofy titles. I forgot why... They said you could be a junior probationary intern, you know, and tell people that when they join, and I'm like, "I love it!" And so that just stuck. That was like, from over 20-something years ago. So in Slack, as I said, the more senior I got it felt like the more people just kind of, like, shy away. I told you, like, "Carolyn is a partner now. Oh, my God." It's like, "No guys, I'm still the same person I was a year ago making fart jokes at the last offsite." Okay, I'm like, pretty sure I'm the same person. So, you know, I made that my title for a long time in Slack just because I feel like we're joining you and people would then hear like, oh, you should talk to Carolyn. You know she has engineering, whatever. She's a partner. Then they look at my title in Slack, they're like, "She's just a probational intern". Some people that also don't know me, I love it. They're like... I just feel like they laugh because they're like "I love your title." So it's an instant icebreaker. You don't even have to say a word, you know?

You’re invited to Interact on October 25th!

Want to know how engineers at Slack and Stripe connect their dev teams’ work to the business bottom line? Or how do team leads at Shopify and CircleCI keep elite cycle time while minimizing dev burnout and maximizing retention?

These are just two of the topics we’ll tackle at Interact on October 25th.

A free, virtual, community-driven engineering leadership conference, Interact is a one-day event featuring over 25 of the most respected minds in development, all selected by the thousands of engineering leaders in the Dev Interrupted community.