Web Directions Code Leaders 2018 Leading Engineering Teams

With so much of the front end focus on JavaScript, and frameworks and libraries like React and Angular, front end developers can lose sight of the ever increasing sophistication and richness of CSS and SVG.

In this session, Sara Soueidan, one of the world's foremost experts in these technologies will bring us up to speed with what's now, and what's next for the Web platform in relation to typography, layout, animation and visual design.

Lurking underneath our CSS and HTML, our JavaScript, underneath our React and Angular, is a powerful, often poor understood platform–the browser. Its APIs give developers access to device capabilities, security features (like cryptography and authentication), and much more than developers generally realise.

In this session, Marcos Caceres, a platform engineer at Mozilla, with many years experience working on standardising the Web platform will give us a sense of what's possible now, and what's fast approaching.

Recruitment in tech is almost always a second thought but can we take away some of the guess and make it an enjoyable and fruitful exercise?

The process I have built at Siteminder as VP of engineering is focused on

• defining what good looks like (engineering persona)
• understanding how to interview people
• avoid common pitfalls in judging candidates
• build a repeatable process that adds value

This is a story about hiring juniors, why we should do it, and what things I've learned from hiring a bunch and mentoring them.

In this session Emma Jones will review the part heuristics play in unconscious bias, explore the impact in the workplace, and present strategies for addressing bias. Learn how to create an 'inclusive' work environment by understanding and mastering the effects of unconscious bias.

Company Culture and Employee Engagement aren't just popular buzzwords - really understanding what makes your teams tick can lead to a significant difference in company performance, profitability, customer satisfaction. At Agile Australia in 2016 I presented a Culture Manifesto derived from data from over 100,000 survey responses from engagement and exit surveys at more than 150 companies, many of them in the New Tech space, and explained why factors such as effective company leadership, and learning and development, can have a real impact on improving engagement and reducing turnover.

In this talk I will dig in to the topics of leadership and growing people, with updated insights from more recent data, and explain some of the differences we see in groups such as engineering teams, and at different stages of company growth. I will present stories from our own company and other case studies, where people have taken action and the differences we see.

You will appreciate the importance of effective leadership and developing people and how it contributes to engagement; gain insights into the drivers of engagement and turnover; and also hear about the things that we expect would make a difference, but the data proves us wrong!

Lessons on leadership from inside a fast-growing startup that adopted the Team of Teams model.

When you move from a traditional company structure to a Team of Teams model, by forming independent, cross-functional teams around specific company objectives, the nature of leadership changes. Team Leaders, Mentors, Coaches and Capability Leads are each responsible for a distinct form of leadership in this model. Recognising and investing in each, and deciding what kind of leader you’re best suited to be, is perhaps the most exciting challenge of adopting Team of Teams.

Technology has a profound effect on humankind. But the exponential progress resulted in negative societal impact—from data breaches, promoting inequality to rampant harassment. Tech is incredibly susceptible to bias and manipulation, which has led us astray from humanity towards profitability and exclusion. Disruption cast a shade on responsibility for our creations.

In this talk, you will see examples of algorithmic bias, learn how to understand the impact of exclusionary decision-making and implement actionable strategies to combat it. Come and learn about pitfalls of disruption and how to design products, business models and cultures for ethical innovation.

Are you a mercenary or a missionary? Lured by the promise of a big pay packet, would you write code that will actively harm other humans? Most developers steer clear of overtly illegal activities (e.g. writing malware or building chrome extensions that steal people’s bitcoin) but how about ethically questionable activities? Some of the biggest employers in tech are online gambling purveyors, resource extraction companies offering exciting data science challenges and algorithmic trading firms that widen wealth inequality. On the flip side, other companies are emerging that focus on solving societal problems like climate change, healthcare access, lack of affordable quality education and wealth inequality.

On the surface it seems like a tradeoff between getting a higher salary and making a difference. Is this true? Is there really a salary divide between the for-impact sector and other employers? Can you really make a difference if you work for a mission driven company? Is the world better off if you earn a lot of money and donate it to charity rather than working on these issues yourself?

These questions fall under the philosophy of effective altruism. In this talk, I will present market data on salaries in the for-impact sector, discuss a methodology for calculating the net societal impact of your work, explore whether taking a big salary at an ethically questionable company and donating the excess to charity can absolve the potential damage and showcase a free, non-profit jobs board for for-impact tech jobs: programmerswhogiveashit.com

You were a superstar developer! You wrote elegant code, you understood how things were put together behind the scene and you were the go-to person for any technical issue or question about the organisation's code base. And because of that, you got promoted. The saying about what made you successful in your previous role won't necessarily work in your new role couldn't be more right. As an engineering leader who once used to be a superstar developer, how do you survive and then thrive in your new role? I will be sharing with you everything I have learned and observed in the last five years as an engineering manager, all the struggles I had and my strategies for how to not only be an effective engineering leader but also enjoy my job.