Software Engineering in a Challenging Era – Shailesh Kumar, ClickUp

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Shameless Kumar who's senior vice president for engineering at clickup. They are a Work Management platform, and we're talking about what it takes to be a successful software engineer these days shayla's welcome the show. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Regardless of the state of the economy. We're always looking for the best talent.

We can find and software Engineers are hard to find and maybe even harder to retain these days but not everybody's cut out to be a software engineer. So what does it take to be successful in your perspective? What traits do you look for?

I think the two things we look for one is of course, we look for the basic technical skills that you're able to code. You have a logical approach to problem solving. So that's the basic skill that we look for the second most important thing will actually I look for is great and resiliency.

Written isilencia more about you know in a software development. You'll always have setbacks. You'll always have hard problems that you need to solve and you have to think for the long-term perspective that how is it how is it going to impact as your platform skills as your user base skills.

Great and resiliency is about just going at it and keep going at it until you get to a solution and many times. I've seen a lot of people this is this is one of the most important thing or most important trade I've seen for people who have been successful versus people who have been probably average like the difference between average and extremely successful has been all about written resiliency. We have that or not.

Keep going at it even even when the time is difficult, even when you don't have a solution even when you have made a mistake and the solution is not worked out. Keep going at it is the single thing that has probably in my mind in my experience. It has separated the excellent folks from the average folks.

So short of asking them if they've ever seen a John Wayne movie called True Grit. How do you measure whether or not they have great. How do you know?

I didn't make a couple of things that that I do one is ask about their experience because you don't build grit and resilience in a day it you know, it comes over a period of time. It's not that you're born with it. Also.

I think it's it's over a period of time you grow these things so having learning about the experience asking about what they have done in specific circumstances when they're faced with adversaries or if they're faced with failures is a great way to know that what was there response to that that event or that outcome so that gives me a lot of insights into their personality. We actually sometimes we discovered them to join him from pickup. So then you know, what pickup is very hard you really want to join click up and give them all all the hard things about click up all the difficulties and all the challenges that face today and see how they react to it if they are excited about it if they are willing to go at it.

I have a few things that few examples that they give and of course learning from the experience to see how they how here in a specific circumstances. That's how you learn. It's a little offbeat.

I would say it's not very it's not the very standard interview tag pattern where we ask them technical questions, but this is more about getting to know them. At so that's those are the things that I try to get out from a great perspective that how would they behave given similar situations and click up? So in almost sounds like you're looking for people who are deliberately looking for heart problems to solve and that's what Canon keeps them engaged.

I actually do think in software. There are a lot of hard problems and if you're I guess at click up if you're looking for an easy job software development is I like to believe the software development is a hard job where you have to think about the problems. They're very logical way, but also think about from a scale perspective.

These are hard problems if you and we need people who can take on these problems and really think critically about it. You see loss software companies fail because they find the first solution to the problem and Just Go With It, they're not thinking deep. They're not thinking hard about the right way to solve the problem.

And that's what differentiates Google from many other companies that probably tried search like I don't think Google was the only company tried search. It's it generates billions of dollars in ad Revenue. I'm sure many many companies try it.

They're not successful at it because the force solution became into the mind and went with it and it don't work out and they gave up that's what that's where that's for a differentiates great company from companies that probably survive to three four years and then die. There are some folks that say successful Engineers are almost inherently lazy in a good way in the sense that they get tired of doing the root stuff over and over again. So they look for some way to automate it because they don't want to be bothered with all this stuff.

So is that part of the attribute if you're looking for is somebody who sees something and says, you know, let's not just waste our time doing this thing over and over again. So laziness is different from wasting your time. I would I think there would okay.

I mean for I think for the lack of better words, they associate them together. I think I differentiate them. You don't want to waste your time.

You want to invest your time in the most optimal thing if something can be automated. Why are you wasting your time there go and try like the world and if you think about the world the world has many many hard problems. We have not scratched the surface.

Why are you trying to do something that can easily be automated? Use your brains use your use your mind to something else that the world will benefit from so I look for those people who are like if they find a problem if it can be automated automate and get out of it so that you can get to the next problem. There is no birth of problems in the world enough problems out there for all of us to solve.

But if you don't have that desire to solve problems that makes you lazy. I don't think you want that. We want people who have the desire to solve problems, but also desire to solve them in a way where you can move to the next one very quickly.

What's your sense of are we getting better at kind of Bridging the Divide between the engineering teams? And the rest of the business a lot of folks would say, you know, it's a left brain versus right brain conversation. That doesn't go so well, so our business people getting better and understanding Engineers or Engineers getting better at explaining what it is.

They're doing to the average person. Interesting, actually, I think both happened recently. So one thing is I'll put the Advent of knowledge workers.

I think engineering or technology has seeped into everyone even business books. If you look at salespeople, they use it a lot of tools not marketing people. There's a lot of tools a lot of automation.

So they have started to understand the Technologies a lot better than probably 10 years back. From an engineering side. I think I'm seeing the latest set of Engineers and even in the last 10 years.

There's a significant shift for engineers to understand business. Why am I trying to solve this problem? What's the actual impact?

I'm going to make on a customer. What are they trying to do understand that so that they can tune their solutions to the right way so that like I think the both are coming together. The engineers are trying to understand the business problem so that they can engineer or song You Know solve a problem better and the business folks in GTA marketing and other DNA teams have gotten a lot of exposure to technology which have them in some level.

I would say appreciate engineering a lot more but that's where I think they're getting a lot closer now than they were 10 15 years back. Do you think that the tale is starting to Wag the Dog a little bit in this sense. We used to complain that it was too slow and he couldn't keep up with the pace of business.

And now I'm starting to wonder if the engineers are able to deliver new capabilities so fast that the business can't absorb it all. I haven't seen that. I think the it all comes down to there are probably from a problem perspective.

If you think of from a business, there are the business also needs some Focus priority and focus is a big thing for businesses to be successful at if you're not very focused not have the right priorities then it's your every function is focused in a different perspective. Someone is trying to go after SMB the other one things that we're going up to Enterprise another one things what we're taking a different segment and you will build a product with your smash. So everyone is aligned on the priority and focus on the right one the company becomes successful most of the companies when I talk to different people around me.

The alignment kills them if they don't have alignment across business any generating that's what probably takes the company down and surprisingly so you see you'll find this lot more common than I thought, you know, even for small companies. I thought you know what business and Engineering it's not a thousand percent company. How hard can it be to get aligned on a single problem that you're trying to solve funnily enough.

He is there enough out there. They're not aligned on the problem. They're trying to solve the thing.

They are good. They're not and that's where it becomes the problem. Otherwise, I don't think the delivery or engineering delivery or the business needs are in Conflict like there.

I think they call hand in hand as long as you're aligned and focused. Is great something you can teach or is that something that just people show up with? You can teach it but it takes time.

I think it's not that I like it's not your manager can teach you? I personally speaking I think like teaches you good. And these are very hard attributes and hard traits to teach in a small amount of time.

It takes time to build those things. But you can get those you can build those things it start. I don't think it's not.

It's not an online course that you can go and take it and you become you suddenly have great something that you don't work at it. How big an advocate of devops workflows does engineers have to be or do they just have to kind of be logical and consistent or you know from your perspective? How committed do they have to be to a particular philosophy?

Now that I have seen many different philosophies. I don't think they need to be committed a specific laws fee. I think they need to be the company to be need to be aligned to a philosophy.

They can be different philosophies. But if a company is not aligned to one specific philosophy, that's where everyone wants to do things their own way and you can suddenly see a lot of slowness and Chaos in the engineering organization. As long as everyone is aligned to single philosophy many of them work.

You need to have the tools the right people align and build your pipeline that pays, you know, there are a lot of people who have the devops philosophy. There are a lot of people who have SRE philosophy. None of them are wrong now think about Google and Amazon, they both are great companies, but they're developing processes.

They're very different. They both are fine. They both are great.

They both have built their tools and processes according to their philosophies. Now, if you get the Google says close to Amazon and try to make it more people not work. So you have to I think as a company Here We Care philosophy Hired people or look at your people and became philosophy and then stick with it build tools build processes that you're making that efficient.

Right, so you've been at this for a while and looking back in your career? What do you know now that you kind of wish you knew years ago when you first started? I think great question.

I don't think I would have put great as my number one quality when I started my career. I think I started My Career Technical abilities ability to write code that would have been like the only thing that mattered as As life has you know life went on now I have as I said that now I have probably few years ahead of me. Then I had I've lived.

It started a few things on personality and people. And I think I value other things outside of technology or technical skills a lot more than I used to when I started. All right.

Well, it sounds like you actually might have a life that you're enjoying. I'm What's your best advice? Then?

We have a lot of folks who are watching this who are either currently software Engineers or aspiring to be a software engineer in you know, if you're talking to these folks. What's that? One thing that you would tell them to say?

Hey think about this before you go to too much further. So the first thing I think is you need to enjoy your work. So pick up software development try to do logical thinking and try to solve your solve the problems.

See if you really enjoy it. No, a lot of there's a lot of hoopla about software development or engineering as a you know, you can make a good money are in in this business, but you're not enjoying it. You're not yet far.

So the first thing is you got to enjoy problem solving you go to enjoy logical reasoning you have to enjoy these things in order to be a software developer and then don't give up you will have failures. It will not be easy. You will have setbacks to not give up keep going at it and and it will give it time.

Don't be in a rush. It will it will turn out very good. All right.

Well otherwise, man one said he like what you do. You'll never work a day in your life. Hey, shall I thanks for being on the show.

Thank you. All right back to you guys in the studio.