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OSCON: Scaling a distributed engineering team f...

OSCON: Scaling a distributed engineering team from 50-250

The Elastic engineering team is made up of ~250 employees, across more than ten teams, in over 30 countries — it’s been distributed since day one. It’s also been open source since day one, as the company behind the OSS projects Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats.

This talk will cover how the engineering team has evolved as we've grown, how we work and communicate effectively across all timezones, the tools we use, and how we make decisions. We’ll discuss the core values we’ve defined and re-defined at different stages of growth, and how we identified and communicated those values. Additionally, we’ll talk about what team structures work well, how to hire, and balancing open source and commercial development.

Elasticsearch Inc

May 23, 2017
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  1. ‹#› A distributed system is a software system in which

    components located on network computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages
  2. 24

  3. 25 25 Table Group 50 70 Demo Day Dev Standups

    Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings
  4. 25 25 Table Group Black Belt Session 50 70 140

    Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings
  5. 25 25 Table Group Black Belt Session Cross Product/
 Per

    Product Sync 50 70 140 200 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings
  6. Engineering all-hands: 2x a year Vision, long term plans Talks

    from CEO and investors 2 days team time 1 day cross product
  7. Release Process: Time based Merge when ready and scalable Otherwise

    catch the next train Important: No pressure on devs for pushing features
  8. 47

  9. 52

  10. Hiring No puzzle questions Each team has different interview styles

    Technical and team fit for distributed environment
  11. 56 0 10 20 30 40 50 0-3 3-6 9-12

    12-15 15-18 18+ Average experience
  12. On Boarding: x-school Week-long orientation in Mountain View, CA Meet

    team leads, product team Big Picture: Understand business functions