Camille Fournier

Popular technologies (like GraphQL) can be 'fads' that solve specific problems for giant companies but create unnecessary complexity for others.

"GraphQL... is one of the things that is both popular and thought relatively poorly of by most of the senior people that I know... if you're seriously thinking about it and you're not Facebook, you may..."

Internal platforms should be treated as products with dedicated product management and a focus on user (developer) productivity.

"Platform engineering is not just maintaining cloud infrastructure... platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more pro..."

Platform teams should generally be established once an engineering org reaches ~50 people or when redundant efforts across teams become highly inefficient.

"I think it gets to be like, you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are 10 engineers... when you hit either a lot of inefficiency where you're seein..."

Successful platforms often emerge from 'harvesting' solutions already built by application teams rather than building from scratch in isolation.

"A lot of the best platform type offerings in companies start in individual application teams. An application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves and it turns out that that's actually a..."

Engineers should achieve deep technical mastery (often requiring ~10 years) before transitioning into management to maintain long-term credibility.

"Don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones... I do think it's probably somewhere in the 10-year range of really having spent a lot of your time over those years writi..."

The most surprising shift for new managers is the loss of autonomy over their schedule and the transition to a service-oriented role.

"The fact that you really don't own your time as a manager. Your team and your management and the company owns your time... individual contributors often think that if they become a manager, they will..."

Full system rewrites are often traps because teams underestimate migration time and the burden of supporting two systems simultaneously.

"Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems. By the way, you still have to support the ol..."

Incremental evolution and targeted tech debt cleanup are more successful than 'big bang' rewrites.

"Take pieces potentially of the old system, uplift them, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, clean up the tech debt, but trying to say we're going to just go away. We're going to re..."

A healthy work culture prioritizes focus and prioritization over raw hours worked.

"Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place... I just think... people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the importan..."

Failure to delegate prevents leadership scaling and stunts team growth.

"I also think people don't delegate enough. So, if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything, because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegat..."

PMs often annoy engineers by hoarding credit; the solution is to be inclusive and let engineers present their own work.

"Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard on, right? So making eve..."

A lack of empathy for technical details is a major friction point between PMs and engineers.

"When you act like they don't matter and you don't care about them and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when you can get this done or why is it going to take so long? My god, this just s..."

PMs acting as a 'middle-person' or playing 'telephone' between stakeholders and engineers wastes time and causes translation errors.

"If you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know or because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have... and you put yo..."

Excluding engineers from product ideation leads them to over-engineer technical solutions as a substitute creative outlet.

"When you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else and it's actually kind of bad for the product."