Scaling Developer Teams: Rich Archbold Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom

Software companies often grow quickly, which means developer teams often suffer to manage scaling at the pace of growth and necessary workload. We sat down with Rich Archbold to pick his brain on how they scaled developer teams at Amazon, Facebook and Intercom. In this episode we’ll be covering: -Biggest challenges when scaling a developer team -How he overcame these challenges -First steps to scaling teams -How to get hiring right Excerpt from the interview: Common mistakes when scaling engineering teams... "I would say the biggest one is not putting enough emphasis on hiring for behavior and attitude. It’s the most expensive one too. Understand the team you're hiring for, and what's the balance you need to have in there. The mistake we made in the past is hiring too many juniors. Unless you've got two seniors to match every eight juniors, you don't have a viable team. I call it guns and bullets. There's no point having a lot of bullets, if you don't have any guns to fire them, or the other way around. Hiring 10 junior engineers can reduce the capacity in your organization, because your best people who were executing at a high rate, now have to mentor juniors. It takes a lot of their time for about six to nine months, and the overall capacity takes a hit. Make sure you understand the balance of strengths in your organization, and you're not just thinking about adding people, but strengthening the team." Read the full post here: (https://codingsans.com/blog/scaling-developer-teams)

Om Podcasten

Level-up Engineering reveals actionable management secrets from some of the most successful engineering leaders (VP of Engineering, Director of Engineering, CTO). This podcast brings you key insights from fellow engineering managers, to level-up your management skills and to take your software development team to the next level. The podcast covers the biggest challenges engineering leaders face, showing exactly how others overcame these challenges. Learn the best practices on management and leadership to understand people and organizations as much as you understand code. We interview engineering leaders and dive into the fundamentals behind hiring and retaining developers, motivating developers, scaling dev teams, mentoring developers, and much more! The episodes are brought to you by Apex Lab, a digital product development agency offering end-to-end, stress-free product delivery. Check them out on https://www.apexlab.io/ If you have any feedback or would like to be featured on Level-up Engineering please, drop us a line at podcast@apexlab.io