So You're Running Engineering at a Startup Now

When I was in undergrad, Google was the hottest company in tech, and I wanted in. I interned there in 2011, in a class of thousands. I declined the return offer, disillusioned by the sheer size of it. So I joined Twitter instead, back when it was a fraction of Google's size — and then I watched it bloat until there was a team for almost everything. Git trouble? A team. Want to hire, or ship to production without taking the site down? Teams for those too.The thing about that much structure is you stop seeing it. You spend years inside it and never think about how it works, because making it work is someone else's job. You only notice once some of it is gone. At Mixpanel the team that handled git didn't exist and safe deploys had to be built, so I helped build that structure inside engineering. But the systems that support engineering from the outside were mostly already standing by the time I had any say. Hiring, onboarding, career frameworks, comp cycles: every one is something…