Keynote: Building and Motivating Engineering Teams - Camille Fournier, Senior Thinker and Raconteur

Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen some big changes in the marketplace for engineers. There are far more startups competing for talent, and established companies beyond the tech world have realized the value of having strong engineering teams. We’ve also seen an increase in the supply of engineers who are looking for jobs. Between students realizing the value of a tech degree, people changing careers, and bootcamps rapidly churning out graduates, the mix of types of people who write software has changed. Most of the people I knew writing software in 2007 had tech or tech-adjacent (math, physics) degrees. These days many teams have a mix of those with tech degrees, those who have switched careers into technology, and even some without degrees at all/

All of this is to say, playing to 2007 nerd stereotypes is not always a good way to build an engineering team in 2017. What DO engineers want? I believe that you have 3 important axes to play with: money, purpose, and respect. Depending on your company, you can lean more on one to cover problems with the others, but you have to find your balance.

About Camille Fournier
Camille is the former CTO of Rent the Runway, where she led the engineering team until late 2015. She is currently pursuing startup ideas, running seminars on engineering leadership, speaking, and writing. Her upcoming book, "The Manager's Path," will be published by O'Reilly in early 2017. She serves on the technical oversight committee for the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, on the board for the ACM Queue publication, and as a PMC member and committer for Apache ZooKeeper.

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