Charity Majors, Honeycomb.io
As an industry, we are obsessed with being (or hiring) the best, the smartest, the most wildly productive individuals. But engineering teams own production software, not individuals. And placing too much focus on individuals has a way of letting leaders off the hook for crafting—and investing in—the sociotechnical systems that unlock higher productivity, which is a big part of what forges great software engineers over time.
What if the greatest engineering orgs in the world are the ones where normal engineers can show up every day and ship code, be productive, and move the needle materially forward on business priorities, each and every day.
Open Questions
- Is this just an excuse for mediocrity, for not valuing excellence? Why or why not?
- How should we define “excellence”? Is it the same everywhere?
- How can managers distinguish between low performers and engineers with low metrics, who quietly make everyone around them better?
- Can you change a culture or improve productivity by hiring in different people? How does a culture change, how do productivity standards go up?
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.
author = {Charity Majors},
title = {On Building Systems Where Normal Engineers Can Do Great Work},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}