You Belong Here: Coming to :Slack:
It’s hard to tell when a relationship starts. There are milestones, points of increased commitment and interest, and it’s only in hindsight that we can claim “that was the moment.”
In February 2016, Slack wins a Crunchie. Slack sends four engineers, all Black women, to accept. I notice.
Somewhere around the same time I attend a meeting with Slack as a Netflix stakeholder. The owner of the relationship invites me basically so I can be the Bad Cop[tm]. I make sure to remove the Slack sticker from my laptop prior to attendance. Slack Sales is refreshingly candid about platform challenges, and refreshingly conservative about promising fixes. I notice.
This was my first meaningful reach out to Slack, to Nolan Caudill who at the time was Chief of Staff in Engineering. Nolan and I had a great conversation, and I came away from it having that bone-deep “damn, I like talking with this person” feeling. In it, he mentioned Slack has a Chief Architect.
“Architect?” I said, “I have a general belief that architects are an anti-pattern.”
“You should totally have that conversation with Keith!” he replied, and so I got a chat scheduled with Keith Adams, who started the conversation with “so let me tell you some of the ways I think of having architects as a bad idea.” It was a delightful conversation. And then Nolan said “you should talk to Ross Harmes! He’s fun!” and on May 10, 2016, I talked with Ross via Skype, a sort of video chat product built by Microsoft. And then I came onsite to chat with Ross and Richard Crowley, at the time Director of Service Engineering, and had a lovely chat.
And then Richard asked me “would you ever be open to working at Slack?” and, in Martin Lawrence’s words, shit got real. I wasn’t in the market, but it’s hard (and silly) to decline something so abstract, so I responded with some version of “… maybe? What do you have in mind?”
And that’s the story of how I became a candidate to lead the back-end services team at Slack.
Time passed. I wasn’t in a hurry. Slack didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry either. I had a few preliminary conversations with members of the team. I went onsite and had an Actual Interview[tm].
I got a job offer. It was good. Actually, it was great. And it was working in a company where I had already talked to about 10–12 different people and had a yearning in my soul to continue talking to these people.
Timing is everything.
In the few months that passed while I was chatting (then interviewing) with Slack my team suffered some setbacks. I had my first ever voluntary departures in my ~4 years leading the team. I terminated a leader in the team. I had a new group of people in it. It was a mess.
I sat down with my boss at Netflix, and talked about it. And he said “I’d love for you to stay, but you should do what’s in your heart and we’ll be OK. It’ll suck but we’ll be OK. Nobody’s irreplaceable.”
Subject: No(t Right Now)
Date: 8/12/2016Let’s start with the short, most immediately relevant, version of this message:
I would love to come to Slack, but won’t at this time.
[…]There’s not a single reason I don’t want to work at Slack, and many reasons why I do.
Which obviously makes this message an awkward one.
My group at Netflix — Insight Engineering — was for a long time stable (I had no voluntary departures in 3.5 years of managing the team). In the last quarter, we saw [a bunch of change] … and what I find now is a team in a precarious position, full of backfill positions in need of love, and whose management holes are deeply in need of remedying (I need to hire two managers). And the problem is two-fold:
1. The people reporting to me vary between mildly liking working for me and really REALLY liking working for me; and
2. They like working for me because of a certain management style that they won’t get if I leave right now and they’re shuffled onto my boss[…]
It’s a bad time. It’s a terrible time. It’ll always be emotionally hard for me to leave, I have no illusions about that — I make strong, tight, relationships with people and my heart aches when I leave. But I can do that. And doing that, to go to Slack, would be eminently doable. But right now? It would be a terrible impact on my team, my people. And I go back to something Stewart said in http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/business/stewart-butterfield-of-slack-experience-with-empathy-required.html — “Don’t let your colleagues down.”
I need to fix this team. I need to hire great managers these engineers will love reporting to. So when I leave, people will be sad, and we’ll go to dinner and celebrate the time I’ve had at Netflix and what I’ve accomplished, but we’ll then go on our separate ways and this org will be strong and these people will be comfortable and confident in their future here. I hope it takes very little time (realistically, though, it’s probably a 6–9 month endeavor). I hope that when it’s done, there’ll still be a place at Slack for me. Things change, and companies’ needs change, and I recognize that there won’t be something at Slack for which I’m perfectly suited when I’m done fixing this place — that’s OK. In one of our very first conversations, I said I believed Slack was in my future. I still believe that. And I believe that in fixing my org before I come, I’ll know more certainly that I’ve earned the right to call you, and Serguei, and everyone else at Slack my coworkers.
[…]
Warmly,
-roy
So I said no to Slack.
My spouse was so pissed off at me, she didn’t talk to me for two days.
Richard being Richard, and Slack being Slack, I got this response:
Thank you for sharing your complete thoughts, Roy. I am of course
majorly bummed but not at all surprised by this decision. It’s the
kind of decision we expect you’d make at Slack and the very kind of
decision we’re trying to hire you to make.I wish you the best in getting the ship back in shape at Netflix. I
would still very much like to work with you one day so our door is
always open here at Slack. The opportunity will be different when you
resurface but I promise it’ll remain in some form and I think as we
grow it’ll only become more interesting to you.Don’t be a stranger,
Richard
Time passed.
Around October/2017 Slack contacted me again. This time it was Chauncey Brooks, on behalf of Julia Grace, wanting to talk about a role in Data Engineering. And this time it felt right. I talked to a few friends about this possibility; mostly what I got was “OMG, Julia Grace? She’s amazing.” I scheduled a chat with Chauncey for the end of October. I ended up having to cancel that because my family and I dropped everything on 10/24/2017 to fly out to Cleveland and start the adoption process of our daughter.
Once we got situated, though, it turned out I had plenty of time. So I chatted with Chauncey. Then I talked to Julia, who true to reputation was … fantastic. “What concerns do you have?” she asked at the end of the call, and I said “well, I’m not at all certain I’m technically qualified for the position.” And she said “yeah, that’s a concern for me too.”
And so I flew out to San Francisco, my home town, to interview with Slack. They sent me the interview panel lineup ahead of time, and I remember calling Chauncey and telling him that I noticed that five of my eight interviews were with technical women. And that it mattered.
And then I got an offer from Slack.
At this point I had been on parental leave for almost two months. My team at Netflix was doing great. Ruslan Meshenberg, my boss at Netflix, is a genuinely decent human being who’s good for people; Vinay Shah, who worked for me as the manager of Fault Detection Engineering and was leading Insight Engineering in my absence, was doing great. There was not a shred of concern in my mind about what would happen to the team in my absence. They didn’t need me.
And I said yes. And then negotiated on compensation, and parental leave. Which was a bit of an odd thing to do. When you say “yes, I’ll take it, I’ll come work for your company, but I’d love to see if we can work out some of these details and if we can’t I’m telling you right now I’m still coming,” you’re sort of giving away some negotiating power. And yet Slack moved in some ways; in other ways it demonstrated its commitment to fairness by keeping me in the same range that someone with less power, and less ability or willingness to negotiate, would have. Slack was honorable, and humane, and in every conversation demonstrated a deep and abiding care for my family and me, and a total commitment to fairness, and inclusion.
It wasn’t a difficult choice.
I sat down with Ruslan (via video) in the first week of January and, heart in my throat, started the conversation with “So … I’ve decided to leave Netflix.” We chatted about the opportunity, and he said something like “well … I like to approach these opportunities from a regret minimization mindset, and I don’t know how you walk away from this and not regret it later.”
Julia asked me a week after I started if I was still happy I made the change. I told her my happiness at coming to Slack was not in any way diminished, just more informed. These two years of mostly informally, and twice formally, talking to Slack let me get to know the company and its people and its culture. From a “what it’s like at Slack” perspective, there’ve been no surprises. This is, in fact, a deeply caring, compassionate, and humane company. I talked to a whole lot of people on my way here, all of whom I thought to myself “damn, I like talking to this person. I’d like to do more of it.” 24 days after joining, that describes everyone I meet.
What I didn’t really have a good sense of was the breadth of the role, and its potential. When I’ve moved into a new home, I’ve typically taken some time to look around and figure out where the fences are and where my property line is. A month after coming, and partially because of the rate of growth and size of challenges, I’m still working on discovering my metaphorical property lines. It’s an exciting, and daunting, and exciting experience after having known for a few years exactly the scope of my job. I leave work each day exhausted, feeling like I spent a day doing mental athletics, and with joy in my heart. And still get home by 6, typically, to spend the evening with the kids and the spouse.
I think back to that first conversation with Julia. “I’m not entirely certain I’m technically qualified for the position,” I said.
I’m still not sure. But one thing helps.
Slack’s onboarding process for new employees is pretty thorough. It starts with two days of onboarding presentations, with more onboarding presentations in the week or two afterward.
The first presentation you get as a new employee at Slack starts with one simple slide. All it says is
And … I guess I believe it.
