Leading 650 Engineers with Microsoft’s Brendan Burns

Dev Interrupted
Dev Interrupted
Published in
2 min readAug 26, 2021

Brendan Burns is famous in engineering circles as one of the co-founders of Kubernetes, but he’s more than just a talented developer — he leads a team of 650 engineers at Microsoft.

In the first episode of a two-part series, Brendan joins the Dev Interrupted podcast to talk all things engineering leadership and management. After joining Microsoft and being given a team of 30 people, he has seen his teams double each year. Adopting a leadership style that he jokingly refers to as “my form of punishment is micromanagement,” Brendan discusses how to be intentional about employee interactions in a remote world, the importance of delivering a concise message and why saying “yes” to as many opportunities as possible has led to career success.

Episode Highlights Include:

  • Learning to program on a Commodore 64
  • Saying “yes” to as many opportunities as possible
  • The “meet them where they are” philosophy of employee interaction
  • How to run distributed engineering teams
  • Being intentional about meeting employees in a remote world
  • Why missing deadlines creates opportunity

If you haven’t already heard, Dev Interrupted is partnering with Dzone to host INTERACT: An interactive, community-driven, digital conference on September 30th — by engineering leaders, for engineering leaders. 1 day, 10 speakers, 100s of engineers and engineering leaders, all free.

https://devinterrupted.com/event/interact/https://devinterrupted.com/event/interact/

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Originally published at https://devinterrupted.com.

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Dev Interrupted
Dev Interrupted

The Dev Interrupted podcast and its articles and podcasts are made exclusively for dev leaders, featuring expert guests from around the world.