CTO interview: Charity Majors, the amazing ops engineer who founded Honeycomb
Charity is one of the nicest and fastest talker I had the chance to interview. Her approach to managing people is made of kindness, and her attitude leads to trust. She built an incredible experience as an ops engineer at Facebook before starting Honeycomb. You’ll be impressed!
Can you tell me more about Honeycomb? What is it?
Honeycomb was the world’s first, and some would say only, actual observer ability tooling meant for the next generation of systems where instead of just having the web tier and the database you have everything in high cardinality dimensions.
The industry is changing, and developers own their code in production instead of guarding the production environment. We invite devs in instead of keeping them out. It means that we need to give them the tooling so that they can understand what’s going on, because for the longest time we’ve been using low level systems and ops (operations) tools to help us understand our application code.
You need a tool that speaks to devs in their native API endpoints and variables instead of low-level system stuff. We need to understand all dimensions of the systems to answer almost any question these days.
Therefore we can figure out if an issue is only for a particular OS, specific build ID, or version of the client. You can’t predict in advance the unknown unknowns. The last generation of tools was all about known unknowns, but it’s really about the unknown unknowns.
How did your career prepare you to have the idea of Honeycomb and build it?
I’ve been an ops engineer my entire career. I was never one of those kids who was like “oh, I’m going to start a company”.
I hate the whole founder-industrial-complex. Why would starting a company make you so much better? I find it really nauseating, and I’ve never been an ideas person. I’ve always been an implementer.
Year after year, I faced these ops problems, and then got a glimpse of the future at Facebook when using some of their internal tooling. The platform that I was building at the time enabled us to identify and resolve problems very efficiently. We went from days, to hours, to not even minutes. We were able to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to answer each time.
Instead of flipping through our dashboards and trying to figure out which problem it was. It was revolutionary. It changed my life.
So Facebook was a defining factor?
Yes. You know I was working on systems that were really ahead of their time. We were doing microservices before they were a thing. We had major platform problems. If you’re a developer you can write a whole mobile app without ever understanding that you’re writing a database query. So our devs would send the most horrendous things down the pipe.
We had to fast forward, like a decade or so in terms of the problems we’re trying to solve. Being at Facebook meant that we got to peek ahead at some of the problems about scaling, and take these lessons with us.
What are the biggest challenges of building a company?
It’s different for everyone. I don’t recommend it. Starting a company is the worst thing in the world. I’m only doing it once, I’m never doing it again.
It’s grueling; it will ruin your life, your relationships, your health.
Be sure that it’s what you want to do, and then do whatever you need to survive.
Exercise helps, trying to keep some sort of a regular schedule. The overwhelming majority of startups fail. So don’t start it. Don’t start a company if you’re in it for the money. Because that’s not good enough. It’s not enough of a reason to tie you over when everything is terrible. You should always start a company if you know there’s something that is eating at you, you know it needs to exist, and it’s worth the pain and suffering to do it.
How do you design the interview process to get the best engineers on board?
We have strong feelings about how the industry tends to interview people and the fact that it’s totally messed up. So right from the beginning Emily, my VP of Engineering, and I talked about this a lot. We didn’t want to make the same mistakes as the rest of the industry.
Interviews tend to feel like there’s overwhelming power disparities: you’re being vetted, you’re being quizzed, you’re being inspected to see if you’re good enough to join our team. That’s ridiculous because the job market for an engineer, right now, means that they can walk out the door and get a new job right away. This should be an equal meeting where you’re also evaluating us.
If we’re interviewing you, we already think you’re amazing. We know what we have to get done this year, it’s do or die if we don’t do it. So every person that we hire, we have a clear sense of how they’re getting us closer to survival. Some of the best people I’ve ever worked with just aren’t the right fit; not for that particular need that we have.
Never spring surprises on people. Tell them everything up front: what the day is going to be like, who they’re going to talk to. Tell them what the questions are. You can’t have a whole conversation about a high-level technical topic. If you’re asking questions that people can memorize, they will answer to your stupid questions. They’re not going to tell you anything except how good someone is at memorizing.
During the interview process, companies often act like you should be lucky enough to join us. But people have options, so be honest.
From your perspective, why do you think there are less women than men in tech? Is there anything we can do to change that?
It’s not an easy question to answer. I’m not an expert in diversity stuff at all. I feel awkward and uncomfortable about being asked to speak on behalf of all women because I don’t know.
What recommendations would you give to people building their career?
Christine, my co-founder, and I said to each other like over and over in the early days when it seemed like we were going to fail, that if we to do nothing else but create a company where the people who came to work with us felt like they were valued for who they were, if they improve their craft and they look back fondly on it for the rest of their life, if we can set the bar for them so that for the rest of their career they won’t accept bad jobs because they know it can be better right, then we will have done something worth doing.
Too many people are so unhappy at work and they just stay because of self-doubt, because interviewing sucks. Interviewing sucks, but it’s a short amount of time versus a lot of time that you spend at work and you only have one one career. It’s the biggest asset you own.
If you curate your career correctly, you will earn millions over the course of your career and you owe it to yourself and your family too to do it well.
If you want to connect with Charity, click here.
To learn more about Honeycomb, visit their website: honeycomb.io
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
FROM THE AUTHOR
>> How Omni-channel Communication Will Improve Your Collections
