Skip to the good bit: The journey from self-taught developer to engineering manager

“A little bit of grit, a little bit of impatience in an engineer to want to get something done quickly.”

Alicia Collymore, a senior engineering manager at incident.io joins the show to chat about entering the industry without a formal computer science degree, transitioning from tech lead to management, setting goals for people who don't want them, and her priority zero of a big Microsoft Teams integration.

Below is a transcript of this conversation, which has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can subscribe to PriorityZero on Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, and YouTube.

How did you get into engineering in the first place?

Probably a bit of a classic story of wanting to understand how things work. I was around when the internet first started to get some hype around it. I remember seeing my first web page, wondering where it was coming from, and how it got to my screen. I went on a journey of self-learning to figure out how to develop websites. I started off in web development, building PHP, WordPress-based websites, before I moved into more complicated app work and development.

How did you start with tech?

There was a module in my IT GCSE course: some HTML and CSS. Then I started playing with jQuery, which is very old school, and tinkering with lightweight animations there. I just started exploring more from there online with tutorials. There weren't a lot of YouTube tutorials, it was all article-based, so just scanning through them and building different things.?

Do you think you would have learned a lot quicker if there were all the YouTube tutorials?

I don't know. It's really hard to say because that is the way that I learned, I really struggled watching video content to learn, I have to read it now.

At what point did you think about software engineering as a career?

It was when the topic of university started coming up, and that really wasn't anything that I wanted to do. At this point, I could code as well. So, I know how to code. I know what the salaries look like. So I thought, let me just try to get a job.?

Skip to the good bit??

Skip to the good bit. Yeah. It was really hard though, because I didn't have a degree or any work experience. I was just like, "Hey, I can code, trust me." I managed to convince someone somehow to hire me.

Who gave you a shot??

It was Sebastian Lewis, the CEO of a company called Sole Trader Websites. We would literally build websites for plumbers, electricians, and all of that kind of thing. I was one of the first engineers to join that company. I've always been in the start-up world, smashing out WordPress websites. Eventually, we built a website builder that would build WordPress websites. Then, I started to get into Angular and sort of more complicated software development, which was really cool.?

Were you dealing with the clients as well?

Yeah, I would be on the phone to them, it was really cool. It was fun. They had no idea what they wanted. They just knew they needed a website.

Did you immediately know that start-ups were the kind of environment you wanted to work in?

It wasn't you know. After I was there for a while and taught myself how to code, I knew there was a bunch of stuff I didn't know. We weren't doing test-driven development, but I had read a bunch of stuff about it and was starting to wonder if we should be doing it. We weren't doing any Agile development, so I was wondering if we should be doing that, but I didn't know what the industry standard was. We were just making stuff up as we went along. So I decided to join a bigger company to figure out what I should be doing and the direction I should be taking as an engineer.?

So, I joined UVTV; I learned a lot there, probably more than in any role as an engineer. My manager at the time sat me next to him for like three months and said I just want you to learn some of this complicated stuff, which was really cool and a great opportunity for me.

It seems you already had the instincts of a manager—you weren’t just busy doing, but also questioning if there was a better way. Did you realize that about yourself back then?

I guess I was; I've never actually thought about it. I was always interested in making sure things made sense. I kind of have a mind where I want to understand things, and if I work in a sort of rogue, chaotic fashion, I just get distracted and start doing random things. I like to have a bit of a process and stability in what I'm doing. I guess I look for those things.

What took you back to start-ups after that?

I guess it was being away from decisions that were being made. I didn't like it. I liked having the conversation. I liked the CEO sitting across from me and going to lunch with them. There was just a degree of separation in larger companies. UV wasn't that big. But it was big to me, where there was a cloud team, or I couldn't build my own service. I just want to build this service myself so I can ship my code but I have to wait for this thing, and I'm incredibly impatient. I just didn't really like it when decisions were being made, and I was the last person to hear about it.

At what point in your career did you decide that you wanted to go down the management track?

I naturally lean into that kind of stuff, as you were saying, and that sort of way of thinking with processes and ways of working. I became tech lead at a company called LaterPay. A lot of what I was doing, unbeknownst to me, was engineering management; I just wasn't managing anybody. I was doing a lot of process. I was still doing a lot of the technical stuff, like CircleCI pipelines and things like that, and the sort of bare bones of our applications and how they should be set up, and all of those types of things.?

But I was leaning probably more into the process and team side of things. My manager at the time just suggested it to me. I was scared of having that responsibility over somebody's career. I know you're not entirely responsible because it is on them as a person, but you are there to guide them. I was fortunate to have a really great team there, with whom I'm still friends today. That made things a little bit easier for me.

Did you enjoy being a tech lead?

I think it's a useful stepping stone. You are brought into conversations, you are steered into a way of thinking that is interesting and exciting. I know some people want to go back to being an IC and ship things without having to do all this other stuff. But that brought me more energy.

And do you miss the hands-on work?

Sometimes. When I see my engineers doing really cool things. I was a front-end engineer, and a few weeks ago, my team was working on a UI component refresh. I would have loved to do that. But the feeling doesn't come up a huge amount.

When did you join incident.io and what attracted you to the company?

I joined about a year and a half ago as an engineering manager, the first engineering manager, which was quite cool. There was a team of 10 engineers, and we've doubled that since the time that I've been there. My main role is looking after multiple teams in the company. It's been really cool as engineers have joined to think about product direction in teams and spit them out.?

My main role is people management, driving people's careers forward, making sure that they have feedback, goals, and all of that type of thing. I also make sure that our processes enable us as a team to deliver quickly. That includes our project processes, rituals like retros and stand-ups, making sure they're snappy, quick to the point, and getting the value out of it, rather than sort of dragging things on.

How different do you find it is being thrust into a management role, to being hired into one?

It's so strange because people have an expectation of you. It's incredibly nerve-wracking, but I've been blessed with good teams and people who are excited and want me to be there. I think that always makes it a little bit easier than having to hunt around and deal with resistance.

Have you done much hiring?

So much. Yeah.

What do you look for in a good hire?

It's different per company. You might need a different thing depending on the direction that you're taking your business. At incident.io, what we look for is a little bit of grit, a little bit of impatience in an engineer to want to get something done quickly and not mess around with all the faff that might come with a complex problem. Just to drill down to the value as quickly as you can.?

Also a product mind. I think you could have a lot of engineers that never really think about the products, and you have product managers to do that, but we really care about our engineers thinking through product problems and understanding them and coming up with ideas and suggestions and writing product specs. That's also something that we interviewed before.

Is there anything else unique about the culture there?

I think it's kind of what you mentioned earlier. It's the closeness of the team. I'm going to my tech lead's birthday party in a few months. I had one of my engineers and my office manager help me redecorate my home two weeks ago. We are so tight-knit across the business, whether it's CS – going to a festival with Lucy, one of our CSMs – or going on holiday with Danny, our head of talent, it's just like, so integral to my life now. I think that is just amazing. And my favorite.

Did you have any bad incident experiences before you joined the company?

Yeah. Especially when I was a tech lead at Later Pay, there were a few times where I definitely got woken up in the night, which wasn't great. We want to make it as easy as possible for somebody to do the right thing in a world where you're getting woken up at 3am.

Your talk today is about setting goals for people who don't want goals. Why did you pick that topic and why is it important to you?

I think it's something that every manager faces.

Do you get reports to set their own goals, or do you set them for them?

I think it's something you should be doing together. The process effectively removes all barriers from your reports' minds in that anything is possible; there is no pressure and nothing is permanent. Let's just brainstorm some ideas together. You are taking away any pressure from goals and just thinking about it together. I find you always come up with goals that they are excited about at the end of it. There's definitely a balance.?

There are also things like feedback. Or things that you want them to work on, and then there are things that they want to do, and there are things that the business needs. You've got to try and put that all in one place. So it's not an easy thing to do, and like I said, a lot of engineers don't really care for it, but I think it's an important thing to do, and it helps people. Hopefully, my process will get people a little bit more excited about them.

What have you figured out about goals through all this?

That even though people say they don't want them or have ideas in mind, they always do. They just need a little help.?

What's your priority zero right now?

For me, it's making sure my team successfully deliver our Microsoft Teams integration. We are a Slack-based tool at the moment, and we want to start moving into other applications to enable companies to manage the incidents. MS Teams is the next obvious space to move into. The big challenge here is trying to understand how much we want to be in line with our Slack offering. I think another challenge as well for the team is understanding how people use Teams. We use Slack day in, day out, so we have a really good understanding of what would be useful. But we don't really know how people use MS Teams, so it's been quite challenging to figure that out.

How do you start to collect that kind of insight when you're not using that tool yourselves?

Talking to people. We have a really good relationship with all our customers and people who we'd like to be customers, so we jump on calls, and ask questions. Then there's us downloadingTeams and using it ourselves as well and trying to get a bit more of an understanding of how it works functionally. We do have a bit more of a lightweight version in MS Teams, but it's powerful enough to get people to do what they need to do.

How do you make sure you don't get paralyzed by the analysis part?

I think we're lucky in that we have a culture of just getting started. It's a huge project. We've got lots of features that we want to build. So we break it down feature by feature. We have announcements, we have messaging, notifications, and incident creation. It actually becomes a lot more manageable and easy to handle.

How do you keep things on track?

Keep things small and sweet. Scope up front as much as you can. Slow down to go faster rather than bumping into problems halfway through your project, we should have a good idea of what the unknowns are. Do the hard bits first. With a short, one-week project, it is really easy to know when you're off track because you get to Wednesday, but with a three-week project, it's a bit harder to know.

How do you start to build the team?

We do this in planning, and it starts with who do we think is the right person to lead this technically, who has the technical depth and skills to do this? Then there's opportunity as well, who should be learning this or that, or could drive this forward? Then there's time pressure. A mixture of those three things means that we can pick the right team.

Are you always looking for those opportunities for people?

Yeah, always, I think it's one of the main parts of my job, to push and drive my engineers to be doing the things that are going to help them succeed. That means finding opportunities for them. They should be doing it themselves, too, but I'm in a lot of rooms and conversations ahead of time that I could help.

Does that give you a lot of satisfaction?

I love it when I get them into something and then they get a lot of gratitude and praise for it, that's the best feeling.?

When do you know this is no longer priority zero?

Once we've shipped it and someone's using it, it's kind of there. I think my biggest indication is there being another priority zero.

Do you pick that next priority zero, or does it often land in your lap?

It depends. It can come either way. It can come from management, product – like MS Teams – or it could come from me.

Do you have a prioritization process?

It happens a little bit more organically. I've got an ADHD brain, and my process has to change every few months. Otherwise, I just don't get stuff done. So it's organic. It changes often. It might feel chaotic to some people, but it makes sense in my mind.

Alicia’s recommendation: Medusa.