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.
Listen to the full episode
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
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Originally published at https://devinterrupted.com.
Latest comments (3)
Seems like a great guy to work for. The way he talks about intentional communication is an example for dev team leaders everywhere.
Brendan was a great podcast guest - can't wait to have him back next week to tell us the founding story of Kubernetes!
Awesome podcast guest. Listening now and I love his joke about his team being large enough to need "2 pizzas" lol.