Michael Coté
From Pivotal
Michael Coté works at Pivotal in technical marketing. He’s been an industry analyst at 451 Research and RedMonk, worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Dell in software and cloud, and was a programmer for a decade before all that. He blogs and podcasts at Cote.io and is @cote in Twitter.
I very rarely check the messages in LinkedIn. Try emailing me or DM'ing me instead.
Blog: http://cote.io
Methodology & Culture
How to survive and thrive in a BigCo
If you work at a small, cool company, you can skip this talk. The rest of us in large, slow moving companies that rely on meetings, email, and inbox 2,000 to get the daily work done need some therapy and advice for thriving in big, "dumb" companies. I've worked in such companies and figured out how to thrive in the "back to back meetings" world we're taught to avoid. I'll tell you my tactics.
Ideally, you’d adapt the no manager GitHub dream, adapt the Spotify and Netflix cultures of awesomeness. Indeed. However, oftentimes there are good reasons to stay in the relatively dysfunctional companies you’re at. They’re big, slow moving, and seem to use Microsoft Office as their core innovation engine.
If people at your work always talk about “aircraft carriers” this is the talk for you.
Methodology & Culture
Better ways of developing software or, coding like a unicorn
The way software is developed and run in production has changed dramatically over the past ten years. These changes are just now reaching the “mainstream” who are looking to respond to the idea that “software is eating the world” and use software like all the “unicorns” we read about in the market. Getting your advice strictly from unicorn companies can feel a lot like getting dieting advice from celebrities: it sure will work if you have unlimited resources, few constraints, and, well, are already successful. What can the rest of shlubs who actually work in “the real world do” to get closer to the benefits of being “cloud native”?
This talk answers that question by looking at the current state of IT and how the role of IT has changed in recent years: if around ⅔ of businesses think IT doesn’t help them innovate, how is IT going to be effective in an era where custom written software is key to surviving and thriving in a business world where competitive advantages are now highly transient?