Stripe Infrastructure Management with Uma Chingunde

Software engineering is a new field. There are theories about how we should be building our systems, but these theories might change over time. The same is true for engineering management. 

There are many successful examples of companies scaling with the management hierarchies pioneered by Microsoft and Google, but since everyone knows that those techniques work, they get continually copied. Of course, there is tremendous risk in pioneering a brand new management structure. There have been examples of successful software companies that have suffered tremendously due to a trial of an exciting new management structure.

New software is much easier and safer to try than revolutionary new management structures. New software is easier to try in a company with a strong engineering team, because that team is equipped to assess the new software and figure out if it is actually solving a problem that the company has. 

Uma Chingunde is an engineering manager at Stripe on the compute team. Uma has worked in management for a decade, and has worked in virtualization in infrastructure for even longer than that. Uma joins the show to give her perspective on management of engineers as well as management of compute infrastructure. We discussed some timeless principles of engineering management, as well as contemporary ideas around virtualization and compute.

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Transcript

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