Iteration Velocity is the Key to Engineering Success with Malte Ubl (#193)

hey what's up everyone welcome back to Dev interrupted I'm your host Dan Lin's co-founder and COO of Linear B and today I'm joined by molta ubel CTO of versel and former engineering director for Google Search now molta has extensive experience leading engineering teams at scale and of course today we'll dive into the changes happening with the rise of platform engineering verel approach the AI and how engineering leadership is

evolving Malto welcome to the show thanks for having me this is super cool awesome having you on the show today and to our listeners if you enjoy this episode just take a moment to rate and review di on your podcast app it helps us continue bringing you great conversations with leaders like Malta all right let's kick this off into our first segment let's talk about platform engineering and some AI workflows Malta

platform engineering has emerged as a centralized movement for supportive functions for software developers and I know it's a topic you're passionate about how do you see platform engineering changing the way modern software engineering functions that's a great question it actually reminds me so I went to college I it's kind of embarrassing how long ago that was but like over 20 years and I technically have a software engineering and a business degree and I I hated every minute of the business part but it

probably was actually more useful to me in the long run uh than the the soft engineering where where you go to school and I had this like where' you go to school oh it's it was in Germany Northern Germany um school called n Academy we literally had a class on it organization and the one thing I took away was that you have this oscillation between a centralized and a decentralized form of of doing broadly it this holds true for for almost every kind of non-core function of engineering

that I've seen across these years so like there is also this word of Shadow it and like in every every time you you find like okay we're we're way too inefficient like we have all these people here that kind of do let's say platform stuff let's turn let's put them into a team so that they can professionalize what they do right I'm highly familiar and then you're like and then they have like oh my God their road map is like two years planned out they're not going to do what I want so I'm going to secretly like hire this one person on my team and I'm going to have

them do Platform work right and so you have this oscillation and eventually you're back to like okay there's so many of them I need to centralize and so clearly like platform engineering as a as a discipline itself is is like a centralization movement like because you now saying okay we're going to professionalize this work that that's been doing for a while but just didn't have a name probably do didn't have a character and like I actually have been like I've been part of this myself in in my career create Google and I started

there um I was in a team that was part actually funly enough in the goog plus organization and we were like well funded we could do like build infrastructure and so we built Google's microservices orchestration system I built the the framework that now every single like consumer front is using on the on the client side and but we were just this like small team and then now nowadays and I mean this happened maybe like five six seven years ago Google created the core product area which is basically Google's plat team it's not like a thousand Engineers right but it

was it was made from that and kind of this turn team emerged in it and so that that's kind of my career path and and what we're trying to do it for sell in a way is that if you don't have a platform team you kind of buy your software and it does a big part of that job for you yeah and kind of are that for you or you are a platform TM and because if you're particularly focus on the front end uh space it's very commonly true that people have like a very experienced backend platform engineering team you know they