In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.

This talk is little about why you need to say No to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough. 

In this talk, we will detail our experiences as Staff Engineers functioning as Tech Leads, Glues and Facilitators in a leaderless role. We’ll discuss the real-world problems we faced, our solutions, and the lessons learned that allowed us to grow as leaders and as an organisation.

Bobby D takes inspiration from the popular game “Among Us” to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another, and shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.

Nayana Shetty shares some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.

Michael Tweed will cover a case study of the problem “how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards”, looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.

Sabrina Leandro shares how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.