Sydney Tech Leaders

A man and a woman seated in front of an audience at a meetup

And now it’s time for our patented #sydtechleaders Q&A panel! We’ve already had questions about distinguishing good vs bad productivity; how to respond when you ask someone if they’re okay and they say “no”; how to respond when the request is for YOU to do something differently…

Ultimately avoiding burnout is not about minimising stress; it’s about figuring out how to recover in a way that allows you to get stronger (like an athlete). That’s how you stay in the game long term. #sydtechleaders

It’s not always easy for people to ascertain how they feel (if they have trauma, if they are neurodivergent, etc). It’s important to keep in mind when having conversations about stress and mental health. #sydtechleaders

A man presenting at a tech event with a slide illustrating ineffective and effective ways to recover from stress

So what is effective recovery? Move (rather than exercise), create (and play), connect (with people and places and yourself), reflect, rest… and repeat. #sydtechleaders

Everybody knows how to talk about stress; what they struggle with is effective recovery. Drinking too much, doomscrolling, signing up to expensive gym memberships you won’t use… these are not great ways to recover. #sydtechleaders

A man speaking at a tech meetup in front of a slide. The slide has a graph of “managing stress” with a line that follows a sine curve slowly trending downwards.

Bodies don’t differentiate between paid and unpaid work. Stress in your personal life contributes too. You do your best to manage it, but the tank never manages to get topped up. With burnout, you’re always drawing down. #sydtechleaders

A man speaking at a lectern at a tech meetup with a slide that says: Beat burnout Find Alourishing

A man speaking at a lectern in front of a tech meetup with a slide with a parody of the “This is fine” meme. A man in a burning room sits in front of a laptop and says “This is fine,” and someone on the laptop says “You’re on mute.”

Our second speaker for the night is Navin Keswani talking about burnout - a topic really important to most of us in the room. The pandemic hit many in tech hard. #sydtechleaders

To have meaningful mental health conversations, you need to make sure you’re in the right space yourself. Then ALEC - Ask RUOK?; Listen; Encourage action; and Check-In. #sydtechleaders

This year, over half of Australians say that rising cost of living is having a big impact on their mental health. This is very real, and there’s probably someone you know who is not okay. #sydtechleaders #ruok

Our workplaces don’t always lend themselves to kindness. We have to make the effort to pause and remember to see our teammates as human beings, check in with them, and really listen. #sydtechleaders

Tonight’s talks are obviously going to be a bit more personal than usual, so social media posting will be restricted to high level topics. ❤️ #sydtechleaders

An African woman speaking in front of a lectern with a slide that says: Leading with Kindness: Creating Space for Meaningful mental health Conversations

Our first speaker is Saliya Kutungu-Moran talking about leading with kindness and creating space for mental health conversations. She’s an RUOK ambassador with lots of experience in tech, and we’re so glad she’s here. #sydtechleaders

A woman speaking at a lectern at a tech meetup

Reminder that we are still looking for Lightning talk speakers for our Nov. 6 meetup. Great for first timers, and we’ll even give you some mentoring if you like! #sydtechleaders

A woman speaking at a lectern at a meetup

A selfie of a crowd at a tech meetup

Tonight’s STL is kicking off at Atlassian! Nice big crowd for an important topic - mental health. Thanks as always to Atlassian for hosting! #sydtechleaders

A panel of four people at a tech event

Engineers like to focus on their little patch of the code base and getting it just right, but leaders need to remind them of the bigger picture. And sometimes you have to make a trade-off, and it just sucks. #sydtechleaders

A panel of speakers at a tech event

Right into the AI questions! Jeroen thinks that smaller teams might struggle to take advantage of agentic coding assistants because they will quickly run out of the expertise to review all the suggestions appropriately. #sydtechleaders

A man holding a microphone cube, with four speakers seated in a panel

It’s time for the patented #sydtechleaders panel!

A slide that says: Aim for trust "That was really worth while! We trust you can do this again"

Really the goal for teams that want to tackle tech debt is to ESTABLISH TRUST. You want leaders to let you do this again! #sydtechleaders

Two men presenting at a tech event. The slide says: Validate Impact Progress against baseline What moved? Something to speak to How much? Images over words What did we learn? Target next hypothesis

And at the end of that project, you need to validate the impact and tell the story of the improvement. Data and graphs can really make that story clear (if they are accurate!). #sydtechleaders

Two men presenting at a tech meetup

A slide that says: Measure it No baseline, no goal Rough numbers Something to speak t Visual sizing Images over words Forecast Target hypothesis

When you get the refactor project approved, don’t rush to get started too quickly. You need to establish some metrics and a baseline to show the improvement! #sydtechleaders

A slide that says: I'm telling you, we have a problem! Hiring challenges That technology is so old that we cannot scale the team VULNs and incidents That library is abandoned and not supported anymore Velocity and cycle time The process to deploy that service requires careful manual orchestration "Rule of two" There are 4 different in-memory stores adapters

The lead engineer needs to be able to SELL the tech debt problem to the manager. Some suggestions are hiring challenges, velocity and cycle time, risk of vulnerabilities and incidents… #sydtechleaders

A man role playing a developer, while another man playing a manager holds a sign that says “Who gives a crap?”

“I’m telling y manager that this code is 💩 but they won’t even listen!”

Two men presenting at a tech meetup

Final talk - Alberto and Fernando from Atlassian talking about how to actually deal with the tech debt that’s been accumulating. Apparently there will be role play!

A man presenting with a slide that says: Quality - Green field Doc Testing Input Cognitive load (Educational)

Jeroen venturing a hot take - he’s a big fan of AI and how it can help ensure code quality! #sydtechleaders

A man presenting at a tech event with a slide showing many boxes with stages of software development and opportunities for tech debt to accumulate

There are so many ways a project can go wrong and incur debt. Wrong conclusions, optimisation trade-offs, evaluation defects… and especially when bad info ends up in the sales brochure! #sydtechleaders

A man speaking at a tech event in front of a slide describing the various stages of the R&D software process

Tech debt takes on a different weight when you are shipping code on chips or physical devices. Once it’s out there, you can’t really push updates. It has to work. #sydtechleaders

A man speaking at a tech event with a slide that says: TLDR Commercial R&D: debt Startup R&D: debt^2 Al for SW: beyond force multiplier, radical change in organising software projects

Next speaker is (Dr.!) Jeroen Vendrig from Prooftec. He’s talking specifically about technical debt from R&D. #sydtechleaders

A slide that says: Metrics That Matter Cycle Time: Is this debt causing reviews, builds, or releases to slow? • Incident Frequency: Are outages tied to it? Escalations/Sales Impact: Has it cost deals or customer trust? Developer Friction: Do engineers complain it slows them regularly? Security: Is it exploitable?

There are metrics you can track related to your tech debt too. It’s okay, Inga says, to kill the zombie tickets. If no one’s championed it in 3 months, kill it. Saying “This doesn’t matter anymore” is super powerful. Code you don’t write can’t introduce bugs!

A woman presenting at a tech event

A slide that says: How to Tell the Difference (Save vs. Bury) Ask 3 questions: • Does this debt block customers or revenue? • Does it compound and get worse if left alone? • Would fixing it unlock speed elsewhere?

First speaker tonight is Inga Pflaumer talking about the graveyard of tech debt. How do you know what to save or bury? Does it block customer revenue? Does it get worse if you leave it? Will it unlock speed elsewhere?

A person at a lectern announcing a Lightning talk night on November 6

Breaking news - #sydtechleaders will be hosting lightning talks ⚡️ in November! 5 min talks perfect for first time speakers. We can even provide you some mentorship. Reach out via the new channel on our Slack. Meetup is Nov. 6.