7 Lessons I learned at Sysdig

Over last one and half years, I've had one of most fruitful time at Sysdig. It has been one of the company, I've had my eyes on since start of my career, and I am fortunate enough to get to work for it. But change is the only truth, and such is the change, that I have decided to bid adieu to Sysdig.

I wanted to summarize my lessons learned at Sysdig, as an engineer and a person.

1. Be transparent with your business

Our CEO Suresh Vasudevan is one of the most transparent CEO, I have worked under.

He has not only showed us "Why it matters?" but also "How of why it matters". Lessons here has prompted me to think in more detail what our company wants to achieve, how it is going to achieve. This has allowed my team to give enough freedom and autonomy to contribute to the "How" part of problem.

And it is not just him, entire leadership embodies this principle, and this has allowed me to be always in sync with what business wants.

2. Cultural diversity brings different value systems to the team

This is one of the most multi-cultural, multi-lingual team I've worked with, spanned over all continents, and time zones.

Each of us had a unique value system, based on how we think culturally and how we were raised.

I have personally come to appreciate this juxtaposition of multiple value systems and result is something that I have not seen anywhere in my previous work experience. By understanding each of us, communication/collaboration in this remote world has been smooth. This is a lesson, I could not have learned anywhere except at Sysdig, and I am forever grateful that.

3. Tussle between craft and hustle is real

Sysdig is one of the best place where you will see many craftsperson, each doing their work in the best way possible. I have learned a lot on how to do mature automation and product work.

Being a hustler myself, I was mesmerized by looking how processes are developed both at human and code level. However, I've also learned that it is important to balance both hustle work and craft work in the world of startups. I am still learning in this area, cause it opens up whole field of Prioritization and Planning, but so far I think I am doing good due to experiences I've had at Sysdig.

4. Customer obsession lies in details

Customer obsession is all about surface area your product exposes to customers.

And in true sense, customer obsession is all about details and how you do each detail well. These could be following

1. How responsive your product support is? Does it iterate and learn from its historical context ?
2. How you can engage your customers on their feature requests and demands from product.
3. How do you make sure whether customers are doing the best work of their lives by delegating an important responsibility to us.
4. 100% reliability is a myth. It is also about how honest are you with your failures

Once you've recognized each of these surfaces, all you have to do is build better iterative loops so that it gets improved on day to day basis.

5. Enable an environment so that your colleagues can do best work of their life

I recently read a quote

Between a journey and destination, which one you would choose. And the best answer I got was the company.

Every good thing starts with people. If you have good people around you, and you are bound by singular purpose, I guess you can achieve anything.

At Sysdig, I got to meet the most humble people. They were my mentors when I needed help. I also got to do the same with my younger team mates. We should always pay forward the help we receive in one way or another.

1 + 1 >>> 2

People will come and go, but we should always leave more than sum of what we each individual is capable of.

As a result, I personally learned a lot on how to enable my fellow developers in this journey, and I will continue to do it so, until my last day, cause everything is about people.

6. Family is important

We are people who really give each other time for them to be with their family, so that when we come together, we know that our loved ones are taken care of, and only purpose and goal to do something interesting bind us.

Personally speaking, as a young dad, it has given me time to build my value system as a dad and as a professional who will do anything to "GET SHIT DONE" for my company.

7. Be flexible in conflicts

When you work in a green-field organization, you have an opportunity to create solutions where you are in complete sync and harmony. You get job done, and you define a way to maintain it.

But when you work in a brown-field organizations, with its own technical debts, and idiosyncrasies of the teams, and existing value systems, you need to know how to navigate and frame your solutions so that it confronts conflicts in healthy way

Instead of goal hitting, goal navigation skills are more important to get things done.

You need to

1. Engage early on with stakeholders
2. Iterative about your goals
3. Build partnership driven mindset, apart from ownership driven mindset.

It has been my fortune to work in brownfield organization like Sysdig, where there are lot of hard problems, and needed a lot more nuance to solve it. Again, it has been a brand new area of development for me, and I am happy that Sysdig is where I got to do it.