Camille Fournier
VP of Engineering, CoreWeave. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorexecutiveengineer@skamille ↗LinkedIn ↗camilletalk.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Camille Fournier is the author of The Manager's Path and co-author of Platform Engineering. She previously served as Chief Technology Officer at Rent the Runway and held senior leadership roles at Two Sigma and JPMorgan Chase.
2shows
2appearances
39statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Camille Fournier said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fournier: GraphQL rarely works well in practice outside of Facebook
“The impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it'l…”
Fournier: Product managers are far easier to manage than engineers
“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”
Fournier: Ground-up software rewrites rarely succeed
“Trying to say, we're going to just go away, we're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new, and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works.”
Fournier: Big-company frameworks often fail when adopted outside their original context
“Some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Where the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company …”
Fournier: Companies must allocate dedicated product managers to internal platform teams
“I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset. And frankly, you need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product mana…”
Fournier: Excluding engineers from product ideation triggers massive over-engineering
“What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things because engineers Are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? Like I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creat…”
Fournier: Many engineers underestimate what the product manager job actually requires
“Like I just, my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job. That they would need to be successful.”
Fournier: Engineers need roughly 10 years coding before entering management
“So I do think it's probably a like somewhere in the 10 year range of like really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and, you know, really understanding how to be a technical expert.”
Fournier: Shifting engineers to project management is the worst leadership path
“Often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager, which is actually also the worst, you know, worst sort of path to real leadership, in my opinion.”
Fournier: Managing stakeholders via one-on-ones isolates unhappy stakeholders
“Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're happy or unhappy with things,
Your unhappy stakeholders kind of aren't hearing that.”
Fournier: Overworking allows people to sidestep the difficult work of prioritization
“Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.”
Fournier: Platform engineering teams must include dedicated software engineers, not just SREs
“First of all, I really am a very strong believer that like platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team, and you only have like, you know, more like operation systems engineers, DevOps…”
Fournier: The best platform tools originate in individual application teams
“A lot of the best platform type offerings and companies start in individual like application teams, like an application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves. And it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem.…”
Fournier: Good management is essential, not waste or overhead
“The thing that I'm observing is that actually like management is pretty important, that good management is actually a pretty important part of making engineering teams effective, making companies effective. It just simply isn't true that management is overhead…”
Fournier: Engineering management is a distinct technical discipline
“Help them understand that it's kind of a hard and a special discipline, but it's also a technical discipline and not just something that, you know, any random people manager can do.”
Fournier: Early startup success creates a false belief that management is unnecessary
“When you have a lot of people who have seen success at these very small stages and they're, they believe incorrectly that the thing that made them successful was just like, well, we just got these smart people together and let them do what they thought was rig…”
Fournier: Directly fire chronically negative employees instead of putting them on PIPs
“There are sometimes when you shouldn't pip someone. You should just say, you know what, this is just not working out, and we just need to part ways. And I think that people who clearly are just unhappy, that they clearly don't want to be there they're super ne…”
Fournier: Firing negative employees boosts team productivity far more than expected
“The impact, the positive impact on the team when you get rid of that negative energy is always shocking to me. Because it's always more than you think it's gonna be. Like, the team is always so much happier and healthier and therefore more productive once they…”
Fournier: Side projects cannot substitute for production experience when evaluating technologies
“Knowing a little bit of like Go or like having like spun up Kubernetes on my, you know, on a test, test cluster at home is not nearly enough to have an informed good opinion about A new language or like a new system. Like you have to run those systems in produ…”
Fournier: Tech hiring competition makes trial employment periods unrealistic
“I think trial periods are a very nice idea. I think in the current competitiveness for staffing, you would be very lucky to get away with trying to do that.”
Fournier: Managers who only play 'management telephone' add very little value
“If you, if all you're doing is playing management telephone, your manager is adding very little value to the team. And so that's why, like, I think management is not just about people management because people management is just not all of the job.”
Fournier: PMs acting like technical details do not matter alienates engineers
“Engineering done successfully really is all about the details.
And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details, but when you act like they don't matter, and you don't care about them, and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when y…”
Fournier: PMs acting as middlemen for technical questions wastes time
“So if you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know, right? Because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have that you just don't have. And you're, you put yourself in this in-bet…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Camille's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | VP of Engineering, CoreWeave | 1 | 21 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | VP of Engineering, CoreWeave | 1 | 18 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |