Camille Fournier
VP of Engineering, CoreWeave · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
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1 assertion · 1 opinion · 15 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Camille Fournier said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: Management becomes necessary once startup teams outgrow direct constant alignment
“At some point you get enough people that you need to really coordinate work Amongst people who are not just like joined at the hip talking to each other all the time, completely on the same wavelength. And that's when structure and hierarchy and some kind of m…”
Fournier: Regular one-on-ones prevent minor workplace issues from causing resignations
“The reason that you have one-on-ones, the reason that you try very hard to honor whatever frequency is the right frequency for your team, Even if you don't have anything planned to talk about is that like, you need to make it comfortable for them to feel like …”
Fournier: Engineering teams devolve into parallel play without deliberate team-building
“I think that a lot of engineering sometimes feels like parallel play, where it's, like, People, they aren't really working together exactly. They're kind of each working on their own project separately, and maybe they give each other code reviews, but making y…”
Fournier: Engineering managers cannot code their way out of delivery problems
“New managers tend to default to writing code to solve their problems. So new managers who used to be ICs, they look at a team, and they look at a team that's struggling, and the thing that they want to do is be like, I can just take some of these tickets, I ca…”
Fournier: Managers must proactively resolve interpersonal conflicts instead of separating teammates
“A big mistake that I see rookie managers make is like just not dealing with interpersonal issues on their team proactively. If two people are not getting along, And you just let that sit and fester. It's just gonna cause you problems. There's, you can't just b…”
Fournier: Quality tech companies offer senior career tracks without people management
“Most companies that I see that I would consider to be quality companies. They have separate tracks that do not require like you managing A lot of people or any people at all to become a very senior person, a very well, you have a career.”
Fournier: Managing leaders who never ask for help is much harder
“Speaking for myself as a manager of managers, it's much harder to manage someone who never asks you for help and doesn't,
Doesn't know, doesn't think that they're, they should, you know, lean on you occasionally than someone who knows when to come to you and a…”
Fournier: Large companies should reassign misplaced talent rather than fire them
“I also think that like, if your company is big enough you should be trying, if you hire someone and you think they're great, but they don't work out on the job you put them in, as long as you think they're a general cultural fit for the company, you should try…”
Fournier: Asking insightful technical questions builds immediate credibility with engineers
“Being able to ask good questions is what makes you legit to engineers, right? If they feel like you actually understand what they're telling you that they're working on and can ask them like an insightful question about that system, like you get a lot of cred …”
Fournier closes all-hands meetings with peer-to-peer appreciation shoutouts
“Every time we do an all hands, we do at the very end, we say like, you know, who's done something awesome. And I ask people to just stand up and thank their coworkers for doing great things. And that's something that we started at rent the runway and I've carr…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Camille Fournier on Managing Technical Teams · Y Combinator | Jul 17, 2019 | 39m |