Ep 054, Expect Success

Episode #054 features Steve Picciano, VP of Engineering at FineTune. What if you interviewed for a job, didn't love it, but the interviewer says, "One of the reasons you don't want to come here is one of the reasons we want you here." Do you take the job and the challenge? Steve did. Hear that unusual tale, as well as taking the Smalltalk language to the big time, witnessing post-acquisition speeches that eviscerated engineering org charts, and Steve's secret to managing distributed teams (hint: it is not more Zoom meetings). Finetune product page https://www.finetunelearning.com/ When Teradata closed the Boston Office, they also jettisoned the Presto product. However we had a few customers paying for support and they no longer had engineers to support these customers. So they transitioned the Support money to a spin off that became known as Starburst. This was founded by some of the Hadapt founders and several of the Teradata engineers who were working on Presto. Today the distribution is named "Trino". https://trino.io/ Some great articles on changing a culture https://hbr.org/2017/06/changing-company-culture-requires-a-movement-not-a-mandate https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/10-tips-for-changing-your-companys-culture%E2%80%94and-making-it-stick.aspx Some history about Smalltalk https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1241904/Introduction-to-the-Smalltalk-Programming-Language Atari 800 Game System https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3750/a_history_of_gaming_platforms_.php?print=1 Great Sports article about adapting, modernizing and expecting success https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/nfl/daily/jan00/27/coaches27.htm