Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios.
Meet Rory Malcolm, Product Engineer here at incident.io.
Q: What has been your favorite incident.io memory so far?
The release of On-call was a fun project to be involved in. But my favorite memory was when we were in Marseille and we reached the top of the hill that we'd been climbing up for 10 minutes (but felt like an hour). As we reached the crest, you could see the ocean all around you.
Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?
Raise the Pace. I quite like doing things fast and getting told that I've done things fast, and it's that little loop that makes me happy.
Q: What's your favorite benefit?
My favorite benefit is the last Friday of the month. The ability to just go on a side quest in the middle of the day is really, really good fun. I've ended up in places that I never would have, whether that is the Thames Barrier Park when it's opening, you just wouldn't have ended up there on some random Friday or having the chance to go home to see family.
Q: What is your favorite Slack channel?
#engineering-nits. We have some fun but it's where the real work gets done and we thrash out what's currently bad about our engineering processes. It's a really good channel to be able to talk to the team about things we can improve on.
Q: What advice would you give to yourself on your first day?
The advice I would give myself on my first day would be to relax. Everyone here is really good at what they do but wants you to do well and value what you bring to the team.
Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing?
While we're looking for strong engineers and we're looking for people who know what they're talking about with regard to engineering problems we work on, you don't work in a box. We're not really interested in someone who can just write a lot of code really quickly. We're interested in how you think about that in relation to the product, how you think about it in terms of scalability, and how your code will work with other people's codes. We're looking for you to exhibit those skills just as much as we are, your actual engineering ability.
Q: Which incident.io employee would you want to be stuck in a lift with?
Eva Camus-Smith, she's the smallest and I also feel that she's probably the most calm and collected in a stressful situation. I know that while I’d have the most room in the trapped lift, I do believe that if Eva was there it would resolve itself and I wouldn't have to do that much work.
Q: What does the last Friday of the month mean to you?
The last Friday of the month, to me, is an unexpected day off. I always forget that I have it and therefore I end up doing something that I wouldn't otherwise do. Exhibitions on Friday afternoons are pretty easy to get into; I've done a lot of stuff, particularly for someone who's not from London.
Q: What are you most looking forward to with incident.io this year and beyond?
We're working on some really exciting product stuff and at the moment what we’re working on feels really hard and every single day we're fighting against it and banging our head off it, but we’re making clear progress. If you do that for a sustained period of time, I think you just get something that's really, really good. I’m really, really excited about what that turns into.
Q: What is it like being part of the Product Engineering team?
Colleagues here quickly become friends in a way that’s really exciting. Everyone here knows their stuff front to back, but you're not scared of them. Engineering here feels super tight-knit. When new starters arrive they're quickly welcomed, it's really nice to be part of that.
Q: How would you describe the day-to-day as a Product Engineer?
Being ambiently aware of what you're working on and what other people are working on. There might be a part of the day where you sit down and go really deep on the problem that you're working on. But then there might be a contentious issue that's occurring in another team that's working on the product feature that you care about and you might have to involve yourself in those discussions.
Then something might break for a little and you might have to abandon what you're doing and jump on that. Then it might be the case that you have to join a sales call later on in the day and you have to speak to a customer about some very niche issue in a monitoring solution that they use, that you have a workaround for. It’s wearing multiple hats, but ensuring you have time to go deep on stuff when you need to. If you're working on a really important feature and you're time-constrained, you have to be prepared to stand up and push back, so you can focus on shipping what you need to.
Q: What is something that surprised you when you joined?
The relationship that Product and Engineering have. I've worked in companies before where Product Managers kind of call the shots and Engineering is an observer of product discussions but sort of supplies them. I thought it might be different in a company where we're building an engineering tool for engineers, product and engineering here are embedded together. They're basically the same team and that's really good but the degree to which that was and how different it was at other places I've worked was really good.
Q: What is something that you are excited or proud to have worked on?
On-call. It's really cool that we've built this system, I was the first engineer at incident.io to be paged by on-call. It happened on a random Thursday afternoon at the lunch table, it felt super real and it didn't take that much longer to get that into a customer's hands.
Q: If you were to join another team for the day, what team would you join and why?
I would join the Talent Team. I like interviewing candidates and seeing them do well and progress through our process. I am currently involved in the Engineering interview process but I would love to see what good looks when interviewing a Sales team member and how they answer different questions. That is just one of the reasons why I would join the Talent Team.
Q: What has been your favorite customer interaction?
My favorite customer interaction was when we built a feature really quickly for a customer and afterward, the team’s boss reached out to me on LinkedIn and said “Thanks a lot for that feature”. It wasn't a big feature and we shipped it quickly but when you're building something that for someone makes their life quite a lot easier, it’s really rewarding. There's a thorough thread that goes, “Hi, I'm the engineer that's gonna build this”, you ask a few questions and then you build it, it’s great to have that personal connection.
Q: How does Engineering collaborate with other departments?
The collaboration culture between Engineering and other departments here is quite special. I have friends in Sales here in a way that I've not previously had, which shouldn't be a high bar to reach, right? But the relationship between Engineering and Sales is necessarily sometimes a bit rocky. Here we're really good at just admitting, “This feature here is really important, and Sales and I will work together to achieve that”. I love the relationship that Engineering has with Design. Design here always tries to push you to go further, but when something is an egregiously unacceptable ask, we can go back to Design and they'll be comfortable to tune it. With the Data team, they are more than happy to sit down with you and help you work out why some features haven't had the option you expected it to.
Q: How does incident.io recognize and celebrate employee achievements and milestones?
So the milestone that I've repeatedly returned back to, is the On-call release. We'd had a few design partners and beta testers, so we invited them all over to the office. We'd all been working really hard up until that point and our product had only been in the world for a couple of days so we all had one eye on our laptop. It was a really nice moment to meet people that you'd only ever seen on the other side of a virtual call.
Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?
Well, simply because things do go wrong all the time and you're better if you own up to that fact. The idea that you're going to have an Engineering operation that doesn't sometimes make mistakes is crazy, let's plan to be prepared here. Having the right processes to follow, having it be quite defined, and making sure that people can't go off-piste; all of that is really important to keeping reliable and keeping your word internally.
