Decoding Duolingo: Returning to the Office, Enabling First-Time Managers & More | Fabio Lessa

0:00It's not black and white, right? You can't really replace the acceleration that you get of everyone in the room, like even like whiteboarding together, doing ideas, laughing, joking, good ideas, bad ideas. Now, you don't need to do that every day of the week, but there are certain situations that, you know, you can really accelerate. Want to reduce your team's code review time by up to 40 % without touching your budget? GitString is the new free dev tool from Linear B that eliminates a key bottleneck in your team's workflow, pull requests and code reviews. After reviewing the work of over 2 ,000 dev teams, LinearBee's engineers and data scientists found that pickup times for code reviews were lasting four to five days longer than they should be.

0:45The good news is that they found these delays could be eliminated in four key steps. First, by adding context to every pull request, such as estimated time to review. Second, automatically assigning the right reviewer and number of reviewers to pull requests. Third, having co-review automation that auto-requests changes. And finally, by automating PR approvals and merges. To learn more about how GitStream works and to try it out free for your team, please visit gitstream.cm or search for GitStream in the GitHub Marketplace. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Dan Lines, co-founder and COO at Linear B.

1:24And today we're joined by Fabio Lessa, Senior Director of Engineering at Duolingo. Fabio, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome to have you on with us today. I think a lot of people know, but if you don't know, Duolingo is a great company. In fact, some of our producers actually use the app, producers of Dev Interrupted, so they were excited to have the conversation today. And we're going to get into a lot of the things that you're doing at Duolingo. You have some interesting training programs for managers. So we're going to touch on that. I think our audience will be really interested in that.

2:06But also, we're going to talk about some insights of how to create a great company culture that's not just a culture, but kind of transform into a business value. But before we talk about those things, you're passionate about RTO, which for those of you who don't know what that means, I didn't know the acronym. So it's return to office, which is a really hot topic right now, actually completely different than when we first started this podcast. It was during the pandemic. I think I was working out of a closet in my tiny apartment. And back then, everyone wanted to talk about remote work and how to make a transition to like working at home.

2:49But as all things in life that we've learned, it's about balance. So maybe the pendulum's coming back a little bit here with the RTO. So if we fast forward to today, I think it's great. Let's just start there. You say, you know, Duolingo has a strong belief in this in-person office culture. Why is that? Yeah, I think like it's something that we've always believed in. I think our founders always put an explicit effort into making sure that we had a nice office and we hung out together. So I invested a lot on that. I think if you look at it, we don't do anything different in the office. If you go to a Duolingo office, the things we have there are things you'll find in a lot of tech companies today.

3:29We have good lunch. The setup is really nice. But I think there is something tangible about that investment and how people feel about work. like as a personal experience I can share. Like when I joined, I was actually still at Spotify and I was looking for like my next opportunity. I was interviewing with a few companies and that's when Duolingo reached out to me. And so I was like, you know, I'm already interviewing, preparing for interviews, might as well add one more from the left, but wasn't really thinking much of it. So it was right before the pandemic and I actually traveled to Pittsburgh where our headquarters are to do my interviews.

4:03And it was that day of interviews that I spent in the office I met everyone that I really got sold on the job. I don't know. I just felt tangible, like how that people were genuinely were happy working here and enjoyed it. So it definitely bumped it to the top of the list. So how did the pandemic actually, because, you know, like pandemic, we went all remote. Did that change your opinion during that timeframe about remote culture? Or then did you like get like sick of it a bit? And now, like, how do you compare like the pros and cons of each world? Right. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I think one thing about the pandemic that is funny and complicates a little bit the conversations that we have today about it is that I don't think personally it was a good experiment of remote work.

4:53Right. Like, because although, like you said, we were all forced to be at home and work only through like without interacting with anyone. It was a really weird time. Everybody was stressed out. there were so many things happening in the world that made that a really stressful time, right? Like, I think one thing that today that things are mostly back to normal, if you're working remote, you know, you can, you get the benefits of being able to, you know, spend more time with people outside who go outside and do go work from a cafe more often. And those offices were not available. People are all just literally locked inside their houses for the whole day.

5:25So I think there's like that data is a bit polluted, so to speak. But one thing that we did learn is that people really enjoy their real benefits to also spending more time at home. I think, especially on some of the ways that we work today, remote, working alone in your office, in a good office setup has real benefits and people with like different life situations, like, you know, young kids and things like that, or long commutes like I do have that, that makes a real difference. So we feel that like it changed our perception more in that, like, now we incorporated some of that. What is the best of those two setups?

6:00And I think now we settled a lot of other companies into a three to two. So we do Tuesdays, Thursdays in the office and money of credit. It's optional to come in. Yeah, so that's interesting. So now it sounds like you've settled into a hybrid situation. That's right. And how strict is it for the engineering team? And is it like I have to be in these days or how do you balance the hybrid nature? We definitely encourage everybody to be in. We've been having more and more events and things centered around everybody being there in those three days. But again, because there is more flexibility with this, if someone has something at home, I have this package delivery, I need to stay home.

6:45That's an easier thing to do to just stay home. And that's okay because everybody's used to, when you set up a meeting, there's always a Zoom link in it as well. and people are used to doing that. I think before the pandemic, it wasn't such a habit for everyone. Yeah. And what do you think is specific to engineering teams? So there's a lot, you know, I had the privilege to be like on the start on engineering, then do the go-to-market thing of like sales and marketing, some support, then go back actually now to product. and I'll give you my experience. I'd love to hear yours as well. So another like life lesson, this is what my co-founder Ori always says to me, it's not black and white, right?

7:35Like full remote or like versus like full in office. And it also, I think really depends on what you're doing. So for example, in product and engineering, we're kind of creating something together. Usually we're innovating on a new feature or something new. And I think you can't really replace the acceleration that you get of everyone in the room, like even like whiteboarding together, doing ideas, laughing, joking, good ideas, bad ideas. Now you don't need to do that every day of the week, but there are certain situations that, you know, you can really accelerate. Now, on the other side of like go to market, I've been in situations where really I'm on sales calls or I'm on customer success calls and I'm really doing like a solo job.

8:26I'm not. It's more about, OK, am I am I in a comfortable environment? Can I take a walk outside really quick? And I and so, you know, that's kind of my and that kind of favors like a more remote atmosphere. I'm not collaborating. What has been your experience for your engineering team with that? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, I 100 % agree with what you said. But I do think also for engineering, there's like a lot of work that we do that there's true value in also having that one set up where, you know, you have dedicated focus time, where working from home is great for. And I think what's really funny, one story I've been telling, I think before when we started going open office, right?

9:09Like the setup with like no, yeah, no cubicles and things like that. When I started, it was all cubicles. And then we moved to that because that's when like agile as a way to work was like really picking up. And we were like, everybody's like, oh, we're going to pair all the time. And we're going to talk over, you know, in the team room and everybody can overhear it. And we're going to have design decisions, like all of that. Right. And if you look at it, we started shifting the tooling together. Like, okay, so now everybody uses some version of GitHub, and we review code through pull requests.

9:37Everybody chats on Slack. I feel like before the pandemic, I don't know, 8, 10 years before the pandemic started, I caught myself multiple times in situations when I'd be like, see two people flacking each other, shoulder to shoulder. I'm like, look, you're sitting right next to it. Why don't you just turn around and have this discussion? And or other cases where we'd be talking in a team room and people would be like, oh, you know what? We're trying to focus here, guys. Can you please go over there to talk? And I was like, no, this is open exactly so we can overhear each other and collaborate.

10:09And I think like that is the bit if you're thinking like hybrid, how do we come back to the office? Like you can't ignore the fact that today the way we operate in engineering needs a lot of that. We built the tooling around that to be able to work. And that's why people really leaned into remote when it started, because they're like, yeah, I mean, the way we were doing the work, this is totally like the tools we have already are almost there. And I think the benefits of the office become more, you know, we get to hang out, we have lunch together and we can go like to social activities in the evening.

10:43But maybe we don't need five days of that. You know what I mean? Like two or three days of that is more than enough. And so I think if we ignore that reality that for engineering work, there are lots of situations where that focus time is important. You're not going to be able to design like your office time and your office space also to leverage that. Yeah, I remember that. I was a developer during that. So my first job was cubicles, but I did that for one year and then the open office thing hit. And so like my core developer experience was in the open office world. And then I remember, you know, Slack came out and all that.

11:21And I was that developer that would slack someone sitting to, you know, spaces away from me. Now I'm thinking, why am I doing that? I'm doing that because I was locked into coding. I need and I maybe I had a question, but I didn't want to leave my bubble of I don't really want to be bothered. I need information, but I don't want to get out of the zone. You know, I'm like, get in the matrix. I'm locked in. And it makes me, and then, you know, that whole open like office era was like insane. I remember also when it was like, okay, we're going to put sales next to engineering. We did that at one of my companies.

12:00It didn't go well at all because the engineers couldn't focus. And then the sales guys were like bugging them all the time. It was crazy. But yeah, I think it is about balance. One of the things, you know, if you're listening to this pod, because I do think there's a lot of benefits also to going back into the office. But I saw like convincing engineers to do so at some companies. I saw a lot of pushback. Right. Yeah. And my advice would be if you have like certain days of the week, I think you said you're doing two days, right? That's right. Yeah. At home. Two days at home, three days in the office.

12:39Yeah. Two days at home, two in the office? Three in the office. Three in the office. Okay, yeah, five days. Yeah. For the ones that, okay, here's the days that we're going to be together in the office. What I would say is make sure those are the days that you're doing the things that are better for collaboration, right? That's a good, okay, it's not just you're going to come in and then zone into your computer. Like, otherwise, why do I need to be? So one of my advices would be when you're communicating a return to the office, make sure that those days that you're coming in, it's like, hey, we're going to do product collaboration.

13:17We're going to do our retrospective meeting together. We're going to whatever it is. I was wondering if you had any other tips of how to do that communication to an engineering team of getting people to come back for a few days. yeah yeah i mean i think we we even throughout the pandemic we kept the message like everyone we hired during those times we still ask people to relocate to one of our the cities where our offices were and i mean there was more flexibility about like we didn't have to ask people to relocate immediately but we it was definitely an expectation that you know you would be in one of our offices so in in that sense it was easier i guess even though you know obviously there were people who asked to continue remote for a while and we had an exceptions process that was in place for people to be able to ask to stay remote.

14:08But it wasn't that difficult for us because we focused on, we're thinking this is going to end and we're going to return in some shape or form. So let's make sure that we find people who see that value, who will still want to have that in some capacity so the push doesn't get too difficult. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, you know, some great insights there. Now, in kind of our intro, I mentioned that you are really proud of the culture at Duolingo. And of course, you know, we just talked about like your in-person experience, all of that. Can you now catch up our audience on your role at Duolingo? You know, the work you're doing there, even like size of the engineering team.

14:49And then let's get into like the culture around that. So my role, I today, I'm one of the engineering leads for the platform area at Duolingo. The platform covers what you would think of it and most other ARGs, like the infrastructure on the cloud providers that we have services in. It also covers all of the data side, so all the data ingestion and making that data available to internal consumers, our A-B testing framework. It's all produced by those teams. And we have other teams like security, IT are also part of platform. The company is around 600 people. Engineering is roughly half of that, so we're kind of 300 ballpark.

15:24Nice. Okay. Okay. And, you know, you kind of talk about this great culture, but what makes the culture so great at Duolingo? Yeah, I mean, that's something that I think a lot about to try and get to the bottom of the answer. Because, again, similar to the office, you know, the things I would point out, you can say that for a lot of companies as well, right? Like, I think people in general are very nice. There's like a very supportive environment. So in that sense, I guess there isn't a lot of difference. My take is that I think like this, a more than average, like number of people with a really strong connection to the mission and what we're doing, more so than I've seen in other places.

16:04And, you know, if you think about it also, I think something that's related here is a lot of people have that draw to kind of consumer space products, right? So it has that kind of, if you're especially for an engineer, it has that thing of like, oh, yeah, I work on this app and you can show people and they love the product, you know? so people really enjoy that and i think like if you look again industry-wide for tech things are like we're in a bit of a weird phase right now you know what i mean like there's a lot of people like tech has a kind of a bad rap in a for a lot of you know good reasons and i think like if you look at the consumer space there aren't that many products that you can like firmly stand behind and say what we're doing genuinely help people here there's no buts or ifs or you know what i mean And I think Duolingo falls a little bit into that.

16:50I think people see that. We get a ton of that feedback, obviously, from learners that how much they love the product and how much it helped them. So I think that really helps, too. People feel that. They see that they're helping, and that helps kind of the whole thing. That's a good point. The product, the mission certainly helps if it's something that's really justifiable. and you know it's not something i don't know that you can see between the lines of like oh you're just trying to get like advertising money or like selling people's data or like you know try i'm sure you know there's billion dollar companies that are super successful that do that but when you really think about the mission you might say to yourself yeah and i think like you know we want to do that yeah right exactly and i think like we reached a size a certain scale that like now it has also the technical kind of challenges that people usually look for you know what i mean There's a ton of data, there's a ton of traffic and you have to build like, like big services and like a very consequential type of operation that, you know, a lot of, for a lot of people in engineering, sometimes if you chase just that, that side, that's when it gets complicated, right?

17:58Like, cause I think that most companies offer the same thing. And then, you know, if, but if you have, if you find that connection with the product and what you're doing and you see that it helps that side, then it really becomes something like special. Well, what's cool for you is you're on the platform engineering side, right? You say you have like about 300 developers and usually at least at Linear B when we think about platform engineering. And I love to hear like the goals that you have for your team or organization, but it's a lot around empowering the rest of the developers that are within your organization so that they can do their job more efficiently with higher quality, streamlined.

18:37But, you know, throwing like a different question at you, like, how do you think about platform engineering and what are the goals of your organization? Yeah, I think you touched on that already, the kind of empowering the rest of the teams to do their jobs and kind of like, we want to build a platform that basically lets you do without us getting in the way, I guess, like, you know, all of our requirements when it comes to reliability, security, they get built in more than, you know, you having to come to us for help. you know it's a journey that we're on there's a ton of work that we need to get to fully realize that vision but that's how kind of we've been thinking about it and also like platform today at Duolingo I feel like covers a lot of space because you know we have kind of the data side that I mentioned and I think there's different like customer groups today that we serve so there's all the data side is really like not just engineering but it serves like product heavily uses that marketing so that's like almost like an org on its own then we have like teams like security and IT, like I mentioned, that serves the entire company.

19:39They cover a lot of things that we need to interact with everyone. But then there's the core platform side, which is more engineering-facing and that's when we're providing tools like CICD and libraries for you to build your services and observability, things like that. Yeah. Going back to what you were saying about mission of the company and stuff like that, I think also in the platform engineering world, there's like a really nice mission as well. Like, so like, for example, some of the stuff we're doing at Linear B and our product GitStream is all about allowing developers to merge pull requests faster and not let them get stuck with higher quality.

20:21That's like a really good, you know, feeling with that product. And I'm sure you probably get the same sense just being on the platform engineering team. Now, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like, how does that feel to be leading like that type of organization that's helping developers? Yeah. Yeah. I think like the people who gravitate usually are really passionate about, you know what I mean? Like their tooling and how we make this more efficient and really getting in the weeds of like how things work and providing kind of the best experience possible. Because I think like a lot of times it's like, they felt frustrated with what, you know, they were getting before.

20:57And they're like, you know, I'm going to go build that and I'm going to make the best it can be. But it touches even on that culture side and the product side, because I think that is, again, a case in platform more than other in product engineering. We really need to spend more time, the leadership group, on reminding people what we're doing and what's important and what's happening on the product side and how their work that they're doing supports the teams that are building those features. So you don't get just stuck on the tech side. Now, if I'm moving us into our last topic, which is maybe kind of like the meat of the discussion, you have something that you're doing with a work training program.

21:40I think it's for newer managers. But can you give us like an overview about this training program? We have, I mean, we have a leadership management training program, right? And I feel like we invest a lot in that first phase of first transition, right? From I see to management. And there's a few reasons for that. Like the main one actually is that we almost have to, because we have a very successful internship program at Duolingo. We have, we hire a ton of people that come through that program. So if I like our pyramid, probably like the base looks like we have a lot of like people more on the junior side or people whose job here is their first job.

22:16And so that means that like we have a lot of people who A need coaching, but a lot of we have also a lot of people who are stepping into management for the first time because they've been here since they joined. Right. So so there's that side. And also because, you know, like I was saying, that transition is always the the trickier one. The first time you do management, there's like focus on like how do we support those folks better? So what are the elements of that program that you have? Yeah. So there we have the sessions, right? Like we have a couple of week long round of sessions, but I think like the biggest thing that, that helps is that we need, you need a strong coaching support from that.

22:55Because again, it's like, you need to have both the managers who manage those managers, they properly trained to support them going forward. And also like peer support is something that we believe a lot in. And we have like structured like programs for people who go through that week long program to then after they finish that, get together to do like support groups and talk about things. Because I think one of the things about management is that it's something that you can't just get from books. I think a switch that happens for engineers is that like, you know, if you read, you're used to a world where like you can, you want to learn something new.

23:28You're going to use some new technology or whatever it is. like you learn about it through books and videos and whatnot, and you're kind of ready to go and you do it and it will work, right? Like, because there's some deterministic aspect to it. But like with managing is the kind of like complete opposite. If you go with that approach, one thing that happens all the time, people is that you go and you're having this issue with someone on your team and you go and you find this book and you read it. And it's like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to come in and I'm going to say this and that, and that, and it's going to be great.

23:53And it goes completely different than what you expected. Someone else in the team that you even think of reacts really poorly to it. And you're like, oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing. This is terrible. And so it does take a lot of time and experience to doing it. You know what I mean? Like you really have to do it multiple times, different teams, different people. And that's really when you start finding a footing as like, what's my style here? How do I approach these problems for different people in different situations? How do I need to respond and things like that. Specifically going from an individual contributor on the engineering side to a manager, what are some of the aspects of like the training program that it touches on?

24:36And what are some of the common pitfalls going from individual contributor to new manager that you see? The only thing that's different in the program itself is like, we have a session dedicated to just talking about that transition and these pitfalls, I guess. It's more of like get people in the right mindset as they approach it, approach the role. Because I think like some of the things that are difficult, like there's the classic one that always gets talked about is the fear of losing your technical skills, right? Like how much time should I spend coding versus management stuff? And, you know, you're exposed now to new responsibilities and situations that if you're incompetent again, I think that plays a factor.

25:14But, you know, I think the biggest thing that trips all to that. I think even though they understand what needs to be done, I think people still approach it from a like, I do what I used to do before, plus these other things. Now I have to have these one-on-one and I think it should be completely like, I have a new job here. I used to like build products. Now I build teams that build products and it might feel like I'm just playing with the words here, but like, I think that's a fundamental shift in how you approach things going forward, right? Like, so a request comes into your team, you need to kind of pause immediately and be like, okay, should I pick this up?

25:49Because the reaction, especially for a strong, we're a strong, I see is to like, just go and do it. Cause you're like so good at it. That's why you're, you know what I mean? Like you're senior, but like, you need to now take all these other things into consideration to be like, I'm trying to build a team here. Is it the best move for me to do it? Right. Like when does this need to get delivered? Who are the people who I have in the team who are looking for opportunities, right? Like, should I try to coach someone on that and on doing that work? And so I think that is the kind of shift that needs to happen for you to like really start hitting the right node.

26:19Now that you're at 300 developers, it probably means that you have dozens or tens of new managers, right? If you know their managing team of 10 or less or something like that. How do you roll out of like an engineering training program like that at scale? Yeah. So that, I mean, I can't take credit for that one because it's mostly driven by our people team, but it's done in like strong partnership with engineering. You know, we work with them. I mean, I run one of the sessions and other engineer leaders in the company do as well. So we can like really that, for example, this session that I talked about for new people doing that switch was exactly because we felt that need.