Ep 054, Expect Success

Underserved

Andrew Gelina

Society & Culture, Technology

5.0 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, everyone, to episode number 54 of Under Served.
0:04.3	Today, we are featuring Steve Pichiano,
0:07.2	VP of Engineering at Fine Tune.
0:09.5	Let's get started.
0:11.6	Welcome to this week's edition of Under Served,
0:15.7	the podcast for the rest of the tech industry.
0:19.0	Where we focus on stories of tech industry leaders,
0:22.1	their insights and their lessons learned.
0:25.1	And now your host, Andrew Jalina.
0:31.0	Steve, welcome to the show.
0:32.4	And thank you for coming down today.
0:34.4	Thank you for having me.
0:35.7	It's a real pleasure.
0:36.9	So tell me a bit about what was the initial impetus?
0:40.8	What kind of sparked your interest in technology way back when?
0:44.4	Oh, that was easy.
0:45.5	Back when I was in middle school, when really,
0:48.0	there were computers in most people's homes
0:50.6	or even too many electronics.
0:52.8	We were fortunate to have one of the early towering computers,
0:57.0	the one that had a keyboard on it.
0:58.6	You can play games with it.
	...

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