22: Supporting Production Software Systems at Scale - Interview with Jeffrey Smith, Manager of Production Operations at Centro

Jeffrey Smith is Manager of Production Operations at Centro, a media services company that helps brands and ad agencies execute their digital advertising strategies. These companies have broad advertising campaigns, and they come to Centro to get help with the digital parts. Centro provides web-based tools with standardized workflows in an industry which has in the past been very disorganized and analog. Centro also has a demand side platform (DSP), allowing advertisers to bid on digital ads in real time auctions. Centro's main business is in placement of ads on digital properties, based on the user viewing the site. Centro is planning to ramp up in the social media advertising space too.

Production Operations (ProdOps) ensures that production environments are up and running, that they are patched appropriately, that security rollouts are maintained and updated. ProdOps at Centro (and in the industry as a whole), is starting to move beyond just supporting customer-facing production, and also support internal business processes and systems, such as internal software applications, testing, demo, and training environments. The reason is that ProdOps has the domain expertise to handle these, and therefore, should.

When non-tech people think of technologists, they think of just programmers. But there's many technical folks beyond programmers that support the entire technology platform of a company. Jeffrey says that running software on a programmer's laptop is very different from running it in a production system with thousands of users at the same time. There's different problem domains that programmers are not equipped to solve. This is were Production Operations come in.

As manager, Jeffrey warns that a "working manager" is a myth. Management is a full time job, and you can't just do it on the side, while also doing individual contributor work. One of his jobs as a manager is to identify work that does not uniquely require his team, and to automate away or otherwise remove that work from the team, so that the team can focus on their unique contributions to the organization. Another way to remove that work is to simply pay an outside company for a common service, ultimately outsourcing it since it's not unique to the business.

Growing up, Jeffrey was interested in computers and computer games. But he did poorly in school and was working in a furniture store after high school. Eventually he ended up doing an entry level data entry job. He sat right at the entrance of the IT department, and befriended the manager of IT operations there. He was fortunate enough to get noticed and given an opportunity to work on the IT team, and worked his way up the ranks at MVP Healthcare, while also going back to school. Jeffrey has a degree in Computer Information Systems at SUNY Empire State College. Jeffrey eventually worked at Grubhub, managing the SRE (System Reliability Engineering) team, before ending up at Centro. Along the way he intentionally learned management and added it to his skillset.

Jeffrey says technology is a tool that serves the business. It helps him collaborate effectively with business folks in organizations.

Jeffrey warns against unconscious biases. Everybody has it. It's important to recognize it and guard against it, and don't let it drive your decisions. This applies to job descriptions and interviewing. Jeffrey knows many African-Americans working in technology. But he has only interviewed only two African-Americans. He's concerned about the unconscious biases that are preventing candidates that get to him. In regards to inclusion, something as simple as dietary constraints should be considered when for example, doing a team lunch. It is part of the bigger picture of an inclusive culture.

Jeffrey says there are many technical roles/fields. Not just programming. These include, network engineering, production operation support, release engineering, security (both technology and policy), and technical writing. He says that if you get into a technical field, make sure you are passionate about it, since you have to continually focus and hone your skills on it. It is a career, not just a job.

linkedin.com/in/jeffery-smith-37a0162/

twitter.com/darkandnerdy

allthingsdork.com/

[email protected]

Centro

Demand side platform

The Myth of the Working Manager

MVP Healthcare

SUNY Empire State College

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