A Chat With: Russ Miles at Crown Agents Bank
By Donna Fielder and Sarah Cronk
Russ Miles may be a familiar face to Chalk Eastbourne readers, as this month he presented for us on mentoring at FOUNDRY in Eastbourne. We wanted to share his inspiring stories with you, so we caught up with the software engineer, author, and speaker to find out more about his career path and experiences working in the UK, the US and Dubai - as well as his return to a great work-life balance in Eastbourne.
Russ, can you provide a quick summary of the role you’re currently working in?
Russ: “I’m Head of Engineering at Crown Agents Bank. I’m responsible for establishing a great engineering environment, where people can do great software engineering and thrive as human beings. We are operationally responsible for the software, so if it goes down we have to fix it.
“I set the parameters for how we grow - how we scale the system and the people around it. As with Conway’s Law, software and its architecture is shaped by the groups of people that are working around it, so that’s something I have to turn an eye to.
“I’ve been in my current position for a year. I realised my biggest strength is around how people operate and supporting people. At the same time I got a cancer diagnosis, which changed my priorities in life.
“Now I’m much more interested in how people work and behave around these systems we construct. I look to the people more than the tech systems: how people think, work, collaborate. That is why I’m writing and starting to speak about: EQ, resilience, psychological safety - all the facets of the humane environments that people can operate in when doing this kind of work.
“If you have a technical problem, you have a people opportunity. When there are fundamental system problems, it is usually because of a historical effect of how people think and operate.”
Where did your career in tech begin? And what have been some of the highlights?
“I had a somewhat irregular path into tech. I was a failure at my A-Levels - if I love a subject, I will be great at it. If I don’t love the subject, I will flunk. So as a result, I didn’t get into uni.
“Instead, I did an HNC sponsored by General Dynamics. It went well, and I then decided I wanted to keep going. I asked to do a Computer Science degree, which I completed part-time over three years. When I completed that, I didn’t receive my result. It turned out I had passed, but because I got a first and had completed it in three years part-time, they didn’t believe I had achieved it. So they had to investigate it!
“I was a workaholic, working full time and then doing this degree one day a week. I was very career-centric. But as a result, my personal life and friendships suffered. Looking back, the toll was too high. I became a driven, focused person, addicted to achievements. Immediately after my Bachelor’s degree, I started a Master’s degree at Oxford. Once again part time, but I finished it quickly. At the same time, I wrote two books and worked full time. I am proud of what I achieved, but I sacrificed a lot. I ended up lecturing at Oxford for a while and one of my books became required reading.
“Like I said, I am proud of what I achieved, but that is all I had from that period of time - so it was good but also bad!
“At General Dynamics, I worked in defence on systems such as fast jets, weapons systems intelligence systems, some work related to special forces. I worked with some amazing groups of people.
“I then wanted to try out the commercial scene. My first introduction to this was working on a mobile portal, and I worked in Dubai and South Africa for the African Cup of Nations. Open-source also became an interest of mine.
“By this point, I had also written my first best-selling article and this got translated all around the world. This article bought me to the attention of other organisations, who got to know me and then approached me.
“I saw some awful software construction, as the discipline of creating software was quite poor at that point. In the early 2000s, I joined the search engine Ask Jeeves where I learned a lot about test-driven development, which was quite new at the time, as was Agile.
“After being made redundant, I then got involved in a start-up in the United States, which failed as there was no business plan. I learned a lot about business.
“Then I joined a successful start-up, the company behind the Spring Framework. People started to know who I was in small circles and they gave me the opportunity to go on stage and speak. I’m strongly introverted, so it doesn’t come easy!
“I then started my first successful company, a consultancy, which grew from 0 to 40 people over the course of three years. I did another start-up at the Valley with an amazing group of people, but we didn’t have a clear purpose so it didn’t go very far.
“Following that, I’ve been doing consultancy, I wrote some more books, I became an independent consultant on how to set up good architecture and design, and I’ve been giving training courses on architecture and design issues. I have become known for chaos engineering, based on some work I did with Netflix, and I created an open-source project - The Chaos Toolkit.
“In the middle of last year, I stopped and asked myself - what am I interested in? My cancer diagnosis changed how I look at the world. When bad things happen, I naturally use it as an opportunity to learn.
“I’m now working in a fabulous place with a great group of people, helping the UN and UNICEF get money into countries that need it. It’s the first time that work alone, or financial compensation even, isn’t the reason I’m there.
“In the last 8 months, I have trained to become a Samaritans listening volunteer. Learn to listen - it’s life-changing stuff. It’s the toughest, but most valuable time of my week.”
Which individuals would you say have been particularly influential in your career journey, and why?
“That would be my mentor - Adrian Colyer. It’s not a formal mentor relationship, but he was the reason I wrote my first book. I accidentally went to the wrong lecture and it was Adrian giving the lecture. I proposed my dissertation to Oxford based on what I heard in that room. They said ‘no, that’s not research, that’s a book!’. So I sent a book proposal to a publisher and it got approved.
“The lecture was aspect-oriented programming and I didn’t realise at the time it was so leading edge. It was Adrian’s technology and he was custodian of it at IBM. He was then my hero.
“Adrian then became my CTO when I joined Spring Source. So he got me into the first job that got me into working on open source full-time, and got me on stage! He is such a humble person and always the smartest person in the room, but you would never know it.
“In more recent times, he has been more formally a mentor. We are both motorcyclists, so we would go out for rides, go to a biker cafe and chat about the world, computing, software. He has had a massive mentoring influence on me. He has been a constant throughout my career - a touchstone.
“I was too introverted to approach him that first day I heard him speak, so the first time he knew of me was when I wrote an article on the Spring Framework. He also knew that I had tried to get involved in the open source frameworks around his tech. We connected loosely through open source and articles.Then, as his company was hiring, he heard of me and, as he kind of knew me, he recommended as a good hire.
“He doesn’t go in as the ‘big I am’ and tell you what to do. Adrian listens and figures out what is good for you. Not just telling what to do. He’s a great friend and mentor.
“When I give my talks on mentoring, especially “humble mentoring”, which is the style I advocate, like the one I gave for Chalk, I base it on him.”
What exciting opportunities do you think the tech industry can offer people in the next few years? And alongside those, what are some of the key challenges?
“Tech is the best industry to work with other people, as you’re creating something that can make a difference to people’s lives on a daily basis. You can be really influential if you want. We have so many good things happening to make it accessible - remote working, work-life balance.
“We can collaborate. If you want to travel, it is a great skill set to have so you can then work anywhere. It opens doors.
“This industry suffers at times from people that don’t want to be in it. They were attracted by money but not by the craft. We have such a resource problem and the money is good, so some people entering it don’t really care what the company does. People do things they hate because of the money.
“We are still growing as an industry. We’re still figuring out that software engineering isn’t just about building code - it’s building solutions.
“In the future, we will still be writing code, but that’s not only where the value comes from. I was a programmer when I started. I only cared about how much code I was writing: lots was a good thing.
“But more code isn’t usually a good thing! Great programmers come in and delete code more than write it sometimes. They simplify systems. As a developer, you are building a system and you are aware of how it runs. With software engineering, you are someone that will engineer a solution. This includes coding, but also looking at the requirements, the options available, how it can be run, and building it too. A software engineer needs to be operationally aware of how it will be used.
“When I am hiring, I look for:
Whether they have ever been responsible for being a pager on a system and carrying the burden if a system isn’t working. People will have a sensitivity to learning when they have experienced that pain.
Understanding the importance of feedback loops.
Awareness that we learn so much from incidents.
“Everyone that works for me has to have the pager. When I start the interview process with them, I make it clear that the process will help answer the question - ‘will you grow, flourish and thrive here’?”
What advice would you give people starting out in the tech industry today?
“Be excited about learning. You know very little and be excited about that. It’s a fast moving environment. Be prepared for this to be an exciting industry to grow in and be challenged.
“Carefully pay attention to what is important to you. Pick the opportunities for how you want to grow. Don’t say ‘yes’ to everything. You need to learn when to say ‘no’ for you.
“There are many routes and many opportunities, but you need to do the work to figure out what is important to you. What are your values? You need to work these out to have a compass to guide you.”
Why did you decide to settle in Eastbourne?
“I tried to escape Eastbourne for a long time and I failed! I worked in LA, New York, San Francisco, Dubai, but what matters in your life beyond work is the connections you have with people. I love the work I do and I’ve managed to engineer a life where I can work anywhere.
“The environment here in Eastbourne is soothing and nothing beats the people and the connections I have here. My family are here, my long term friendships are here.
“I need to be living in a place that isn’t relentlessly bombarded with tech industry concerns. When I shut the laptop down, I have to do something else. You can really achieve a work-life balance here.”
What are you most looking forward to in the next few months?
“My new book is coming out on how to build technical strategy - it should be available by the end of the year.
“I’ve recently been to Austin, Texas, to do a talk on chaos engineering and emotional intelligence, which is funded by Amazon Prime Sports, and then a talk in Sweden on what an architect and designer of software thinks about.
“In November, I’ll be doing a CloudNative Kubernetes Community Day talk on learning from life incidents - it’s a 20-minute talk as a closing keynote. And then following that, I’ll be speaking on incident management and what you can learn, with the right mindset and skills, from things getting difficult at the YOW! Conference in London.”
You can hear more of Russ’s advice to those starting out in the tech industry in our special edition Chalk Talks podcast “Getting into Digital” here.
