How Netflix uses an innovative approach to technical debt

Watch this video interview with engineering manager Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith is an engineering manager at Netflix and a Senior Director for Women Who Code. She lives near Raleigh, NC, with her husband and their 5 children. She is passionate about inclusion and diversity, supporting and nurturing early career talent, and has spoken extensively about recruiting and retention of underrepresented groups in technology.

Lisa sat down with the All Things Open team to talk about technical debt, how to define it, how Netflix assembled a team for legacy code, and much more.

Key takeaways

• Tech debt is something that everybody has
• And the way we approach it is that it’s not necessarily a burden or a thing that we drag behind us but, as an opportunity to make good decisions and innovate in spaces
• We avoid the big, monolithic thing that we have to get rid of and instead flip it on its head and look at all of its pieces and say, how do we break down these little pieces?
• Try tagging your issues in JIRA with “tech debt,” then you can see a burndown chart to begin to measure it
• It’s not just about money, it’s about the actions that we undertake every day it’s about what we do to make sure that the voices that aren’t being heard are included
• It’s about advocacy and representation so each of us in the tech community can take it upon ourselves to sponsor somebody, promote somebody, encourage somebody, or help somebody