We Fear Change
Submitted to SREDay Amsterdam. Accepted. Given .
This talk was given. See the talk page for slides, the recording, and (usually) a transcript.
Abstract
Changing how 10 people work is difficult, changing how 100 work is very difficult. And, barring Planck's principle, changing how 5,000 or more people work is, typically, impossible. When it comes to improving how large organizations build, release, and run software, scaling to thousands of people is the real challenge. If you're trying to move beyond your initial success at transforming how your organization builds and runs software, you've experienced this scaling challenge. Thankfully, most of the problems in this challenge are common challenges. Though you may feel cursed and alone, in our experience talking with hundreds of organizations, most of the problems are the same.
This talk will look at several of these common challenges and cover tactics to address them. Part of applying a tactic successfully is understanding why the challenge exists in the first place, which the talk starts with.
Text taken from Coté's Sessionize speaker library on 2026-08-10, not captured at submission time. Sessionize keeps one abstract per talk and reuses it for every event that talk is pitched to, so this is the talk's text as it stands now - it may have been edited since this particular submission.