Podcast appearances and mentions of brandon charles

Today, new employees start their first day at A Line's first ever out-of-state location! In this episode, Karmen sits down for a glass of wine with familiar faces COO Brandon Charles Barker and CFO Kelly Harrison to tell the whirlwind story of how A Line's new Carlsbad store was born.You might be thinking, "Wait, wasn't it supposed to be Salt Lake City?" SLC is coming soon, but when opportunity presents itself sometimes you just have to take the leap.Thank you, listeners, for making the A Line community what it is! See you at our opening party on February 23rd.Connect with Karmen and A Line:aline-online.comIG: @alineboutique@karmenberentsenCheck out Karmen's memoir Learning to Fly, here.https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Fly-Memoir-Karmen-Berentsen/dp/1735235008

This week Karmen sits down with her OGB--the original Brandon in her life--A Line COO Brandon Charles Barker. They count down on a list of 10 things they've accomplished together, from Brandon's job interview to opening stores in new states. Karmen and Brandon are a brilliant team with a sacred bond. It's easy to be lonely as an entrepreneur, but having a true partner running operations is the best fix.Connect with Karmen and A Line:aline-online.comIG: @alineboutique@karmenberentsenCheck out Karmen's memoir, Learning to Fly, here.https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Fly-Memoir-Karmen-Berentsen/dp/1735235008

Melissa has overcome a lot of things in her life. In this hour, she shares passion for reading and writing, voiceover and broadcasting, and how words and communication might be the most important skill we have to manage our mental health, and build strong friendships with others. Find her on Twitter @morning_song

Mike Parsons is currently a producer at 760 WJR Radio Detroit. In this episode he talks about going from a punk rock kid who really didn't care about radio, to falling in love with the intimacy of news talk radio. He produces a podcast called pod Suey, and hosts a podcast called, whatever Dave, independently. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

“I realized that corporate just was not for me. I realized that I needed to be my own boss and do my own thing.” – Shaniece M. Wise During Season 9 Episode 1 of WinHers United the podcast Shaniece M. Wise, CEO of Wise, Armstrong, and Associates, talks to us about the work required to run a thriving business, having multiple streams of income within your business, and how therapy helped her to become a better business owner. She also shares insight on investing in yourself to get to the next level, reinventing yourself when necessary, and defining what self-care means to you. Episode Highlights (4:05) Shaniece starts off her interview by telling us more about how she got started with her business: Wise, Armstrong, and Associates (10:15) Shaniece discusses the business expansion system she created to help entrepreneurs excel (14:30) Shaniece talks about the different levels of scalability for business owners (18:34) Shaniece emphasizes the importance of investing in yourself to grow and scale your business (20:31) Shaniece shares a personal story of her experience with “coach hurt” (22:59) Shaniece gives us advice on how to broaden our mindset (31:08) Shaniece explains power words and discusses why they are important (35:54) Shaniece talks about her view on personal development and what she does to develop herself (41:17) Shaniece tells us why self-care is important to her and gives us several examples of what we can do to show ourselves care (42:27) Shaniece shares some of her favorite self-care practices with us (46:25) Shaniece talks about her latest win and why it is important to her Latasha discusses the importance of positivity in entrepreneurship (49:53) Shaniece gives us her definition of a WinHer (51:20) Shaniece offers her parting words of wisdom Shaniece's Bio Shaniece M. Wise is the CEO of Wise, Armstrong and Associates, LLC which is a Business Coaching and Consulting Firm. As a Certified Business Expansion Coach and Strategist, Shaniece helps business owners gain more visibility, increase profitability, and improve systems and strategies in order to build six and seven figure empires. Through the strategic blend of coaching, consulting and mentorship, clients experience guidance, support and accountability, and are able to grow their businesses on average between 60-200% in 12 months after joining her coaching program. With more than seventeen years of coaching under her belt, Shaniece teaches from a Business Expansion System while using biblical concepts and principles. Her direct and powerful speaking style has led her across the United States, teaching business owners and leaders how to broaden their mindset, business, and profits through events, seminars, and workshops. She is two-time author of Activating Your Gifts, and Activating Your Gifts 2nd Edition – 15 Steps to Identify Your Gifts to Prepare For Entrepreneurship, in which she sold 102 books in ten days. Shaniece has had the opportunity to speak for Essence Magazine/Chase, National Associations of Woman in Business (NAWBO), The Ohio State University, McKesson Pharmaceutical Company, National Black MBA Association, Women in Sales Columbus Chapter, Women in Economic and Leadership Development (WELD), just to name a few. She also has had the opportunity to teach Business Programs for the Columbus Urban League. Shaniece was featured in the Influence Digest as one of the top 20 Coaches in Columbus, Ohio in 2021. Shaniece is married to Stafford Spencer and they have two amazing sons; Brandon Charles and Xavier Charles. Her past time consists of her spending time with her immediate and extended family, traveling, reading and writing. One of her favorite scriptures is, But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man. The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9 To visit Shaniece's website go to: http://shaniecemwise.com To purchase a copy of Shaniece's new book go to: http://activatingyourgifts.com How to stay engaged with and support Nicole Walker and WinHers United If you want to attend the 2nd Annual WinHers United Virtual Summit go to: http://winhersunited.com/events If you have any suggested questions or topics for WinHers United the podcast send an email to: winhersunited@gmail.com. If you are an aspiring or newbie podcaster Nicole would love to help you on your journey. Schedule a Podcast Launch Consultation Session with Nicole using this link: http://bit.ly/WinHers-PodCall. If you want to support to show send your donation to: CashApp: $winhersunited http://buymeacoffee.com/winhersunited Follow Nicole on Clubhouse @winhersunited. Check out the WinHers United website at: http://winhersunited.com. As always "Be Empowered and Empower On" - Nicole Walker

Jennifer has a well rounded career, from skills training to her current work for beyond vision as an employment specialist. What I love about this conversation is that we tackle a lot of serious employment concerns and self marketing, but we do so in a practical and respectful way. To get in touch with Jennifer about potential opportunities, call her at 414-335-3762. Or email her, jobs@beyondvision.com

This episode features Scott Gibson, it is archived from mid 2018. We discuss workforce development, and inclusion with people of all abilities for the workforce. Find out more information about a fantastic Maryland, DC, and Virginia area organization called Mellwood at Melwood.org

Though I always talk to my girlfriend Amy Billman around the house, it was interesting to step into the role of professional interviewer to allow Amy the space to share so many unique stories about her perspective regarding compassion, advocacy, and hard work. In this hour we talk about The inspiration she found in studying vocal performance in music and why it is a unique resume skill that should be appreciated. She talks about the opportunity where she was allowed to be a part of helping others with various disabilities accomplish jobs they always wanted to do, and encourages all of us to be ourselves. She is currently co-owner of a business called speed dots, making tactile screen protectors for iPhones helping blind users to be more efficient with their smart phone. For more information about Amy, find her at speeddots.com

Scott Chambers is currently a voice actor in his 30s, with ambition to have many more career paths in his next 30 years of life. The thing I love about this conversation is that it's not inside baseball, it's a general overview of who he is, and the industry itself. Hear about Scott moving in to voiceover from radio, and his fascination with airplanes. And to hear more about Scott's passions for being a Voice actor, world traveler, weather geek, and aviation enthusiast among many other things. www.ScottChambersVO.com is his website. Subscribe to Breaking Bread with Brandon on all your favorite podcast apps, new episodes every Tuesday.

This is a tribute to the late Sarah Ramirez. The interview is from 2017 which took place on my radio show called breaking boundaries on WERa 96.7 Arlington. This episode is about her experience seeking independence as a blind woman in San Diego. My thoughts are with her family and friends at this time, may we all share memories about the good times we had with her. May she always be remembered for her accomplishments, and the things we can learn from her experience.

On this episode, damion and Brandon talk about the importance of mental health and creativity. Damion discusses his 20 plus years as a singer songwriter, score composer for film, and making the transition beyond playing covers during bar gigs. Damion's new EP, “Shiny Mad”, finds the singer-songwriter putting down his acoustic guitar and assuming the role of producer, programmer, and engineer. Combining synthesizers, organic instruments, catchy melodies, and thoughtful lyrics, Wolfe's new musical adventure offers a little something for everyone. The singles "You Shine", "Holes In The Moon" and "Wrap You Up" have been receiving radio play in the U.S., Canada and the UK. It's now available on all music streaming services. For more information about Damion Wolfe, visit his website: https://damionwolfe.com/home

The episode the fellas welcomed Brandon & Charles pops for father day! Great conversation about several topics, the longest episode but the best one yet, sit back relax an enjoy! Hard Copy Link for “My Brothers Shield” author Charles J. Clark Jr. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-brothers-shield-link/1136890577?ean=9781538075715 E-Copy Link for “My Brothers Shield” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087FB6VN4 Song:  DMX - X gon give it to ya

E3 is right around the corner. This episode we talk about some games that we anticipate from Nintendo, Microsoft, and possibly Sony. We also discuss the future of Nintendo and Microsoft's future relationship. SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook! @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram! CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: INTRO/OUTRO: Cloudy by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

Unpopular opinions are the root of all evil that separate the darkness from the light. Join us as we kick back and socially divide our selves! SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook! @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram! CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: INTRO/OUTRO: Cloudy by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

Pet peeves are why I consider waking up in the morning... We have plenty of these as well as an unexpected discussion on saving the planet and reasonable methods of getting the population to do so.  Let's Kick-Back!  SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook!  @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram!  CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: OUTRO: Sunny by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...  INTRO: Hide by Le Gang https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...   --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

This is the final part of Let's Solve A Problem #LSAP Depression is a negative place for anyone. It's filled with negative and crippling thoughts that can harm you. Never be afraid to reach out to someone for help. Even if you feel that there is no one there for you, you can always message or call a willing agent who will listen to you and help you reach a better state of mind.  Crisis Text Hotline: TEXT CONNECT TO 741741 If you know someone who's in a bad place or seems off, don't be afraid to ask questions or even offer company. SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook!  @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram! CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: OUTRO: Sunny by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... INTRO: Hide by Le Gang https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...   --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

The Second part of Let's Solve A Problem #LSAP Some times work just sucks and other times it just really sucks. If you've ever had anxiety going to work because of the toxicity, Brandon has a few things to say about it. Let's Kickback and talk it out. SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook! @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram! CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: INTRO: Sunny by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... OUTRO: Hide by Le Gang https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

The first part of Let's Solve A Problem #LSAP Do you find yourself neglecting and loving yourself too little at the expense of other's lives? Here we dive into the thoughts of Xavier where he explains the feelings he knows all too well. Let's Kickback and laugh at our problems! SOCIAL MEDIA: @kickbackboys1 on Twitter! @kickbackboys on Facebook! @evans00xavier (Xavier), @thedenk77 (Brandon) (Charles) @charlesbrock69 on Instagram! CREDIT AS FOLLOWS: INTRO: Sunny by KODOMOi https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... OUTRO: Hide by Le Gang https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kickbackboys/support

Episode 3 Season 3 Shaniece M. Wise-Spencer is a mother, wife, daughter, child of God, and a lover of music. This only scratches the surface of who she is. Shaniece is blessed to be the mother of ten year old son, Brandon Charles. She is also able to live her amazing life with her husband, Stafford "Staff" Spencer. Brandon Charles is active in sports, he maintains excellent grades and is currently in the gifted and talented program at his school. Shaniece talks with Brandon about what type of business that he would like to start one day. Shaniece is a Certified Business Expansion Coach and Strategist, author of workbook “Activating Your Gifts” and currently working on writing her second book for business owners. Shaniece speaks, does keynotes, and travels around the country teaching at workshops and events. Shaniece works with businesses owners who ask the question, “what’s next”. They are past the start-up phase; have a few employees and need to up-level their systems and strategies. These business owners are ready to transform, and expand. They are ready to transform their revenue, profits and cash flow. Shaniece calls herself a one stop shop for her clients where she is able to work with them on every area of their business. Shaniece is a proud graduate of THE Ohio State University, Max Fisher College of Business. After graduating with two business degrees. After spending two years in Corporate, she walked away from her job in order to run her own business. Shaniece started her successful 14-year journey with Mary Kay Cosmetics as a Top Sales Director. Shaniece earned 7 free career cars, 4 of them being Pink Cadillacs, ran a unit with over 200 consultants, and in one year sold over a half-million dollars, worth or products. Business owners all over the country were asking her how to help them build their businesses. It was hard trying to help business owners outside of Mary Kay because her business and managing her unit took up so much of her time. After 14 years, and hearing from God, a shift took place. Shaniece stepped down from Directorship and sent her 7th Pink Cadillac back to the company. It was the end of the road for Shaniece in Mary Kay Cosmetics. She was no longer limited to who she could help and now she was building her own brand. Shaniece’s book was birthed after her transition. She watched many business owners sit on their gifts, and her greatest motivation was her father. Her father was an excellent stylist. He had the ability to match and coordinate outfits that caused his family and friends to seek out his help. Shaniece’s father never fully acted on his gift, and took it to his grave. It is her life's desire to never see another person be buried with their gifts untapped. Shaniece’s book is titled, “Activating Your Gifts”, is all about Personal Development. She believes before you can fully develop your business, you must personally development. She believes they both go hand in hand and that is why so many businesses across the country are using it. Shaniece then, invested in a Business Coach because she believes that all business owners need a Coach. She needed someone who could teach her, because she knew a lot. Shaniece needed someone who knew more than her, and could help her expand. Needless to say, the rest is history. Shaniece has a phenomenal Coaching Program and her clients receive results, high level results. They are happy to be in the program and Shaniece is happy to have them. Make sure you subscribe on iTune Podcast Website: http://redlipstickchroniclespodcast.com Web-site: www.shaniecemwise.com https://www.facebook.com/groups/shaniecemwise/ YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC5OlnisrdKGpR3_uf6Xtisw Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/shaniecemwise Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shaniecemwise/ Original Music By: Christopher Brown Contact Information: music.christopherbrown@gmail.com

Building all sorts of bridges in these five short minutes - across political, ideological, geographic and life divides. Vivek Patil, Stacy Snyder and Brandon Charles open their own versions of curiosity conversations in this segment on empathy and making a commitment to really listen.

There was an eclipse, and then there was transportation for you to an alternate universe, hey! What's up Bombshell Radio addicts, it's your friendly neighborhood Brandon Charles back again to take you on a journey through many forms of alternative music. This week I have bands like the Lumineers, arcade fire, blackberry smoke, oh yeah, and that song from house! You know the one. So spend two hours with me and my expansive alternative music collection, Tuesday 11 AM to 1 PM Eastern, Wednesday morning at midnight to 2 AM Eastern, and Sunday morning at 3 AM to 5 AM Eastern. www.bombshellradio.com #Alternative #rocknroll #TuneIn #Eclipse Teardrop - Massive Attack. Dustbowl - Joe Bonnamasa Ready To Start - Arcade Fire Don't Walk Away - Los Lonely Boys Beautiful Wreck - Shawn Mullins Somewhere Only We Know - Keane Shut Your Eyes - Snow Patrol On + Off - Maggie Rogers Banquet - Block Party Dashboard - Modest Mouse Write About Love - Bell And Sebastian Any Rain - Garland Jeffreys Welcome To The Boomtown - David And David The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness - The National Big Sky Country - Chris Whitley Fall At Your Feet - Crowded House Bleed - Collective Soul Castle On The Hill - Ed Sheeran Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart - Chris Cornell Ditmas - Mumford And Sons So Close - Andrew McMahon And The Wilderness Cleopatra - The Lumineers Unbelievers - Vampire Weekend It's Getting Late - Honeysuckle Ain't Gonna Wait - Blackberry Smoke Take A Drive With Me - Jeff Talmadge Sunshine - Eric Benet Alone Together - Daly featuring Marsha Ambrosius Back In The World - David Gray

Today 11am-1pm EST Wednesdays 12am-2am and Sundays 3am-5am EST bombshellradio.com Bombshell Radio Well my fellow Bombshell Radio addicts, it's Brandon Charles in charge and it's that time of the week again. Time to transport you to an alternate universe, where the biggest hits of alternative and Indie, are blended together. Providing information about your favorite artists quickly, to return you to the music. This week I reflect on bands I've played on previous shows like Dawes, and Foo Fighters, as well as playing other established alternative acts like Robert DeLong, and capital cities. Listen at 11 AM Eastern, with a repeat tonight at midnight. And Sunday morning at 3 AM. All times are Eastern, get your time zone and listen in

Two years ago, tonight’s guest, Brandon Charles, packed all his stuff in a duffle bag, boarded a Greyhound bus on a snowy evening, and traveled overnight from Pittsburgh to DC. When he arrived, he hopped on the metro – something he had never done before – and then took a cab to his temporary new home. What makes this story compelling is that Brandon was born blind, and his bold move followed a string of challenges he had experienced over several years. The move turned out to be a major turning point in his life and a great thing for Arlington residents. Brandon has since begun producing and hosting the Breaking Boundaries program on WERA-LP, an advocacy program for the disabled. The show airs on Mondays at 4:00 p.m. on 96.7 FM and is in its second year. Brandon joins us to share his story of self-discovery and higher purpose, and to challenge us in how we see, interact with, and serve the disabled.

We say goodbye to our friend and co-host of The Frontside Podcast, Brandon Hays. Brandon Hays: @tehviking | blog Transcript: BRANDON: Hello, everybody and welcome to Frontside Podcast Episode 48. It is a podcast, as you can tell from the intro music, about woodworking and dads and dads working with wood. CHARLES: And power washing wood. BRANDON: Yes and power washing, sanding decks. Today, we'll be talking about the difference between mortise and tenon joints and dovetail joints and when it's worth going through the extra effort for that dovetail. Our guest today is Charles Lowell, woodworking expert. CHARLES: Hi, Brandon. BRANDON: Hi. I think I've never heard anybody acknowledge the fact that there's new music in the intro. I don't know if that has been publicly acknowledged in the podcast yet. But I was on the selection committee for that music and we had many options and we went with the one that sounded most appropriate for, I don't know, a woodworking show on PBS but I like it. CHARLES: I like PBS. I like woodworking. I like the music too and the best part is I didn't have to choose it. I just had to promise to make music myself for 50 weeks running. BRANDON: It was about 150 weeks. CHARLES: About 150 weeks. BRANDON: Yeah. Charles, we are here in the new Frontside HQ, which is sort of still under construction. It's kind of cool, though. It's a different space. I haven't been here much so it doesn't feel like home to me yet, I don't know if it does to you yet. CHARLES: It's beginning. It's still unfinished in many ways. It's not painted. We just kind of have the bare minimum for survival. The kitchen is stocked, there's coffee in the cabinets, the grinder is set up, the bar is set up, the wall sockets are set up, and the wireless router is set up. BRANDON: Home is where the vermouth is. [Laughter] CHARLES: And cavernous is really the word to describe it. BRANDON: This is a shop that's clearly set up for a version of the Frontside that does not yet exist and it's interesting to see current day Frontside in a space that is clearly marked for a future version of this. CHARLES: Yeah, you feel small walking in. There are not enough people to fill all the seats that we have in here. BRANDON: Which is kind of cool. I don't know if you recall, maybe we'll save that discussion for later but there was a prior iteration of this company where that was very much the same thing. So it's kind of cool, like a little bit of an emotional journey to see this process start over again. CHARLES: Yeah, it is definitely a new space and it's a new era. BRANDON: Yeah, for you. Not for me. [Laughter] BRANDON: You guys can go right to hell. CHARLES: Well, it is a new era for you too. BRANDON: Yeah, that's true -- a new era of fun-employment. We wanted to do one final 'dadcast' because basically, as of officially 10 days ago or so, I no longer work at the Frontside and I've had people ask me and I was like, "I don't want to talk about it." And so, I think it's probably time that we -- I don't want to belabor it. Nobody handed me a card when I quit as the co-founder of the Frontside that said, "You are officially invited now to Medium.com to write a think piece about my incredible journey." CHARLES: [Laughs] You'll get that in the mail. BRANDON: Okay. It may be sent to my old address. It's sent to our old office, which is the problem. It's lost in the mail. So yeah, instead I'm going to do my incredible journey podcast and really just regale everyone with stories of what an incredible, incredible journey it's been -- truly incredible. CHARLES: Don't leave out the travelling with the fish and the cat, and like a little pug dog. You know like all those incredible journey stories when we were kids. BRANDON: Yeah, like Homeward Bound. CHARLES: Yeah, there you go. BRANDON: I think it is like Homeward Bound. CHARLES: That time that you fell into the water with the kitten, that was adorable. BRANDON: I don't know where I'm stealing this joke from but there is an Incredible Journey sequel with a squid and a cow, truly the most unlikely of friends. [Laughter] BRANDON: Here we are giving my swan song on this podcast. I've actually actively took a month off to think about basically to try to recuperate and think about like, "Is this something that I can continue to do." I purposely took off from the podcast which was agony because I so wanted to have those conversations that you all did with Noel, and with Yehuda, and with Sarah. They turned out really good. I'm so happy with the result of stepping back and realizing, "Wait a minute, I think I'm redundant." CHARLES: It was your idea to create the podcast, in the first place and the podcast has been infused with your personality. Even on the episodes where you weren't present, like you were behind the scenes, arranging it, making sure that it all happened. I can understand like missing that part of it. It really was like your baby, so to speak. BRANDON: What's cool and agonizing is first off, I want to acknowledge that talking about a podcast that you're on while you're on the podcast actually should cause the podcast to collapse in on itself in a recursive loop. CHARLES: You're witnessing a podcast singularity. BRANDON: Then I'm commenting about the fact that we're commenting on the podcast on the podcast. So before we jump into a stack level too deep, I just want to acknowledge that I've had this experience before where I've stepped down as an organizer or a maintainer of something and I've watched the project get better as a result of me leaving. The biggest fear a person has when they step away from something like this is that the thing will collapse as a result of them leaving. The second big biggest fear is that it will not collapse as a result of you leaving. CHARLES: [Laughs] BRANDON: It's sort of like, "Oh yeah. Okay, well, you know..." And the amazing thing is watching it get better. It feels a little guilty like, "Why did I let go of the steering wheel of this thing sooner so that..." Yes, the podcast was definitely my baby and I took care of everything and then I realized so much of that work, there are people that are actually better at this than me. When we brought Mandy Moore in to help with the editing and then organizing and she's taking a bigger, mega-role in all that stuff, she does a way better job than I did. I think that's true of anybody who does a bunch of things and that means, if you are the founder of a company, that's you. You do a bunch of things if you are a founding member of a small organization. As you start letting those go, you find that there are people that like doing the stuff that you don't like to do or are better at the stuff that you do like to do. It's always an interesting, humbling process. Just that alone right there was sort of the lesson I took out of it was that letting go is something can actually improve it. CHARLES: That's actually, I think, critical to the process whether it's open source, whether it's a company, whether it's some side project that you have. There's a phase where -- and really, I guess it applies to the whole start up cycle in of itself, right? There's a phase where you do have to do everything. But then at a certain point, the critical path is you do not do those things. BRANDON: It's before you think it's going to be too, so you always feel like there's always a leap of faith you have to take to say, "I think it's time for me to hand this off and pay somebody else to do something that I've learned to survive doing." And it's before you're comfortable letting go of that thing. And so, people that are uncomfortable letting go of stuff will just hold on to everything forever because there's no clear point where you just point at that and go, "This is the time to let that go." It feels natural. It's time. It's like your kids' first day at school. You're going to cry. They're going to cry and then everything's going to be okay. That was one big thing. Actually, it's kind of linked to why I left in the first place, which is I have historically been so bad at that skill. I have not exercised the muscle of letting things go and it doesn't feel ever appropriate to let things go. So I just took on more and more physical and emotional work and tried to cover more and more bases and did so like borderline adequately in all these different areas to where I just really burned myself out to the point where I couldn't get up and go to work in the morning anymore. I think anybody can relate to this feeling of getting up and being like, "Please don't make me do this again. I don't want to get up." It's like getting up and driving to a place where you eat dirt all day. CHARLES: That's a division of the Frontside. BRANDON: And you're like -- CHARLES: Eating dirt. BRANDON: You know what? It's okay but I had that yesterday. CHARLES: Yeah, it was hard to watch especially like standing right next to you and seeing that process unfold month to month and then compound over the years. BRANDON: Yeah, 'Hard to Watch' is the title of the lifetime movie of my life. [Laughter] CHARLES: Also, I believe it's the title of a Steven Seagal movie from the early 90's. BRANDON: It was a Steven Seagal documentary about getting his hair plugs. [Laughter] BRANDON: "I'll take you to the bank, the hair plug bank." CHARLES: Oh, you beat me to the punch. That's the exact joke that I was going to make. BRANDON: I did it. "I'll take you to the bank, senator." CHARLES: What am I going to do? I guess, I have to carry the torch of early and late 90's movie references around here. You just got to let that fart go. BRANDON: Yeah, there is a dearth of the 40-year old contingent here. Yeah, in the process, I learned a lot of stuff. But the problem was that it was too late to fix it in a way that felt super repairable so it was too late to try to like, "Okay, we'll just make these small tweaks and your life will get better. Okay, let these things go." I was advised by several people like, "Hey, man. You should totally see this thing through. The Frontside is right on the cusp. It's just having its breakthrough moment. The business is doing really well. The employees here are fantastic. Everything is just kind of teed up for 2017 being a banner year." And I just went, "Yeah, but it doesn't matter like how awesome the next city is if you broke down on the side of the road, out of gas." CHARLES: Right. There's a certain point where it doesn't matter if there's more water coming down onto your bucket, like your bucket is full, the bucket is full and it's just the fact. BRANDON: Yep. I'm fortunate to be able to take a little bit of time to think about what's next. I don't think there's much more to say about that aspect of it than that. It is not complicated. People burning themselves out is a thing that happens all the time particularly among founders. There's usually a recovery period and usually they get back on their feet. It's a bummer because I love the people here but I knew I couldn't do it anymore. There may be people with Psychology degree who is listening to this and they are like, "No, no, no. there's plenty more to say about your stupid brain." That's all I've got. It's just I kind of ran out of gas. I stepped away about six weeks ago and you all are doing amazing work, you're in this awesome new space. I don't know... There are a couple things I wanted to talk about. One of them being maybe do a little bit of a retrospective about -- CHARLES: Yeah, let's wind back the clock. Do you want to have a flashback? BRANDON: Let's have a flashback. CHARLES: All right. You actually joined on, was it September of 2013? BRANDON: And we had been talking for about six months before that. Potentially longer but it was really like we started talking in earnest in early 2013. CHARLES: Yeah, it was a long process, like everything we do. It's painfully slow sometimes but that process, by which we came together to try and really do something special unfolded over a long time because there was a lot to talk about. There were so many conversations, meet-ups after meet-ups, phone calls, and just like discussing what would it look like, what are we trying to accomplish. At that time, we're really very focused on pinning down like, "What are we going to do here?" But that was what the focus was. We were talking about the details of how we're going to make it run, who we're going to hire, all that stuff. It was all about what is the purpose of this. It turns out that a lot of people give that short trip but it can be and should be a conversation that takes six months. BRANDON: I don't think I've really acknowledged this too much. But I didn't really have a purpose at the time. I just wanted a shot at trying to build something. Eventually, I knew that if I didn't take it, I would regret it. I found your vision very compelling. You had a vision from the minute we walked through your space. All that was in it was a ping pong table and in the corner, you crammed yourself an intern. At one point, two interns and you were all crammed into one corner room of this big office for some reason. CHARLES: Underneath a marionette. BRANDON: Yes. CHARLES: A marionette from Mexico. BRANDON: Yeah, from Juarez or something and I had you walk me through the space and you're like, "I have a really clear picture in my mind of what's going to happen here." You probably can describe it better than I can. It was like, "Over here..." CHARLES: I actually want to hear you say it. BRANDON: I don't remember this, maybe but -- CHARLES: I do. I remember it very vividly but I'm actually -- BRANDON: Okay, so I remember you walked me through the space and you were like, "Over here, I see two people pairing on a really hard problem. Over here, I see somebody writing open source software. Over here, I see somebody writing documentation for some open source program." You had this really compelling vision of like a beehive of activity around collaborative, open source oriented, good engineering work that grew developers into great developers. It was super clear in your mind that there was a way to do this that what you needed was an engine of growth to hook that vision up to. And I was like, "I've never done this before. But I'd sure give it a shot." CHARLES: Yeah, and the thing is part of what was missing was this understanding that to make all of those things happen, to build that great software, and give engineers the chance to really grow into that role of producing that good software, that you need so much focus on that growth pattern and to foster. You can't just say like, "We're going to adhere to these engineering practices," and boom! Voila! Out of the mix will just pop great engineers. BRANDON: There's a tremendous amount of intentionality in the process of doing that side of it and then there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure underneath that to create. That was the part I think, we both underestimated was how much infrastructure work you and I would have to do over the ensuing few years. But you cannot let go of that vision because if it's all infrastructure, then congratulations. You have a business that makes money and has no reason to exist. Nothing is a bigger turnoff to potential employees in a hard to recruit industry like software development than like, "Show up and we'll pay you." I have a lot of those opportunities. Thank you. So, it was never that. We would rather pack up and go home than that happen. It was always driven by, "If we can't make the kind of place that we want to work, then we should just shut it down." CHARLES: That's definitely was a mantra and it's hard too because in order to make that place, you have to earn that right which means ultimately, you have to have a solid business. You have to take in more money than you spend. BRANDON: I don't want to sugarcoat the initial because we needed money in the beginning anyway. So my first three or four months here was drowning in -- like I showed up on the client and they're like, "Oh, good. You're the Rails expert." And I was like, "I've been a professional programmer for OO for like 14 months." I had worked really hard and studied really hard and I was able to perform job duties. But I was like, "I didn't come here to be a Rails expert." CHARLES: Yeah, but also what was interesting is they wanted you to be a Rails expert. I think I might have sold you as a Rails expert. BRANDON: Yeah. [Laughter] CHARLES: But the thing is as you came in, with an uncanny ability to wrap your hand around what they actually needed so you are probably an expert. While there was the implementation side, I think one of the best things that we brought to that project was focusing on the code that we didn't need to write and only writing those pieces which were critical. But yeah, so you came in for the first, about four months? BRANDON: Yeah, between four and six months. It was September to like January, February. CHARLES: Right. You've got to be the Rails expert in order to have a business so that you can actually play these things out. BRANDON: Yep. And I remember thinking, before I came on I was like, "I want to run a business but here's the stuff that terrifies me -- I don't know how to set up QuickBooks. I don't know how to set up payroll. I don't know how to sell a client. I don't know how to even find clients." And you're like, "I have all of that stuff set up already." So when people are like, "Wow, how did you get the guts together to start a business?" I'm like, "I didn't. I totally [inaudible] one. CHARLES: Well, the thing is you have to start a business at multiple phases, right? I had a business running that could adequately support four people. But then, obviously, we ended up growing and we ended up growing beyond four people. Then the infrastructure of the place, alarmingly, became inadequate so we didn't have to build from the beginning. BRANDON: Another thing that is difficult to learn in business is like it's a truism that is so often repeated that has become trite, which is the things that got you to where you are, are not the things that are going to get you where you want to go. It's trite because it's also not always true, like having a vision is permanent. I was describing this to somebody. Basically, the Frontside policies for a long time were very much like a startup, where people go, "You do the laziest version of whatever you can do in a certain area," so HR practices are lazy. "Hey, we don't have HR people." And then you pat yourself on the back for being a laid back work environment. [Laughter] BRANDON: We're really laid back. We don't have any policies or procedures or payroll? Hang on, hang on. Too laid back. CHARLES: We take a relax policy for vacation. We don't have any. BRANDON: Yeah, you either do or don't go. We don't know. We don't care. That vacation policy of like not having a policy, turns out the laziest form of that winds up being harmful to the people that work there. So we had to discover a lot of the stuff the hard way and start designing and crafting the experience of working here. CHARLES: The thing is that part becomes difficult, like having a clear vision and an idea of what it is that you want to accomplish with this company, it puts you in chains. I don't want to say bad but basically, what it does is it sets very hard parameters on actions that you can take in the things and the practices that you can engage in. It is a good thing but it can feel like you're being squeezed by your own parameters at times. BRANDON: Yeah, I think you and I in the past have called that 'value death', where we had all these values and we started the company as a manifestation of these values where other people may start a company as a manifestation of a business model. CHARLES: Right. BRANDON: It sounds pretty awesome. CHARLES: It does sound pretty awesome. But a concrete example of that is our health plan. We want a place where people feel secure in their living situation so we want to pay them a fair market rate and what benefits we do offer if we want to make sure that they're second to none, that is a really, really expensive value to have. BRANDON: A lot of places will buy that value back out of profit and we want it back out of our first dollar. CHARLES: Right, so it's hard then because it really puts you and the tradeoff is you have a lot less flexibility when it comes to your finances and you see that again and again. BRANDON: I talked to other people that ran businesses in the other direction. When they started with a business plan and a business model, then layered values on top as they were able to afford them. I was like, "Man, that's such a better strategy." And they're like, "No. it's just as painful," because now every time you add a value, you watch it take away the business that you've built. So it's almost the same emotional work, if not more, to try to layer and add those things on top as you go along because you watch your business become less and less of what it was and every time you do it, it feels like you're risking your business. So by absorbing a lot of that risk upfront and defining what we wanted, we actually kind of like we didn't have to move the stake in the ground. It was already planted there and we just had to figure out how to build the business around that. I never recognized that as a tradeoff because it's always like grass is greener over there. CHARLES: It's true and I don't bring it up like a complaint because I don't have any regrets. BRANDON: I got regrets all over the place. [Laughter] CHARLES: I don't have any regret for doing it that way, in the sense that maybe it's just because I have to compare everything to the way that we write software or maybe I just think about software too much. But it really is the outside in paradigm, right? You start from your intentions, your purpose and the system that you want to have and then you infer the processes and tactics that are required to realize that and make it real. BRANDON: As long as it's not crystalline and you can adapt it, then that's a great strategy. CHARLES: Yeah, but when you set those lofty goals, it means that the implications for the infrastructure are bigger than either one of us estimated. BRANDON: Vastly so. And you're right that we didn't quite grasp the costs associated with embracing those things. One of the costs is it requires a lot of thought. It requires a lot of time to manage and it requires defining processes. It just requires a lot of like mental and time overhead that goes into, and then financial overhead that goes into managing all these things that we really cared about. That collected together, we said, "This is who we are." And we've had to back off of a couple of them because we got in over our heads on, "Hey, we're going to try to reinvent apprenticeship." Instead of doing exactly what other people are doing, I know that 8th Light takes a year to design their apprenticeship and it takes about eight people. They weren't able to even take their first apprentice until they hit eight or nine people so they had enough infrastructure of support underneath that apprentice. Instead of learning from them, why don't we just do exactly whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it because we've met a really cool person and experienced a lot of pain at trying to reinvent things that exist elsewhere, instead of trying to look at what else is out there? Again, this is not by way of regret. This is just one of those things that people do when they have their own thing is they feel like, "Okay, I'm going to do it different," and then they realize why other people all do it the same. CHARLES: Yeah, and I certainly learned like you have to stick strong to your principles but make sure that they're within scope. You know, make sure that be aware that for every value you hold that sits at the top of the pyramid and there's a whole base that needs to support that value. So by all means, hold the value but be aware that's the top of the cone and you have to account for the volume of the rest of it. BRANDON: It comes back to like how closely does this align with your vision of where this thing is going and why. Like, "This is going to allow us to recruit. This is going to put us in a situation where 12 months from now, we've got more senior engineers to help mentor the mid and junior level engineers." And being able to play that really long game is key and it's really difficult and requires patience that I had never possessed in my life before this. CHARLES: You are an enigma in that sense and that you're both impatient yet incredibly patient. BRANDON: Anything that I have that looks like patience is 100% fake. [Laughter] BRANDON: I will put myself in a situation where I can't have the thing that I want to do right now on purpose because if it was up to me, I would have every stupid trinket and gadget the minute like -- CHARLES: Man, I got my eye on a drone right now. BRANDON: Yeah? CHARLES: Yeah. I'm taking it a little bit of Charles to Charles. But yeah, I see what you mean. BRANDON: But you learn the law of the harvest which is you have to plant the seeds. If you cannot, there's no such thing as impatiently getting the return of the values that you want to instill. CHARLES: For me, I don't view patience as a personality trait. I view patience as a behavior. BRANDON: Yeah, it's a muscle that you learn to exercise. CHARLES: Yeah, it's a muscle. It is about impulse like understanding. You said it best -- the law of the harvest that you plant the seeds and you wait and you will get corn or wheat or pumpkins or whatever it is that you harvest and like dance under the moon or whatever. BRANDON: Obviously, pumpkins. I guess you figured out my plan now is to live out to a farm. It's Decorative Gourd Season. CHARLES: This is G-rated podcast. BRANDON: Yeah, all right. Yeah. I want to kind of pivot the discussion with the few minutes that we have left. I want to talk about because it's fun kind of reminiscing about how we got together. Before we pivot to where the Frontside is going, I want to talk about why this partnership worked. There were a couple things wrong with it. Namely, that you and I are both big picture people. My strong recommendation to people that are like, "I need a partner for my business. Cool. Make sure one person is big picture and one person is more detail-oriented," because somebody is going to have to fill that gap and handle details and you'll both hate it if you're both one or the other. But barring that, I would say this is one of my favorite partnerships I've seen in our business, in our industry. I'm very lucky to have participated in it. So I want to talk about a couple of things that have worked well with that. I think the most important thing in any relationship or particularly business relationship is trust. That sounds obvious and stupid but you don't understand how hard that is to maintain because so much is at stake. You're going to have differences of opinion. You're going to have differences of priority. There's going to be money involved, sometimes large amounts of money and that makes enemies of people really quickly. Our relationship of trust has been founded on six months sussing each other out for the fact when like I recognized this the minute I met you but it took six months to confirm that you were going to be the kind of partner that put my needs above yours and I need that because I'm going to be the kind of partner that tries to put your needs above mine. So when two people are striving to do that, you're going to have a solid foundation for a partnership and everything else is secondary. You hope that they have the right skill sets and you hope they have the right other personality traits. But the ability to put the other person's needs above your own, on both sides of that exchange is like with a bullet, to me the most important piece of this. First off, thanks for continuing to be that kind of person, as I've bowed out, that has not changed one wit and even the conversations we've had. I have a few other things but I'm going to bounce it over to you to talk about stuff that makes a partnership work in your experience. CHARLES: I think having that trusting relationship absolutely is the cement in the foundation. Throughout all of this, for example, it did not come to me as a surprise that you were burnt out on this work. I was able to be there the whole time and we were having very honest and very candid conversations about this throughout the entire course. While you did mentioned that we're both very high-level, big picture thinkers and you do want to have someone who is very detail-oriented to make sure that the operations are going to happen, I think that it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have two big picture people who approach a problem from two radically different perspectives. I think your mind works very differently than mine and I really appreciate the way that your mind works. It was always so wonderful to be able to attack a problem. I'm thinking in terms of pairing sessions, in terms of when we were selling something or presenting to a client together, when we were doing trainings, being able to recognize that this person is grappling with the exact same problem than I am and they're bringing a completely different skill set and they are pushing the ball forward using a set of moves that I actually don't even possess. Yet we're focused on the same goal and both even find the process of pushing it forward like enjoyable. I know there have been so many times over the course of this time, this last three years. Even quite recently, I think the last time this happened was when we were interviewing a candidate and it was like you were talking to one of the candidates and kind of explaining who you were and what it would be like to work here. I was like, "Wow, I just really appreciate your mind." Almost like if I could take your mind and hang it on a wall. I know it sounds kind of like Hannibal Lecter. BRANDON: That's super creepy. CHARLES: Yeah, I know. [Laughter] BRANDON: You're like Sylar from the first season of Heroes. CHARLES: Yeah, I was like, "Should I go for it?" Yeah. So let's go there. No, but really, I do. I really have an admiration for the way that you approach things. I don't know, it's just I feel like it's very rare to meet somebody that you have such a strong values alignment with and you get along so personally with and their tactics are completely and totally different than your own. Oh, not totally different, right? BRANDON: Yeah, different enough. CHARLES: The angle of approach. BRANDON: Yep. I loved that I wrote down a blog post about what constitutes a senior developer and at no point did I have any evaluatable technical criteria because that is how my mind works, because I don't care about that. People were like, "What sort of evaluatable technical criteria do you use?" And I was like, "I don't know. That's Charles' territory." And then you did that podcast with it and I just sat there and I re-listened to that a couple times actually as I was writing my conference talk about because it's actually really important to develop those and it's really important to have the signifiers that you have developed those. I couldn't have done any part of this without you. So I will always be deeply, deeply grateful for the fact that you saw something in me that you kind of gave me the shot that I was waiting for somebody to give me, which is weird. Like I was waiting for somebody to ask me to come and found a company with them then you did. That doesn't happen. I don't recommend to people to sit around and wait for the perfect partner to come along and ask them to co-found a company. I think what I learned through the process of all of this is, "Go ahead and be bold and do that." The rest of that is that stuff but do find a partner that you can have that level of trust with and don't settle for one that you can't, that would be like all the horror stories I know in business. CHARLES: I cannot even imagine. BRANDON: I've seen it and it's really sad. When you said it wasn't a surprise to you that I was burned out is because we had such a deep relationship of trust that when we finally started having one-on-ones, I was able to confide everything in you because I knew that you would take that information in the right context. You could be trusted with the raw part of my feelings. The fact that I was scared, the fact that I was frustrated and you wouldn't turn that into either a weapon or you wouldn't turn it into something that made you like me less or trust me less. I just could always trust you that I could tell you unvarnished truth. CHARLES: Yeah, that's certainly when you talk about lessons learned, that's actually a very personal lesson that I took away from this experience. And really this relationship is something that you show is like you can give somebody very direct, very frank feedback and how it is received and how it affects the relationship going forward has everything to do with your emotional intent towards that person. So if you are coming from a place of love, you almost have a free reign of the things that you can say because you're just stating facts and people know that there is that love in there. BRANDON: Charles, I love you but you have cream corn on your face. [Laughter] CHARLES: But it's true that you can get the same feedback from someone who is trying to use that as a weapon and trying to make you flinch. It doesn't even have to be malevolence. It can just be -- BRANDON: Indifference? CHARLES: Indifference but it makes all the difference. So I always try and replicate that with the other relationships in my life, with varying degrees of success but I learned that here. That's a very personal but very powerful lesson that I took away in having experienced that first hand. While we're talking about different skills and different lessons learned and very personal lessons learned, another thing that I took away from here, I said I always like to bring things down to the concrete. I feel like obstructions are dangerous. BRANDON: Yeah, they could obscure your intent. CHARLES: Exactly. So when I say like, "I really appreciate your mind," one of the things that I like is when you're talking, you paint a very clear picture, like your analogies and your metaphors. They're just always on point and you're always able to relate, whether it's we're doing something with software, whether it's an interview, whether it's designing one of our business processes, always able to paint a very clear picture and tell a very compelling story around why it should be that way. So it is focused me that I feel like I've been able to grow as a communicator and really kind of perceive that communication is really the one true best practice, so to speak, and making clear so that you can build consensus around people who are trying to cooperate to do something. It's affected the way that we write pull requests, making sure that you're laying out the facts in the order in which they should be. It means that if you want to accomplish something, you're going to have to convince people that it's worth doing and that is the key thing. Sometimes you can convince them with code but not always. BRANDON: It is a lever that can give you leverage when you're trying to make a point. But you have to recognize it for what it is. It's just an additional lever. CHARLES: Right. BRANDON: All right. Well, as we continue this, I'll volley back one more thing and then I want to ask you about the future of the Frontside. I kid you not. I think I'm actually going to do this. I'm going to change my iPhone lock screen to say, "Is this something Charles would say?" I've told multiple people this so I apologize if I've said this on the podcast before but we were partners for three years, which is as intense a relationship as marriage, if not more so. In those three years, you have said nothing that could even be construed or misconstrued to me as unkind. Not even neutral. Just kind, like inquisitive kind, caring, and the reverse is not 100% true. I don't have anything that I sit around and regret. But I want to thank you for giving me a standard of kindness that I can hold no other people to but I will try to hold myself to. You have made me a better person as a result of our time working together and that you just the deep, deep example of human kindness and thoughtfulness in your approach to the way that you communicate with people. I just want to thank you for all the things that I've learned here, other than my own ability to kind of make my own way in the world which I did not have before this company. The other big thing as an example of this is the kind of kindness that a person four decades into their life can continue to have, the lack of cynicism, the lack of snideness, the lack of anything resembling superiority, so I just want to thank you for that. Thanks for being such a wonderful person. I assume that's inborn and cultivated. I love you so much. So let me shift the topic in our last few minutes here and ask because I'm curious and I'm sure people will be curious. Let me phrase it this way. We walked around a big empty building and said, "Oh, I see this over here. I see this over here. This is going to be a great place where people are encouraging each other and growing as developers." Has anything changed as you're in this new building and walk around in a big empty space that doesn't have enough people in to fill it? And is anything changed as your vision for the Frontside, like I know you're hiring a salesperson and there are a couple watershed moments. CHARLES: Absolutely, and I think this is a watershed moment. I think tying it back to where we were when you came on. It was basically you and me are the two full-time employees. We had this company. We had this idea. We had this dream and we were able to, I think, realize that dream to a large extent. There were people pairing and it was right next to me this morning and I was listening into the conversation and I was not even a part of it. My heart's desire was to jump in the middle of it and get right in there because it sounded like such a fun conversation to have. But I held back and I just listened to it and appreciate it. For all of the wonderful knowledge and value that was being generated right before my very eyes, like it very much was a realization. I think of those dreams that we had back in 2013. In order to make that happen, we had to grow this company beyond just you and me. Now, we were up to almost nine people. I think, with you leaving, we're going to back to seven because we're going to bring, like you mentioned, a salesperson. So there was definitely a couple of phases of growth. We've talked about this on a previous podcast but we kind of had another watershed moment back in March where we realized, “Wait a second. We've cowboy-coding our business. We need to actually write tests, we need to write documentation, we need to shore up these internal structures to make sure that this vision is financially viable and sustainable.” And so we did that. I think that I want to actually like call out and say like, "I don't see that I could have done that without you. That's been the story of this place for the last six months. It is a fundamental transformation of how this company operates. You know just as well as I do that those changes that we put in place, those checks and those parameters and those processes had a profound impact on the viability of this company. But in the process, it also like it did. It burned you out. I think that this last six months and this last year in particular, were incredibly hard. So the next question and part of the problem was that you and I were kind of the single points of failure in that system. We stop cowboy-coding, we put in these checks, we put in the balances, we put in these measurements but we still had a system that had these two single points of failure. I'm not going to lie with your departure that is going to put a lot of stress on the company but it begs the question now, "Is a company that has one point of single point of failure a viable company?" So for me, I don't think the vision has changed that much. I still want to be a place where great engineering happens and where there is a space where engineers or people can come in and grow to be great engineers. But the thing is the change that I want to make is scalable. It needs to be distributed so the changes that we're making right now, the air that is beginning now is going to be introducing scalability so that I can exit or I am not necessary and the people who are here, whether it's eight people, 10 people, 20 people, they can continue this process and live under the umbrella of that vision without there being any one that's critical to success of the entire network. That's what I see coming and that's where I'm focusing all of my energy. BRANDON: Well, I'm excited to see what happens with it. Not excited to show up here to work anymore. [Laughter] CHARLES: But you got to come by and podcast. BRANDON: Every once in a while. CHARLES: Every once in a while. BRANDON: All right. I really love this place and what it stands for. Not just because I got to help define it. It's sort of like everybody loves their own kids. But I think even if this was somebody else's kid, I would love and admire this company because it has stood on principles that are hard to stand on. It's done things that are harder than just getting a business up and running and it survived, which says a lot. I ran out of tenacity juice but it doesn't mean this company has and I'm really grateful to have had a great co-founder that made that possible. It made me feel like I was capable of more than I felt like I was capable before I came here. So this has been a tremendously life altering experience for me. Because of your willingness to give me a shot to risk your business on this guy that you just felt like, "I like this person. I like [inaudible] together." CHARLES: Don't sell yourself short. You shine and you burn brightly. That's apparent to anybody who stands in proximity. BRANDON: Well, thank you and I am so grateful for having had this opportunity. I hope I can use you as a reference. [Laughter] CHARLES: "To whom it may concern..." [Laughter] BRANDON: I guess my wife is like, "Are you going to get a job?" And I was like, "I don't know." CHARLES: I promise not to [inaudible] you on the internet. BRANDON: Yeah, that's the best I can hope for. Charles, this has been really great. I appreciate getting to do this with you. I will miss these 'dadcasts'. CHARLES: I will miss them too. BRANDON: I wonder if anybody listening doesn't know what those mean. Let me reiterate the story. We obviously didn't talk about being dads. But we totally are dads. Stanley, when he used to work here would call the podcast, with just me and Charles, 'dadcast' so that stuck. The problem is if we started a side podcast called 'Dadcast', people would expect us to talk about dad stuff and we're not going to do that pretty much. CHARLES: Yeah, no. It really has stuck, It's like, "So, what's the format of the podcast this week. Is it going to be a dadcast?" [Laughter] CHARLES: "Or should we try, you know, organize a panel." BRANDON: I've heard from other people are like, "When are you going to do another dadcast?" [Laughter] BRANDON: So the answer now is '???' but we'll figure it out. CHARLES: Yeah, we'll figure something out. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. You all are moving to weekly, which is a pretty big deal. Maybe, we'll be able to slip one of those in there in a few months. CHARLES: We're definitely thinking about taking our podcast game up to the next level. We had Mandy, actually came to Austin last week and we ran over a bunch of different options. So yeah, we're thinking about going weekly and I'm actually pretty excited about the content of the podcast. But it's going to be distributed. It's going to be a lot more people doing a lot more stuff. BRANDON: I love that you're removing a single point of failure thing because I think a lot of what my inability or unwillingness to do that was part of what contributed to my burnout, which is obviously not a great way to run your business, to burn yourself out of being able to go back in. I'm glad that you're doing that and I'm excited to see where the Frontside goes. So Charles, thank you for letting me come on for one last show here. CHARLES: Yeah. Well thank you, Brandon. When I think about the future and you can take this as one last contribution, I feel like this is somewhat of a daunting task but I actually take solace in the fearlessness that you've given me, in the sense that I've seen you be fearless in learning Emacs. I've seen you be fearless and having really hard conversations with clients and be fearless in having those same hard conversations with our own employees that we see every day and just watching you operate gives me knowledge, just in the sense of an incontrovertible fact that, "Yes, I can do this and I can try." And so thank you for that. Thank you for everything that you've done over the last three years. BRANDON: I love you, Charles. CHARLES: I love you too, man. BRANDON: Okay. All right. Everybody, please if you have questions for this podcast, send them in. It's the @frontside on Twitter and if you have any feedback, it'd be really awesome if you leave an iTunes review on iTunes that helps people find the Frontside podcast and share with people. Tell them that I won't wreck future ones as best as I can. I won't interject and remove the opportunity to listen to cool guest that you have coming up. Anyway, thanks everybody for listening. And Charles, thank you for being a friend. CHARLES: [Singing] You have a friend and a confidant... and you know what? BOTH: [Singing] And if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew. You would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say: THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND!

Recently, there was a flurry of activity around one of Brandon's posts about defining the term "senior developer". But he left the purely technical aspects of the role for later discussion, which left a lot of lingering questions. In this episode, Charles and Brandon dive into the technical side of identifying, hiring, and growing senior developers, and explain The Frontside's somewhat unconventional standards. Links: The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development Don't use animal names as an insult Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to the Frontside Podcast, Episode 41. I am your host, Charles Lowell. With me is our other host, Brandon Hays. BRANDON: Hi, welcome back. It's been too long. It's been one week since you looked at me. CHARLES: And we were actually talking right before the start off that we don't have any witty banter prepared for this episode. BRANDON: Also, you just drop that hot Barenaked Ladies reference right on the floor, like an apple pie upside down. CHARLES: Right, you got to prep me for that. BRANDON: You're like, "Nope. Pass." [Laughter] CHARLES: Like I said, you got to prep me for that. BRANDON: "In Second 7, I'm going to drop a Barenaked Ladies reference." I'm going to send you three or four music videos. I did send you one that you didn't have time to watch about don't use animal names as an insult. When you say, you're not going to be able to riff off me on that one just yet either, but yeah, I respect you and I respect dogs so don't use dog as an insult. [Laughter] CHARLES: Is that 'They Might Be Giants'? BRANDON: It is not They Might Be Giants. It is three vegan randoes on YouTube. CHARLES: Is that the name of the band or is that just the content of the band? BRANDON: No, they're just three vegan randoes on YouTube. CHARLES: Okay, three vegan randoes is a pretty good band name. BRANDON: You'll immediately know they're from Portland so you could really pick a lot out of that from just the name of the band. We want to tight 30 today. We don't let people behind the curtain very much, Charles, where people don't see what it is that you and I do behind the scenes. But one of those things that we do is sometimes we will record a podcast and throw it in the garbage because we hate it, and this is actually one of them. You and I sat down and recorded this podcast before. Just like the hot apple pie Barenaked Ladies reference that I served you earlier, we just dumped it right in the garbage. We did not like the way that it tasted. We did not like its Barenaked Ladies references, and so this is our second attempt at this. Then the topic that we want to cover today is really important to us to not screw this up. So hopefully, we put a little more effort into preparing for this and thinking very deeply about this. The idea is that we want to understand from a technical perspective largely what it is that a senior developer is, what they do, how we can find them, how we sometimes miss that, and basically how we define a senior developer so that we can build that as a track for our people to grow toward and find the ones that want to come work with us and may self-identify a senior, how we can kind of verify that. That's the poorly defined topic in our industry, interestingly enough. CHARLES: Strange, because everybody seems to want that. BRANDON: Yeah, right. Everybody put it on their job descriptions. Anyway, I wrote a blog post about it. It did all the things that blog posts do when they sort of struck a nerve with the tech industry and they got posted around. I got called literal human feces on Reddit. CHARLES: Did they call you human feces or do they call you literal human feces? BRANDON: They said literal -- CHARLES: Did you literally get called literally human feces? BRANDON: I literally got called literal human feces. [Laughter] CHARLES: I shall wear it as a badge of honor. BRANDON: I was kind of like Ron Burgundy. I'm like, "I'm not even mad, I'm just impressed." [Laughter] CHARLES: People had some strong, strong, strong feelings about that. BRANDON: They did. So now, a skull in a cowboy hat and literal human feces are going to sit here and preach to you about what we think and how we're basically like willing to sink or basically, sink or swim for our business on this definition of senior developer because that actually is core to what it is that we're doing. I want to tee this up and then I'm going to let you just freakin' roll. I want to provide a little background. The cool thing is, I already wrote a blog post so I don't have to sit here and talk at your face about these things. I was going to tell you some additional thought I've had about this. But basically, the point of this blog post was that we generally categorize what it is to be senior developer in three broad categories that have a little bit of overlap. The three categories are technical skill, which is the one that people typically think about, evaluate for leadership and connectedness, which sounds all [inaudible] but the reality is it's actually very concrete and very important. The categories [inaudible] leadership is basically the idea that the more ownership you give someone over the broadest version of the problem you're trying to get them to solve, the better they perform. So if you give somebody a small task, they will maybe perform it. But if you give somebody ownership of the actual problem and the business problem that you're trying to solve or a user's pain point, they will find ways to solve that problem that you wouldn't have considered yourself. They will pull other people into their orbit to solve that thing. Basically, there's a sense of ownership and the experience they have in owning something all the way through to completion basically. Then, the technical skill one which we'll dive into in this podcast, that's what I want you to kind of drive the conversation around, is basically the idea that the more difficult a problem you hand somebody, the better they perform. A lot of times, that's due to experience, some of it is personality type, some of it is muscles that they like to exercise. Then, the last one is connectedness, which sounds like it's hard to define but it's actually the idea that the more people that are impacted and the more deeply people are impacted by somebody's participation in a task, the better that person performs. These people like to mentor, they like to be parts of communities, and they have a deep sense of empathy for the users that they build software for and the other developers that they're developing for alongside. CHARLES: Right, and I think that one of the reasons you got such a negative reaction, you kind of, I think, were assuming technical skill and then really kind of unpacking the leadership and the connectedness as absolutely key components to be what we consider a senior developer. So, kind of pointing out that especially from the leadership aspect, it's like you need to be a wholly-formed developer, you need to have those headlights on the car to see where it is that you're going and you can have a huge engine and like four-wheel drive and like big mud tires that can dig into any surface. But unless, you can actually see where you're going and perceive the problem holistically, those skills aren't going to be put to as good of a use. BRANDON: I think that's a good metaphor. The idea is that it's traction and direction in addition to the raw technical horsepower that you bring to the table. So pointing out and emphasizing these other areas, I think, made people - there was a lot of confusion. Some people reacted very positively to it like, "Oh my gosh, finally somebody understands that I bring more to the table than just my raw technical capability," especially people from -- CHARLES: I'm going to guess those were the people not in the literal human feces camp. BRANDON: Well, I didn't set up a Twitter poll or anything but I hope I can assume so. Then there were people that felt very strongly that I was overlooking technical skill. I was like, "No, no, no. That's a fair question. That's Charles's job here." And so that's why, at this point, I am going to drop kick this entire conversation into your side of the metaphorical foot game ball field. I think, football pitch. Pitch, right? Quidditch pitch. I'm going to drop kick the Quaffle into your side of the Quidditch pitch. CHARLES: Okay, all right. Well, let's unpack the technical skills that we look for. What we're looking for, I think, on the technical side, and this is going to seem obvious but what we're looking for is experience. We're looking for the quantity of experience and the quality of experience. We can roughly subdivide that into four key areas. First of all, what's the experience that you've developed around your curiosity? Maybe we should go and lay all these out. We look for curiosity. We look for rigor in your technical skill. We look for your ability and history for actually shipping things, and we look for you to be fearless when it comes to taking on new problems and sizing up the problems that you choose to attack. When we break down those experiences, if you are a curious person, you have been exposed to a lot of different technologies. So we're going to be looking for, you have an opinion on a bunch of different languages, a bunch of frameworks. We're going to want you to have tried a bunch of different things. We don't want you to have knocked your head against a lot of different problems, and then tried a lot of different solutions. That's going to be very indicative of your ability to bring a diversity of solutions to any given problem that you face. But it's not just the quantity of the experience that you develop. It's also like the quality. Like how much in the solutions that you develop are you looking to find the whole solution that fits your problem? How willing are you to do A-Grade work where you consider every corner case and you are willing to dedicate the CPU resources to find the best solution. Finally, what is the scope of problems that you're taking on? We've talked about the difference between quantity and quality of experience. You can make a career banging out WordPress apps. It's a great place to start but if you're doing it -- BRANDON: Or you can do a CRUD over and over again. CHARLES: Yeah, you could do CRUD over and over again. Like I said, that's a great place to start at the beginning of your career. But if 20 years on, that's what you're still doing, then you're going to have a lot of experience but is it going to be a high-quality experience? Are you actually taking on bigger and bigger problems, and is the scope of the things that you're tackling growing as you move throughout your career? BRANDON: It's interesting that's actually like fearlessness, that kind of technical fearlessness is actually a skill a person learns to practice. I was a very fearful developer a few years ago because I felt like if I charged into the bramble of a complex and thorny problem, that was going to cut me up and I die. It turns out, no, it just cuts you up real bad then you get back with thicker skin. And eventually you start going to the point where you start learning to tackle, you learn to take on things you don't understand because that's literally the job. CHARLES: I think it's important to point out that fearlessness is a skill. It is not a personality trait and it's something that you have to develop and you can actually take on problems that are too big for you at the given time and kind of have to know when it's time to step back from that. I know that's actually something that I even look for, anecdotally is asking a developer, "What are some of your greatest failures? What are the things where you took on way too much than you could chew? How did it make you fall down flat on your face?" Because that is an artifact and evidence that someone is practicing and taking on things that maybe are too big. Sometimes you're going to overshoot the mark. You know, you don't want to be taking on too little but one of the ways that you're going to do that is by accidentally taking on too much. And so I find that most people who have a senior level of experience have some big failure story. There's a skeleton in their closet of something they did wrong and they know that they can acknowledge that. I don't know. That's certainly how I feel about it. BRANDON: Yeah, I can agree with that. I guess you're saying you wrap all of those four things together like whether this person is willing to take on difficult problems, whether they actually complete them, whether they do them in a way that displays that they have enough experience to have kind of developed principles about how they approach stuff and whether they are continuously looking for new ways to approach problems. Like if you combine all of those things together is this like cool technical Voltron that exhibits a directed, focused kind of practice that over the course of 5 to 10 years yields basically a person that you can throw at any kind of technical problem and they will act like, I don't know, like nanobots just destroying that problem from the outside and until the problem doesn't exist anymore. It's thoroughly solved. CHARLES: Right. And I think that ties you to this propensity to ship. That's something that we look for. If this is a skill that you have, if you are at a senior level of experience, you will have a set of technical achievements that we can look at, that you have shipped and we can study them. Fantastically, as a happy coincidence you can see inside those things that a person has shipped. Are they rigorous? Are they curious and how fearless are they? What's the array of technologies? How unique are the solutions? How informed are they by different technologies and what is the scope of problem that you are trying to take on throughout the course of your career? So, having actual things that you have shipped whether it's products, whether it's libraries, whether it's open source, something like that, you want to be able to look at those and it is important. We don't rest everything on the GitHub. But I think at a senior level, you should have some equivalent that you can point to, public or otherwise. BRANDON: Yeah, there's some artifact that pops out of that, and if you made a career of 10 years and you come and say, "Hey, I have been doing this 10 years and I'm a very skilled senior developer but I can't show you anything." I understand that people will find themselves in situations like that but that's going to be, I think, the great exception of the rule. If you really don't have anything to show, it probably means there's some sort of practice, one of these traits that likely could use a little more exercise on that particular muscle, and that you've been leaning on compensatory muscles in other areas. So that's going to ding you in terms of like, how we evaluate somebody as whether they'll sync or not. And we're open to being surprised. Well, I should probably hopefully get to that before we end our podcast. CHARLES: I'd like to contrast it with what we look in, in a junior developer because it is very, very different. I think we've talked a lot about or there's a big conversation about, does passion matter in evaluating a candidate? I think passion is a word that's kind of fallen by the wayside but talk about maybe a less charged words like just caring deeply about a product or a solution or something like that. In a senior developer, to be quite honest, passion and caring is something that we expect to be there but it's not something that we look for because it's not something that we need to look for because if they do care about diversity with technologies, if they have this propensity to ship and they're taking on big problems, then that evidence will be there. So we're not looking for passion because it's either there or it's not. That's something that we look for more in a junior developer because we're going to be looking for that enthusiasm in the same way that you kind of track a hurricane. You don't know exactly what path it is but based on the weather patterns and the basic trajectory, you can find out essentially where it's going to end up. BRANDON: Yeah, I think there's a lot of talk in the industry about how passion, when people talk about looking for passion, what they're basically saying is we are looking to exploit people who are at the top part of their curve. When you look at how the undulations of a person's amount of passion over the course of their career, you have companies only want to clip off the top of that. As soon as you're not passionate anymore, you jettison that person. What we're looking for is somebody who's sort of stabilized that. So the passion part of it is like, "Oh, that's cool. The passion is in your past or it's in your present." But we understand that that is a sine wave and we're looking for the line in there that says, "Hey, sometimes I care more than I care about other times but the main thing is I produce things." Otherwise, instead of looking at as a sine wave of passion, you're like trying to exploit it at the top and then going, "Well, this is just going to keep going up and up and up," and you burn people out for that. Anyway, so it's not something we look for. It doesn't make sense. It's not sustainable and it's actually something that in a senior developer has stabilized enough that you're not going to see it. CHARLES: We look for, "Hey, here, we build things. So, if you're at the beginning of the career, are you following a path that will lead you to build good things and then at the end we're kind of towards the back half." We are looking at, "Hey, what are the things that you have built that are capable of building?" And that's the extent of it. I don't want to suck all the emotion out of it but the thing is that I want to suck the pressure out of it. BRANDON: Yeah, and the way that we try to assess that right now is we do this in a full day pairing interview. We do a lot of stuff that leads up to that and hopefully, the ancillary stuff we do around that helps gauge like, "Hey, this person is active in the community in some way, or they try to make contributions to people this way." We do our best to get a sense of the stuff that is not pure technical skill because delivery, it takes longer than a day. So, how well does this person deliver? How well do they work with other people? That stuff is very difficult to suss out in a day but you can generally get a sense of like technical experience capability. So I kind of want to focus on like during the course of the pairing interview, what it is that you're sussing out? How do you know a person in a pairing interview is exhibiting those technical leadership traits, technical skill traits? CHARLES: I'll beat this drum again. I'm looking for quantity and quality of experience. It comes down to little things. How comfortable is a person with their tool set and that demonstrates both the experience and you can tell if it's good experience or not. How comfortable are they with the command line? How comfortable are they with Git? Are they taking baby steps with it or they doing large motions in one kind of fell swoop? Like, how effortlessly is the muscle memory there? Whatever the tool set is, whether you're using iTerm, whether you're using C-shell or bash or whatever editor you're using, I do expect to see a familiarity that can only come through having done it again and again and again and again. So, if you're working with Git, for example, and you're kind of stumbling and stuttering at what commands to run or pausing, when you are parsing the output of a command if there's an error or something didn't go, what that says is either you don't have the experience which is most of the case or that has not been a priority in the experience that you do have. So there's like kind of a difference in the quantity and quality of experience. Some people move fast. Some people live slow but I want to say continuity that I'm looking for, in the same way that you can play a piano quickly, you can play it slowly but when people are missing notes, you can detect that. That's what I'm looking for, kind of with the tool sets. When someone is moving within a code base, I'm looking for confidence of motion. I remember an interview that we did recently where we were working in a code base. We're trying to get something running and this developer deleted like two directories at a time that caused like 10 files to be just missing from the code base. Just gone, at the stroke of a key. Then, we ran the test again, and lo and behold, like everything worked. Or the test that we were expecting to fail failed. BRANDON: Or was that the test directory? CHARLES: Sorry, what I meant was -- BRANDON: No, I know what you mean. They were comfortable enough in their understanding of the code base they were working in. CHARLES: Right. There was a high level. We were not down in the weeds. There's like you're applying very light pressure to the code base to make it move in gigantic swings so you understand the pressure points and you can zero right in on it. BRANDON: You can say you're looking for like, the aikido development strategy or whatever. CHARLES: Right, and then the other thing is being able to -- and this is important because I don't believe that every coding session or every pairing session needs to be this dance across the keyboard. Certainly there are times when you recognize that it's natural to stop, to pause, and have a discussion and say, "Wait a second. What are we doing here? Let's hash this through," and be able to converse at the higher level of where exactly are we going because normally you have fallen into this rhythm, or you've got a driver, you got a navigator but then sometimes you have to stop. You have to take your bearing and realizing when that time is and naturally transition into that, and be able to discuss the problem at its highest level where the code really and the tools that you're using really fade away into the background. They're not important. Then you can transition back and I'm looking for a pair in that conversation and I'm looking especially for someone who can teach me something. If there's a knowledge gap that I have or a perspective that I haven't seen, so when I'm looking for where it is that we're going, if someone helps me pair around a corner, that's a huge indicator that this person is senior. Because not only do they have that perception but they can also share it with me and they can effectively argue for it and make me see it, as well. BRANDON: Another thing for me in that same vein is the ability to be challenged. Like, for a person to challenge and be challenged. So they go, "Hey, I have an opinion about this," and you go, "Well, what about this?" And they're like, "Gosh. I never really thought about that." Or they defend their position or they push you on something, "Why don't you do it this way?" And you're like, "Well, I've always done it this way but let's try it your way." So the ability to challenge and be challenged particularly, that is sussed out in a pairing interview, you could probably do that asynchronously through a pull request and stuff like that. But just being able to suss out, whether somebody can challenge and be challenged as a part of the educational process means that this person sharpens the people around them and they're sharpened by the people around them. CHARLES: Absolutely. I am looking for that ability to be collaborative at that level and to educate those people around them just by virtue of their interaction. BRANDON: One thing that sort of heretical in some circles and it seems weird to me but if you look at 95% of jobs descriptions, they will tell you, "We are looking for X number of years in X technology," and I don't want to discount the years thing. The thing is gaining experience takes hours of practice, of dedicated practice and those hours add up to years. So you're typically you are talking in the scale of years when you're talking about experience so there's not really a way around the fact that you were going to be talking on the scale of years. I think that's not worthy of too much debate. It can take some people two years to learn something. It might take somebody else 10. But that you are talking about a scale of years. The thing that I want to challenge is the idea that language and framework experience is the thing that you're looking for. We have a lot of counter experience so that where people cross those boundaries and lines so I didn't really have that thought before talking to you about this so you kind of pushed my thinking in this regard, like why don't we care about that or why do we care less about that than others might? CHARLES: From my perspective, it kind of flies in the face of the way we operate. If we're requiring that someone have a certain number of years of one particular technology, we're asking them to be curious. We're asking them to be diverse. We're asking them to be able to be fluid and slot themselves into any problem space. So, why would we then demand all of those things and then, "By the way, you need to be able to be slotted into this problem space to come work here." I think that something that gets overused in the industry. I think it does make sense in certain cases. For example, not for a developer position, it's less than $250,000. Like if you want someone with five years of MySQL experience or something to manage who has to do micro-optimizations for these huge scale things and you want to pay them half a million dollars, because that's the thing that you need, you really need somebody with that much experience in that technology. Well gosh, they'd better be charging you a lot of money for that experience. Like, "You literally want to buy five years of my life? Okay. I can do that. But I'm going to think if that really is your need, that's what I'm going to be charging you for." But we're looking for people who will be able to move into any problem space that we come across and that necessarily implies language and framework. In fact, one of the things that I like best, I talked about evaluating for the ability to teach and that was inside the context of the one project that we're looking at, but I've had great experiences where someone has taught me something completely outside of certainly my level of expertise, and sometimes outside of what I've even heard of before. That's a much better like if we're working on a JavaScript project, and you can say, "Oh, this is how we do things in Scala, and maybe we can apply that here." Man, that is so valuable, and that has nothing to do with JavaScript experience and everything not to do with it. So what we're looking for is you to be able to bring to bear the arsenal of tools that you have developed throughout the course of your career and all zero them in on a problem and just blast it out of the water. So why would you limit that? Why bring one gun when you can bring 30, and one of them is a howitzer. BRANDON: That makes a ton of sense. It's the idea that is connected to our purpose which is like one of our purposes in existence is to advance the state of the art in UI engineering. That may sound like BS but it's very true. That is very much why you get up in the morning and come to work. It's like half of it is about creating a generation of leaders, and half of it is advancing the state of the art in UI engineering. Advancing the state of the art in UI engineering is not going to happen if you only bring people in who already think the things that everybody else is already thinking in UI engineering. So, we need people with orthogonal experience in other things so it's the diversity of experience that actually helps us get closer to that goal. Bringing tool sets from alternate languages and frameworks is a huge way to bring that to bear. I also think it's a way that our industry is like an adorable little baby. It's adorable. Basically, 95% of the people in our industry are generalists, and we hire, as if we're all hiring for the 5% that is a specialist because we don't know how to do this as an industry. We're just a baby. When you think about it, it is kind of adorable. We're all kind of making this up as we go along so if we can start like the goal here is to kind of push this conversation forward and understand, maybe it's counterintuitive to hire a passionate specialist when what you're looking for is a stable generalist, primarily as an industry. Start understanding, maybe these are some of the ways that we've accidentally been making our industry narrower and less diverse is we're looking for people that started programming on a TRS-80 back in 1984 or whatever. And so the problems that come along with that, we're starting to have to struggle and cope with now. So, anyway, in our own tiny little corner of the universe just for our local maximum of trying to build a better software consultancy, it makes a ton of sense for us to look for generalists. CHARLES: Yeah, that's definitely fits right with our value proposition is that we do UI but we can apply our UI skills to any number of problems. But it might not make sense. Like I said, if you're managing some gigantic database cluster and you need really, really, really specific skills, I just hope whoever that is you're charging a lot of money. BRANDON: Yeah, you can get away with generalizing and going, "Hey, I'm going to select for a lot of things." But if you're going to specialize, you basically have to go for money. I think we're getting into the place where we're pulling this into a tight 30 minutes. We've got to wrap this up. There's always a million more things to say on these topics but I feel like, I've learned a lot through the course of preparing and then doing this with you today to around like why we do what we do? What we're looking for technically? It'd be really cool, 'Hint, hint', that this turned into a blog post on your part. Because I do feel like it was the piece that was missing in people that kind of riled them up a little bit. It is an important piece like not to just -- CHARLES: It's okay people, we do care about technology. We do care about technical skill. In fact, we are a company dedicated to developing it. BRANDON: Yeah, that's true. People have to walk out with more of that than they walk in with or we fail. But that's not going to stop the people from yelling at you. CHARLES: Hey, it's fun. It's fun to yell on Twitter. BRANDON: It is funny. It's fun. All right, man. Well, this was really cool and I hope we get to do this again. We basically are in the process of kind of rebooting our podcast and getting in on track while we record it. Every two weeks at least, we have guests lined up -- CHARLES: Do we want to share like a sneak preview? BRANDON: Oh, gosh. Yeah, I mean with the people that we're talking to soon, we're going to have a conversation with Ember Sherpa about apprenticeship. We're going to have a conversation with Leah Silber about building communities. Then, there's a ton more in the hopper. This is going to be a really good rest of the year for this podcast and we're going to get consistent about it and we've hired help with it. We're really excited to have Mandy Moore. She's @DevReps on Twitter, if you are looking for any assistance with stuff like this. And we're really excited to start kind of kicking off a new -- CHARLES: A new era. BRANDON: But for those of you -- CHARLES: For those who like the intermittent, unreliable, yet sometimes pleasing dead cast, we'll interleave a few of those too. BRANDON: We'll do our best but this is yeah, for those people, I must apologize. I really liked how infrequent it was. Like, oh man. Maybe just check in every once in a while. CHARLES: Yeah, it's cool. All right. BRANDON: Charles, it's been great talking to and I can't wait for next time. CHARLES: Yep, likewise, man.

Brandon Charles hosts "Breaking Boundaries", a radio program about living with disabilities, and happens to be blind. He joins me to talk about the importance of curiosity on the path to empathy and moving forward with understanding one another. What do you think: is it possible to break boundaries without curiosity? Join us next time when we explore the impact of trauma on curiosity before, during and after incarceration.

Arlington Detective Sara Bertollini explores the role of curiosity in law enforcement, dispels some popular myths (sorry, folks!) and revels in the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. And what of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time"? You'll just have to listen in... Join us next time for a conversation with "Breaking Boundaries" host Brandon Charles for a conversation about curiosity, empathy and disability.