Podcast appearances and mentions of will larson

Come relieve your stress with The Girls! This week Vanessa is presenting “The Charlie Method” by Elle Kennedy! This hot-off-the-presses book is #3 in the Campus Diary series. When student woman in STEM Charlotte Kingston gets super stressed out it gets her super horned up. When it's time to release some of that stress, she becomes Charlie, a less inhibited version of herself who is only looking for sexual release. When swiping through a hook up app, she comes across two shirtless (and faceless) hotties! After a few steamy DMs and an eventual meetup, she realizes she actually knows these guys! Will Larson and Beckett Dunn are best friends who play hockey and do EVERYTHING together. This steamy book not only follows this throuple as they navigate their new world, but there's a fanfic about Elizabeth the First and Alexander the Great sprinkled in?! Tune in to this episode so you don't get sent back to Korea! New Episodes out every Tuesday! Join our Patreon to receive early, ad- free (and bonus!) episodes and more! Patreon.com/ClutchMyPearlsPod Watch the video version of this podcast on our YouTube channel! Follow @ClutchMyPearlsPod on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and GoodReads! We have MERCH go to ClutchMyPearlsPod.com Do you have a smut recommendation for the girls? Send an email to: ClutchMyPearlsPod@gmail.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

CTO Series: Mastering the CTPO Role, Katrina Clokie's Guide to Tech and Product Leadership   In this BONUS episode, we sit down with Katrina Clokie, a seasoned leader in strategy, change management, and building inclusive teams. Katrina shares pivotal moments in her career, offers practical leadership insights, and discusses her role as Chief Technology and Product Officer (CTPO), where she's balancing innovation with business objectives. Whether you're an aspiring tech leader or looking to sharpen your leadership toolkit, Katrina's wisdom will inspire you to embrace growth, resilience, and collaboration. Defining Moments in Leadership “Look for roles you can't fully do yet—it's the best way to grow.”   Katrina reflects on a transformative moment early in her career when a mentor from the shipping industry encouraged her to seek out challenging roles that would push her growth. This advice set her on the path to engineering management and C-level leadership. She shares how fostering curiosity and pursuing conversations about topics she didn't yet fully understand has kept her continually learning.   “Ask yourself: where do I feel stretched? That's often where the best growth opportunities lie.” The Role of CTPO: Combining Technology and Product Strategy “We needed both a unified vision and an efficient structure to remain competitive.”   Katrina discusses why her company created the CTPO role and how it reflects the size and growth stage of the organization. With no prior head of product, Katrina leaned into her experience while recognizing the importance of partnering with skilled product managers. She emphasizes the importance of having clear accountabilities and embracing growth within the role.   “The key is knowing when to lead and when to lean on your team's expertise.” Aligning Tech Strategy with Business Objectives “Trade-offs are inevitable—make them strategically, not reactively.”   At Fergus, Katrina implemented clear guardrails, such as avoiding a complete rewrite of their decade-old monolith, focusing instead on retiring components that hindered stability and developer experience. She shares how they allocate 60% of engineering capacity to strategic initiatives and 40% to ongoing business needs, ensuring tech and business priorities stay aligned.   “Guardrails help teams make decisions that align with the big picture without constant oversight.” Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration “Healthy conflict is necessary—escalation usually signals a breakdown in structure.”   Katrina describes how she structured cross-functional teams with clear goals and metrics to foster collaboration and ensure diverse perspectives are represented. She highlights the importance of empathy and role-modeling constructive conflict resolution at senior levels.   “A well-designed structure turns potential conflict into productive problem-solving.” Roadmapping with Flexibility and Focus “Roadmaps should guide—not handcuff—teams to long-term commitments.”   Katrina's approach to roadmapping balances transparency and adaptability. By reserving only 60% of capacity for roadmap initiatives and keeping annual plans intentionally light, her teams can pivot when necessary without overcommitting. Frequent, smaller releases (up to 160 changes per month) help deliver value continuously.   “Leave room in your roadmap to handle surprises without derailing progress.” Scaling Teams During Rapid Growth “Avoid constant recruiting—it can burn out your leaders and upset team dynamics.”   Drawing from her experience at Xero, Katrina advises against an “always-on” recruitment strategy, which can overwhelm hiring managers and disrupt team cohesion. Instead, she recommends batch hiring and partnering with finance and talent teams to manage hiring budgets in stages.   “Hiring in waves allows teams to stabilize and thrive, rather than constantly adjusting.” Overcoming the Challenges of Growth and Constraints “Shifting from hyper-growth to steady growth meant saying ‘no' more often and being precise.”   Katrina shares how transitioning from an environment of rapid scaling to a more constrained SaaS company required a shift in her approach to decision-making. She focused on making the business context clear to her team, fostering trust and transparency in her decision-making process.   “When people understand the ‘why' behind constraints, they're more likely to trust the process.” Recommended Reads for Tech Leaders Katrina shares the books that have shaped her leadership journey: Resilient Management by Lara Hogan The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier The Engineering Executive's Primer by Will Larson   “Great leadership isn't innate—it's learned through mentorship, reflection, and resources.” Scaling Your Influence as a Leader From her experience at global companies to her current role, Katrina's insights on transparency, collaboration, and strategic trade-offs provide a blueprint for navigating the complexities of tech leadership.   “Leadership isn't about having all the answers—it's about empowering your team and staying open to learning.”   About Katrina Clokie   Katrina Clokie is a respected leader in strategy, change management, and building inclusive teams. A keynote speaker at international conferences, she is passionate about leadership and communication. Her book, A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, has reached over 7,000 readers. In 2018, she was a finalist for New Zealand's Inspiring Individual of the Year Award.   You can link with Katrina Clokie on LinkedIn.

Lou, Hannah and Josh talk to 7-piece Melbourne experimental funk band Steppers. Members include singer Reginald Auldist, guitarist Louis Allan, bassist Adam Brown and Arlon Faria on keys. The band's 3-piece horn section is made up of trumpeter Ed Farrar, sax player Will Larson and Patty Langdon. Steppers talk about their new single ‘Friend to Hold'; their origin story, rituals, and the learning experience involved in record productions and live performances. The Hoist is blessed with a live performance of ‘Snail Growth'   Their new single ‘Friend to Hold' is available on streaming services. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Breaking Changes, Postman Head of Product-Observability Jean Yang dives into the world of engineering leadership with Carta CTO Will Larson. From career progression to team building and navigating challenging transitions, Will's experiences offer a wealth of wisdom. Tune in as they discuss leadership consistency, hiring strategies, and the importance of clear communication. Plus, they delve into underrated advancements in the industry, AI's impact, and the exciting release of Will's third book!   For more on Will Larson, check out the following: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lethain Personal Website: https://lethain.com/ Company Website: https://carta.com/   Follow Jean on Twitter/X @jeanqasaur. And remember, never miss an episode by subscribing to the Breaking Changes Podcast on your favorite streaming platform, company website at https://www.postman.com/events/breaking-changes or Postman's YouTube Channel—just hit that bell for notifications.   #BreakingChanges #postman #Carta #TechLeadership #ExecutiveProfessionals #LeadershipDevelopment #Adaptability #ConsistencyMatters #TechIndustryInsights #CareerGrowth #LeadershipSkills #ProfessionalDevelopment #AdaptiveLeadership   Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction and Background 03:25 - Career Path and Leadership 05:09 - Different Roles as a CTO 07:28 - Leadership in Times of Scarcity 08:16 - Approaches to Hiring and Building Teams 10:19 - The Importance of Consistency in Leadership 13:19 - Reasoning from the Boxes 14:25 - Qualities to Look for in a Hire 16:33 - Red Flags in Hiring 18:02 - Smooth Transitions and Migrations 23:42 - Challenges in Leading Change 27:20 - Lessons from Reductions in Force 32:51 - Absorbing Upsetness and Dealing with Conflict 33:27 - Leading Through the Growth Stage 37:00 - Growth in Leaders Themselves 45:13 - Underrated Breaking Change: Venture Capital 46:37 - Breaking Changes Introduced by AI 49:18 - Exciting Change: Release of Third Book

Matthieu Leroux-Huet est entré dans la tech en 2008, non pas grâce à ses études ni après une reconversion, mais grâce à un ami rencontré sur World of Warcraft. Là où certains construisent leur réseaux sur LinkedIn ou à l'école, Matthieu a construit le sien au travers de ses pairs de jeu vidéo. Depuis plus de 15 ans il est spécialisé sur l'aspect performance logicielle, un sujet large qui regroupe des notions de performance donc, mais aussi de sécurité, de code, d'infra, de réseau, etc.Il est également l'un des organisateurs de la conférence We Love Speed, une conférence nantaise centrée sur la performance dans le web créée en 2018.Sa spécialité dans la perf, il l'a donc largement éprouvée, dans des contextes clients en ESN, mais également chez un éditeur de solution de lutte contre les fraudes & blanchiment et plus récemment en startup.Depuis l'été dernier, il est passé consultant en freelance pour « avoir avant tout la liberté de travailler sur des sujets qui me plaisent ».Assez déçu des process de négociation salariale, il se jure après sa première embauche de devenir bon pour ne plus se faire avoir, et en vient même à mentorer d'autres personnes sur cette thématique ; il nous partage quelques conseils sur la négociation salariale.Durant cette discussion passionnante, on évoque notamment :En quoi consiste la performance software ?Comment améliorer les performances de son application ?Qu'est-ce que la culture de la qualité ?Envisager sa carrière comme une suite de chapitres.Quelles sont les soft skills les plus importantes ?Assurer son évolution salariale en faisant des entretiens tous les moisLe lancement dans le freelancing : questionnement sur l'impact à long terme et l'appartenanceEst-ce que freelancing équivaut nécessairement à plus de liberté ?Comment fuir une discussion difficile a mis fin à une missionComment communiquer avec quelqu'un qui a un mode de communication différent du sien ?Comment inclure la formation dans son travail en tant que Freelance ?Références citées lors de la discussion :Le livre Never split the difference, par Chris Voss (amzn.eu/d/ey6hf5C)Le livre Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track, par Will Larson (staffeng.com/book/)Le livre Comment leur dire... Process communication, par Gérard Collignon (www.amazon.fr/dp/2729610588)La vidéo Fast Inverse Square Root (youtu.be/p8u_k2LIZyo)Retrouvez Matthieu sur LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/lrxmatt/Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

В этом выпуске: PATA для бэкапа и невероятные приключения. [00:18:28] Чему мы научились за эту неделю [00:52:40] Anthisesis: continuous reliability platform [01:28:09] Will Larson’s new book — The Engineering Executive’s Primer [01:42:00] #темы457 Лог чата в Telegram. КДПВ: нарисовали нейросети Голоса выпуска: Света, Ваня, Саша. Фоновая музыка: Plastic3 — Corporate Rock Motivation Loop 4

Will Larson is Chief Technology Officer at Carta. Prior to joining Carta, he was the CTO at Calm and held engineering leadership roles at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is the author of two foundational engineering career books, An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive's Primer, which will be released in February. In our conversation, we discuss:• Systems thinking: what it is and how to apply it• Advice for product managers on fostering productive relationships with engineering managers• Why companies should treat engineers like adults• How to best measure developer productivity• Writing and its impact on his career• How to balance writing with a demanding job• How to develop your company values—Brought to you by DX—A platform for measuring and improving developer productivity | OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster | Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.—Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today's transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.—Where to find Will Larson:• X: https://twitter.com/Lethain• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/• Website: https://lethain.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Will's background(04:12) Changes in the field of engineering(06:27) We need to stop treating engineers like children(08:32) Systems thinking(13:23) Implementing systems thinking in hiring(16:32) Engineering strategy(20:21) Examples of engineering strategies(25:08) How to get good at strategy(26:48) The importance of writing about things that excite you(32:40) The biggest risk to content creation is quitting too soon(35:24) How to make time for writing(37:41) Tips for aspiring writers(41:18) Building productive relationships between product managers and engineers(43:45) Giving the same performance rating to EMs and PMs(48:24) Measuring engineering productivity(55:53) Defining company values(01:02:10) Failure corner: the Digg rewrite(01:11:05) Will's upcoming book, The Engineering Executive's Primer(01:12:04) Lightning round—Referenced:• The end of the “free money” era: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/11/techscape-zirp-tech-boom• Work on what matters: https://lethain.com/work-on-what-matters/• Sheryl Sandberg to Harvard Biz Grads: “Find a Rocket Ship”: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/24/sheryl-sandberg-to-harvard-biz-grads-find-a-rocket-ship/?sh=708c9a93b37a• What Is Systems Thinking?: https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-systems-thinking• Introduction to systems thinking: https://lethain.com/systems-thinking/• Thinking in Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557• Silent Spring: https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Spring-Rachel-Carson/dp/0618249060• Writing an engineering strategy: https://lethain.com/eng-strategies/• Carta: https://carta.com/• Eric Vogl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericvogl/• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-difference-matters/dp/1781256179• The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists: https://www.amazon.com/Crux-How-Leaders-Become-Strategists/dp/1541701240/• How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512/• Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as Strategy: https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Strategy-Patterns-Architecture/dp/1492040878/• The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud: https://www.amazon.com/Value-Flywheel-Effect-Accelerate-Organization/dp/1950508579• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290• The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Executives-Primer-Impactful-Leadership/dp/1098149483• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management: https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track: https://www.amazon.com/Staff-Engineer-Leadership-beyond-management-ebook/dp/B08RMSHYGG• Gergely Orosz's newsletter: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/author/gergely/• Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/leaving-big-tech-to-build-the-1-technology-newsletter-gergely-orosz-the-pragmatic-engineer/• The art of product management | Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/the-art-of-product-management-shreyas-doshi-stripe-twitter-google-yahoo/• Henry Ward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heward/• Vrushali Paunikar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vrushali-paunikar/• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339• How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-measure-and-improve-developer-productivity-nicole-forsgren-microsoft-research-github-goo/• DORA: https://dora.dev/• Setting engineering org values: https://lethain.com/setting-engineering-org-values/• Digg: https://digg.com/• Kevin Rose on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinrose/• Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/• Dash Gopinath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashgopinath/• Rich Schumacher on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richschumacher/• The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant-ebook/dp/B00NP9LHFA• Top Chef on Peacock: https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/top-chef/5172289448907967112• Hard to work with: https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Our recommended five books are:Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright)An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building (Claire Hughes Johnson)Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products (Laura Klein)Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais) Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (2020, 575 pages, Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright)A fascinating insight into software engineering practices and tools used at technology leader Google. I love their definition of software engineering as programming integrated over time. The 25 in-depth chapters are written by Google domain experts and offer a glimpse into how scaling and sustainability are handled and traded against other concerns.The is a big book full of useful information, but the density of multiple authors limited to a chapter apiecedoes make it challenging to read at times. Definitely recommended, but be prepared to devote a chunk of your time to study the book and get the most out of it.An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (2019, 288 pages, Will Larson)A beautifully presented hardback book containing engineering leader Will Larson's guidance on engineering management. There is a lot of strong and hard-won advice on organizations, tools, approaches, culture and careers. The content is practical and provides an unusual depth on engineering management in modern software organizations.The figures are sometimes obtuse and the last 71-page appendix and endnotes are mostly superfluous. I also did not enjoy some of the referencing out either where no information is given other than a single word and Q-code link. Regardless, this is a great book.Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building (2023, 432 pages, Claire Hughes Johnson)Author Claire Hughes Johnson is a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe after spending seven years as COO while they rapidly scaled from 200 to over 7000 people. Before this, she spent 10 years at Google leading successful business teams. The book is beautifully presented, full of valuable guidance and provides practical advice of great leadership and pragmatic scaling. The examples are perfectly placed and insightful to demonstrate the advice around them.Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products (2016, 368 pages, Laura Klein)I am starting to love the Rosenfeld Media series — high-quality books, presented beautifully, edited expertly and eminently practical. Color is used intelligently throughout as you would expect from design-focused books.Lean startup expert and “What is Wrong with UX” podcaster Laura Klein writes a great book on how to build new products. This practical guide is organized around exercises with expert advice from experienced practitioners at the end of each chapter. Expect lots of strategy, design, analytics and empathy; heist teams are worth the price of admission on their own.Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (2019, 240 pages, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)Pragmatic and informative guide to organization design from IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Building on their work on Team Topologies with real experience, the authors cover teams as a means of delivery, team topologies that work for flow, and evolving team interactions for innovation and rapid delivery. The book is well written with a good level of depth, with valuable illustrations and strong use of color and design throughout. I recommend this book to anyone interested in creating effective teams and high-performance workplaces. Peter Hyde is surely one of Gartner's most prolific readers and writers. He is an enterprise agile coach with deep experience in helping global organizations transform product development to achieve higher performance, increased quality, faster delivery and an outstanding customer experience.

Will Larson is the CTO at Carta, an ownership and equity management platform that raised at a $7.4b valuation in 2021. Prior to joining Carta, Will was CTO at Calm, founded Stripe's Foundation Engineering org, and led Uber's Platform Engineering people and strategy. Will also writes extensively about engineering leadership, and has authored two books in this area: Staff Engineer, and An Elegant Puzzle. — In today's episode we discuss: How to form an engineering strategy Common engineering management mistakes, and how to avoid them Advice for explaining, measuring, and optimizing engineering velocity Will's nuanced approach to organizational policies Why it's sometimes counterproductive to tell someone not to micromanage — Referenced: Accelerate (book): https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 Calm: https://www.calm.com/ Carta: https://www.carta.com/ DORA: https://dora.dev/ Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (book): https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239 JavaScript: https://www.javascript.com/ KAFKA: https://kafka.apache.org/ Minto Pyramid (framework): https://untools.co/minto-pyramid Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/ SPACE (framework): https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm Stripe: https://www.stripe.com/ — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find Will Larson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lethain LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/ Personal website/blog: https://lethain.com/ An Elegant Puzzle (book): https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186 Staff Engineer (book): https://staffeng.com/book — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (03:03) The nuances of taking lessons from old companies (14:28) The value of writing down engineering principles (17:03) How to structure a strategy document (18:48) The 2 parts of any engineering strategy (21:08) Advice for turning strategy into action (23:44) Carta's unique "navigator" model (24:50) The Hidden Variable Problem (29:59) Explaining, measuring, and optimizing velocity (35:28) Useful metrics for engineering orgs (39:08) The balance between micromanagement and understanding details (43:03) Management anti-patterns (45:49) How to execute policies whilst managing their exceptions (47:56) What an excellent engineering executive looks like (53:53) How Will has evolved as an engineering executive (56:56) How to communicate with executives (63:18) Things that derail meetings (66:10) How to approach presentation feedback (67:30) A bad sign when working with direct reports (69:13) Advice for growing as an early-career engineer (71:11) Will's model for developing engineering teams (74:33) Sources of inspiration for Will's views on engineering management

Ever wondered what it's like to be a VP or Director of Engineering? Kendra chats with Alex Robson about leadership in technology, what you can get out of coaching or an MBA program (should you be interested), and what makes a high performing team. We'll also chat about recommended content to hone your tech leadership skills. Alex Robson's site and blog: https://robsonconsulting.services Alex's content recommendations for folks who want to think more about technical leadership: "I believe Camille Fournier and Will Larson are wonderful writers with invaluable insights and advice. For product thinking, I recommend folks read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Principles of Lean Product Development Flow by Don Reinertsen, Safer Sooner Happier by Jonathan Smart, and Accelerate by Dr. Nicole Forsgren. Be sure to read books on leadership that are outside of engineering. Dan Pink's Drive and Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal are two of my usual recommendations. Last but not least - read books that are about human behavior. Both economists and psychologists ask important questions that may help you unlock better ways to relate to and understand others. I love Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, and highly recommend Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavins and Elliot Aronson."

Monica and Urban discuss what they've been up to in the last six months. Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s) Release It! by Michael Nygard (https://pragprog.com/titles/mnee2/release-it-second-edition/) Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner (https://www.engmanagement.dev/) An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson (https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle) Listener question: https://masto.ai/@edebill@wandering.shop/109501793033994252 (https://masto.ai/@edebill@wandering.shop/109501793033994252) Ask questions via our anonymous feedback form (https://forms.gle/MW8qZFD7RLYriqKj8) You can reach us via email at hosts@expandingbeyond.it (mailto:hosts@expandingbeyond.it). You can follow us on Twitter at @podcast_eb (https://twitter.com/podcast_eb). Where to find Monica on the internet: Website: monicag.me (https://monicag.me/) Mastodon: @nirnaeth@mastodon.online (https://mastodon.social/@nirnaeth@mastodon.online) Github: @nirnaeth (https://github.com/nirnaeth) Blog: dev.to/nirnaeth (https://dev.to/nirnaeth) Where to find Urban on the internet: Mastodon: @ujh@masto.ai (https://masto.ai/@ujh) Github: @ujh (https://github.com/ujh/) Blog: urbanhafner.com (https://urbanhafner.com/) The intro and outro music is Our Big Adventure (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/Our_Big_Adventure) by Scott Holmes (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes). It's licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Focus on your CTO career in this podcast with Will Larson about leaving a CTO role, finding a new CTO role, and negotiating your compensation. Will is the thought leader behind the popular blog "Irrational Exuberance" and the book "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" and "Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track". Additionally, he is the former CTO of Calm who has also led teams at Uber, Digg, and Yahoo. Listen to find out: - How to find

As product lead, Russ Nealis has been focused on introducing the discipline of product management in the Developer Foundations organization. This episode discusses the reasons why PMs are currently uncommon in platform organizations, examples of when having a PM has been helpful, and more. Discussion points: (1:23) Russ's role at Plaid  (2:49) Why platform product managers are uncommon (3:28) Backgrounds to look for when hiring a platform PM (4:58) Deciding whether to hire a platform PM (6:20) Signs that bringing in a Product Manager would be beneficial (9:16) How Russ personally became a platform PM (12:15) Whether a platform PM is a career path  (14:55) Articulating the business impact a platform PM has (18:56) Challenges Plaid's platform team has faced without a PM   (19:19) Symptoms of a need for product management in an internal-facing team (30:15) Whether Twilio had platform PMs   (31:22) Example projects where PMs have been crucial (34:12) How the book “Ask Your Developer” influenced Twilio's engineering culture  (36:13) Getting started with introducing a product management discipline to an organization  (38:33) Org structure and where platform PMs may report  (40:00) Career ladder for platform PM when reporting to engineering leadership (41:20) Being product-led or technology-led (43:14) How technical skills may help when in a platform PM role ‍Mentions and links: Follow Russ on LinkedIn Episode 7 with Will Larson - related to why it's difficult to find Platform PMsEpisode 27 with Jean-Michel Lemieux - related to the percentage of investment that should be put towards platform investments The Build Trap by Melissa PerriAsk Your Developer by Jeff Lawson

Simon Willison rounds up the goings on around Microsoft's new GPT-powered Bing search, The Vue/Vite team build a nimble web client for Mastodon, Will Larson writes about writing an engineering strategy, Denis Pushkarev seeks support to maintain core-js & I share a lightning round of cool tools I've found and used recently. ⚡️

Simon Willison rounds up the goings on around Microsoft's new GPT-powered Bing search, The Vue/Vite team build a nimble web client for Mastodon, Will Larson writes about writing an engineering strategy, Denis Pushkarev seeks support to maintain core-js & I share a lightning round of cool tools I've found and used recently. ⚡️

Simon Willison rounds up the goings on around Microsoft's new GPT-powered Bing search, The Vue/Vite team build a nimble web client for Mastodon, Will Larson writes about writing an engineering strategy, Denis Pushkarev seeks support to maintain core-js & I share a lightning round of cool tools I've found and used recently. ⚡️

Cohosts Jeannie and Jesse chat with Maia Stone, 1608 FE Alum and Director of Engineering at Uplight. Maia shares her Turing story and high velocity career trajectory and then turns to coaching the co hosts on their own careers. Show Notes: https://conscious.is/ - Conscious Leadership The Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They also reveal recommendations on filtering / assessing decisions & their go-to leadership styles!ABOUT ALI LITTMANAli Littman is the Director of Engineering at Modern Health, where she leads product engineering teams that make it possible for people to receive online mental health services the moment they need and at no cost to the individual. Prior to her current role, she served as the Director of Engineering at Omada Health. Outside of her role, she is also a champion for diversity and inclusion, most notably leading a Women's ERG, serving on company-wide belonging councils, and providing imposter syndrome coaching.Ali Littman is a passionate engineering leader specializing in healthcare technology both in traditional and digital healthcare settings. She currently serves as Head of Engineering at Modern Health where she gets to lead engineering teams on the exciting journey of evolving how people access and receive mental health care treatment around the world. Ali enjoys taking startups through their scale phase and has been an engineering leader on hypergrowth journeys at both Omada Health and Modern Health - leading them through organizational, market, and product expansion. Her background in business from Haas at UC Berkeley helps navigate these business challenges with the philosophy of having business strategy inform the engineering strategy.At the end of the day, she cares most about being a great people leader who creates inclusive cultures and teaches managers how to be great managers for their teams. She also goes a step beyond her usual management duties to serve on Belonging Councils, lead ERGs, provides imposter syndrome coaching, and mentor individuals from under-represented groups in tech. Additionally, Ali's led external talks on navigating career growth, imposter syndrome, challenging leadership scenarios, and more!"I view my relationship to people that I work with or people that I manage right now, as actually like a lifelong commitment and I think because of that, I end up with these really strong connections even beyond past opportunities."- Ali Littman   ABOUT ALI IRTURKAli's day-to-day passion is creating and being part of efficient and effective engineering organizations that are firing on all cylinders where team members can achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in a psychologically safe environment. He will continue to realize this passion by working at CommerceHub as their Vice President of Engineering.He previously worked at rocketship start-ups funded by some of the top VCs in the world including a16z, SoftBank, Microsoft Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures to name a few. Ali was the Vice President of Engineering at WorkBoard, a strategy and results enterprise SaaS platform helping large organizations align quickly for results, leading product delivery as well as accessibility, application security, release engineering, platform, and infrastructure teams. Previously, he was the Vice President of Engineering at ALICE Technologies working on revolutionizing the construction industry with an artificial intelligence-powered enterprise SaaS product.Ali also created and managed the advanced products group at Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) for 8 years while working as an adjunct professor at UC San Diego. His team worked on creating innovative industrial vision systems and software to help companies improve their product quality, eliminate production errors, and lower manufacturing costs. Examples of the products he worked on were the world's first vision system on chip and the world's fastest 3D scanning system to name a few.Where Ali is today is quite different from where his journey began. Born and raised in Istanbul, I graduated from the Turkish Naval Academy and served as an officer in the Turkish Navy. After leaving the Navy, he earned Master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics at UC Santa Barbara, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and an MBA at UC Berkeley."In a grander scheme, I think people should be always looking for opportunities at all times. There's a famous saying... 'The best time to eat hors d'oeuvres are... they're being passed around. The moment that if you're not ready to eat, now you're gonna miss that!'"- Ali Irturk   This episode is brought to you by JellyfishFor insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they're operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today…Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE:jellyfish.co/emrTo understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarksCheck out our friends at Shortcut!Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcTake our DevTools survey & share what dev tools you use!As a gift, we'll send you a copy of one our favorite books AND you'll be entered to win a free ticket to the 2022 ELC Summit!Fill out the DevTools survey HERE: elc.community/devtools2022SHOW NOTES:Frameworks for navigating new internal & external opportunities (3:36)Three steps for determining which opportunities you should prioritize (5:21)Ask this question to validate your assumptions (8:08)Reflecting on your personal values & how they align with opportunities (9:02)Why growth & interpersonal connection matter to Ali Littman (10:08)Ali Irturk's recommendations for great networking (11:13)View your professional relationships as life-long commitments (13:09)Book recommendations for frameworks on the job search process (14:29)How the right manager can provide the best opportunities (16:47)Use a decision-grid to help filter & assess decisions (20:06)Analyzing your energy level & trusting your gut while making decisions (21:52)How your priorities evolve over time (23:49)The hedgehog & outliers concepts (25:45)Balancing your current strengths with opportunities you can grow from (29:29)Why there's no such thing as a singular leadership style (30:47)Vulnerable leadership & creating a culture of trust (34:10)Rapid fire questions (36:42)LINKS AND RESOURCESThe 2-Hour Job Search - Steve Dalton's instructional book on how to conduct a job search in the most efficient way possible.This Is Day One - Drew Dudley's guide to cultivating the behaviors that will help you succeed and empower those around you.Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson's book on attaining and operating in staff engineering roles.Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Dr. Robert B. Cialdini's book on the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles in everyday situations.A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine's book on how the insights and wisdom of Stoic philosophy are still applicable in our modern lives.Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership - Dr. Alan Watkins' book on the challenges that take a toll on a leader's effectiveness and the solutions designed to improve physiological factors that impact on core competencies.

Will Larson, the CTO at Calm, covers a wide range of topics including whether Infrastructure Engineering is chronically understaffed, the role of Eng Ops, how his opinion on the “build vs buy” question has changed, his thoughts on metrics, and more. Helpful resources: Will's Infraeng book Will's article, Infrastructure planning Will's article, How to invest in infrastructure

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. Audio tape drives are real!  Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. If you  want  to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for their comeback!We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do. Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he's reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to Create an array of random numbers in Swift.

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. Audio tape drives are real!  Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. If you  want  to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for their comeback!We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do. Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he's reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to Create an array of random numbers in Swift.

This episode may of been recorded 2 weeks ago but that doesn't mean we still don't want all of you to hear it! Better late then never but here it is, episode 61 as Marc and Mike are back behind the mics to discuss all the action across the world of racing (from 2 weeks ago of course) and answer all the fan questions from (yet again, 2 weeks ago) Mail It In Monday on Facebook! Tune in and find out what the guys thoughts were on the upcoming round of 8 in the NASCAR playoffs, which two races have already happened. Were they right, or were they wrong? Formula 1's crazy season so far and the battle between Hamilton and Verstappen. Recap from Port Royal with the World of Outlaws and all the USAC action. Mail It In Monday saw a flurry of questions. Many to do with the Harvick, Elliott feud. Will Larson win the Championship? UMSS related topics and sprint cars on ice??? Get the boys reactions and much much more on this episode of the Reaction Time Sports Podcast! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reactiontimesports/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/reactiontimesports/support

Qual é o papel de um Sênior? Dá pra ser promovido(a) só com tempo de casa? No episódio de hoje, chamamos o Mentos (Guilherme Sampaio) do iFood para uma conversa sobre as responsabilidades de uma pessoa desenvolvedora sênior e o que a sênioridade significa de fato. Siga a gente no Twitter: twitter.com/BuildFailedCast Nosso perfil no Instagram: instagram.com/buildfailedcast Links comentados: - Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson: https://staffeng.com/book

About KatieKatie Sylor-Miller, Frontend Architect at Etsy, has a passion for design systems, web performance, accessibility, and frontend infrastructure. She co-authored the Design Systems Handbook to spread her love of reusable components to engineers and designers. She's spoken at conferences like Smashing Conf, PerfMatters Conf, JamStack Conf, JSConf US, and FrontendConf.ch (to name a few). Her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes, and has been translated into 23 different languages and counting.Links: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/ Design Systems Handbook: https://www.designbetter.co/design-systems-handbook Book of staff engineering stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG staffeng.com: https://staffeng.com ohshitgit.com: https://ohshitgit.com dangitgit.com: https://dangitgit.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Katie Sylor-Miller, who is a frontend architect at Etsy. Katie, thank you for joining me.Katie: Hi, Corey. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, I met you a long time ago—before anyone had ever heard of me and the world was happier for it—but since then you've done a lot of things. You're obviously a frontend architect at Etsy. You're a co-author of the Design Systems Handbook, and you were recently interviewed and included Will Larson's book of staff engineering stories that people are mostly familiar with at staffeng.com.Katie: Yeah.Corey: So, you've done a lot of writing; you've done some talking, but let's begin with the time that we met. To my understanding, it's the only time we've ever met in person. And this harkens back to the first half—as I recall—of 2016 at the frontend conference in Zurich.Katie: Yes, before either of us were known for anything. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. And it was, oh, great. And I wound up getting invited to speak at a frontend conference. And my response was, “Uh, okay. Zurich sounds lovely. I'm thrilled to do it. Do you understand who you're asking?”There are frontend folks—which, according to the worst people on the internet is the easiest form of programming; it isn't a real engineering job, and if that's your opinion, please stop listening to anything I do ever again—secondly, then there's the backend folks who write the API side of things and what the deep [unintelligible 00:02:03] and oh, that's the way of the future. And people look at me and they think, “Oh, you're a backend person,” if their frontend. If they're backend, they look at me and think, “Oh, you're a DevOps person.” Great. And if you're on the DevOps space, you look at me and think, “What is wrong with this person?” And that's mostly it.But I was actually invited to speak at a frontend conference. And the reason that they invited me at all—turns out wasn't a mistake—was that I was giving a talk that year called, “Terrible Ideas in Git,” which is the unifying force that ties all of those different specialties together by confusing the living hell out of us.Katie: Yes. [laugh].Corey: So, I gave a talk. I thought it was pretty decent. I've done some Twitter threads on similar themes. You did something actually useful that helps people and is more lasting—and right at that same conference, I believe, you were building slash kicking it off—ohshitgit.com.Katie: Yes. Yeah. It was—Corey: Which is amazing.Katie: Thank you. Yeah, it was shortly thereafter. I think the ideas were kind of starting to percolate at that conference. Because you know—yeah I was—Corey: Because someone gave a talk about Git. Oh, I'm absolutely stealing credit for your work.Katie: No, Corey—Corey: “Oh, yeah. You know, that was my idea.”Katie: [laugh].Corey: Five years from now, I'm going to call myself the founder of it, and you're just on the implementation details.Katie: I don't—nonononono—Corey: That's right. I'm going to D.C. Bro my way through all of this.Katie: [laugh]. No, no, no, no. See, my recollection is that my talk about being a team player and a frontend expert with a T-shape happened at exactly the same time as your talk about Git because I remember I wanted to go watch your talk because at the time, I absolutely hated Git. I was still kind of learning it. So yeah, so I don't think you really get any credit because I have never actually heard that talk that you gave. [laugh].Corey: A likely story.Katie: [laugh]. However, however, I will say—so, before I was up to give my talk, the emcee of the conference was teasing me, you know, in a very good-natured ribbing sort of way, he was teasing me about my blog being totally empty and having absolutely nothing in it. And I got on the plane home from Zurich, and I was starting to think, “Oh, okay. What are some things that I could blog about? What do I have to say that would be at all interesting or new to anyone else?”And like I think a lot of people do, I had a really hard time figuring out, okay, what can I say that's, maybe, different? And, I went back home, I went back to work, and at one point, I had this idea, I had this file that I had been keeping ever since I started learning Git and I call it, like, gitshit.txt. And hopefully, your listeners don't mind lots of swears because I'm probably going to swear quite a bit.Corey: No, no. I do want to point out, you're accessible to all folks: dangitgit.com, also works but doesn't have the internal rhyming mechanism which makes it, obviously, nowhere near where it needs to be.Katie: [laugh]. Well—Corey: It's sort of a Subversion to Git if you will.Katie: Yes, exactly.Corey: I—Subversion fans, don't yell at me.Katie: [laugh]. Anyways, so I remember I tweeted something like, “Oh, what about if I took this text file that I had,” where every time I got into a Git mess, I would go on to Stack Overflow—as you do—and I would Google and I—it was so hard. I couldn't find the words to find the answers to what I was trying to fix. Because one of the big problems with Git that we can talk about it a bit more in detail later is that Git doesn't describe workflows, Git describes internal plumbing commands and everything that it exposes in its API. So, I had a really hard time with it; I had a hard time learning it.And, you know, what I said, “Okay, well, maybe if I published on my blog about these Git tips that I had saved for myself.” And I remember I tweeted, and I got a handful of likes on the tweet, including from Eric Meyer, who is one of my big idols in the frontend world. He's one of the godfathers of modern CSS. And he liked my tweet, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Maybe this is a real thing. Maybe people will actually find this interesting.”And then I had this brilliant idea for this URL, ohshitgit.com, and it was available, and I bought it. And I swear to you, I think I spent two hours writing some HTML around my text file and publishing it up to my server. And I tweeted about it, and then I went to bed.And I kind of expected maybe half a dozen of my coworkers would get a little sensible chuckle out of it, and like, that would be the end of it. But I woke up the next morning and my Twitter had blown up; I was on the front page of Hacker News. I had coworkers pinging me being like, “Oh, my God, Katie, you're on Hacker News. This is insane.” And—Corey: Wait, wait, for a good thing, or the horrifying kind of thing because, Hacker News?Katie: Well, [laugh] as I have discovered with Hacker News, whenever my site ends up on Hacker News, the response is generally, like, a mix of, “Ha ha ha, this is great. This is funny,” and, “Oh, my God, somebody actually doesn't understand Git and needs this. Wow, people are really stupid.” Which I fundamentally disagree with and I'm sure that you fundamentally [laugh] disagree with as well.Corey: Oh, absolutely.Katie: Yeah. So—Corey: It's one of those, “Oh, Git confuses you. You know what that means? It means you're human.” It confuses everyone. The only question is, at what point does it escape your fragile mortal understanding? And if you are listening to this and you don't believe me, great. I'm easy to find, I will absolutely have that discussion with you in public because I promise, one of us is going to learn something.Katie: [laugh]. Awesome. I love—I hope that people take you up on that because—Corey: Oh, that would be an amazing live stream, wouldn't it?Katie: It would. It would because Git is one of those things that I think that people who don't understand it, look at it and think, “Gosh, you know, I must be stupid,” or, “I must not be cut out to be a developer,” or, “I must not know what I'm doing.” And I know that this is how people feel because that's exactly how I felt myself, even when I made ohshitgit.com, that became this big reference that everybody looks at to help them with Git, like, I still didn't understand it. I didn't get Git at all.And since then, I've kind of been forced because people started asking me all these questions, and, “Well, what about this? What about that?” And I was just like, “Uh… I don't know. Uh…” and I didn't like that feeling, so I did what, you know, obviously, anyone would do in my situation and I sent out a proposal to give a talk about Git at a conference. [laugh].And what that did is when my talk got accepted, I had to then go off and actually learn Git and understand how it works so that I could go and teach it to other people at this conference. But it ended up being great, I think because I found a lot of really awesome books. There's A Book Apart book called Git for Humans, which is incredibly good. There's a couple of websites like learngitbranching.com.There's a bunch more that I can't think of off the top of my head. But I went out and I sort of slowly but surely developed this mental model, internally, of how Git works. And I'm a visual thinker and I'm a visual learner, and so it's a very visual model. And for what it's worth, I think that was my biggest problem with Git was, like, I came from Microsoft .NET environment before that, and we used a program called TFS, Team Foundation Server, which is basically like a SVN or a CVS type source control system that was completely integrated into Visual Studio.So, it was completely visual; you could see everything happening in your IDE as you were doing it. And then making this switch to the command line, I just could not figure it out until I had this visual mental model. So yeah, so ever since then I've just been going around and trying to teach people about Git and teach people this visual mental model that I've developed, and the tips and the tricks that I've learned for navigating Git especially on the command line. And I give talks, I do full-day training workshops, I do training workshops at work. And it's become my thing now, which is flabbergasting [laugh] because I never intended [laugh] for—I didn't set out to go and be this Git expert or to be, quote-unquote, “Famous” for a given value of famous, for knowing stuff about Git. I'm a frontend engineer. There's still a piece of me that looks at it, and is like, “How on earth did this even happen to me?” So, yeah, I don't know. So, that's my Oh shit, Git!?! story. And now—Corey: It's a great one. It's—Katie: Thank you.Corey: Git is one of those weird things where the honest truth of were, “Terrible Ideas in Git”—my talk—came from was that I kept trying and failing to understand Git, and I realized, “How do I fix this? I know. I will give a talk about something.” That is what we know as a forcing function. If I'm not quite ready, they will not move the conference. I know because I checked.Katie: Yep. [laugh]Corey: And one in Zurich was not the first time I'd given it, but it was very clearly something that everyone had problems with. The first version of that talk would have absolutely killed it, if I'd been able to give it to the core Git maintainers. And all, you know, seven of those people would have absolutely loved it, and everyone else would have been incredibly confused. So, I took the opposite tack and said, “All right. How do I expand this to as broad an audience as possible?”And in one of the times I gave it, I said, “Look, I want to make sure it is accessible to everyone, not just people who are super deep into the weeds but also be able to explain Git to my mother.” And unlike virtually every other time where that, “Let me explain something to my mom.” And that is basically coded ageism and sexism built into one. In that case, it was because my mother was sitting in the front row and does not understand what Git is. And she got part of the talk and then did the supportive mother thing of, and as for the rest of it. “Oh, you're so well-spoken. You're so funny. And people seem to love it.” Like, “Did you enjoy my discussion of rebases?”Katie: [laugh].Corey: She says, “Just so good at talking. So, good.” And it was yeah.Katie: [laugh]. Oh, yeah. No, I, I—totally—I understand that. There's this book that I picked up when I was doing all of this research, and I'm looking over at my bookshelf, it's called Version Control with Git. It's an O'Reilly book.And if I remember correctly, it was written by somebody who actually worked at Git. And the way that they started to describe how Git works to people was, they talked about all kinds of deep internals of Unix, and correlated these pieces of the deep internals of Git to these deep Unix internals, which, at the time, makes sense because Git came out of the Unix kernel project as their source control methodology, but, like, really? Like, [laugh] this book, it says at the beginning, that it's supposed to teach people who are new to Git about how to use it. And it's like, well, the first assumption that they make is that you understand the 15 years' worth of history of the Linux kernel project and how Linux works under the hood. And it's like, you've got to be absolutely kidding me that this is how anyone could think, “Oh, this is the right way to teach people Git.”I mean, it's great now, going back in and rereading that book more recently, now that I've already got that understanding of how it works under the hood. This is giving me all of this detail, but for a new person or beginner, it's absolutely the wrong way to approach teaching Git.Corey: When I first sat down to learn Git myself it was in 2008, 2009, Scott Chacon from GitHub at the time wound up doing a multi-day training at the company I worked at the time. And it was very challenging. I'm not saying that he was a bad teacher by any stretch of the imagination, but back in those days, Git was a lot less user-friendly—[laugh] not that it's tremendously good at it now—and people didn't understand how to talk about it, how to teach it, et cetera. You go to GitHub or GitLab or any of the other sites that do this stuff, and there's a 15-step intro that you can learn in 15 minutes and someone who has never used Git before now knows the basics and is not likely to completely shatter things. They've gotten the minimum viable knowledge to get started down to a very repeatable, very robust thing. And that is no small feat. Teaching people effectively is super hard.Katie: It really is. And I totally agree with you that if you go to these providers that they've invested in improving the user experience and making things easier to learn. But I think there's still this problem of what happens when everything goes wrong? What happens if you make a mistake, or what happens if you commit a file on the wrong branch? Or what happens if you make a commit but you forgot to add one of the files you wanted to put in the commit?Or what happens if you want to undo something that you did in a previous commit? And I think these are things that are still really, for some reason, not well understood. And I think that's kind of why Oh Shit, Git!?! has fallen into this little niche corner of the Git world is because the focus is really like, “Oh, shit. I just made a mistake and I don't know what to do, and I don't know what terminology to even Google for to help me figure out how to fix this problem.” And I've come out and put these very simple, like, here: step one, step two, step three.And people might disagree or argue [laugh] with some of the commands and some of the orders, but really, the focus is, like, people have this idea in their head, I think, particularly at their jobs, that Git is this big, important thing and if you screw up, you can't fix it. When really a lot of helping people to become more familiar and comfortable with Git is about ensuring them that no, no, no, the whole point of Git is that just about everything can be undone, and just about everything is fixable, and here's how you do it. So, I still think that we have a long way to go when it comes to teaching Git.Corey: I would agree wholeheartedly. And I think that most people are not thinking about this from a position of educators, they're thinking about it from the position of engineering, and it's a weird combination of the two. You're not going to generally find someone who has no engineering experience to be able to explain things in a context that resonates with the people who will need to apply it. And on the other side, you're not going to find that engineers are great at explaining things without having specific experience in that space. There are exceptions, and they are incredibly rare and extremely valuable as a result. The ability to explain complex things simply is a gift.Katie: It really is.Corey: It's also a skill and you can get better at it, but a lot of folks just seem to never put the work in in the first place.Katie: Well, you know, it's quote-unquote, “soft skills.” So [laugh].Corey: Oh, God. They're hard as hell, so it's a terrible name.Katie: [laugh]. Yeah. Though I could not agree more, I think something that I really look at as a trait of a super senior engineer is that they are somebody who has intentionally worked on and practiced developing that skill of taking something that's a really complex technical concept, and understanding your audience, and having some empathy to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and figure out okay, how do I break this down and explain it to someone who maybe doesn't have all the context that I do? Because when you think about it, if you're working at a big company, and you're an engineer, and you want to, like, do the new hotness, cool thing, and you want to make Kubernetes the thing or whatever other buzzword term you want to use, in order to get that prioritized and on a team's backlog, you have to turn around and explain to a product person why it's important for product reasons, or what benefits is this going to bring to the organization as far as scalability, and reliability. And you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose goals are totally different than yours.Like, product people's goals are all around timelines, they're around costs, they're around things short-term versus long-term improvements. And if you can't put yourself into the shoes of that person, and figure out how to explain your cool hot tech thing to them, then you're never going to get your project off the ground. No one's ever going to approve it, nobody's going to give budget, nobody's going to put it in a team's backlog unless you have that skill.Corey: That's the hard part is that people tend to view advancement as an individual contributor or engineer purely through a lens of technical ability. And it's not. The higher you rise, the more your job involves talking to people, and the less it involves writing code in almost every case.Katie: One hundred percent. That's absolutely been my experience as an architect is that, gosh, I almost never write code these days. My entire job is basically writing docs, talking to people, meeting with people, trying to figure out, where, what is the left hand doing and what is the right hand doing so I can somehow create a bridge between them. You know, I'm trying to influence teams, and their approach, and the way that they think about writing software. And, yes there is a foundation of technical ability that has to be there.You have to have that knowledge and that experience, but at this point, it's like, my God—you know, I write more SQL as a frontend architect that I write HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript because I'm doing data analysis and [laugh] I'm doing—I'm trying to figure out what does the numbers tell us about the right thing to choose or the right way to go, or where are we having issues? And, yeah, I think that people's perceptions and the reality don't always match up when it comes to looking at the senior IC technical track.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: At some level, you hear people talking about wanting to get promoted, and what they're really saying—and it doesn't seem that they realize this—is, “I love what I do, so I'm really trying to get promoted so I can do less of what I love and a lot more of things I hate.”Katie: [laugh]. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. [laugh]. In some ways, in some ways, I think that you've got to kind of learn to accept it. And there are some people, I think that once you get past the senior engineer, or maybe even the staff engineer, maybe they don't even want to go there because they don't want to do the kind of sales pitch, people person, data numbers pitching, trying to get people to agree with you on the right way forward is really hard, and I don't think it's for everyone. But I love it. [laugh]. I absolutely love it. It's been great for me. And I feel like it really—it plays to my strengths in a lot of ways.Corey: What I always found that worked for me, as far as getting folks on board with my vision of the world is, first, I feel like I have to grab their attention, and my way is humor. With the Git talk, I have to say giving that talk a few times made me pretty confident in it. And then I was invited to the frontend conference. And in hindsight, I really, really should have seen this coming, but I'm there, I'm speaking in the afternoon, I'm watching the morning talks, and the slides are all gorgeous.Katie: Yes. [laugh].Corey: And then looking at my own, and they are dogshit. Because this was before I had the sense to hire a designer to help with these things. It was effectively black Helvetica text on a white background. And I figured, “All right, this is a problem. I only have a few hours to go, what do I do?”And my answer was, “Well, I'm not going to suddenly become an amazing designer in the four hours I have.” So, I changed some of the text to Comic Sans because if you're doing something bad, do it worse, and then make it look intentional. It was a weird experience, and it was a successful talk in that no one knew what the hell to make of what I was doing. And it really got me thinking that this was the first time I'd spoken to an audience who was frontend, and it reminded me that the DevOps problems that I normally talked about, were usually fairly restricted to DevOps. But the things that everyone touches, like Git, for example, start to be things that resonate and break down walls and silos better than a given conference ever can. But talking instead about shared pain and shared frustrations.Katie: Yes. Yes. Everyone likes to know that they are not alone in the world, particularly folks who are maybe underrepresented minorities in tech and who are afraid to speak up and say, “Oh, I don't understand.” Or, “That doesn't make any sense to me,” because they're worried that they're already being taken not as seriously as their white, male counterparts. And I feel like something I really try to lean into as a very senior woman in a very male-dominated field is if I don't understand something, or if I have a question, or something doesn't make sense is I try to raise my hand and ask those questions and say, out loud, “Okay, I don't get this.”Because I can't even tell you, Corey, the number of times I've had somebody reach out to me after a meeting and say, “Thank you. I didn't understand it either.” Or, “I thought maybe I just didn't understand the problem space, or maybe I just wasn't smart enough to understand their explanation.” And having somebody who's very senior who folks look up to, to be able to say, “Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense.” Or, you know, I don't understand that explanation.Can you explain it a different way? It's so powerful and it unblocks people and it gives them this confidence that, hey, if that person up on stage, or leading this meeting, or writing this blog post doesn't get this either, maybe I'm not so stupid, or maybe I do deserve to be in this industry, or maybe it's not just me. And I really hope that more and more people can feel empowered to do that in their daily lives more. I think that's been something that has been a tremendous learning through all of this experience with Oh shit, Git!?!For me is the number of people that come up to me after conference talks, or tweet me, or send me a message, just saying, “Thank you. I thought I was alone. I thought I was the only one that didn't get this.” And knowing that not just am I not the only one, but that people are universally frustrated, and universally Git makes them want to swear all the time, I mean, that's the best compliments that I get is when folks come up to me and say, “Thank you, I thought I was alone.”Corey: That's one of the things that I find that is simultaneously the most encouraging and also the most galling. Every once in a while I will have some company reach out to me—over a Twitter thread or something—where I'm going through their product from a naive user perspective of, like, I'm not coming at this with 15 years of experience and instinct that feed into how I approach this, but instead the, I actually haven't used this product before. I'm not going to jump ahead and make assumptions that tend to be right. I'm going to follow the predictable user path flow. And they are very often times where, “Okay. I'm hitting something. I don't understand this. Why is it like this? This is not good.”And usually, companies are appreciative when I do stuff like that, but every once in a while, I'll get some dingus who will come in, and like, “I didn't appreciate the fact that you end up intentionally misinterpreting what we're saying.” And that's basically license for me to take the gloves off and say, “No, this was not me being intentionally dumb. Sure, I didn't apply a whole bunch of outside resources I could have to this, but it wasn't me intentionally failing to get the point. I did not understand this, and you're coming back to me now reinforces that you are too close to the problem. And, on some level, when your actual customers have problems with this, they are hearing an element of contempt from you.”Katie: Totally.Corey: “This is an opportunity to fix it and make it more approachable because spoiler, not a lot of people love paying money to something that makes them feel stupid.”Katie: [laugh]. See, Corey, I don't know. You say that you're not really a frontend person, but that is a very strong UX mindset. Like that—Corey: Oh, my frontend stuff is actually pretty awesome because as soon as I have to do something that even borders on frontend, I have the insight and I guess, willingness to do the smart thing, which is to immediately stop talking and pay someone who knows what they're doing.Katie: [laugh]. Thank you. On behalf of all frontend engineers everywhere, I applaud that, and I appreciate it.Corey: It comes down to specialty. I mean, again, it would also be sort of weird from my perspective, which is my entire corporate position is I fix the horrifying AWS bill. So, if you're struggling with the bill in various capacities, first, join basically everyone, but two, you're not alone so maybe hire someone who is an expert in this specific thing to come in and help you with it. And wouldn't it be a little hypocritical of me to go in and say, “Oh, yeah, but I'm just going to YOLO my way through this nonsense?”Katie: Mm-hm. [laugh]. Yeah, [laugh] I don't know we'll want to include this in the final recording, but I have a really hilarious story, actually, about Amazon. So—Corey: Oh, please. They listen to this and they love customer feedback.Katie: [laugh].Corey: I'm not being sarcastic. I'm very sincere here.Katie: Well, this is many, many, many years ago. I mean, probably, oh, gosh, this is probably eight years ago at this point. I was interviewing for a job at Amazon. It was a job to be a frontend engineer on the homepage team, which at the time, I was like, “Oh, my God, this is Amazon. This is such an honor. I'm so excited.”Corey: And you look at amazon.com's front page, and it's, “Oh, I can fix this. There's so much to fix here.”Katie: Yes.Corey: And then reality catches up if I might not be the first person in the world to have made that observation.Katie: [laugh].Corey: What's—Katie: Well—Corey: Going on in there?Katie: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what's going on. So, I think I did five different phone interviews. You know, before they invite you out to Seattle, there's—and again, this was eight years ago, so this was well before everyone was working at home. And in those five hours of phone interviews, I want you to make a guess at how many minutes we spent talking about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.Corey: I am so unfamiliar with the frontend world, I don't know what the right answer is for an interview, but it's either going to be all the time or none of it, based on the way you're framing it.Katie: Yes. [laugh]. It was basically, like, half an hour. So, when you are a frontend engineer, your job is to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And in five hours, I talked about that for probably half an hour.It was one small question and one small discussion, and all the rest of the time was algorithms, and data structures, and big O notation, and oh, gosh, I think they even did the whole, like, “I typed something into my browser, tell me what happens after I type a URL into my browser.” And I think that just told [laugh] me everything that I needed to know about how Amazon approached the frontend and why their website was such a hot mess was because they weren't actually hiring anyone with real frontend skills to work on the frontend. They were hiring backend people who probably—not to say that they weren't capable or didn't care, but I don't know. That's my favorite Amazon story that I have is trying to go work there, and they basically were like, “Yes, we want a frontend engineer.” And then they didn't actually ask about any frontend engineering skill sets in the job. They didn't offer me anyth—I don't think I got invited to go to Seattle, but I probably wouldn't have anyways.Corey: No. Having done it a couple of times now, again, I like the people I meet at Amazon very, very much. I want to be very clear on that. But some of their processes on the other hand, oh, my God. It shows that being a big company is clearly not necessarily a signal that you solved all of these problems. In some cases, you're basically just crashing through the problem space by sheer power of inertia.Katie: Yeah, definitely. I think you can see that when looking at their frontend. Harkening back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier is you don't go to Amazon and learn patterns of interaction that are applicable to every single site on the web. Amazon kind of expects that users are going to learn the Amazon way of shopping and that users are going to adjust how they navigate the web in order to accommodate Amazon. You know, people learn, “Oh, this is what I do on Amazon.” And then, you know, they're—Corey: Oh, that's the biggest problem with bad user experience is people feel dumb.Katie: Mm-hm.Corey: They don't think, “This company sucks at this thing.” They think, “I must not get it.” And I know this, and I am subject to it. I run into this problem all the time myself.Katie: Oh, yes.Corey: And that is a problem.Katie: Yeah. It's why I think, like you said earlier, it's so important when you work somewhere to figure out how do you get that distance between being a power user enough so that you can understand and appreciate what it's like for a regular user who's not a power user of your site. And what do they do? And UX researchers are amazing. A good UX researcher is worth absolutely their weight in gold because, I don't know if you've ever sat in on a UX session where the researcher is walking a user through completing a specific task on a website, but oh my God, it's painful.It's because [laugh] you just want to, you want to push them in the right direction, and you want to be like, “Oh, but what about in the upper right over there, that big orange button,” and you can't do that. You can't push people. You have to be very open-ended, you have to ask them questions. And every single time I've listened in on a UX research recording, or a call, I want to scream through the computer and be like, “Oh, my gosh. This is how you do it.”But, you know, you can't do that. So, [laugh] I think it's important to try to develop that kind of skill set on your own of, “Okay, if I didn't stare at this website every day, what would it be like for me to try to navigate? If I was using a keyboard for navigation or a screen reader instead of a mouse, what would my experience be like?” Having that empathy, and that ability to get outside of yourself is just really important to be a successful engineer on the web, I think.Corey: Yeah. And you really wish, on some level, that they would be able to articulate this as an industry. And I say ‘they,' I guess I'm speaking of about three companies in particular. I have a lot more sympathy for a small startup that is having problems with UX than I am for enormous companies who can basically hurl all the money at it. And maybe that's unfair, but I feel like, at some point of market dominance, it is beholden on you to set the shining example for how these things are going to work.I don't feel that way, necessarily about architecture on the backend. Sure, it can be a dangerous, scary tire fire, but that's not something your customers or users need to think about or worry about, as long as it is up from their perspective. UX is very much the opposite of that.Katie: Totally. And I think, working at a former startup, there's a tendency to really focus a lot on those backend problems. You know, you really look at, “Okay, we're going to nitpick every single RPC request. We're going to have all kinds of logging and monitoring about, okay, this is the time that it takes for a database API request to return.” And just the slightest movement and people freak out.But it's been a process that I've been working really hard on the last couple of years, to get folks to have that same kind of care and attention to the stuff that they ship to the frontend, especially for a lot of organizations that really focus on, “Well, we're a tech company,” it's easy to get into this, oh, engineering is all of these big hard systems problems, when really your customers don't care about all of that. Yes, ultimately, it does affect them because if your database calls are really, really slow, then it has an effect on how quickly the user gets a response back and we know that slow-performing websites, folks are more likely to abandon them. Not that it doesn't matter completely, but personally, I would really love it to see more universally around the industry that frontend is seen as this is the entirety of your product and if you get that wrong, then none of the rest of your architecture, or your infrastructure, or how great your DevOps is matters because you need customers to come to your site and buy things.Corey: It turns out that the relationship between customers coming to your site and buying things and the salaries engineering likes to command is sometimes attenuated in ways that potentially shouldn't be. These are interesting times, and it does help to remember the larger context of the work we do, but honestly, at some point, you wind up thinking about that all the time, and not the thing that you're brought in specifically to fix. These are weird times.Katie: Yes.Corey: Katie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about several things. Usually—it's weird. Normally, when someone says thank you for speaking to me about Git, there is no way that isn't a sarcastic—Katie: [laugh].Corey: —statement. But in this case, it is in fact genuine.Katie: Yes, I will bitch about Git until I am blue on the face, so I appreciate you having me on board to talk about it, Corey. Thank you.Corey: Of course. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Katie: They can find me at ohshitgit.com, or as you pointed out, the dangitgit.com swear-free version. As a little plug for the site, we now have had the site translated by volunteers in the community into 28 different languages. So, if English is not your first language, there's a really good chance you'll find a version of OSG—as I like to call it—that is in your language.Corey: Terrific. And we will, of course, put links to these wonderful things in the [show notes 00:39:16]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Katie: Thank you, Corey. It's been lovely to reconnect, and gosh, look at where we are now compared to where we were almost five years ago.Corey: I know. It's amazing how the world works.Katie: Really.Corey: Katie Sylor-Miller, frontend architect at Etsy. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment written in what is clearly your preferred user interface: raw XML.Katie: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Please note that this episode contains brief mention of suicide.Today's guest needs no introduction! Of course, they will get one anyway:Will Larson is the CTO of Calm and has worked at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is also an author and has written two books, one of which is on Staff Engineering and serves as the inspiration for this podcast! In our conversation with Will, we discuss one of his earliest blog posts on a catastrophic launch at Digg and why he felt it was important to write about his experiences. We talk with Will about the expanding role of Staff Engineers and how that is affected by the rate of change in the field of startups and technology companies as a whole. Later, we explore the tracks of technical leadership and management within technology companies and the pros and cons of the pendulum model. Will shares what he's learned about the skills needed for leadership positions and why working with a team of managers versus a team of engineers requires a completely different skillset. After that, we talk about Will's career in writing and public speaking. We loved having Will on the show, so join us for engaging conversation spanning many topics from the potential for leadership in technology companies to the joy of writing!LinksWill Larson on LinkedInWill Larson on GithubWill Larson on AmazonIrrational ExuberanceCalmStaff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management trackAn Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering ManagementDigg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessityHigh Output ManagementThe Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, talks to Will Larson, CTO at Calm, about getting into management early in his career and how it impacted his professional evolution and his books An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management and Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track.Jean and Will discuss: Negotiating their first tech jobs (or not negotiating their first tech jobs)The false expectation that the staff engineering route will be more predictable than the management routeHow getting external support is keyIncreasing difficulty of switching between the paths as you become more seniorHow to approach non-work work (books, talks, blog posts, etc).

There are plenty of resources and advice on unlocking the secrets of the engineering management career path. But what if the manager role is not for you? Calm’s Will Larson chats to Intercom's Brian Scanlon about the road beyond Senior engineer.

We’re tackling one of the most ambiguous and subjective roles in the software engineering career path, the Staff Engineer. Many companies don’t even have this role, and the ones that do have a hard time defining exactly what it means. Will Larson, the CTO of Calm, and author of the new book, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track, joins us to share his research on what a staff engineer actually is. Join the Dev Interrupted discord server: https://discord.gg/tpkmwM6c3g 

Will Larson CTO @ Calm shares with us how to focus your time on what actually matters. You’ll hear about many of the common traps engineering leaders fall into and his frameworks to help you better target your time to focus on long-term, high-impact work. "A lot of times they'll be like, 'Oh no one's working on this... I can make a huge improvement here!' But then they'll get signals from leadership that 'Actually this isn't valued...' And so I think it's really important to understand what SHOULD be valuable, and then understand what IS actually valued, and then make your own decisions based on that in terms of where you want to put your time." WILL LARSON, CTO @ CALM Will previously working at places like Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He's been writing on his blog, Irrational Exuberance, since 2007 with 600+ different posts covering tons of topics on engineering leadership, management and career. He is also the author of “An Elegant Puzzle” and his *NEW* book “Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” Follow Will on Twitter @Lethain Here is the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs (engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’) SHOWNOTES When Will confronted the existential question “Am I actually working on what matters?” (3:56) Where most people go wrong when evaluating how they spend their time (8:52) How to focus on long-term impact and avoid short-term “snacks” & “preening” (10:12) How to navigate a company that recognizes high visibility work over high-impact work (13:12) How to mitigate & reduce status-chasing in your teams (16:09) What high-visibility, low impact work looks like with engineering leaders (18:20) “Chasing Ghosts” and the trap of projecting familiarity onto problems (20:59) How to catch yourself “chasing ghosts” (27:31) Focus on what really matters by seeking the “existential issues” & where there’s “Room AND Attention” (32:10) How to identify and anticipate future existential issues with the “Iterative Elimination Tournament” (35:28) Creating “Room and Attention” & identifying your unique capabilities as an eng leader (38:20) Get projects unstuck and prioritized fast by “Lending Privilege” (42:11) Why Will wrote his new book - “Staff Engineering: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” (45:42) Takeaways (48:40) LINKS & RESOURCES Will's blog Irrational Exuberance: https://lethain.com/ Here’s the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs on engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’: https://staffeng.com/stories/aaron-suggs Will's book An Elegant Puzzle: https://lethain.com/elegant-puzzle/ Will's *NEW* book - "Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track": https://staffeng.com/book Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish! Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

HAPPY RACEDAY! Dega Davy and The Nose dive deep into a review of Speedweek and preview the 2021 Daytona 500. Will Larson lap the field 10 times and set a new track record? Will Austin Dillon cuck Bubba again on Sunday? So many questions, so much guessing. Let's go racing at Daytona!!

What happens after you go past Senior? Will Larson, CTO of Calm, has been interviewing Staff-plus engineers across the industry for his new book, Staff Engineering.

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the The post Staff Engineering with Will Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the expectations and obligations of staff engineer? Will Larson is an experienced engineer who has worked at Stripe and other prominent tech companies. He joins the show to talk about the role of staff engineering, and the material he has written about it.

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the The post Staff Engineering with Will Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the The post Staff Engineering with Will Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

How we got into software engineering. sending a bat signals to attract like-minded people, and building your personal network.Show links:https://charity.wtf/2020/09/06/if-management-isnt-a-promotion-then-engineering-isnt-a-demotion by Charity MajorsInterviews with the Masters, book by Robert Greenhttps://lethain.com/network-of-peers by Will Larson

In this episode, Tom and Jamie chat with Jeff Foster, Redgate's Head of Engineering and Will Larson, CTO at Calm all about scaling your engineering culture. They cover topics such as why culture is so important, maintaining a small and clear tech stack, the sweet spot for team sizes and the need for specialism and clear development paths.

This episode, I was joined by Will Larson to discuss our limited time together at Whitewater and dynasty sports. Will is a huge fan of dynasty football and also has his own podcast, Podcast 2 Be Named Later. (Podcast 2BNL on Spotify) Give him a follow and thanks for listening! "Hot Chocolate - Every 1's a winner (Album Version)1978 HQ Audio." YouTube, uploaded by harbalite, NA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFFRaIUisY.

ALICE experts David Chambers and Will Larson join me on the show this week to reminisce about their glory days durdling at the birth of the modern ALICE format, plus we go deep on some real stinkers.

Monty & Jake are talking Kyle Larson and his racial slur, that has now gotten him fired from Chip Ganassi Racing. Has the N word become too easy, and has pop culture normalized the word, plus is it too late to stop it? Will Larson ever race again, and should he be given a second chance? The guys debate the greatest NBA Player of all time as ESPN does the same. For Monty it is clear who the GOAT is, but his #2 shocks Jake. The guys got a surprise in their bank accounts over night, and debate the impact that has on their lives. Plus they discuss new 70's era CIA documents that detail wild Russian mind control experiments, there is more fall out from Donald Trump's daily CoronaVirus briefing, and a legend returns to fill Jake's soul with happiness and warmth …and Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden. The guys also want to play Call Of Duty: War Zone with you! Follow the show on Twitter & Instagram: @TheMontyShow

Jamison quickly took us through his studies, how he zoomed in on computer sciences... not without a few detours beforehand. We talked about his part time jobs and how he learned what a bad manager can be. We then jumped forward a few years to talk about management, what it takes to do a good job there, the challenges and successes of the function. We finished talking about two dreaded responsibilities of a manager: hiring and firing and how Jamison made his way through this.Jamison is a code whisperer and experienced product engineer. He has led teams and been led. Jamison is currently an engineering manager at Walmart Labs leading a distributed team in building delightful APIs and UIs that configure Walmart’s performance systems. He also co-hosts the "Soft Skills Engineering podcast". If this name is new to you, you should definitely listen to Episode 77 of this very DevJourney podcast where I interviewed Dave Smith, the other half of the co-hosts of this show. Oh and Jamison thinks you are great!Here are the links of the show:https://www.twitter.com/jamison_dancehttps://jamison.dancehttps://softskills.audiohttps://devjourney.info/Guests/77_DaveSmith.htmlhttps://tinyurl.com/shitty11meetingsBook: The making of a manager by Julie Zhuo https://amzn.to/37VTt1cBook: An elegant puzzle by Will Larson https://amzn.to/31layz0https://conf.reactjs.orghttps://www.reactrally.comhttps://devjourney.info/Guests/52_CharityMajors.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_FournierCreditsMusic Aye by Yung Kartz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.Your hostSoftware Developer‘s Journey is hosted and produced by Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, a crazy frenchman living in Germany who dedicated his life to helping others learn & grow. More about him at timbourguignon.fr.Want to be next?Do you know anyone who should be on the podcast? Do you want to be next? Drop me a line: info@devjourney.info or via Twitter @timothep.Gift the podcast a ratingPlease do me and your fellow listeners a favor by spreading the good word about this podcast. And please leave a rating (excellent of course) on the major podcasting platforms, this is the best way to increase the visibility of the podcast:Apple PodcastsStitcherGoogle PlayPatreonFinally, if you want to help produce the podcast, support me on Patreon. Every cent you pledge will help pay the hosting bills!Thanks!Support the show (http://bit.ly/2yBfySB)

We take a slight turn with our book choice with An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson! This is the episode where we fix the audio somewhat! Grab a beverage as we discuss management tips.

Hear from Stripe's Head of Foundation Eng and author of An Elegant Puzzle, Will Larson, on how we handled a situation when upper management wasn't happy with an engineer who messed up (when In fact, there were systematic Issue at play). Later in the episode, Will offers advice to an engineering manager on balancing the pressure to fix technical debt with shipping new features.Support the show (https://www.platohq.com/)

At Stripe, guest Will Larson received his first official management training by an employer. It taught him about different management styles, problem solving, and more. But most employees don’t get management training, which can cause problems down the road. Marcus and Will discuss this, plus what it takes to handle leadership roles. Show Notes  Most coders don’t aspire to be managers “there's that idea that really if you think about the consequences and the kind of statefulness of these human systems that you're working with, you can come to understand them in a way that you can't if you look at them as causal” “this is where systems thinking is so powerful, which is if you look at it causally you've solved a problem, if you look at it from a systems perspective you've created a problem, and you really have to have the slightly longer term view and just to recognize that you are burying yourself when you take many of the quick easy ways out” “the joy of senior manager is these problems are really hard to solve but you actually can finesse most problems into like a problem statement where everyone like is happy” “So I've been thinking about the idea of forced change a lot recently.” “A lot of incident programs have the same problem where they learn about the gaps but then you have to find the space to improve upon them”  We’re still learning: Most Silicon Valley companies are still very young “There's still a ton of scarcity for kind of the folks at the top of the market.”    Links: O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference – Berlin, Germany.  November 4-7, 2019. Use discount code MB20 to save 20% on Bronze, Silver, and Gold packages. Will Larson on Twitter Will’s book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

In this podcast we discuss a holistic approach to technical leadership, and Pat provides guidance on everything from defining target operating models, cultivating culture, and supporting people in developing the career they would like. There are a bunch of great stories, several book recommendations, and additional resources to follow up on. * Cultivating organisational culture is much like gardening: you can’t force things, but you can set the right conditions for growth. The most effective strategy is to communicate the vision and goals, lead the people, and manage the systems and organisational structure. * N26, a challenger bank based in Berlin has experienced hypergrowth over the past two years. Both the number of customers and the amount of employees have increased over threefold. This provides lots of opportunities for ownership of product and projects, and it creates unique leadership challenges. * A target operating model (TOM) is a blueprint of a firm's business vision that aligns operating capacities and strategic objectives and provides an overview of the core business capabilities, internal factors, and external drivers, strategic and operational levers. This should be shared widely within an organisation * Pat has curated a “trident operating” model for employee growth. In addition to the class individual contributor (IC) and management tracks, he believes that a third “technical leadership” track provides many benefits. * People can switch between these tracks as their personal goals change. However, this switch can be challenging, and an organisation must support any transition with effective training. * Pat recommends the following books for engineers looking to make the transition to leadership: The Manager’s Path, by Camille Fournier; Resilient Management, by Lara Hogan; Elegant Puzzle, by Will Larson; and Leading Snowflakes by Oren Ellenbogen. Pat has also written his own book, Talking with Tech Leads. * It is valuable to define organisation values upfront. However, these can differ from actual culture, which more about what behaviours you allow, encourage, and stop. * Much like the values provided by Netflix’s Freedom and Responsibility model, Pat argues that balancing autonomy and alignment within an organisation is vital for success. Managers can help their team by clearly defining boundaries for autonomy and responsibility. * Developing the skills to influence people is very valuable for leaders. Influence is based on trust, and this must be constantly cultivated. Trust is much like a bank account, if you don’t regular deposit actions to build trust, you may find yourself going overdrawn when making a deposit. This can lead to bad will and defensive strategies being employed.

Will Larson on Greater Than Code, Marcus Blankenship on Software Engineering Radio, Sonal Chokshi on Software Engineering Daily, Roman Pichler on Being Human, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Hanselminutes. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 2, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. WILL LARSON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Will Larson with hosts Jessica Kerr, Arty Starr, and Rein Henrichs. Will talked about systems thinking, specifically referencing Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As a sixteen-year-old, he was exposed to systems thinking by his economics professor father. They talked about how to bring about change in complex systems and Rein brought up Virginia Satir’s change model.  They talked about various forms of dysfunction, with an example being tasks that are marked as completed by developers without first doing the work of validation. Will’s own example is that executives never miss their goals; they just redefine the goals so that they hit them. There is a certain level of seniority where you can never be held accountable because you are the accountability function. Getting back into the topic of how to change complex systems, Will referenced the book, The First 90 Days as a great explanation of the need to go slow and observe before you try to change things. He says that the “great man theory” has been out of style for decades in the study of history, but is still in style in tech as the most causal way to understand how change works and also the most comforting. Rein talked about how the heroic individual myth is the other side of the coin to the scapegoat. Just as you pile all the blame onto the scapegoat, you pile all the credit onto the hero. He says that cultures that engage in hero myth-building are also likely to engage in scapegoating. Will says he himself has not seen much scapegoating at the companies he works at, likely because those cultures were unwilling to hold folks accountable for their work, but he has seen the hero myth at every company he has worked. Will then spoke about the 10x engineer myth. Will says he meets people who have been in tech for six or seven years who have the idea that they are almost done with their career. It may be due to the “senior engineer after two years” phenomenon where the career path is not well-defined and a lot of companies don’t know how to take advantage of the skills of people with 15 to 20 years of experience. A second reason is that the industry is an overwhelming and draining environment and people choose to opt out of it. As a result, we have very few engineers who have been around long enough to witness the long-term consequences of their brilliant ideas. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/142-modeling-constraints-in-human-systems-with-will-larson/id1163023878?i=1000446345964 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/modeling-constraints-in-human-systems MARCUS BLANKENSHIP ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RADIO The Software Engineering Radio podcast featured Marcus Blankenship with host Travis Kimmel. They talked about motivation, specifically motivation of engineering teams. Marcus says that motivation is the desire to get things done and every engineer coming out of school is motivated from day one. If you get one of these people hired onto your team and, two years later, they are demotivated, suffering from PTSD, scared to offer ideas, and figuring they are just a cog in a machine, your problem is your company or your team, not the engineer you hired. Marcus says he is doing secret research on motivation as he is now interviewing candidates for a job and asking them why they are looking to leave their current job. Nobody says, “Pay.” Often the answer is a lack of alignment with their boss or their company, resulting in the engineer losing the desire to contribute because of a relationship problem. These engineers are not stick-in-the-muds that are angry they don’t get to use COBOL anymore. Something happened where instead of having their ideas valued and heard and being part of the discussion, they somehow got disconnected from their boss. In the seventies, Marcus says, researchers discovered a strong correlation between positive employer-employee relationships and the amount of job satisfaction, quality of work, turnover intentions, and amount of promotions. We are thirty-five years into a few thousand scientific studies that continue to prove that the relationship one has with one’s supervisor matters more than any other factor when it comes to job performance and job satisfaction. Marcus says that a supervisor’s one true job is to create a trusting relationship with the people that report to you. Travis shared his own experience in having one-on-ones with his supervisors that felt to him like they were trying to artificial manufacturing a relationship because there was no indication of what the goal of the meeting was.  Marcus says that good one-on-ones are bi-directional. One-on-ones in which the boss just gets status updates from the subordinate and gives new marching orders are often dissatisfying for both parties. Another flawed kind of one-on-one is where it is all about the employee. Such one-on-ones are not effective and neither party likes these either. Marcus suggests that we apply to our one-on-ones the same Agile thinking that we apply to our work. Every month, at one of your one-on-ones, do a retro on the one-on-one. Talk about why you are doing them, what value you’re getting from them, and how to make them better. They talked about psychological safety. Marcus says a lot of managers don’t realize that they are not in a good position to measure psychological safety based on their own gut. He says tools like Claire Lew’s knowyourteam.com, officevibe.com, and other anonymous survey tools can help. When we become a manager or team lead that has you supervising or leading, we forget that we are in a position of power. Travis added that leaders need to be careful about what they say casually so that it doesn’t get taken as a mandate. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/id120906714?i=1000445260176 Website link: https://www.se-radio.net/2019/07/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/ SONAL CHOKSHI ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured a16z podcast host Sonal Chokshi with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started out by asking why a VC firm decided to start a podcast. Sonal says that a16z has always had a culture of writing, blogging, and sharing ideas. This led them to develop an editorial operation from which the podcast naturally followed. Jeff asked what lessons from blogging apply to podcasting. Sonal sees podcasting as the next evolution of blogging because of its similar intimacy and a similar feeling of authenticity. The difference, she says, is that podcasting is a community and a movement.  Sonal talked about her favorite a16z episodes, including an episode on emojis. She loved it because everybody understands how to use emojis but there is a lot of deep tech and governance involved in making emojis possible. That episode, she said, encapsulates the whole a16z podcast: the intersection of technology, people, politics, context, culture, and humanity.  Jeff brought up a16z’s connection to Mike Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency. Having read Ovitz’s book and noticed how it portrays Ovitz as a workaholic, Jeff asked Sonal how she finds balance while drinking from the addicting technological firehose. Sonal says there is a lack of nuance in the debates about screen time and work/life balance. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/id1019576853?i=1000446547922 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/09/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/ ROMAN PICHLER ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Roman Pichler with host Richard Atherton. Richard asked Roman what a product manager is. Roman says a product manager is someone who takes an idea and helps bring it to life, launch it, make it successful, and keep it successful. Richard asked about the distinction between a product manager and Scrum’s notion of product owner. Roman sees the product owner as a product management role, but methodologies like SAFe have redefined the product owner to be a tactical role, misunderstanding the intention behind the role and the practicalities such as answering questions from the dev team, refining backlog items, and answering support and sales questions. He says there is too much focus on the details and this risks losing sight of the big picture. To do a good job for users and for the business, Roman says it is helpful to have people looking after digital assets with the right qualifications, skills, organizational support, authority, and autonomy. He says the term “mini-CEO” appeals to some product people because it indicates that product people need a certain level of authority, but a CEO would have marketing and sales functions under their control and product people do not. Richard asked what talents Roman had to develop to be a great product person. Roman started out as a programmer and began to help business groups come up with new products. What helped him most was to boost his own understanding of how business works and the second most important element was letting go of being interested in how digital products work and focusing instead on who benefits from them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/72-to-manage-products-is-to-care-with-roman-pichler/id1369745673?i=1000446514943 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/9b2501e7-e618-46f6-8f41-abd69c871211.mp3 DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started by asking whether Dave and Andy knew at the time they wrote the Pragmatic Programmer 20 years ago that they were writing what would become a seminal work. Dave said that both of them were stunned by its success. The book was intended as a way to clarify their own thoughts based on their experiences as consultants in which their clients all had the same kinds of problems: inconsistent builds, the shipping of untested code, and impossible-to-change designs. Scott asked about the importance of the name of the book. Andy said that there was a strain of thought at the time the book was written that was dogmatic and they deliberately pushed against such approaches. Dave pointed out that this was harder on their readers because it forced them to figure out for themselves what works for them. They got into a discussion of what kind of educational background one needs to be a successful programmer. Dave revealed that he is currently teaching classes at SMU to, he says, corrupt the youth by teaching them things like functional programming, and because traditional computer science education is poorly serving the industry and the student. People are coming out of university with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and, in terms of their value in the industry, they are not much different from people who are coming out of eight-week bootcamps. He teaches third or fourth year undergraduates and graduate students and he has found that none have been shown any form of testing. He would much rather hire someone who had the right attitude, was smart, and who could talk to people and he could show such a person how to code while on the job. Andy added that he gets the feeling that most computer science programs are there to teach you to become a professor of computer science rather than a problem-solver. What Andy says people need to learn, and what university education is not providing, are problem-solving skills. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-dave-thomas/id117488860?i=1000446461596 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-with-dave-thomas-and-andy-hunt-VBmLw9lP LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

As Head of Foundation Engineering at Stripe, and Author of An Elegant Puzzle, Will Larson talks about that not all decisions are final and/or permanent, being self- aware, and modeling your behavior in a way that you would like to personify your organization. Every few weeks as part of The Heartbeat, I ask one question… Read the full article

In this episode Will Larson, author of An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, speaks with Uma Chingunde of Stripe and Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily about engineering management. Will was also featured on SE Daily recently. An Elegant Puzzle is an excellent resource on management techniques and strategies for scaling software organizations. Will’s writing draws from The post An Elegant Puzzle Virtual Book Club appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Will Larson is the author of my new favorite engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, and this week, we’re answering listener questions about real-life situations with him.Will has been an engineering leader and software engineer at technology companies of many shapes and sizes including Digg, Uber, and Stripe. He currently leads foundation engineering at Stripe, where he is responsible for the infrastructure and platform organization. If you haven’t heard of Stripe, they’re a huge player in the online payment space, building the economic infrastructure for the internet. They’ve raised over $700M to date and show no signs of slowing their growth any time soon.For notes and a full transcription of the episode, visit woventeams.com/29. Special Guest: Will Larson.

Stephane Kasriel on Unlearn, Melissa Perri on Build by Drift, Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily, April Dunford on Product Love, and Claudio Perrone on Agile Atelier. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 22, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. STEPHANE KASRIEL ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Stephane Kasriel with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Stephane about what unlearning he has had to do as CEO of Upwork. Stephane said that when Upwork started, they developed software in a waterfall process. Development cycles were long and it was frustrating for people. When the product failed in the field, the level of investment was high and everybody would be pointing fingers at everybody else. When they switched to an Agile model, there was a lot of unlearning to be done. They stopped trying to specify everything up front and instead tried to build minimum viable products, get feedback from customers, and iterate quickly. When they went looking for Agile trainers in 2012, it was hard to find anyone willing and able to train Upwork’s remote teams. Many trainers at the time told them that being Agile meant being colocated. Today, there are many companies doing distributed Agile development and some best practices have been built up and shared. I liked what Stephane had to say about company values. He said that what you don’t want as a value is one in which you are a good person if you have it and you are a bad person if you don’t. You want instead to have values that say, “This company is not for everybody. If you don’t believe in these values, there are plenty of companies that more closely match your values and you should go there. But if you want to be here and you want to be successful, you should be excited about this company’s values.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ceo-school-and-the-future-of-work-with-stephane-kasriel/id1460270044?i=1000443495925 MELISSA PERRI ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Maggie Crowley. Maggie started out by asking Melissa how she defined the build trap she references in her book Escaping The Build Trap (https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X/). Melissa says that the build trap is a situation an organization finds itself in when it gets too concerned with how many features it is shipping and not concerned enough with the value for the customer and the business that those features are producing. She says that these businesses fail to retrospect on the impact that the features they shipped had on customers and the business. Maggie asked how companies get into the build trap in the first place. Startups, Melissa says, don’t typically have this problem, but as they scale and get more money, the distance to customers increases, they talk to customers less, and have more runway. They tend to go into an execution mode where they just keep asking themselves, “What’s the next thing we can build?” and forget to go back to their customers and make sure that what they build for them is producing value for them. Maggie described the challenges Drift faces in having teams that locally optimize for particular features and Melissa says this comes back to how the company thinks about strategy. Small companies don’t need a strategic framework but, as you scale, you want all the new teams you are creating to move in the same direction and a strategic framework can help with this. Maggie asked what Melissa prescribes when she consults with a company that is stuck in the build trap. Melissa instead gave an answer on how she assesses a company before making a prescription. She first looks for how the company sets strategy and how it deploys it. Second, she looks to see if the company has the right people in the right roles. She also looks at whether the company has the right processes to learn from customers and incorporate feedback. Next, she looks at product operations, such as a cadence for revisiting decisions and the right data infrastructure to support decisions. Last, she looks at culture and how people are incentivized. Maggie asked what Melissa would change first if the company had problems in all of those areas. Melissa says that she starts by making sure the company has good product leaders and product managers who can learn from those leaders. Many companies had product leaders who didn’t start in product management themselves and can’t train or help the product managers. As Maggie points out in this podcast, this echoes what Marty Cagan said when she had him as a guest in an earlier episode. I referenced that Build by Drift episode in the 14th episode of this podcast, named Safety Is Not A Priority. Melissa says she spends a lot of time translating what the teams are working on into something that executives can get behind because executives don’t care about the list of features that the teams are shipping; they care about what those features are going to do. Melissa says that storytelling in these situations is about relating your story to the goals people care about. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/whats-the-build-trap-what-does-it-mean-for-product-managers/id1445050691?i=1000443704053 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fbfcff04 WILL LARSON ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Will Larson with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started by asking whether Will thinks Google, where they once had a very flat management hierarchy, could work with no managers today. Will said that today’s hyper-scaling companies are so fast-growing that you need people to help manage that growth while dealing with tools and systems that are constantly becoming out of date. Jeff asked about the psychological ramifications of working in an environment of rapid growth. Will said that the best part of rapid growth is every week you raise your head and look around and see some really smart, talented person who is sitting next to you and wasn’t there the week before and can help. During change, he says, you have to stay open. Don’t try to control the change but you can help to facilitate it. You should be aware of your needs and take action to ensure those needs are being met so you can be the person you want to be for longer, rather than peaking in your first months in a role. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/id1019576853?i=1000441481446 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/06/14/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/ APRIL DUNFORD ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured April Dunford with host Eric Boduch. April talked about product positioning. She says that many treat the product positioning exercise as a Mad Libs-style template to be filled in. The actual thinking of how to position your product is often ignored. She says that the first thing you have to do is get a handle on what the real competitive alternatives to your product are in the minds of your customers. For many startups, their real competitor is Excel, or hiring an intern, or doing it manually. Next, she says, is to look at what you have feature-wise that the competitive alternatives do not. This is usually a giant list of things. As you go down this list, you ask yourself what value for customers each feature enables. She says that an interesting thing happens at this point: the value tends to theme out. There are usually two or three big buckets that three quarters of your features fall into. Those buckets get you to your differentiated value. That, she says, is your secret sauce. She uses the analogy of building a fishing net specifically for tuna. You have a choice. You can travel to the part of the ocean where you will find tuna and see if your net works or you can go to the part of the ocean where there are all kinds of fish, throw the net in, and see what you pull up. People at startups often think that a certain segment of the market is going to love their product, but they might be surprised to learn that there is a segment that they didn’t even think of that is actually dying for their product. You don’t want to get the positioning so tight that you exclude those people. You want to keep it loose, cast the net wide, and see what happens. April says she doesn’t believe in product-market fit. She says that nobody has given her a good answer to the question, “How do you know you got product-market fit?” You may have a product that people like, but if you don’t know why, you don’t know if it’s at risk of going away or tapping out its market. She asks, “If I can’t measure when I have product-market fit, why am I even trying to get product-market fit?” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000441988263 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product-positioning CLAUDIO PERRONE ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Claudio Perrone with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Claudio talked about his Popcorn Flow model. He says that Popcorn Flow is based on a pragmatic anti-fragile philosophy and starts from the idea that inertia is our enemy and provides a set of principles and steps to fight inertia in organizations. I saw Claudio give a presentation on Popcorn Flow at the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference, so I was excited to find him being interviewed on a podcast. Popcorn Flow applies ideas from The Lean Startup to organizational change. As an entrepreneur, Claudio realized that in entrepreneurship you are dealing with an environment of extreme uncertainty and, as an Agile coach, he saw the same kind of environment of uncertainty in how people react to change. Lean Startup deals with environments of extreme uncertainty by running frequent experiments. Popcorn Flow applies the same approach of frequent experimentation to organizational change. Popcorn Flow is most known for its decision cycle of seven steps from which the POPCORN acronym is derived: Problems & Observations Options Possible experiments Committed Ongoing Review Next These steps are visualized like a Scrum board or Kanban board. Claudio gave an example of running through the seven steps for the problem of poor quality code: Problem: poor quality code Options: pair programming, test-driven development Possible experiments: pair program for three days and see if the code is better and see if we want to continue with the practice Committed: put a review date on the calendar for evaluating the results of the experiment Ongoing: Track the experiment as it proceeds Review: The experiment is not finished until you review it. Compare the reality against the expectation and discuss what you learned and what are you going to do next. Next: The review may indicate that you do not know enough yet, so you may choose to persist, launch a new experiment based on what you learned, or revisit the problem. I liked what Claudio had to say about Agile: “I felt it was about being humble. If we knew the perfect way of developing software, we would use the perfect way. It is because we don’t know that we start with what we have and we continuously inspect and adapt.” Claudio also talked about some of the principles of Popcorn Flow: If change is hard, make it continuous: borrowing ideas from continuous integration and delivery, replace big change programs with small incremental change and do it all the time. Small bets, big payoff (the venture capitalist principle): when you run a lot of experiments, it doesn’t matter that you failed. What matters is how much does it cost to fail and how much do you gain when you win. It is not ‘fail fast - fail often’, it is ‘learn fast - learn often’: without feedback, your experiments are not small bets and you are not experimenting; you are committing to what should instead be an option. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-9-experimentation-popcorn-flow-claudio-perrone/id1459098259?i=1000443480071 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/02/episode-9-experimentation-and-popcorn-flow-with-claudio-perrone/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Will Larson is the author of my new favorite engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Will has been an engineering leader and software engineer at technology companies of many shapes and sizes including Digg, Uber, and Stripe. He currently leads foundation engineering at Stripe, where he is responsible for the infrastructure and platform organization. If you haven’t heard of Stripe, they’re a huge player in the online payment space, building the economic infrastructure for the internet. They’ve raised over $700M to date and show no signs of slowing their growth any time soon.In this episode, we talk about the importance of increasing your offer acceptance rate, how Stripe defines developer productivity, and why sometimes, the best policy is to throw away your policies.For notes and a full transcription of the episode, visit woventeams.com/28.Special Guest: Will Larson.

Author and Head of Foundation Engineering at Stripe (https://stripe.com), Will Larson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/) stops by the People Stack to talk about what the Foundation Engineering team does, the best career advice he ever received, why Inclusion must precede Diversity, sizing teams when managing ICs and Managers, handling on-call status, career ladders and much more Will's book "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" is out now (hardcover is highly recommended): https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186 Intro music is "I'm Going for a Coffee" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/Music_For_Podcasts_3/02_Im_Going_for_a_Coffee) by Lee Rosevere, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Special Guest: Will Larson.

There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Management can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle tackles the challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams, to technical debt, all the way to succession planning. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.In this episode Ledge sits down with the author to discuss key lessons from the book. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists. Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You might expect this core infrastructure which modern humans rely on to have been constructed with The post Elegant Puzzle with Will Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists. Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You might expect this core infrastructure which modern humans rely on to have been constructed with The post Elegant Puzzle with Will Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

01:12 – Marcus’ Superpower: Helping Engineers Become Good Bosses 02:30 – Bosses Who Don’t Wanna Boss: Ending Up in Management The Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) 10:37 – Are there people who just aren’t cut out for management or leadership? 14:20 – Applying Rationality to Organizations 20:23 – Alignment Not Agreement 24:52 – Is there a safe way to try and fail at management? Trying on Hats Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) 31:16 – What does “BOSS” mean? Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017930/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0316017930&linkId=0e148f2c493dbfd36e294137d6ba6651) 36:03 – The Up/Down of the Hierarchy Metaphors We Live By (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226468011/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0226468011&linkId=fe51e9159155a6387c1d742001413d5f) Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Edgar H. Schein (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609949811/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1609949811&linkId=35044b8aa35b0f47b24a48915323ceca) 36:03 – What are the skills that good managers have? How do you know if you’re doing a good job? Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484221575/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1484221575&linkId=ea061ab737b69a99cce64192a3f874b0) Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams by Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/032182203X/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=032182203X&linkId=0257878e2a490afedc2e7518787a93a1) 53:26 – Giving and Receiving Feedback and Support, Reinforcing Behavior, and Focusing Attention Reflections: Jamey: Management vs. leadership. Sam: “I need this from you,” vs. “Why didn’t you do this?” Jess: When we react to something, it’s rarely about the thing we think we’re reacting to. Career narratives by Will Larson (https://lethain.com/career-narratives/) Additionally, management is like being on stage and you can be uncomfortable in your own role. Marcus: Listening to others is critical and impactful. Also, letting people taste and see what it’s like to be in management and leadership without the commitment. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Marcus Blankenship.

This story has gone down in Silicon Valley lore as the ultimate cautionary tale. Digg was the earliest high flying startup in early social media. But then, other startups like Facebook and Twitter started to steal the limelight. So Digg tried to keep up by launching the infamous Digg version 4. And… it’s a disaster. Users hate it. So much so, that many people feel that the reason Reddit is Reddit today is because the Digg community fled their en-masse. Digg Version 4 has become a much cited horror story for when a redesign can be so disruptive it can kill a company. So, what’s the real story behind this urban legend? Today, we talk to Will Larson, who today is at Stripe, was a young engineer working on the launch of Digg version 4. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Will Larson and I dissect our (mostly his) Ivory Tower/Sengir Vampire combo deck that we both took to the top 8 of the Skype Summer Derby.

Will Larson, Infrastructure Engineering Manager at Stripe explains how large system migration are an opportunity to reduce tech debt and paints a picture of infrastructure engineering at companies with massive scale. "The most important thing when you start a migration is to think about you're actually asking dozens or hundreds or maybe thousands of people to take a bet on you...that is why it's so important to make sure that the migrations really solve the problem and two that you're going to be able to complete them once you start" - Will Larson Links Article Mentioned

Will Larson has managed infrastructure teams for some of the biggest names in software. Today, he’s leading Foundation Engineering at Stripe, where his group builds the tools that support every Stripe engineer and keep Stripe reliable and performant. In this chat with Intercom engineering manager Todd Royal, Will shares how he keeps his team innovating, when to hire generalists vs. specialists, the nuances of managing in a high growth environment, and more.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I look for when I’m hiring designers or what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet. I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by Brian Lovin. Hello. Brian, you are a designer at GitHub, a prolific podcaster with design details, but before we talk about all that, I know you made a move recently and you’re getting to design a new home office space. What are some of your goals in building out that workspace? 00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, where we’re moving from, my girlfriend and I, we both work from home and we were in separate rooms, and it always felt pretty isolating. Where, you know, you’re working for most of the day, so you’re in separate rooms most of the day, but also those rooms were the bedroom and the living room, so the office and living space and sleeping space always felt intermingled. So, with our new home office, it’s actually a bigger room where we decided to put both of our desks, which is great cause we see each other throughout the day. The problem is You have video calls and you’re always interrupting each other, so we’re swapping in and out. So one of the big goals that I have for the space is there’s like this tiny little closet off the edge of the office space, and we want to convert that into like a little phone booth, you know, soundproof it, put a little monitor in there so you can just carry your laptop in, plug in and go. So I’d say that’s the biggest goal, but honestly, we haven’t even started cause I don’t know about you both, but post move, you get unpacked and you’re motivated to fix stuff, and then as soon as you’re settled in, you’re like, yeah, it is what it is. You just got to live with it for a while, you know. 00:02:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a dangerous valley in there where you have unpacked enough to live, but you’re not fully unpacked and settled, and sure enough people have boxes for months and years, if they’re not careful. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Which is also a useful little rule, you know, it’s like whatever is in the box for more than a month, you probably can just get rid of. So just take that box away, don’t even open it. 00:02:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I call this moves as copying garbage collectors, you know, and copy everything once and some stuff goes. 00:02:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first started seriously doing work from home, remote work, and lots of video calls and so forth, I didn’t move, but I realized how important it was to have a separate space. I think I had a desk kind of shoved off the corner of my living room, which was fine when I had an office, but once I was working from home, there wasn’t enough separation for me between those spaces. But actually the insight that someone gave me was I had sort of a very small room and a big beautiful one with big windows and you naturally think of the big room as well, that’s the master bedroom, but actually you don’t spend that much time in there. And eventually I converted the biggest room in the house with the nicest windows and all that into a home office. And that was an absolute game changer. I had a big workbench where I could do kind of stand up and do kind of more physical tasks with the hands and I had a big desk. I had a Pin board on the wall for keeping all my stuff up, could also even think about and now always in my mind is what’s going to be behind me on video calls and what lighting is going to be in there. So for example, my current space, I kind of arranged it so that there’s some nice windows right in front of me, so I’ll get, you know, sunlight on the face and then behind me is not facing, I don’t know, out over the whole house so that when the partner walks by, she like suddenly panics because she realized she’s, you know, on camera in the background on the camera, yeah. 00:04:03 - Speaker 1: I did the exact same thing as you. So when we moved this big office space was staged as the primary bedroom cause it has the big windows, it’s the most beautifully lit. And then there’s this other room which was intended to be the office, which isn’t well lit, it’s a lot smaller. We’re like, you know what, we just sleep in the bedroom. 99% of the time the lights are off, so we might as well take the space where we’re gonna spend most of our time and make that the most beautiful and inviting and warm. And enjoyable, right? Like this is where we’re gonna spend all of our time. So yeah, very much with you on that idea, swap the bedroom in the office to match time spent, I suppose. 00:04:44 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I also take a bit of inspiration from there’s a couple of subreddits, one that I like is Battle stations, yeah, slash slash battle stations where people do these beautiful setups. It’s obviously their computing devices and desks and things, but they also get the aesthetic element and yeah, the carpet and the chair and all this sort of thing and. I don’t quite have the time or inclination to go to that level, but we do spend so much of our lives now in a home office in front of one or more computing devices, spending some time to make that aesthetic and pleasing and good vibes just seems to make sense. 00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the last thing I really want to get in here at some point is the couch. I’ve never had a couch in an office and there’s something very attractive to me about. Going and having a sit or a lie down in the middle of the day, where you might be sketching or reading a blog post or catching up on email, but just having that short break from, you know, sitting upright in your office chair. Sounds really attractive. I don’t know, we’ll see. I don’t know if I’d actually end up spending time on it, but there’s an idea of kind of mixing the feeling of what kind of work can be done in there, right? It doesn’t just have to be upright desk keyboard kind of thing. It could also be a little bit more lounging, reading, that kind of stuff. 00:06:02 - Speaker 2: Relaxed posture, reading and thinking. Now you’re very on brand for me. Thank you for that. 00:06:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. 00:06:09 - Speaker 2: Well, tell us a little bit about your background. 00:06:13 - Speaker 1: So like you mentioned, I’m a product designer. I’m currently working at GitHub. I’m working on the mobile apps there, and GitHubb is an interesting place because there’s a lot of different kinds of jobs that it solves for people in the world, you know, you have, of course, developers who come there to code and review code and merge code, and there’s the whole DevOpsy side of things. Then there’s this whole other side, which is like the social productivity side, organizing work and in my case, like taking work on the go. And so I’m interested in that part, that’s what I’m working on and get with the mobile apps. On the side I podcast, I host the Design Details podcast. I’ve been doing that for, I think, 7.5, almost 8 years. So that’s the thing. 00:06:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah you something 400 some odd episodes in. 00:07:02 - Speaker 1: 429. 00:07:03 - Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, and then you were nice enough to invite Mark and I on there recently. I’ll link that episode in the show notes. Very interesting to be on the other side of the conversation there, but it definitely provides me inspiration, which is, I worry sometimes that we’ll sort of run out of things to say, you know, we’re 50 some odd episodes in here, but you’ve managed to keep going this long, keep it fresh and relevant, so maybe there’s hope for us too. 00:07:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the nice thing about what you’re doing is if you do interviews most weeks, you’ll never run out of people to talk to. There’s just too many interesting people in the world to learn from. 00:07:37 - Speaker 2: We’re outsourcing the problem of being interesting to someone else. 00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, just extract that from other people. Our problem is we stopped interviewing, you know, my co-hosts and I just chat back and forth every week and try and mix it up with things like listener questions or talk about industry news. But there are weeks where we just look at each other like, have we talked about this? Have we answered this exact question already and you just can’t really remember, so you answer it again. So I do worry about that, like going in circles a little bit. So that’s the podcast, I guess before that, I started a company it was called Spectrum.chat, and that was myself and two other people, Bryn Jackson and Max Stoiber. The three of us were trying to build large public asynchronous forum software, really ended up gravitating towards like open source communities and design communities. That company was acquired by GitHub, which is how I ended up at GitHub. And before that, I was a product designer at Facebook, and before that at a company called Buffer. And then I guess throughout all of this, I’m a side project, tinkerer kind of person. I like writing, I like building websites, I like the podcast. I really enjoy interviewing people. I’ve launched a couple of interview projects. And I would say my most long lasting side project besides the podcast now has just been my personal website where I have all these random subpages that tickle my brain in different ways. So one of them is like a security checklist, how to be safe online, and the other is A better, more readable version of hacker news, and another is my personal bookmarks and an AMA and my blog and on and on and on. And so that’s really where I find a lot of joy and fun outside of my day job. 00:09:27 - Speaker 2: We’ll link that site in the show notes. I think it is an inspiration. We’ll talk about personal websites here a little, a little later on, but I think Mark and I, for example, both have incredibly minimalist personal websites that we update pretty infrequently. I think you have a pretty comprehensive design. It’s, I think it’s a full web app you wrote about the technology stack there, you use it to kind of. Explore interesting new front end and back end technologies, yeah, tons of writing, that’s obviously the podcast, you’ve got a newsletter now, so yeah, really, I don’t know how you find the time, but I guess the answer is that these are your hobbies and as you say, they tickle your brain, so it’s less of uh finding the time and more of a following your nose to your interests. 00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, hobbies and many, many years, you know, I think there is an incorrect perception that I work all the time. People like, how do you have time for all these different things like, I don’t, these have just accumulated in the dustbin over, you know, a decade. And so with a decade in hindsight, it looks like a lot and it looks like I’m busy, but really it’s quite incremental. 00:10:31 - Speaker 2: That leads nicely to our topic today, which is personal brand. So, I’ll ask first what that means for both of you. Actually, Mark, maybe you wanna start us off there. 00:10:41 - Speaker 3: So two things come to mind when I think of personal brand. The first is the brand in the more pervasive, thicker sense like Coca-Cola is a brand, and I think that some people have such a personal brand, they invest a lot in building it up, and the other more general sense is like information theoretic in the sense of people having Knowledge about other people on the internet or being able to obtain that knowledge if they if they want to, versus the base prior of you’re a random person on the internet and could be, you know, a dog or whatever. I think both of those are interesting and we can talk about them. 00:11:17 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note on the company brand side we did an episode on that some time back because some I have pretty strong feelings about about how to kind of intentionally build a company brand. We ended up describing it as the character and what you know the company for, and you know, if the company has a personality, what is that personality? And so you can imagine that mapping to a person as well, not in the real sense of a fully fledged human with many interests and many dimensions and so forth, but maybe a little bit more narrowly defined as how you’re representing yourself to a field or on the internet or to some target audience. 00:11:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose my personal definition of personal brand maybe skews that direction. I’m stealing this. I can’t remember who said this, but at one point I heard someone say that a personal brand was really just how someone would describe you if you weren’t in the room, which I guess could apply to a company, but for a person, I think you get to capture a little bit more of the nuance there. Like, how would somebody describe you? And the thing is, you’ll never really know. I think that’s kind of the ideas. You can try and influence that, but really people will describe you however they want to describe you and when you’re not in the room, they can be a little bit more open in that description. So that’s how I’ve thought about personal brand and I don’t know, adjectives come to mind like curious, fun, kind, excited, and then maybe some negative personal brand characteristics would be like complains a lot or rants a lot, or is an asshole, right? Like those all fit under the personal brand vibe for me is those kinds of adjectives. 00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess there’s also the, you know, if I think of looking at your website, for example, to get a feel, you know, let’s say I had somehow come across you and was interested in learning who is this Brian fellow, maybe in the context of I’d like to hire you, maybe in the context of like to have you on my podcast, or maybe something a little more general, which is just you said something interesting, and I’m just curious to know the person behind that. And there’s the very practical element of, you know, you say off the bat, I’m a designer, podcaster, writer, and even the order there, I think tells me something. It’s like you may have a long running and a pretty successful podcast, but that’s not the first thing you list, you consider yourself a designer first. So, you know, there’s that sort of pragmatic aspect of just what do you want to be known for in your career, but then yeah, you’re talking about maybe the softer side of it as well. I think aesthetic conveys a lot, maybe this is a medium is the message sort of thing, but right, you have a website that says you are a person that likes clean, modern design, whereas you can imagine there’s this, what is it called, the professor style website. Just these kind of like very bare bones, HTML, you know, not only is it not responsive design, but it’s like barely even styled at all, but you come to associate it with often busy and successful professors who are very erudite and accomplished in their field, and they do have a representation online, but it would almost be confusing or maybe feel wrong in some way. had a sleek, well designed site like a designer would that conveys maybe the wrong idea. 00:14:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it would feel like they were trying to sell you something. 00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s an aesthetic, maybe some of that is almost like tribal affiliation to some degree, you know, you go to the punk rock band’s website and there’s going to be a very different color palette, for example, then you go to the designer’s website and a lot comes across, because almost anything I think you would want to get to know someone online for, again, whether it’s Hiring them, applying for a job at their company, asking them on your podcast, meeting them in some professional context, kind of a lot of what you want to know is just like, are we in the same tribe or do we vibe together or do we have the same interests or the same values because often that’s the thing that matters a lot for those kinds of connections. 00:15:12 - Speaker 1: I think that’s amazing, especially in the designer developer space. I don’t know about you both, but when I find somebody on Twitter and they have a link in their profile that is firstname lastname.com, that’s an instant click for me, right? That already says something about this person that they’ve gone out and bought that and invested in that. Then you click and you get the aesthetic. I like to go just a tiny bit deeper and like, did they build this or was this a template, and that distinction also tells you a lot about that person, you know, maybe it only makes sense for designers, developers, but I find that developers often don’t care as much about having built it themselves. Like I think you encounter a lot more stock WordPress themes or something like that, but designers, I think there’s perhaps this. Community pressure to represent yourself in a unique and special way, so there’s a lot more playfulness with color or imagery or, you know, drawing your own custom icons or things like that. And I suppose maybe I’m like squarely in the middle, like my site is pretty boring, like you mentioned minimal, but I see it as fairly boring. There’s not actually much color or visual interest on the page. But that can be its own tone, right, and people can read into that, how they will and maybe be surprised if they meet me and, well, maybe I am a boring person actually. I don’t know, but I guess that’s up to other people to decide. 00:16:44 - Speaker 3: I don’t know if I would call this boring. I mean, it’s minimally styled, but it’s like it’s a whole app. I mean, there’s a whole sidebar with all kinds of different categories and everything. It’s a whole thing. 00:16:52 - Speaker 2: And maybe that sort of begs the next question, which is if representing yourself online, it is to someone. And that someone is again someone that maybe you want to connect with or they want to connect with you and you’re trying to find the like-minded people to connect with, and that maybe leads into a question of what you might call your, how available you are. To outreach. So, for example, I have my email address on my home page. Some folks maybe have their Twitter handle, but they have DMs turned off. There’s many pros and cons to making yourself more or less accessible and be curious to hear how you think about that. 00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question because my perspective is maybe changing a little bit over time. Which is, I’ve always just tried to be accessible because I’ve always been so thankful to other people who made themselves accessible. For example, I started the Design Details podcast because I wanted to meet other people and what we did is we created a spreadsheet of 100 people who we wanted to meet and just started going down the list and emailing them. And everyone was super kind and most people were open to being on this brand new podcast with these young 20 something designers trying to figure out what they were doing in the industry, and that approachability was magical, and it really opened a lot of doors and helped, I don’t know, get me into the room, so to speak. And so I always wanted to have that same feeling that people could reach out to me, especially. Younger designers or people just getting into the industry who might want to learn about, I don’t know what it’s like working at GitHub, they might want to apply there or work there someday, like having that approachability has all sorts of benefits. But when I said I think I’m starting to maybe change that over time, I’ve just noticed, I don’t know if you both have your DMs open, but like when you have your DMs open, surprising stuff comes through and a lot of it increasingly is noise. Or even if it’s not noise, I feel bad not responding to people. And so there is this trade off of like being approachable and accessible, and then all of a sudden having a 3rd or 4th to do list, you know, you have your work to do list, you have your emails to go through, and now it’s your direct messages and you want to come across as a friendly person who responds quickly and thoughtfully and carefully. But then there is a little bit of a burden there, I suppose. I mean a good burden to have. It’s awesome that people want to reach out and chat, but sometimes that’s overwhelming. I’m curious if you both have experiences cause you both are also quite public and put yourselves out there. 00:19:33 - Speaker 3: In general, I’m very bullish on this channel that is cold contact over the public internet in both directions. I think people underestimate the opportunities that you can create by sending a good cold email or cold DM as it may be. And I think there’s also a lot of value potentially in being open, and I’ve always been open for a similar reason I think to you is I was incredibly fortunate to have people help me out as I was entering Silicon Valley, basically on the basis of cold emails. 00:19:59 - Speaker 2: Mark, I feel you gotta tell your story here about how you came to San Francisco. 00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Oh, the full story will not be told, but I will give the abbreviate story. The abbreviate story is someone posted on the internet that they were looking to help people who were we help people in San Francisco or early in their career, something to that effect, and I emailed this individual, and we ended up meeting at a bar in San Francisco, see if he can help me out, and he introduced me to someone there who worked at Hiroku and one thing led to another and I ended up working there for about 4 years, and the career went on from there. So there’s a classic example of Silicon Valley and cold emails and Just being willing to just reach out. Yeah, so I’m very bullish on the channel, and I think furthermore, there’s not too much downside to being open. I found quite a bit of value in receiving communications and my experience is that very few people actually write in. I get a few emails, mostly about go by example, and I get a few DMs, but the volume isn’t an issue for me, and if anything, I’m surprised at how little it is. 00:21:04 - Speaker 1: I wonder if email is a good filter there versus DMs, like the act of cold emailing something requires a little bit more activation, probably because there’s a subject field, right, and you’re forced to consider what do I actually want to get out of this interaction, whereas the DM it’s just a chat, right? 00:21:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and on my personal site where I have a contact page, my line is that I respond to every thoughtful note. And that eludes this activation energy, which, by the way, is just one special case of this overall dance that we’re doing as strangers on the internet, because again, the base case is that You’re a random person on the internet, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re probably malicious, you know, whatever, but if you’re able to provide just a little bit of signal, which can be a first name last name.com website that’s well done, it can be a simple thoughtful email, either of those, and especially if you do both, it’s like, OK, you’re already in the 99th percentile of random internet people, and I’d be happy to chat with you. 00:22:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The bar is low in that world, right? 00:22:05 - Speaker 3: You would think, but then most people fall blow it, but most people don’t, yeah, yeah. 00:22:11 - Speaker 2: And my experience is that, yeah, maybe through your podcast and Twitter and other things and all the writing you do maybe you end up being higher profile, Brian, but yeah, I would say the amount of inbound kind of both DMs and emails that I get are certainly manageable, but yes, it does create a new to do list. I do like to, even though I don’t say this explicitly, have kind of a similar policy to Mark, but I think it’s easy for me to sort out. There’s ones that sort of obvious good signal where it’s like an interesting person and they have a clear request that’s something I can fulfill in not too much time. Or there’s the case that’s clear spam or something close to spam, let’s say, not classic spam necessarily, but something where I don’t know, you know, the recruiter, the classic recruiter thing. Oh, I see you have a Ruby on Rails project. I’m working with a company that, you know, they clearly just didn’t look at my profile for more than 5 seconds. The middle ground, I think, is the harder thing where someone does know me personally in my work, they are writing to me saying, hey, you know, I’ve enjoyed what you’ve done at, I don’t know what I can switch, Muse, whatever, and here’s the thing I’m doing, you know, I’m a student, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m something else. But then if that doesn’t lead into like a real clear request, it’s more just a general like, I’d like to get to know you or it’s just unclear what they’re asking for, and then maybe it’s a long email, and then it’s like, It is thoughtful and it’s in this middle ground that’s tricky and it’s hard to know 100% what to do with it. I still try to like find a good reply if I can, but it’s often ends up being more of a thanks for the nice words. I think you’re doing something interesting. You know, if there’s some specific thing you’re looking for, let me know, but this kind of comes to the rules for emailing busy people thing, right? Like make it short, have a crisp and clear request. Maybe they’ll say no, but just make it easy for them. 00:24:06 - Speaker 1: Just to add on to that, you know, speaking of what the bar is to stand out as like a non-random person on the internet, like have a domain, have a clear ask. I’ve found. If that puts you in the 1%, well then the 1% of that is people who actually follow up. And what I’ve been really surprised by is, you know, people will email you and they’ll ask a question and it’ll be very thoughtful and you’ll maybe send a reply and say, hey, I think this, or I’m not sure, but I read an article about this, or here’s a person that might know better than I would, and you send out this information, you’re connecting people and ideas. Nobody ever responds to those, but the 1% of people who do are really special and I feel like that’s where you build really cool relationships is, you know, somebody asks, hey, I’m weighing these two offers at a job. What do you think I should do? I’ll tell you what I think. And then they respond, and they say, hey, by the way, I ended up doing this, and even better is they say, oh, I did this, and I learned this, right? And so one thing that I’ve started doing now recently with sort of these kinds of engagements with people I don’t know, where it feels a little bit transactional is I try and explicitly request a follow up, and the way I frame it is. Hey, by the way, if you end up making a decision, I would love to hear how you made that decision if you learned anything. So a lot of times this will end up being like job hunting or negotiation. A lot of people have been asking me how much to charge for freelance service, and I love to say just let me know what you end up doing. Like, no matter how much you decide to charge as a freelancer, please just tell me because I’m trying to populate my own data library so that I can be more helpful or more fine tuned in future interactions. And most people don’t, but the people who do, it builds a cool, cool relationship there and it feels like it keeps the door open for back and forth, right? 00:25:55 - Speaker 2: Nice. Now another topic related here maybe is what some folks call audience, and audience is pretty clear, I guess if you’re a YouTube influencer and your audiences your subscribers, people who are, you know, following your work and you want to grow that because the whole point of your business is, or I should say the business is built on attention and the more kind of attention engagement you have, then the stronger your business is, and it also reflects your impact. You’re sharing ideas, maybe you’re creating some kind of entertainment, and you want to get that out to as many people as you can. That’s kind of what you’re in the business for. Now, all of us, we’re in the business of making products. We want to get our products to a lot of people. That’s kind of our main goal, but if personal brand is sort of a helper, contributes to Your career, but also just your ability to meet interesting people, maybe your ability to hire or be hired. Uh how important or how much do you, Brian, and Mark, I’d love to hear your answer as well. Think about audience as a thing you want to grow, Twitter followers, podcast subscribers, or is that a thing you think about at all or do you think that’s not important to you? 00:27:09 - Speaker 1: I’d love to hear your answer first, Mark, I’m curious how you think about followers specifically. I think first of all, the term, but yeah, how do you think about this? 00:27:18 - Speaker 3: This goes back to the answer that I gave to Adam’s original question, which by the way, I was getting some quizzical looks from you also maybe I can elaborate a little bit. I think there are some people who purposely build a brand as a first class goal and want to have a lot of followers, either because they just enjoy playing that. Game or because they’re in some type of role where having access to that marketing channel is valuable if they’re developer advocate or they write a newsletter, someone like that. And that again is that sort of classical brand that you would think of if you compare it to something like a Coca-Cola. I think of it more as an asset that I can draw on when needed, so I don’t particularly need any followers. I need the ability to point to something and say, hey, I’m reaching out to you. You can refer to this artifact and see that I’m a clueful person, and that’s really all that I personally, and I think that covers most people. Now there’s a bit of a spectrum there, but I think it’s important to differentiate between Having this big standing audience and that being a first class value versus having some signal that you’re able to draw upon. 00:28:22 - Speaker 1: Hm, so maybe more clearly, do you care about how many followers you have? Like if you had 10,000 or 100,000 or a million, like are these break points interesting for you at all as far as Communicating ideas, marketing for use, the product and company hiring, like, those things matter, right? But how much do you care about how much that matters? 00:28:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so mostly not because I don’t need to do a lot of this called outbound. Now there are a few exceptions including marketing, use the product, and recruiting, and so they’re having a little bit of a follower base helps, but there’s also liabilities that come with a larger following base, especially from a personal perspective. And there’s this joke that as you approach Infinity followers, your tweets become like fortune cookies, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And so I think there’s kind of a sweet spot in 1 to 10,000 or whatever, but people have different takes. 00:29:15 - Speaker 1: What do you think, Adam? Do you care about this stuff? 00:29:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it is good to look at the difference between company and personal in this case. I do care about the followers for, say, the Muse Twitter account because that reflects our ability to get our message out of the world, right, or our newsletter subscribers or whatever. In the beginning, when you’re brand new and no one knows who you are or cares what you have to say, if you Built something good or you believe you built something good, it’s hard to get that out into the world and you compare that to working for an established company, you know, I was part of the Salesforce empire for a little while and I saw the value of this huge megaphone, these events they did, just the reach of their voice, and so you could make a product and you didn’t need to worry too much about whether people would see it. You would worry just about making the product good. I think obviously GitHub having such a far reach and being part of Microsoft empire probably only enhances that as well. It’s not to say that you don’t need to worry about marketing, but it’s more, you don’t need to worry about crickets or people not seeing something good you’ve made. If anything, it’s almost, you tell me what you think, but it’s almost the opposite, which is when your things still early on and you need to just get a few people to test it and not get everyone piling on to it, then, you know, it’s almost you have to work hard to sort of keep it under wraps. So I do care about kind of the followers and the audience and the kind of the reach for my companies because that’s part of their existence. For me personally, yeah, like Mark, I would say that’s not something I care about in the sense that it is occasionally useful recruiting is one of the main ones there, or being able to support and promote things my friends and colleagues are doing. So when a friend launches a new Product or you can switch, puts out a new essay or whatever, and I can retweet that or just, you know, do a quote tweet and say this is awesome and get them a little bit more attention than they might have had otherwise, you know, help contribute to that. That feels really good. That’s a nice use of that power. But yeah, it’s not something I want to make go up. 00:31:05 - Speaker 3: I think it’s also the case that as the technology around these social networks advances, the reputational capital becomes more atomized down to the individual, say, tweet. So it used to be back in the day, if you wanted to publish something you need to go to a big newspaper or whatever, a big radio station, and then it was that you need to have a big Facebook page or maybe a big Twitter account, but now you just need the one right TikTok video or the one tweet and it can blow up by itself, and so there’s more weight placed on having something good and valuable to say versus having a stock of reputational capital in the form of a bunch of followers. 00:31:42 - Speaker 2: Hm. Although being known for saying things that people want to hear definitely is a huge amplifier on anything you might say, which is maybe to that fortune cookie point, you can say basically pretty generic platitudes, but if your audience is big enough or you have this reputation where people just care about what you have to say, then, yeah, they’re excited about what would otherwise be a pretty bland statement. Now the other piece of this on the followers though is I would say that the quality is not the right word. It’s people who are following me for the right reason, and I especially like the mutual follows and maybe the mutual followers thing just kind of takes you back to a little more of the classic social network where you have people who sort of all know each other rather than a publishing form, but I guess I like this thing where you can start to follow someone. Without necessarily needing that to be two way, but the really high value relationships to me are ones where we follow each other because we’re interested in each other’s work or we share work values or we’ve worked together in the past or we might want to work together in the future, and you can have those little interactions, those little conversations, etc. But for me, a much smaller number of followers who are people that I really vibe with or have a lot in common with or we just have similar interests and passions. And I think I saw one effect of this when I transitioned, kind of did a bit of a career pivot, still in creative tools, but you know, went from the kind of developer tools, cloud space to the research world and more of kind of like personal productivity software. And so quite a lot of people who had followed me because I don’t know, they saw me speak at a developer conference and now they’re, why is this guy tweeting about tools for thought? What the hell is that? You know, not that interested. Maybe they don’t unfollow, but they just become kind of a dark. The point of our connection is no longer there, and so maybe the newer fresher followers who are here because of things I’m doing now, and then maybe in turn I follow them because they’re doing similar things, that’s to me where the value is. 00:33:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you both have pointed out two things that I think are interesting challenges as you like start engaging online. The first is the cookie cutter problem, and the second is how do you actually allow yourself to evolve? Fortune cookie, not cookie cutter, maybe the same thing. I think the fortune cookie problem is a really interesting one because I think there’s a point where you have a certain amount of reach on Twitter where the algorithm becomes very apparent. You can watch it in real time take hold, and you very subtly understand or maybe subconsciously understand what is going to get likes and what will probably not get likes, and it just breaks your brain, at least I’ll say it breaks my brain because it puts you in this position where You are tempted and also rewarded for oversimplifying, polarizing. Tweeting the hot take, criticizing. Those kinds of things. I think a good example that I learned and in many ways has for me discredited the value of like having a large following in some ways is, I remember when I launched a side project last year, I think. When I tweeted about the staff design project, which was an interview series I did. Maybe 100 people liked the tweet, which is awesome. 100 people checking out my project, fantastic. And then I think the next week I tweeted a screenshot of framer.com, and I said something like, Framer clearly reveres visual design or something like that, and that tweet got 1000 likes. And so that I felt this really deep disconnect between What I thought was valuable and what people seemed to resonate with versus this throwaway screenshot of somebody else’s work that everybody sort of glommed onto and followed me for and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, people are following me because I tweeted a screenshot of somebody else’s work. That doesn’t feel super good. And then to your point, Adam, this idea of almost being locked into a thing you’re supposed to tweet about, I feel is I don’t think I’ve really encountered this yet, but you see other people encounter this where they are the design systems person, they are the accessibility person, and when they try and branch out, it feels particularly hard. Like you can watch them struggle with it. You can watch them try and find their voice because all of a sudden the thing that they’ve become well known for and recognized for and respected for. They’re trying to branch out and are met with crickets, right? Like the design systems person who becomes interested in web 3, that’s a painful transition, like that is an entirely different disconnected audience. And so I think, you know, these ideas connect because You start tweeting things that are your more current modern interests, they’re met with crickets, and you feel the algorithm pushing back against your own personal development, and you think to yourself, well, I like getting likes, I like getting followers. I like that notification dot. Maybe I’ll just keep tweeting about design systems and then you end up with people creating alts, and then you have all these multiple Twitter accounts you’re balancing, and then your life is just These different threads of interests and nothing feels authentic or complete anymore. Maybe that’s OK, maybe that’s how the internet should work. Maybe we should have different accounts for different interests, right? Like we have different networks for different types of communities. Facebook has a different type of connection than a Twitter. Maybe you should have a different Twitter for every kind of interest you have. I don’t know. But yeah, I’ve noticed those sort of tensions in my life, like figuring out what to tweet about and wanting to be real and authentic and true to yourself, while also recognizing as you’re typing, you’re like, uh, I bet if I reworded this to be slightly spicier, more people would like it, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. 00:37:53 - Speaker 2: That’s incredibly interesting. I mean, those pressures, social pressures have always existed, of course. I think of if you want to like reinvent yourself a little bit, maybe like your personal style or something about how you present yourself to the world, the best time to do that is when you move to a new town. No one knows the old you and so you can just kind of, you know, change it overnight and not deal with the I know it’s quite pressure, but maybe even if people are not necessarily trying to push you back into what they know you for, but yeah, I think we always feel a sort of pressure to be what we’re known to be rather than what we want to evolve into, and that comes from our environment, friends and family, peer groups, and so on, and that makes personal change even harder than maybe it already is. Now obviously you digitize these natural tendencies which are maybe not great to begin with and make them maybe even more amped up, particularly when the algorithm makes it so visible to you. So that’s very interesting. Actually this is a nice connection back to a concept we talked about in the company brand episode which is there’s what’s known as brand extension. And the general thing is that brand extension is uh basically a pretty bad idea and almost never works. So, you know, for example, Kleenex is known for making facial tissue. If Kleenex makes printer paper, which perhaps is a similar product in the sense of how it’s manufactured, not only is it confusing what the hell is Kleenex printer paper, but you’ve actually destroyed the brand equity of what Kleenex is in the mind of your customer. And the recommendation there is generally make a new brand if you’re truly transitioning to a different market. So maybe that does beg the question of should I have just started a new Twitter account when I was transitioning my career. And again, to me it feels I’m the same person. It feels like a continuous journey that I went through, and I do think there’s this uniting thing that ties togetheroku I can switch and Muse, which is creative tools and helping people, you know, making things to help other people make things. So to me it’s perfectly, perfectly logical and obvious, but maybe there is places where that ends up being sort of a brand extension. 00:40:03 - Speaker 1: I feel like crypto is just the most obvious example to point to where like everybody has their separate crypto brand now, or I mean we could talk about pseudonymity, which is this interesting trend that’s taking shape right now where people want to have. This alt profile where they can feel safe to talk about this other interest they have, but they know is incredibly polarizing and they don’t want to sort of poison the well of their existing brand by introducing these new topics, right? What do you both think of pseudonymity in this space, maybe even going back to Mark’s point about, I think he called it reputational capital, I think is a really interesting concept that gets associated with, you know, a name, a face, a person, and we’re sort of breaking that a little bit. 00:40:51 - Speaker 2: I think the ability to make multiple profiles and isolate them from each other, have some be private, some more public, maybe one that’s career oriented, one that’s personal, something like that is one of the incredible strengths of the internet, and I pretty strongly, I think Mark Zuckerberg at some point in the early Facebook days said that everyone should have just one personal account, your one person, it should have your real first and last name. And I think that really removes a lot of what makes the internet a pretty special place. I think it’s a place, particularly, for example, teenagers or younger people who are still figuring things out, they can explore parts of their identity that they’re not sure about yet in this sort of safe but still out in the world way. I think it’s an incredible thing. Now, of course, the ability to make anonymous accounts or relatively little tie to your real world identity is also part of what creates so many problems on the internet. Spam and fraud and abuse and different things like that, but I feel that’s a price worth paying. 00:41:48 - Speaker 1: It feels like there’s this tension, you know, in the old world of forums, every forum you went to, you would sign up and have a separate account and you could kind of build your own identity there that wasn’t linked to your other forum accounts, but now we live in the world of Discord where you are. Your account, no matter what server you’re accessing. Mark, I’m curious because I know you’re deep in Discord. I’ve always wondered why Discord doesn’t have this concept of bringing a separate identity to every server, even though it’s all wrapped under one login. And maybe even Twitter has an opportunity to innovate here cause they’re experimenting with a feature called Communities where, you know, your design persona or your development persona or tools for thought persona is just different and as you switch contexts, it should feel very natural to do that and you shouldn’t have to log out of one persona and log back in. It should just be, oh, I’m switching into this space, this mode. 00:42:49 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in general I’m very bullish on pseudonymity. I think it’s super important to individuals, to people, to citizens, and I think it’s honestly fairly threatening and sometimes problematic to like managers and governors, you know, that kind of group, and so that’s why there’s this constant tension of should you be able to make a synonymous account and generally individuals say yes and people running stuff say no. Discord is interesting that you mentioned that because I think it is unfortunate that they don’t natively support multiple. Identities, for what it’s worth. I do have multiple disco identities. I think one is for like personal and gaming and one is for work. I forget how exactly it’s split, but I definitely have several. Yeah it’s too bad they don’t support natively. 00:43:31 - Speaker 2: Identity is also a huge topic of interest for me. It’s something I think that the computing slash internet world is basically serving users really, really poorly on from a security perspective, from a mental model perspective and all that sort of thing, but it is obviously a very thorny problem and here we’re talking about personal brand which is about a public identity or how you’re representing yourself to some. Group, whereas identity could be in the kind of foundational sense, could just be an account with the system or how I represent myself to a computer somewhere that’s relatively private activity. But I do think that, do you have one account that is in multiple things versus sort of many totally segregated accounts is an interesting one on that side because for example, one thing I think GitHub got really right from my perspective is you only have one GitHub account and you belong to different organizations. I don’t get a new GitHub login when I join a new company. And maybe some people choose to do that separate their open source work from personal work or whatever. But at least for me, I find that works very well, maybe because coding related things are not something I feel particularly desirous of separating, but on the other side of it, you can look at something like Google, which has increasingly just rolled up more and more and more and more services into one giant Uber identity, and I basically have tried to stop using Google services for the sole reason that I just cannot stand in their identity system. Because it seems to get the worst of all worlds. On one hand, I do have different accounts, you know, I have the different ventures I’m involved in, each have their own thing, and I have to switch between that. I go to a Google doc, I can’t access it. I got to switch to the right account, but on the other hand, they roll together all this stuff like my search history with other things that I just don’t want connected at all and I’m really annoyed by. It’s sort of like the worst of all worlds. I think we’re very much still figuring this out as an industry. 00:45:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like the YouTube connection is particularly painful. At least for me, I’m like, the things I care about on YouTube are very different than the things I’m typically googling for. I don’t know if that’s the same for you both, but no, yeah, for sure. 00:45:42 - Speaker 3: We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about understanding and aligning with how things actually work in their underlying basis, mostly in terms of knowledge work and tools for thought and Workflows and stuff like that. We can have a whole discussion about this with respect to identity. I think a lot of the troubles that we have with identity and therefore developing personal brands comes from an impedance mismatch between how identity actually works and how it works on these platforms. The way identity actually works, it’s a much more distributed networked mesh concept. The identity is something you Have with respect to another individual or with respect to another group, and it’s the sum or the intersection of all the interactions and labels and information that that subset of the universe has about you and it can vary depending on which subset you’re talking about. So my identity with respect to this group is different than my identity with respect to my family. You know, those two groups are different things there’s some overlap but they’re not the same. Whereas identity in the technical sense tends to be modeled as a single row in a database that again, they tend to want to match 1 to 1 with like a human body, and I think basically that’s wrong and that’s why you get all this impedance mismatch, something that the in which the lab has done a little bit of work on. I’m curious to see them do more on that too. 00:46:58 - Speaker 1: Have either of you encountered a tension between the fact that you Follow people you work with and people you work with follow you, and then this interest graph, right, like you behave differently around your close friends and you behave differently around your family, and then you behave differently when you’re in a work meeting, but all of that stuff gets scrambled up on Twitter and I found this very odd sensation of, I don’t know, like personal brand conflicting with, oh, these are also people that I have professional relationships with day to day and I’m in meetings with them. And my shit post on Twitter kind of shows up alongside, hey, we gotta hop on a Zoom call to make a decision about Q3 strategy. It’s a very odd sort of sensation to bounce between those kinds of things. Have you experienced that or do you feel that in any way? 00:47:50 - Speaker 2: I do think it’s a good thing that they talk about the like concept of bringing your whole self to work, which I’m not sure I quite fully agree with. When I got started in the business world, and there was a sense of professionalism which to me felt really inauthentic, things like you’re expected to dress in a certain way that was just not the way I wanted to dress and That was quote unquote professional and there’s many ways in which I felt it was very sterile and very just kind of restricting of, you know, we’re people here and I think it doesn’t hurt to get to know each other as people a little bit. And the flip side of that, I do believe in professionalism as a kind of siloing of we’re all here to serve a particular mission, the mission of the company that we’re involved in, and we should mostly build our interactions about that sort of thing. So I think there’s a balance to be struck there, and I think it’s maybe not bad that people see your tweet and, you know, thought it was funny and they can reference it and you can make a connection on that level. I don’t know if you feel like it undercuts your serious tone and authority because you like to be a little goofy on Twitter, but I don’t know. I feel like, you know, people just have a little more fun in the workplace than they used to and being taken seriously as an authority or as a boss or as a designer delivering a piece of work that folks are going to needed to sort of take as the golden path for what they’re working on, shouldn’t be undercut by that you like to have fun sometimes. 00:49:11 - Speaker 1: Well, here, maybe this gets back into like personal brand building, like there is this strategy or way to go about building an audience or increasing your online cloud, which is, you just learn things and talk about it, like you build something, you learn something, and then you share that with the world. And the thing is you learn, at least in my case, I learned the most about designing and building products through my engagements at work at GitHub at Spectrum and Facebook. And it does feel like there’s some tension between, oh, I learned this thing from this interaction at work, but now I don’t want to tweet it because it feels like I’m subtweeting a co-worker. And so then I end up only really tweeting about side project stuff. So while it’s great that I work at GitHub and I can like Tweet big product announcements. The things that I am actually learning day to day, I feel very self-conscious posting about that online. It feels almost like betraying the bubble of the workspace where like we’re learning internally at work together, yet there’s still, I believe, something valuable about people sharing that stuff externally. Hey, I learned this thing, I overcame this hard problem. So I don’t know, this might just be like a classic case of overthinking and being too self-conscious about what other people think of me, but that feels like the more gray area boundary of, I don’t want it to feel like I’m ever subtweeting someone at work where we had a particular interaction that I learned from and it was good, but now it’s going public, right? 00:50:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I can see why that would be especially tough for you because you do have a pretty big audience, you do have a lot of Twitter followers, quite a few more than. Mark and I and through your other means as well. And so yeah, maybe if you had 50 followers, then it would be OK to share that, but you know, you have to be conscious of you do have a pretty big megaphone and if you get up there and say, you know, I really realized that a meeting without an agenda is always a waste of time, and you tweeted that right. After meeting without an agenda, and so whoever like organized that meeting, and maybe it’s a good learning and so on, and maybe you even had that conversation with them, but it feels a little bit airing dirty laundry or you know, it’s the way you trust your colleagues as you’re able to be a little vulnerable around each other and going blasting through your megaphone about it is maybe not that nice. 00:51:35 - Speaker 3: I think this is a great point and a very real dynamic, and I think it’s appropriate and reasonable to be mindful of this when you’re tweeting or not tweeting about stuff at your work, but I think there’s a big macro implication of this, which is that there’s a lot of professional dark matter in social media, you know, in astronomy there’s this idea of dark matter, which is All the mass or whatever out in the universe that for some reason we can’t directly observe, but we know indirectly that it’s there. And if you only look at stuff that you can easily and obviously see you’re sort of missing a lot of the universe, I think the same thing happens with professional experiences or takes on social media where there’s actually a pretty narrow subset of stuff that tends to get out of the filter and on the social media, and especially the social media that you look at. So if you turn that around and say, The stuff that I’m seeing on Twitter is representative of what happens in my industry. That’s a very serious mistake, especially in terms of best practices, or what should I do, or how should I approach this problem, because a lot of the, the most effective and experienced people, they just like go and tight for 10 hours and they go back home to their families or whatever, and that’s that. They never post anything on Twitter in their entire life. So I think you got to be really aware of this dynamic. 00:52:45 - Speaker 1: I’m so glad you brought that up, cause this is another topic that I’m really interested in, because I feel like I wish the world worked a different way, that it just doesn’t work, which is that, how do I tee this up? Maybe you’ve seen people say something like, The talkers are on Twitter and the builders are off doing the real work, or people will frequently say the best designers or developers I know don’t have a presence on Twitter, and these things are quite often true. I mean, I have these people in my life, you do too, I’m sure of you just know a fantastic person who is good at their craft, and they don’t care at all about Twitter. And I think that’s great. I think that it’s amazing that there are people out there doing great work and Unfortunately, we never hear from them. We never get to learn from them. So as a result, the stuff that does get posted to social media ends up skewing like not as good or maybe lowest common denominator kind of content, and I understand why this happens, you know, if you imagine even someone inclined to share the things that they’re learning and the skills that they’ve developed, they buy a house. They have kids, they get married. They don’t care about impressing people on the internet. They just don’t care anymore, and those are the people that I want to learn from the most. So yeah, when I said I wish the world worked a different way. I wish the world worked where people who are really good at their craft and felt like they didn’t have to be on Twitter, would still go on Twitter and share what they know with the world. I wish those would be the people whose blog. we read whose Twitter accounts get the most likes, not this other hot take spicy repost screenshot of framer.com stuff that isn’t substantive and quite shallow, but people seem to like, you know, there’s just I don’t know, I complaining about reality, but How do we get more people who are really good at their craft, the person who we say, yeah, you know, the best people are off building, they’re not tweeting. How do we get them to tweet and actually feel comfortable and safe and rewarded for sharing what they know? 00:55:03 - Speaker 3: I have a couple thoughts here. One is, I do think it helps if you take a broader and more networked approach. So my experience with infrastructure engineering, for example, which is the space that I used to work in, uh, and really focus in, my experience was that very few of those people were like online, but they were quite accessible if you just knew who to ask. So you just ask for an introduction and then you tell me your war stories about my sequel or whatever, and you can get access to a lot of information that way. So it might not be online and public social media, but You can access them directly. The other thought I have here is that I think that the edited interview is a great way to surface this information, and I wish people did more of it. That it is you identify someone who might have a lot of insight and experience, but for whatever reason, they just don’t have time or they don’t want to do it, and they haven’t got. The activation energy to go post about it. You just go interview them because people love to talk about themselves, right? And you can usually get people to talk for an hour about their work or what they learned. And if you do all the hard work of editing it and writing it up and publishing it, and so forth, you can get a lot of stuff out that way. And I’ve seen a few people attempt this. Like I think Will Larson, for example, has done the staff engineering series, you know, the podcasts end up being something like that sometimes. But I think that’s a really valuable and underutilized form. 00:56:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, and that’s why I actually think the Meta Muse podcast is so special in the space of whatever we call this design engineering technology podcast, which is that the two of you have experience, you’ve walked the walk and you also know how to talk the talk, and you have the ability to ask questions that go beyond the surface level. I remember when I started the Design Details podcast, when we would interview people. We were brand new to design and it’s like we could ask them questions, but we didn’t know the best questions to ask or even if they gave us a response, we wouldn’t have a nuanced follow up of, oh, I’ve also experienced that, like, how did you solve it and we can compare paths, right? It was very much newbie interviewing expert. So how do we get, I guess, to that point, Mark, like, what does it take to get more experts interviewing experts and it comes back to the same problem of they just don’t have time, they don’t care enough. 00:57:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we need more information entrepreneurs, and by the way, it’s a great opportunity to build a little bit of a personal brand. 00:57:22 - Speaker 1: Oh, interesting phrase, information entrepreneur. Hmm. Do you ever think about how there’s this path, it seems like where people get traction for doing something, and so they talk about it. I think this is quite common in the building and public movement which you all talked about on last week’s episode, which was You know, you build something you share it out with the world, you talk about what you learned, and quite often that gets engagement, but then it quickly becomes like a meta-analysis of, here’s what I learned about tweeting about what I learned. And then you get to the next level, which is, I made money tweeting about what I learned about what I learned, and then you inevitably have somebody selling a course about how to tweet about making money from learning about things that you learned about. And you just get st