Getting Unstuck in Your Career | Charles Max Wood

0:00You know, just helping people see, hey, there is a possibility for you to be happy and to get paid what you need to get paid and do what you need to do and be happy in the work you're doing. I can't express how disempowering it is to feel stuck and how empowering it is to all of a sudden see the opportunities that are out there for you. The most iconic duos in tech, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Google's Dora team and Linear B. You heard that right. Linear B and Google Cloud are collaborating to explore the results from this year's 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps report.

0:36gathered from over 33 ,000 global professionals. This annual report is your go-to for an independent view in the groundbreaking software team practices. Join Dora's Steve McGee, LinearBee CTO Yashai Berry, and me, Dev Interrupted co-host Connor Brazen, for a workshop on November 8th as we guide you through the key findings from this year's report. Learn why teams with faster coder views have an incredible 50 % higher software delivery performance. Gain insight into the latest trends across industries and company size. and see the impact AI is having on team performance. Mark your calendars for November 8th and prepare to elevate your DevOps game.

1:13Register now at linearb.io slash events or follow the link in the show notes. If the ape doesn't work for you, no sweat. Register and we'll still send you the full recording after the fact. Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Connor Bronson. And today I'm delighted to be joined by a fellow podcast host. And that is Charles Maxwood, CEO of Top End Devs. Chuck, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. Great to have you here. As I noted, you're a podcaster yourself and not just for one show like us. You are part of several. Through Top End Devs, you host podcasts reaching over 70 ,000 developers each week.

1:48So I'm excited to get some of the benefit of your input since you talk with so many engineering leaders. Many of your shows focus on the ins and outs of a particular programming language like JavaScript Jabber or Angular or the specifics of iOS development. And you've been at it for over a decade now. So you've interviewed, what, hundreds, maybe thousands of engineers and engineering leaders at that time? Yeah, we've produced, what, like 4 ,000, 4 ,500 podcast episodes over the last 13 years, 14 years, something like that. So to say you've done a few would be an understatement. And you said something really interesting before the show started that I want to start off with.

2:26You said people are looking at the broad scope of tech today. and with so much new tech coming out, they're kind of struggling how to know how to stay current. What's your advice as someone who, you know, you've been around for a decade, you've seen these changes happening, you've talked to so many folks, how would you suggest developers apply a framework to help them make that decision? Right, so I do have a framework for this, but just in kind of broad terms, yeah, I talk to people and they're seeing, just to name a few things in the current space, right? In web development, they're looking at core web vitals from Google, or they're looking at just performance in general.

3:08Core web vitals is a set of performance metrics, but you also got new frameworks or new versions of frameworks or new tools. Or, you know, I think the latest hype thing was the stuff that came out of, what's the name of the stack? Ryan Carniato put it out, Solid Stack, right? Right. Where you had the, you know, different ways of updating state on your web pages and things like that. And so, yeah, it's it's all of these things. Right. And then you've got tools and new tools are coming out, new ways of hosting things. And anyway, it gets pretty overwhelming pretty fast because you feel like you have to be an expert in all of the things.

3:44And even if you're just focused on one stack, there's still stuff coming your way all the time. And so it's tricky. It's really tricky to know what to do. So what I recommend people do just to stay current, there are a couple of things. One is, is that if you can go to a local meetup, a lot of times just talking to other people will help you be able to prioritize the things that you need to learn. And I give people the advice that you don't have to know everything, right? You don't have to learn everything. You just have to learn the relevant things for the next thing that matters, right? And then you can continue to do that.

4:20So it's kind of a blend of what am I working on now and where is my career going to take me or where do I want my career to take me and what do I have to learn in order there, right? So some of the stuff you're going to keep current on is going to be tech stacks, tech tools, things like that. But maybe you want to go management track someday. So some of it's also going to be like leadership, communication, stuff like that. And I recommend that people blend it. But yeah, the framework effectively comes from, I read a book by Russell Brunson called dot com secrets. I think it's in that one. And he talks about the dream 100.

4:55And what the dream 100 is, is it's who are the 100 people that I need to be paying attention to or that are talking about the stuff that's relevant to me. and then what I do is I take that and most media outlets these days have some kind of RSS feed. YouTube actually does as well and so I've been using a tool called Content Studio which is actually made for you to ingest a whole bunch of stories and then share them to social media. I just don't use the share them to social media piece and then I go through and I pick the things that look like they are trends and I'm able to generally pick out, okay, we need to be talking about these things But at the end of the day, that's one way at least of seeing what news stories and things like that are coming out is by doing that and signing up for newsletters and stuff like that that give you lists of articles and things like that.

5:45And given how extensively you read and explore this space, I absolutely want to talk about future trends that you're seeing and do some forecasting. but before we get there i want to understand more about your perspective on how this kind of a framework and the approach devs have to take to stay current has changed over the last several years yes there are more tools today than ever that people can leverage to through their advantage but it also means there's this breadth of knowledge that folks feel compelled to go after do you think developers are struggling in a way that they weren't say 10 years ago to actually consume knowledge and stay current?

6:22Yeah, there are a couple of things that have made the difference there. One of the major ways that they're struggling in ways that they weren't 10 years ago, let's say, or five years ago, is that, and I mentioned meetups to begin with, a lot of those kinds of things slowed down or stopped during COVID. There weren't as many conferences or meetups or things like that. And so that made it harder to just see people out there talking about the technologies. And so just our ability to connect as a community has really suffered. And I'd like to see that change back a bit, but it seems like people aren't as willing to go out of their way to create those situations.

6:58And so I'm working on doing that as much as I can with top end devs, but I haven't cracked that particular nut either. The other thing that's different is that depending on the community that people are in. So I tend to spend most of my time in the Ruby community and the JavaScript community. And with the Ruby community, the rate of innovation and things like that, you know, that you have to stay current on is much slower. Things have stabilized to the point where staying current on Ruby stuff is not terribly hard, right? And so then it's just the minor updates and things like that that come out to some of the things that we've used for a long time that, you know, we update people on that.

7:39And then you have the occasional major change to things, right? And so you have a new, like they came out earlier this year with a new deployment library for Ruby on Rails. And, you know, and so, yeah, that was worth talking about for a little while, right? But the JavaScript community is different. And I remember when Node.js was brand new, right? It was a new innovation every other week, but the rate of change was, you know, it was frequent and it was fast and it was fun because it was all new stuff. And what we've seen is we've seen JavaScript grow into more and more and more areas and take on more and more and more concerns.

8:18And so if you're in the JavaScript world these days, trying to stay up, even if you just focus on React or Angular or Vue, there's still a much wider breadth of things to keep track of now than there were back then. And it hasn't slowed down a ton, right? And you have bleed over between these different ideas. And so at the end of the day, you wind up with these situations where there's a lot of change in a lot of places and it's just really hard to keep up with. And so you think the rise of AI enabled tooling, like, I mean, just using chat GPT basic or copilot, other, other tools will help kind of fill that gap of where folks are like, Hey, I can't have the breadth of knowledge and all this stuff.

9:02Let me focus my area and be really good at, you know, prompt engineering for certain pieces? Maybe. I don't know that it's going to replace things in this particular area of concern, right? It's not going to substitute for my knowledge of what the latest thing is. What I have seen is I've seen these AI tools make up for sort of the common regular things that I need to work on or replace or let you specialize to do. Right. Right. And so when I use them, what happens is, is I'm more efficient in these areas. And so then I can go and learn the state of the art things that are coming down the pipe in other areas.

9:41And so it may help with some of this, but it's not going to keep me current. It's just going to serve as a tool for me to more easily and effectively do what I'm already doing. Right. And so then you still have to make the effort to apply that framework or dive deeper. Right. But I may be able to get more done and then spend the time, you know, spend the time that I gained back to stay on top of what's out there. So what trends do you see coming then? You're someone who's very on top of what's happening lately. Obviously, you're paying attention to these tools. What's coming from the industry as a whole and for developers as far as the next thing they need to be aware of?

10:22If I have to call out a couple of trends that I think are going to come hard and fast, I think the number one is going to be integration of more AI in programming. And it's not just going to be AI tools. It's going to be AI parts of your back end and the need to understand the different models and how they're used and how to use your data and fit your data to what you're doing without overfitting so that you, you know, you get good results on a regular basis. I think people are going to need to understand AI much better going forward. And that's probably in my head, a three to five year trend that we're going to see.

11:05It's going to become much more of a thing, a much more immediate thing. I think within the next year or two, I think we're going to see a huge uptick in the need for people to understand security. And that's been that's been ongoing. Right. But it feels like it's accelerating. It's been ongoing, but it's going to get worse. And the other way that it gets worse is that I can see applications of AI to get past security openings in programs. I definitely see that and I'm very comfortable calling that. I kind of have the sense that there's something out there waiting for its moment to happen in more distributed systems, you know, or distributed apps is what people are calling them.

11:47They usually use blockchain technologies with those. I don't know what the killer app is, but I have a feeling that something's coming. I just don't know when or what. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing distributed ledgers get used in like supply chain and different areas already. But I agree with you. Like what's going to be the thing that kind of hits public consciousness? I'm not sure. I think that's going to come within 10 years. I don't know if it's going to be next year or in 10 years, but I feel like that's coming. But honestly, I'm very, very comfortable with the idea of AI permeating a lot more things and not just because it's trendy, but also because it's effective and useful.

12:21And then on the other end of it, the security stuff. And then finally, I think we're going to see a lot more movement in the infrastructure as code platform engineering space. Yeah, that's been a huge thing for us this year that we've seen in question. Yeah, absolutely. But just looking at the state of things with like Kubernetes and Helm and Docker and all of the tools people use now, there is so much rich ground to plumb. I think we're going to look at things the way they are now in a few years and we're going to be like, man, we've come a long way. It feels like, I'll say DevOps in particular, has really evolved currently where like that next stage of tooling and how all these development processes work and how tooling interacts together.

13:07It's clear that we're on a cusp of a major change and we're starting to see those trends already to your point. Yeah, I think of DevOps more like agile. And then platform engineering is more the technical end of that. And so I think there's going to be more crossover with the way we work within DevOps. But I think a lot of those principles have really been explored deeply. And I don't know that that changes so much is just it fuels the way that we think about our... Yeah, the tooling end though is I think to your point where we're going to see this massive change because the way we work is going to change.

13:44Yeah. But it feels like that focus has been a lot on process, right? On like, hey, how do we communicate? How do we break up teams into different smaller units and have them interact? And now we're saying, okay, now that we've done a lot of that work, let's jump back in and say, how do we fix all these tooling issues that are evolving? Especially now that we're bringing AI into our code, kind of adding all these different efficiency metric pieces. Yeah. And we may see some crossover with platform and AI, right? So AI is designing our infrastructure. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I think we've been going into the ways that we communicate between teams or embed DevOps into our dev teams or ops teams.

14:23We've been talking about that since the Agile manifesto and before. I think that's just going to continue on whatever slow burn it's on. I think the change is going to come in the tooling. I feel like, and I could be off on this, but in, let's say, three years, once we've seen this kind of burst in platform engineering changes and kind of platform tools, maybe we'll kind of see a reignition of that. Hey, are these processes around it right? But it definitely feels like the area of focus now is how are the tooling interacting? Like, what do we need to do on the infrastructure side? infrastructure as code, as you pointed out, and like really making like programmable workflows have high degrees of customization for companies.

15:04And then I'm sure we'll figure out, you know, two, three years on the line once we've explored AI in that area more and kind of have these tools in place, we'll go, oh, actually we have to rethink this process now because we're using AI for, you know, 25 % of our code, 30, 40 % of our code, who knows? I mean, I think we saw just the differences in programming languages that we had in the 2000s versus the 90s versus the 80s necessitated a lot of this where we started talking about agile teams and extreme programming and stuff like that. So I could definitely see that as a natural outgrowth of things, right?

15:36Where before it was mainframe programming and you'd have one guy go squirrel away for a year and come back with your mainframe code, right? It just got to the point where computers were so efficient that we needed a team to design the system that went onto the server. And then we got, Now we're to the point where, yeah, we're building out entire infrastructures in our code. And, you know, that's so we talked about it again, came up with DevOps. And so, yeah, that makes total sense to me. Do you see the programming languages we use today rapidly changing here the next few years as well as AI starts to take certain burdens off us or kind of do some of that grant work, as you said?

16:20But honestly, my inclination, and we've already seen this to a certain degree, is that they will change to accommodate more of the kinds of problems that AI solves. And so, you know, right now, a lot of these things are written in Python. You know, I could see languages evolving so that they're much more concurrent. They can take care of, you know, they can handle multiple cores better. They, you know, solve a certain class of problems better. I could see hardware picking up some of the slack on some of that. And so then your languages take advantage of the hardware, chip design stuff. And, you know, and so we may evolve into a world like that.

17:00I guess languages could start taking advantage of AI type features. Right. But I don't think they'll fundamentally change so much as just maybe add new language features in that allow the AI to take advantage of them. right somebody could sit down and change yeah they'll enable themselves as opposed to change what they already have because it's it's hard to give up backward compatibility unless you have a really compelling reason and i don't know if that's compelling enough so this brings up an interesting point it we're going to see all this change in tooling we're going to see potentially languages adjusting themselves to fit those new realities we i have some clear trends we expect what career advice would you give to engineers who want to stay current and maybe learn a new skill or learn a new language over the next couple of years right so most of it and i've i've been talking to people i've been coaching people on a lot of this stuff where yeah they're they're not sure where to go next and it's tricky too right because if i'm working for a company that's using current technology which they all are right i do need to gain a certain level of expertise in that that's not the future looking thing, right?

18:13It's just the, hey, I've got to get my job done thing. And so I tell people to spend at least 20 or 30 % of their time that they spend learning stuff, learning things that point to the future. And the thing is, is that even if you don't know off the top of your head what's going to come next, you can still see some of these trends like the AI tools or AI as a whole or things like that. And you can go pick those up. And yeah, the current technology or the state of the art there will change. But if you understand the context now, then you can work off the context. You know, it gives you enough of a baseline to where you're ahead of the game later.

18:53And so like right now, we're doing our book club, topendevs.com book club. We're doing it on AI and it talks us through AI tools and algorithms and things like that. Right. And all the examples are in Python. Top end devs, we don't even have a Python show, right? We have an AI show. But the point is, is that it's going to become a highly relevant in-demand skill. And so if I have it and I understand it, or at least I understand enough of it, then I can get into an organization and either help them start it or get into an organization that's already using it. And I can move ahead with my career in that area.

19:33or I may get into it and realize that I hate everything about AI. And so then I start looking at some of these other forward moving things and maybe I get an infrastructure as code or I just stick with the technology that I'm in because they're going to be using it for the next 10 years if they're using it now because somebody's going to have to maintain that software. I mean, how much stuff is they'll build on Unix? Right. And so that's the other advice that I give people is like, look, you don't have to be on the latest and greatest thing. You don't have to be in a place where you're trying to prove out, you know, new technologies.

20:07You don't have to invent anything. And so understand the forward moving forward thinking stuff. But if that's not your cup of tea, then there's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you're highly relevant then in the area you want to be in. I appreciate the parallels between the way that you're thinking about an individual's career and how a company thinks. you know if i'm a cto and i'm looking at you know how am i apportioning my resources across my entire team probably 10 of that hopefully is going to be an innovation right maybe more maybe you know only five percent if we have a high keeping the lights on budget but hopefully uh you've got a percentage that's moving forward you know you've got 50 on new features however you know you're set up but you're going to want to keep something aside to say okay what's the crazy thing we need to learn what's the next step and i think you're kind of applying that approach that many companies these take to an individual's career and saying, okay, yes, you need to kind of keep the lights on with your job.

21:05You need to do well at that. But you also need to think about what's next and really map out maybe not your next step directly, but the next learning opportunity for you so that you can reach that next stage, presuming that you want to continue to grow and kind of stay relevant or even get ahead. Yeah. The other thing that I would add is that sometimes the step forward is not the up and coming technology. Sometimes a step forward is being the team lead, being middle management, being a CTO, starting your own startup, being a tech influencer with a podcast or a YouTube channel, speaking at conferences, being a dev evangelist.

21:41I mean, all of these other things are kind of non-standard track fare that make a lot of sense. Or, being an application engineer, or not engineer, an architect, right? And so that their job really is to go look at these new technologies and see how they fit. If you're looking at your career, there are a lot of different ways you can go that aren't the standard, I'm just going to be a better, faster, more relevant dev. And so I encourage people to explore them all. The other thing is, is that you're talking about companies looking at it and going, hey, 5%, 10 % innovation, things like that. But the thing is, is that if you really think about the way that they operate, it's not the CTO coming up with this in a vacuum, right?

22:28What's happening is, is they're talking with the CEO, they're talking with the chief marketing officer, they're talking to customers probably, they're talking to a whole bunch of other people, they're talking to people in the industry, they're talking to their competitors. And what they're doing is They're formulating all this stuff and they're trying to read the tea leaves and say, what's coming and how do we how do we profit by it? Right. I've worked in some companies where they they think they can maintain the status quo and stay relevant. Most of them are wrong about that. But the reality is, is that, yeah, the ones that are really forward thinking and are moving in the right direction, that's what they're doing.

23:04And so if you're doing the same kind of thing, then then you can stay relevant, stay on the radar. are. And you can also then have these conversations with people who are trying to make those decisions and help influence the direction that they go in. And a lot of times you wind up getting paid to learn this stuff, which is really fun. I love that insight because I think it's something I'll say I've experienced my own career is like looking forward and saying, okay, I have a vision for the future. I'm interacting with others who have that vision. I'm trying to understand it. It's been a huge career differentiator for me, both in my individual contributor skills and as a team leader.

23:38So great advice. Definitely echo that. I'm curious, as you start to coach someone on this, you know, there's a plethora of programming languages available, technologies available, there's platform engineering, there's AI, all these areas you go into. How should an engineer evaluate and determine which, you know, new skill set, new language, or kind of new area, maybe team leadership, they should actually go into based on their long-term career goals and the evolving landscape. So I have some kind of non-traditional advice with this. I'm going to start with kind of the low hanging fruit though, and then I'll move into that.

24:15So the way that I recommend people do this is first, you want to look at what that actually looks like for you, right? Because ultimately you want to optimize for happiness. That's what I'm telling people, right? At the end of the day, you can get a job that pays you really well to work in tech, Right. So what you're looking at, you're probably looking at, hey, I can probably get paid a little more at some company out there to do whatever a wide range of things. Right. And, you know, I've been doing Ruby for what, 16, 17 years. Right. But if I went to another company tomorrow and said, I've never written more than a few lines of Python and they were looking for an experienced developer to write Python, they may still hire me just based on the fact that I have enough experience where I could probably pick things up more quickly than, say, somebody with a few years experience who's been doing Python for a year or two.

25:15There's a tradeoff with what you get out of that. And so you're kind of in a flexible place, right? Where if you go out and you make some effort, right? Even if they wouldn't hire me just not having written any Python, I could probably get myself to a proficiency level that they'd be comfortable with within a few months. So if you're really looking at, okay, where do I go from here and how do I get there? Go try it, right? Go try writing whatever it is, right? If you want to move into AI, go pick up a book, go watch some videos on YouTube, go talk to people who are doing AI. I keep saying AI, but most of the time we're talking about machine learning and machine learning algorithms.

25:55But so then you do that work, right? And you can figure out, okay, this is what that job looks like. This is what this kind of relation to other developers is. Here's what I've got to learn. Here's what I've got to know, right? So that I can show up to an interview and I can have a good showing. And in the course of that, you may figure out, like I said before, this isn't the thing for me, right? And so then you can move on to something else because a lot of these skills are transferable. Chuck, I really appreciate you sharing all these insights from your time and your own experiences with our audience.

26:31I know they're going to find it especially interesting. I'd love to kind of wrap up the conversation with something you mentioned, which is that, you've seen this incredible boon of access to developers all over the world. And I know that you've had incredible conversations with devs, engineering leaders worldwide. Is there a particularly impactful story or profound interview that you've done that you could maybe share a little bit about for our listeners? There are a couple of them that kind of come to mind. Most of them are from a few years back. The reason that they come from a few years back is because it's easier to see the impact as you go.