Intern to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer in 11 Promotions (Career Story)

39:57I think all those things helped. NuGet, SignalR, how did the thing that you helped build and mold and raise, grow, how did it impact the industry, the company? Those all come into account when I think they're fellows who decide who becomes a DE. Were you involved in that process at all or was it a surprise when you got the Distinguished promo? I was involved from the point of view of helping my leadership with content. So I gave them all of my contributions to things, things I've written, like papers I've written, code contributions to various projects. I kind of gave them the raw material. I didn't do anything else.

40:46But what made it impactful for me was seeing the other fellows acknowledge knowledge and say like well deserved and it's about time and like okay maybe I should maybe I should maybe I should be here this is good you mentioned the lofty expectations of this distinguished engineer level yeah is that something that you worry about now that you've been acting in the role for a while at first I I would tell people I am a baby d I've only been here like a couple months or or it's been one year now and i'm not sure yet um i think no it's been two two and a half two and a half two years now um i feel pretty confident i can perform at this level and i think i understand what is what is required um i would say initially very much yes my first review cycle um i felt pressure to like document everything and just write down what i thought was all the impact right it wasn't it felt very much like oh my gosh i should i need to make sure i'm we're not writing all stuff down um telling the boss what i'm doing like making sure he knows and because i think you're you're you're almost an executive at the company like you're you're at the level below being an executive and like it's super scary to think about how having to have that impact every year repeatedly over and over so i think i found the pattern for kind of like making sure i had the right level of impact um talking to my bosses making sure i had i was visible making sure i'm doing all the right things so yeah i i don't i don't feel the pressure as much now um but who knows i mean things could change so you went through it looks like 11 promotions which is kind of ridiculous you went all the way from the beginning all the way to then and the crazy thing you're saying guido the founder or the creator of python is that level as well i can't even fathom because apparently there's one last one the technical fellow what what does that final boss level even look like so the people who are fellows tech fellows i guess the the the one that you know in my division that everyone analyzes anders helsberg made turbo pascal delphi c sharp and tetra so like no one's competing with that dude because like no you can't repeat building four successful languages um but i think if you were thinking about the the archetype of like someone who is a fellow it's that level of impact right or the people who built the windows kernel actually there's one guy dave cutler who came from deck back in like the 80s or whatever and he helped build he built windows nt he built azure the the os he built the hypervisor for xbox he is the only senior technical fellow wow that isn't even a real title that's just his title wow so it's kind of like it i think at those levels everyone's a unicorn and everyone has their own path so you aren't trying to follow people's path one-to-one you're looking for proxies for for impact to be a fellow you need industry-wide impact not just impact in your division in your company it's like you need to do something that impacts the industry i think we hired someone recently who is a fellow who like invented rss it's like that it's like that level of like fame right it's like you built something that became the industry standard for you know the internet like um there was a guy on my team who was the intern for tim berners lee and he is on the hdp spec like is that yeah so yeah this those are the kind of people that end up being fellows i think were there any unexpected perks of getting promoted to distinguished engineer?

44:53A size more money? Let me think. Well, for instance, I guess the thing that I'm curious about is at a lot of companies, when you get promoted to a certain level, you get added to special forums that only distinguished engineers have access. Okay, the coolest part. Here's the coolest part. There's an email alias called engineer. that is all the de's on microsoft oh it's just the coolest alias of the engineer on microsoft like all those that's awesome that's one of the perks yeah but there is there is there's a there's internal um there's a forum where we all meet i think every every couple of months the way this typically works is you have a sponsor right so when i'm when i'm when i was going to be i told my mentor i want to be a de you know i had i had mentors who were fellows okay so one one tip when i became a partner i told my men i told my management that i want a mentor i want help playing a mentor who is a fellow because i want to be one so i figured if i want to be one i should have people who are mentors that can help me get there um and my one of my mentors was who was very impactful in my career.

46:09He invented a PowerShell, Jeffrey Snover. And he was one of the best mentors that I've had. He actually left Microsoft and went to Google recently. But he was like really, really impactful for me in my career. He was one of my main sponsors. And I ended up getting to go to one of these tech leaders forums. I got to mingle and talk to all the people who were like there. And it was really, really interesting, really cool. you mentioned that that mentor was incredibly impactful what was the things that he was telling you that made a difference a lot of people i want to say sugarcoat like how to get places how how to get promoted and they'll give you very generic feedback um you have to do a project that's super impactful he was very very much direct like we should go talk to the people who decide and ask them like where you are and then and it was jarring to me because i never thought about asking the teacher for why why it like no one ever tells you um you have to do x to get promoted exactly and it never exactly works one-to-one it's like you have to have more impact so make sure you're working on something that's like you know super impactful and maybe you aren't now and change he was like let's go to the source go to the host let's go talk to the ctos let's go figure out like what it means for you and your in your role and i was like that is super helpful and because it helped me it helped me understand what i should and shouldn't be doing in a very like real way it wasn't just arbitrary advice that just happens to you it was like very explicit i had a second mentor i had done some there's this thing where you can get feedback from different people in the company, your manager, your peer, et cetera.

47:57And it gets turned into a package and they give you feedback. And it tells you your strengths and what you're good at, what you're really bad at, how you act under stress, all these things. And my first reaction is, oh my gosh, I am going to have to fix all the things I'm bad at. I got to figure out how to get leveled. And my mentor was like, no, no. take your strengths and amplify them even more you could work on the things you're not good at and be average at those or you can work on things that you're really good at and be superhuman at those things and it it broke my brain because up until and that was like i want to say five years ago up until then i had been thinking about man how do i make sure i am better at everything so I can be a well-rounded individual.

48:48I think it was like, no one gets promoted to these roles for being average. You need to, you have to be superhuman in something that you're really good at, that people aren't, right? So that helped me refocus to thinking about finding ways to make up for things that I'm not good at. So as an example, if I form a team, I am not the one that's going to schedule meetings or I am not going to go through every detail of how we ship and all the checklists. I am super bad at that stuff. And I will make sure I have someone who is really, really good at that stuff so I can focus on what I'm doing at. So, basically, help me reframe how to think about amplifying why I do well to kind of get more impact.

49:37Makes sense. I mean, it's kind of like a power law type of thing. At the top is where there's the most insane returns. Just take those things and go further on that exponential. Exactly. It's exactly that. Yep. You mentioned a lot of these, you know, impressive engineers. And I think as a distinguished engineer, you have a unique perspective because you can see what is impressive with a critical eye of a great engineer. What are some examples of other engineers that you look up to and what makes them impressive to you? I can talk about some of the well-known ones and then talk about these people that I work with in general that are impressive for different reasons.

50:17My current team, there are like five other partner-level engineers that have been here 20-plus years that are just really, really good for different reasons. Like experts in the GC. One person is like a super coder. like just he just codes 10x people complain about engineers aren't 10x he's 10x he just produces way more code than everyone else combined right um there's one guy who like literally seemed to know everything about obscure things you would never understand and you're like without having to have seen it yourself there's all kind of stuff stuff about c stuff about compiler stuff both the OS and you're like, how does he seem to know everything about everything, right?

51:05And then there are engineers who just seem to know what to build and have a good eye judgment. So I'm on the C Sharp design review team. So we meet every couple of months and we review C Sharp features, right? New features come into language. And I'm on there with Anders Helzberg who made C Sharp, right? So like, what I say doesn't matter, what he says matters. I mean, it does it counts um but the way he communicates like the way he gives feedback for what feels good and what does not feel good he always does it in a way that is very much like he's not talking down to you i mean this dude invented four languages are just like what everyone uses and yet he can still talk about it in a way where it's like you know some people are really smart and they talk dumb to you and you feel dumb because he's like, oh, he's super smart and I'm dumb.

51:59He does it in a very pragmatic, practical way. Then you see the code he commits and you're like, this dude is inventing types of theory that we haven't even seen before, technically. Insane. So I admire a lot of like watching people like that spread their impact. Mark Rosanovic, who's CEO of Azure, famous for his Windows tools. Um, he still codes and it blows me away sometimes. Like he's, he actually is working on something right now. Um, and he sent an email two days ago. And I was like, holy crap. And it was, it was very dev, a dev centric email. It wasn't a high level. We should do X. It's like, no, I wrote some code.

52:45I improved the performance. I'm like, here's the results. And I was just like, how does he have time to do stuff? so i think whenever i see high level engineers or ices still coding like that i get really inspired it's really easy to fall into the meeting trap um actually when i went partner i fell super steeply into the meeting trap of like i was in meetings all day every day and i got really sad and my mentor said as an IC your job is to have like you need something to think and to build stuff so minimally on your calendar block eight hours a week minimum to to do that stuff and it took me a while to change my brain to say I can just say no to meetings decline decline decline decline decline my can my carry code so I think the next set of questions want to ask you, because you have a public presence on Twitter, there's all these top tweets that you have that I think are really interesting short thoughts that I'd be curious to have you expand on.

53:54Yeah. So I think the first one is talking about university courses. And you said that there should be a university course that explains how to refactor code, how to make changes to it without breaking an existing code base. My question to you is if you were to design that course, what would some of the key concepts be? Having been working for this long now in industry, computer science is not software engineering. It's not even close, right? Computer science is like learning the science of computers and bits and bytes and the math and algorithms. And you do a little bit of things that are software engineering like, but it's nothing like software engineering.

54:39So when you get your first job, you spend a lot of time just trying to understand what's there. So you can surgically make your first change and not destroy everything. Don't break the bill. Don't break everything else. So I think if I were to have a course, you would be thrown into an artificially big code base. We would have a maybe it would have to change every year because students will just copy from the previous year. So it would change every year, different code base. And your job is to make a bug fix. you gotta fix a bug in this code base and write a test for it and just the the skills you learn being a code architect a code archaeologist is so different from just just writing by an LLE code question or doing a homework assignment that is just like this one thing in a textbook you learn a lot of adjacent skills from just trying to figure out where to put the code in the first place i think it's funny i think thinking no i think it would be super useful like every every assignment is making one one fix and maybe you can set up the code base such that it's not super hard to figure out what it is anyone with enough time like you know we can figure out i made it this one triple change and and add one text um but i think a lot of a lot of people's jobs are tweaking software that that is there already not everyone gets to create new software like if you if you work on windows sure you'll build new components but you aren't going to change the kernel unless you're going to do a new a new os um so yeah super useful skill yeah i think there was another set of tweets that i saw that was kind of around this idea of that tech interviews are focused so much on writing new code but actually the real high leverage skill is debugging it yeah what gives you that that thought maybe you can expand on that so early in my career I worked with a ton of engineers who were and on the Donna team we had a lot of engineers who just worked at the platform level so I got to see firsthand people diagnosed crazy crashes risk conditions threading issues I got firsthand a firsthand seat to even watching people's mindset when they go to diagnose issues I thought to myself like there's kind of two skill sets that maybe you learned some coding, but they're just not the same skill set.

57:05And if you think about building an application, deploying it, shipping it, and then getting craft reports, trying to resolve issues, like trying to figure out what's going on in production, there is this second skill set that is just not authoring code. That is, how do you even think through debugging issues? How do you know which thread caused the exception? What tools do you use? How do you think about how I got there? And I thought to myself, it would be fun to have an interview where you give someone a crash dump or something. Like, hey, this app just crashed. Figure out what the problem is.

57:44And you aren't trying to see if they can solve it. You want to see what they even start doing. Do you start adding logs? Do you rerun the program? How do you think about risk conditions? Do you print thread IDs and try to figure out interleaving? All these interesting things come out of watching someone try to diagnose problems. It's funny. I have the highest respect for engineers who can be thrown into a problem situation where they don't know the code base super well. And they can kind of solve the issue. Super fun story. I remember being, this is early days in Azure. there was this very i can't remember what the site was but there was a very popular site that was going down i was running on adler and i'm like also i was up late it was 1am and my cvp sends me a message like a dm it's like hey you free i'm just like what yeah i'm free i get added to a call that has like 100 engineers trying to debug why the site is crashing.

58:55And, you know, we called the team who was working on it. It was some other company, but we were helping them as engineers, trying to debug the issue. And you could just see the different people's skill sets trying to figure out what the issue was. And we solved it eventually. it was a concurrency issue somewhere in some dictionary that caused a risk condition and i thought to myself like this is one of the skills that you need to have as an engineer like writing code is just it's a small piece of your overall skill set learning how to debug and think through issues is like another big big chunk yeah and as evidence of that being very impactful i know some companies you know every company has their different archetypes and you mentioned like super coder also known as code machine in some places yep there's also i've heard the archetype fixer too and that's that's that's a really cool one because it's been described as someone drops in somewhere they make a one-line change after tons of investigation and it gets two times better three times better or something like that oh my gosh we have some engineer on on the team who there'll be a thread to get started off all per issue somewhere in grpc call and i'll add the engineer the thread say hey can you look at this boom boom boom here's a trace i'm just like oh my gosh it's solved it's solved so impressive um another tweet that you had i thought was really interesting is it says lukewarm take the lower on the technology stack you sit the less mistakes you're allowed to make what what made you think of that what did something break super low level in the stack somewhere i have to be working on something so i work on platforms so the way we think about software is way different from you know higher level services or even web web front lines or whatever i think maybe i have been working on something that broke i mean a lot things break that are just kind of insane.

1:00:57The things that we change that break services are absolutely unheard of. We will change the order of how things come back in a method and it just snaps some company's website goes down. So I think when you work at that and it's that you gain an appreciation for the kind of changes you can and can't make. I think that tweet was inspired by one of these bugs. I think at that time I had been working on first party adoption of.NET and we had seen a couple of people upgrade and hit issues that made us just completely shocked. it was like, how did you find that bug? No one has that. What do you mean you have 400 arguments to method?

1:01:54That's not... There's some limits somewhere that can't be a real problem, right? There's another tweet here, and that was really interesting. It's about promotions. You said that when you got promoted to a senior software engineer at Microsoft, you remember thinking that other people were smarter than you and should have been promoted first, and you would have thought they would be angry, but the opposite happened that actually having good co-workers matters a lot and people weren't you know so yeah yeah what's your your thought there this is you you are you are bringing about some good memories so i remember when i was going to senior i actually i was actually a little worried about getting what it before because i had it on a really fast path and i thought i mean maybe maybe it would make people jealous it was like why not me and and when i joined my team i think there were four people from mit and two from cmu and i had gone to florida tech and i was like these people are like way smarter than me so like my way of working through imposter syndrome was just to like work really hard and like be a busy bee doing stuff um i think i understood that when When I got promoted senior, that the impact was not about being intelligent.

1:03:13It was not just about like getting the highest grade or being smart. It was like, are the things that you're working on being impactful with the business? And that was the shift where I began to understand like, okay, it's not just about what I know. It's not just about that this person on the team is really smart in area X. It's like, can I take all that and produce something that is impactful? and that promotion helped me see okay that was the new get thing the signaler thing that's how you get promoted that's how you you you know you you add impact to the team it's not just about knowing this thing about this this feature about this area about this os because i always felt like man i don't know enough about you know technology x or about area x i got to go deeper and learn more and the question was always is that for you or is that for your career right what's it for um you don't have to know how i don't know maybe you should but you don't have to know how tcpip works to get promoted to the senior um i'm sure people don't know the details of how it works right um i think that that promotion for me helped me separate like being smart from making an impact okay promotions impact these promotions being smart is something else is just like knowing knowing more stuff and being helpful for solving problems um and the second part was my co-workers were happy for me at least outwardly it was but i was i was really worried at the time because it was like new person joins team gets promoted really fast like do people see that as why not me or do they see it as yeah that makes sense right when i ask questions about other people who kind of went up really fast to my period at the time they would say things like everyone knew it was going to happen like there's certain people where people kind of know where it happens and you never know if that's the case for you or not or or people are just like man i don't think that person deserved it so you've been working at microsoft for over 17 years now and one of this tweets that you have is talking about big company tips that you have and it says before you change roles ask when the last reorg was

1:05:37what's the thinking behind that advice big companies are are a machine and i remember someone telling me really early on that like and maybe it was it was tongue-in-cheek it was like when you're when you're when you are uh an executive vice president at these companies or a cvp or whatever you are you show that you're doing something like it's like motion like reorgs are motion and motion means that you're you're changing stuff and the only thing constant is change in these big companies like there's always a reorg plan there's always a there's always a reorg coming there's always a reorg that just happened and you're trying to figure out in between the reorg moments what were like who were the leaders what was the the impetus what caused it to happen i mean you can never know when that's what's coming but learning about the previous one is super i think it's super important just to understand like where we are where where you would be heading right in in that dimension my org had a big reorg late recently previous meta person now runs um j now runs um my my my org and i think it's super important to know that because it helps you figure out what the purpose is now right if if it just happened it tells you a lot about where the org is heading where the team is heading where things are going um i think it's easy to kind of change teams or move around and not think about the overall place that org is going but then microsoft is big enough that is like every new org is a whole new company so it's definitely worthwhile trying to figure out where what the goals are of that org where it stands now what happened last time kind of thing i bet i i tweeted that after either talking to a mentee um who had been reorg and i think they had been like four in a row or something that's crazy um or or it happened to me but yeah i see so you're saying you should read the behind the scenes of the reorg and what that means for your career in the future oh yeah oh yeah i heard someone say something to me recently that was really good advice it was when you're looking to change jobs don't think about the things you love because they'll be easy to do think about the things you hate like what what can you not stand about like working in the area or an environment or whatever it is and go look for that if you see that that'll be that'll be the thing that will be hard to get around our work through let's say you hated open space and you wanted a closed office if the company was open like don't go to the company that is open because like then you'll you'll be unhappy right um there are better examples that are probably more toxic about like people but that's a simpler um way of describing it you've been at microsoft for a long time about your entire career even including your internships i'm i'm curious what has kept you at Microsoft as long as you've been?

1:08:35Yeah, every time. Yeah, I think about this myself a lot. Like what keeps me here? And I think I am part of a generation of millennials who broke the curse of like our boomer parents like trying to stay in the same place forever. I have a lot of friends that jumped their own and they got paid for it and it was really good for them in their careers. I want to say I maybe they didn't take the same pack and it kind of worked out. I had a couple of times where probably the most impactful time where I maybe almost left was when I was senior. My boss left and went to Twitter, pre-IP of Twitter. And a year in, she tells, she pings me and tells me to come like go interview at Twitter.

1:09:24And I actually interviewed at Twitter and at GitHub. It's funny, GitHub and Twitter at the same time. and I got to I got both offers and the offers were pretty good and it was the probably the first time in my career where I was like at a crossroads because my career had been going fine I was working on SignalR I was like on the up and up but then here's this offer that like seemed a lot better and they're pre-IPO companies like should I should I go um and there was a lot of deliberation as to like if I should go or should stay or not or whatever. I ended up staying and it worked out. But I will say the morning like Twitter went public.

1:10:11Instant depression.

1:10:16I was depressed for like a week. Oh my God. What kept you at mark? Because it sounds like those offers were better than what you were making at the time. Yes, they were. They were. So when I got, they countered and the counter was fine. It wasn't like, I mean, I guess looking back, no, it was pretty good, but it was, it was fine. But they, they had me talk to like our executive vice president. And he was like, you're going to be like a distinct engineer in like five years. I mean, he definitely oversold. but i was i think maybe for me it wasn't just the money that that made me stay it was like i had been working on something i had built up impactful that was like built permissionless um i had i think at the time i had been getting a lot of autonomy at microsoft and leaving would have been like starting over um probably one of the one of the things that people don't talk about when changing roles or leaving or getting a better offer somewhere else is you build up a network a network of people a network of of you know a track record i can kind of work on what i want to work on at the moment at that time maybe not so much but i think i had been given more more autonomy and when you're weighing the the like should i stay or should i go it's like money is one thing um the other is like are the people like are people good not just good engineers but like good people like but but you want to work with so there's the the people aspect the money aspect the network aspect all these things kind of matter in the soup and i think i stayed because at microsoft i had been getting my fix of working on a new thing every couple of years every if on my LinkedIn, there's like a new project every two years.

1:12:15And that was like by design. I think it helped me not get bored or not like kind of like be, I didn't feel the need to go somewhere else to do what I want to do because I felt like I could do it on Microsoft. So that kept me here for this long. I mean, I won't say that I hadn't thought about leaving every now and then it does it does come with my brain every now and then but i think so far the people um the pay for me is is fine um the people to pay the project the impact i get to have working on what i work on is a is a big big thing for me as well do you think that if you had a mentee today facing the same decision so they're they're at microsoft and they they're doing well and then they have uh you pre IPO, open AI offer or something better than what they have now.

1:13:11Well, would you tell them you should stay at Microsoft or would you say, you know, maybe go with the risky thing? I would tell them to go.

1:13:23So fun story, Ashley had a mentee who got an offer from a separate, a different company, but they weren't in a place where they could do their best work. So the combination of the offer plus that, I was like, you have to go. I said, they're going to counter, but you have to go. You can't stay here. You should go. You should go. If I had that for myself, maybe I would have been gone. I would have been gone.

1:13:54You had this interesting tweet on job hopping that I thought was maybe relevant now, which is that you said once in your career, you should work on a project long enough to see the long term impact of your decision. decisions it's a humbling experience that's a good one so i it could be better for long-term growth uh in some cases yeah so what i would say so that one that tweet was inspired by my career has always been this like work on a thing and move on i would still have ties to the thing i worked on help people that are working right now whenever things go wrong or whatever but the the thing that i'm i have worked on for 10 years dotnet core was the longest of ever worst my anything in my career ever ever and i think it was a good it was a good change because it really helped me appreciate like deciding to do something in the first two years and then holy crap seeing the impact of that decision whether it be bad or good right um it gives you a whole new skill set perspective on how to make decisions and for for some things it's obvious and you can say okay well we didn't understand at the time the scope or the scenario or whatever else but things that didn't seem important became important um one of the jokes that i make about you know when you work on something for 10 years all the small issues you thought were small that were just like we can do it later will become big issues at some point like somebody will hit everything that you planted and it it happened it it all of it happened um and i thought like i think maybe if you think about 10-year projects 20-year projects who knows if it's good for career growth maybe not like maybe if you work on the same for 20 years like oh my gosh not not great but it'll teach you a different skill set that is like you get to understand the implications you get to understand you know if you were going to the next next version you would have much more insight into like what you messed up it's really hard to appreciate what you messed up when you like do a thing and you you leave you should be one all good new project but i don't i don't fault anyone for like doing both things because i've done both too yeah i could see it better for i guess developing judgment but i and i could also see it being you know imagine a career that's a leg of jumps back and if assuming every jump is higher than the other that person's probably have a lot of career growth but if all the projects they start just kind of go downhill once they leave i wonder what it does for their pattern recognition judgment yeah yeah exactly it's funny i i told someone i don't know exactly how to describe the ingredients that make up a successful project but i can tell you when i'm working on one versus when i'm not and that is built up over time and experience and like seeing which things work out which things don't work out um it's kind of fine-tuning i guess an internal model in my head okay this this has the smell of something that can be successful versus versus not and there are some things here that i'm seeing that work out well and some things that are not well and yeah coming to the the end of this i I kind of want to ask you some just high level reflections and things.

1:17:22One thing I'm curious, because you're so high up at Microsoft at this point, and you've been there for so long, too. I know the common perception is pre-Satya, Microsoft was very different from post-Satya, at least in terms of stock performance. Did you notice anything internally, like the culture shifting when Satya became CEO? Huge. I mean, I always tell new hires that it's really hard to think about the culture shift between Satya and Balmer because I lived it, right? I was in it. And it's really hard to see the big jumps from where we are now to where we used to be because it literally happened gradually.

1:18:09it was like things were rolled out and there's a lot more because the culture just changed completely right probably one of the biggest ones that i i noticed because i i experienced this when i joined there was teams competing on the same and angle like two different teams that i think i think historically there's been a microsoft used to do this thing where two end teams could work on the same end state and then one would win and the others would be who knows what would happen miss bando and reyard something else um there was a big focus on collaboration over like just like being the first the first to do something i never experienced it myself on my team but i definitely worked with teams who you could tell were kind of building the solution before knowing what the problem was there's a lot of that um that i saw when i was and i was i was i was an observer i was like very early in career like observing how people interacted and culture wise and just the way people interacted changed like meeting culture like how it means with with a pair like emails things that seem so obvious in hindsight like if i look at how people would communicate in meetings now versus emails versus how you used to work like remote friendliness versus like how people work in teams like i remember being in a meeting and someone raising their hand on teams i was like raise your hand for talk what this is not like so because i i had i had grown up in a culture where you would just talk right you just talk well you don't you wait for a pause and you talk you don't you don't raise your hand to talk or you don't like maybe it sounds crazy a lot more consideration for everyone else it wasn't just what's it called um highest paid person's opinion i think that's that's kind of how microsoft felt when i joined like if you were in a meeting with people that are very senior um hard to get worded sometimes and if and if the if the most the most senior person was loud and like aggressive like people that people that didn't think that way in the moment would not get saved wow i think one of the big changes was in like how we communicated as a as a company as a team collaboration became a thing that was part of your review so like if you were not using if you were not trying to use things that other teams built like you were dinged for it if you were gonna copy and create a clone of someone else's thing because you're special no the incentives push you in the opposite direction i think that's probably the most impactful change that and that and the style of comms was like a big change that i observed just like existing in those time those times i see okay so the culture shifted through performance incentives and maybe just some of the stuff that was messaged top down yeah yeah and and and the behaviors are that were being modeled by like the leaders like literally in meetings people raising their hands people calling people who haven't spoken like imagine if you're in a meeting and there's someone really quiet that has really good thoughts but maybe they don't they don't like to speak up in meetings pulling it out of that person in in the meeting like i remember when that first happened i had never seen it before i had never seen someone say hey Ryan, you're quiet.

1:21:47You've been quiet the whole time. What's your opinion on this matter? There was just people talking and then you would leave. Now there's a lot more, it's much better, much more consistent for others. A lot less people screaming, shouting. I was in a meeting really early where people were shouting. I remember thinking to myself, like, this is normal. Am I going to have to shout at some point? There's a famous XKCD comic about the culture at different companies. And if I recall correctly, the Microsoft one is a drawing of people with guns pointed at each other. The guns. Yeah. It's so funny. I think that picture is funny and it's definitely not guns at all.

1:22:29It went from guns to ambivalence, like don't bother me, to collaboration. So I think that progression is probably the biggest change in between Bomber and Safia. the joke about the guns to, I don't have a gun at you, but as long as you aren't going to disturb my situation, we're good to go. You're over there, I'm over here, it's all good. Two collaborations. We incentivize collaboration. You get rewarded for collaboration. I think that was the biggest shift and change I saw in the culture. When you look back on your career so far, do you have any major regrets that people can learn from? that's a good question major regrets major maybe not I would say early in my career I would say super arrogant I was very arrogant you could probably find my github if you look at some of the github comments and the tone I would say I was lacking some empathy in a bunch of different places one of the big shifts that I think my brain made over time learning how to build teams and kind of impact with others was like patience patience empathy um those two traits help help a lot with like growing teams and growing like influence and people right it's not just because you're right being right means nothing it's not important right being right is like one of many things um and i i used to want i used to like i'm right therefore everything else is like we'll follow on from there and i think learning over time that that doesn't really matter as much because there's a lot of shades of gray when you're in top range areas this is not the most important thing so i think early in my career i was very much like yeah i'm right like i don't really understand why we're having this conversation why are we still talking about this thing i'm right um and every now and then it'll creep out but like it i think i have a lot more self-awareness now whenever that's not the most important thing for the for the moment even though it's like a thing still i learned over time how to dial it um but in general yeah maybe the fact that i didn't leave and go to twitter because i would have gotten like a ton of money as a senior engineer um or go to or go to or go to facebook i i had a bunch of opportunities i just didn't i didn't take it super early on okay one regret that i do have that is not directly career related but like maybe in the same ballpark um i had a friend in 2008 who sent me a message he was gonna do a bitcoin company i was like i don't know about descriptive thing dude has so much bitcoin though what what what oh my god that's so funny yeah that that one um when you look back on your career what was your work-life balance like throughout i used to answer this by saying um there was no balance there was just like work hard play hard kind of thing i would say no someone told me recently that work life balance isn't about nine to five and stopping it's about what things give you energy and what things drain energy from you so early on in my career i was working all hours i still do because i enjoyed what i was doing i may be a little too much so i would just like have to dial back every now and then but i enjoyed what i was doing so i worked a lot like at work i have to work like on different things um because programming for me was not just my job it was like my passion so i i never forget one one summer i came back from vacation i started making games just like for fun um and i learned a lot about making games i took that into things at work that i was doing and more stuff and for me it was always i just love building stuff so i want to build more stuff um what i would say is draining now is like meetings that just don't feel like they have a purpose so if i were in meetings all day and i felt drained after work and i kept doing more work that to me would be like no balance because i i want to do stuff that isn't meetings but i'm i'm not doing that during the day and then then i'm going home after hours doing more work that is like burnout quality so i would say like balance was always i work a lot i'm absolutely over calling for me this i love this career it's it's kind of insane i i get to code for for a living so i i see that as like a privilege that i'm going to keep doing until i can't do it anymore yeah i think when i look at a lot of people's careers who have been you know as successful as you the that's one of the unfair advantages i see almost everyone has is they have this innate intrinsic motivation so they they work a ton of hours just non-stop and and a lot of like like you a lot of people love it and that is such an unfair advantage it is i i saw um when andrew kirkpatty's talks and he said 10 000 hours to get good at anything.

1:28:00And maybe it's not true, but I, early in my career, and maybe even though, I wanted to become a very good software engineer, right? And people always ask me, hey, what book did you read? What did you do to become a good software engineer? And I'm like, I wrote and read a lot of code. Like just anything you can get your hands on. And there's so much more code now. There you can read, consume, and write. And I'm not sure if it's good advice, but why no is that I did not get good at software engineering or building a programming, whatever you want to call it, from like seeing something online or reading a blog post.

1:28:45Just do it. Like build everything. databases distributed systems games like every everything you build will teach you a new skill that you don't even know you have until later on um my github is a graveyard of project i just build stuff and put it on there and it's like i want to learn how to do um multi and i don't forget i tried to build a fighting game when i was 16 i wanted to build street fighter so i got all the art from somewhere online, I started to build a Street Fighter clone. It wasn't for any real purpose. It was just to learn how to build a fighting game. How do you make key combos work and how do you make that stuff work?

1:29:27That pattern of I need to know how this thing works has served me to this day. I need to understand how the thing I'm doing works. How do I get this thing to be on that thing? Yeah. So I... I love what I do. And I think that has helped me do it more and get better at it. And then last question, if you could go back to yourself when you were just graduating college and entering the industry and give yourself some advice, what would you say? Oh, my God. Negotiate your freaking salary. When I got my job, I did not know that I could even negotiate. I would have gotten more offers. I mean, looking back, it doesn't matter right now.

1:30:13But if I was going to talk to a new college hire, getting a job, like get multiple offers and like bump up that money, bump it up. I watched my friends do it. I was I was just like in shock. Like I'm from Barbados. I go to the States. I get an internship. I get a job. They give me the most money I've ever seen in my life. And I'm like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the money. I have my job. to hear kids talk about yeah i i said no or i said i'm gonna go check out google first or facebook and get offers now it's just like what and that just became normal but that became like the norm and it just it blew my mind i couldn't rationalize what was happening i i do think it's definitely worthwhile doing that i i've seen kids do it so well i'm like this is so impressive this is just like this kid is is telling us no and and i've been i've been like on enough hiring committees now to the higher interns and i'm watching the back and forth between this kid and the recruiter and i'm just like this kid's a genius bumping up it's awfully it's amazing mass respect awesome all right well thank you so much for your time david uh really appreciate it um is there anything that you want to say now or maybe where can people find you uh i am available on x discord um blue sky are those the main socials are there more i mean there's linkedin but i don't know if you use it linkedin i'm linkedin yeah you're right like yeah it's funny linkedin has become a social network is the most bizarre thing ever i am on all these things tweeting about dot net and ai and all kinds of programming stuff awesome i'll put it in the links in the show notes thanks so much dude awesome thanks for listening to the podcast i I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to help out with the podcast, you can support by engaging with the content on YouTube or on Spotify.

1:32:13If you want to drop a review, that'll be super helpful. And if there's any guests that you want to bring on to, please let me know. I feel like sourcing very senior ICs. There's no well-studied list out there on Google that I can just search this up. So if there's someone in your org or at your company who you really look up to and you want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll reach out to them.