The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Engineer to manager and back again (Interview)

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled "Does it spark joy?" In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding "What are you optimizing for?" and whether or not what you're doing _truly_ brings you joy.

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Head to do.co.changelog to get started with a $100 credit. Again, do.co slash changelog to get started with a $100 credit again do.co slash changelog all right welcome back everyone this is the changelog a podcast featuring the hackers the leaders and the innovators in the world of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at Changelog. Today on the show, we're talking with Lauren Tan about her blog post, Does It Spark Joy? In this post, Lauren shares the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer

and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding what are you optimizing for and whether or not what you're doing truly brings you joy. Lauren, thanks for coming on the show. As I said on Twitter, we are big fans of yours and all the work you've been doing, the open source and the blogging you've been doing all the years. We appreciate you sitting down and coming on the changelog. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So we have an interesting conversation because you're going through an interesting transition in your career, which we will tell the story of. But first, let's hop back to the

beginning because this starts a couple years ago, but then it also starts back when you're 13. So I thought maybe we'd start when you're 13 so I thought maybe we'd start when you're 13 and you can tell us a story about how you got into programming and making things in the first place because I think that will play a huge role in rounding out the rest of that conversation so yeah how'd you get into it yeah so with programming it started in a pretty unusual way I think because i didn't start programming right off the bat my path into programming was actually from the design perspective so uh when i was 13 or so i don't remember exactly how old i was but my stepdad handed me this pirated copy of

then what was known as macromedia fireworks now it's adobe fireworks but back then it was known as Macromedia Fireworks. Now it's Adobe Fireworks, but back then it was Macromedia. And at first I was like, I have no idea what this software is, but I messed around with it. It seemed like a really advanced Microsoft Paint. And so I started just learning and Googling for tutorials. And I stumbled upon a web forum a while back that had a forum for people who were interested in design and web design and that was actually my entry point into web development and design so i spent

a lot of time on that forum on irc chatting with lots of people we thought we were really cool making like silly memes and like funny jokes at the internet at the time. But it was a really great experience because I was, despite this being so many years ago, I had a wealth of information and tutorials that I could look up. And there wasn't quite the same level of tooling available, but it was definitely really fun to kind of learn web development back then. When you could actually right-click on a website, you view source and you can see, maybe not everything,

but you can see some of the HTML, the CSS, some of the JavaScript even. And that was super fun and helpful in learning. So I remember those days very well. I'm not sure if I used Macrometer Fireworks itself. Adam, did you ever use Fireworks? Oh yeah. I loved actually the brand Macrometer Fireworks itself. Adam, did you ever use Fireworks? Oh yeah. Did you? Yeah, I loved actually the brand Macrometer.

It was a cool brand. It was interesting that acquisition they'd done too with Adobe acquiring them. Just the whole merging. It would make sense now. I mean, you see it in retrospect, but then it was cool to use Fireworks. It was cool to use Macrometer products.

Didn't they do Flash Player as well? Yeah, they did Flash. Before it was known as Adobe Flash, it was Macromedia Flash. Innovative company. Yeah, totally innovative. So these were the good old days, as you said in your post,

where you used to say things like ROFLcopter and then laugh at them. Many of us fell in love with the internet in those days. What's the year? I don't remember exactly what year, but it was probably somewhere in the late 90s maybe. Well, PHPBB was all the rage.

So that places it, I think, late 90s, early 2000s. And even forums. I mean, they were far more popular then than they are today, but you've got to kind of have a comeback. It's interesting, the morphing of a portal like that, the whole portal world. Yeah, it's interesting the the morphing of a portal like that you know the whole portal world right yeah it's definitely very interesting i think nowadays like i spend most a lot of time on reddit which is i guess in a way like the uber forum like it's the forum of forums right but yeah definitely stumbled upon a really fun group of people and community that if not for that form i would probably not even be in programming to

begin with so it's pretty wild what was your path from that age to to say your first professional job in it first professional job i guess if you count like uh freelance i guess just like anything you got paid whenever yeah anything where i got paid well maybe just a few years cash in the bank that's yeah that's that's perfect okay in that case then i want to say i don't remember exactly but maybe 15 16 um was when i got my first job and that was like this is to redesign the school website nice and And to kind of build it as well with HTML, CSS, and some minimal JavaScript. So that was the first time.

I don't think I got paid very much. In fact, I don't remember exactly. It was probably very, very far too little for what I did, I think, because it was a fairly comprehensive website. But it was a fun experience, and I definitely learned a lot. So did you end up going to school for computer science or did you move on from there? No so after all of that experience in high school kind of messing around trying to you know learn web development and graphic design and web design funnily enough after that experience I thought to myself because I was growing up in Singapore at the time

and I think our community we weren't really that very aware of like you know the dot-com boom and things like that so I wasn't aware at least and so it never occurred to me that I could actually make a living doing web development so silly me thinking like oh I needed to go to college I needed to do something that was practical. And so with the encouragement of my parents, I went and did something very practical. And not to say computer science was unpractical, but it was something more conventional, which was at the time finance. So totally different. But, you know, when I look back, I don't regret it at all.

I think I learned a lot of really cool things about business and finance that have actually kind of really rounded out my knowledge, I think. And coming back to how I approach my work today as both now in my new job as an engineer and previously in my job as an engineering manager, I feel like a lot of that information that I've learned has come in super handy.

And so I don't think I regret any of that. It's not a good thing when you regret your past, right? Like the choices you make, the things you've done, you wouldn't want to regret the things you've done to get you kind of where you're at. Yeah. And I think there's this really great quote from Steve Jobs. I think one of his commencement speeches or something like that, he mentions, you know, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And that was a quote that really stuck with me. And so a lot of times it's difficult for you in where you are today

to kind of predict where you're going to go. But you kind of have to trust that whatever you do, you know, you can somehow figure out how to connect the dots backwards and then you see like how they connect and how to continue down that path so like for example for myself i've done finance i've done design i've done programming so some of my friends have actually joked that i'm i could be a one-person startup because i can do like all the roles and obviously maybe not doing all of them really, really well, but I can at least, I know enough to be dangerous, I guess.

Have you considered that path? The startup thing? Yeah, I've actually done it after college. So that's when my friend and I, we had an idea for a startup. And so we worked on it. It was called the Price Geek. It didn't really go very far but we learned a ton from that process both in terms of like how to even create a product to writing like better

code i guess and even making it to the first page i think we were the top of hacker news for a while and that was really exciting and scary because our server went down obviously and we were just like up all night figuring out how to like get it back up and running but those were all like super fun experiences this site's still up the site is still up in fact nice still has its super old design from many many years ago it's almost modern again just it's minimal it's kind of retro.com or what is it uh it's the pricegeek.com and the first question is what is the market price for and then there's a form for searching yeah so the idea was

you would uh search for like the what's the price of an iphone and so if you went onto craigslist or ebay you could then have a good estimate for how much you should bid or how much you should pay for either a new or used iPhone. Yeah, that's what happened. So with the price geek, it really didn't go very far because I guess we ran out of money. We spent about a year or two on it. And at the time, given the business model that we had, which was to make money off affiliates so if you purchase something from through the price geek then we'd get like a small percentage off of it but it just wasn't enough to actually sustain a business so i think at its peak we probably made like a thousand dollars in a month but definitely not enough to sustain like two people working on it full time so after a while

we just decided to call it quits and you know maybe come back and try again later we haven't actually gone back and tried again but I won't say no I mean I think I could definitely consider it sometime in the future well one thing you'd mentioned was having these skills so did you have all those skills then and use them or do you think you've sort of evolved them since then to sort of be more wiser now versus then definitely evolve them I think at the time you know being fresh out of college you feel like you know everything but you really don't know anything at all and I guess when you've just graduated from a business school and you're thinking like oh I'm so great I know everything there is about business uh only to be humbled by how little you know i definitely feel i've come a very long way

since that time but still i think that experience was pretty instrumental in kick-starting a lot of the at least the basics of like you know the hunger the hunger yeah there's the hunger but there's also the part about how do you know. The hunger. The hunger, yeah, there's the hunger, but there's also the part about how do you actually run a business? Like, I think it's a very romantic notion that people have of, you know, being an entrepreneur, working on your own thing,

not having a boss to answer to. And people see all like the really fun parts of being an entrepreneur, but maybe what isn't really talked about is, you know is the lonely parts, the really difficult and frustrating parts where it's just you and your friend or your co-founder and there's nobody else to do the work

except the two of you. And you can get very lonely and very frustrating and very challenging. I mean, you certainly learn a lot of things, but I think more people should probably talk about those things as well as the good parts it's probably fast forwarding a little bit but some of that kind of came back up as an injury manager for you too where you sort of felt isolated or lonely or things like that so it

sort of comes up when you're in a position I suppose of leadership of some sort because the amount of peers you have that have direct knowledge of what you do day to day is limited so it's naturally an isolating event to have that kind of position yeah it definitely is very i think isolating is a great way to put it you you feel like you are going through an experience alone but with a community if that kind of makes sense yeah so for example in my time at netflix as an engineering manager i had a lot of peer managers to work with but our interactions were more around like we would have one-on-ones or like we'd have weekly team meetings and things like that but it wasn't the same level of interaction that you

might get if you're an engineer on an engineering team and you're working with your peer like every day. And so the interactions are very different. So you can feel isolating in that sense because, you know, you might be going through similar challenges. They're not exactly the same, but you're not going through the same challenges. So you don't have that shared sense of suffering or frustration or joy that you might get working on an engineering team like if you're shipping a product and you do that together with your team that's very different so i don't know i found myself with i guess as a manager you're constantly dealing with these pretty difficult situations that don't have clear answers

and again you can kind of run them by your peers, you know, your managers, other managers in the company as well. But ultimately, it comes down to you trying to navigate that experience, like whether it's, you know, a frustrating situation that one of your engineers on your team is going through that you need to give them support on, or maybe it's a performance problem that someone's having on the team or something completely different so it's it was frustrating it was rewarding it was many many different emotions I guess that I went through as a manager let's return back to that moment when you decided to become a manager so we we had you at the Price Geek. Let's fast forward.

You're at Netflix. You are a software engineer at Netflix. This is about two years ago now. And you remember the day vividly. So tell us what happened. I would like to talk about that decision because ultimately what I'm interested in, in addition to you and your story, is the decision-making process, which you outlined very well here.

I think it's so helpful for so many of us because so many of us have to make these hard decisions, right? Like, do I move from developer to engineer? Do I go from engineer to manager? Do I go into a startup? Do I work for a big company? Do I stay as an individual contributor? All these difficult choices. And what I love about what you've written is really the inside story of how you make these decisions. So you had the first big decision, which is I'm going to move

from software engineer to engineering manager. That was two years ago. And then just recently, you decided to revert and go the other way. So take us back to that day and the circumstances that surrounded your move from engineer to manager. So going from engineer to manager was also a very challenging decision that I had to make because it was my first time doing management professionally of a fairly large software engineering team and I had never done it before so it was something that I had to very consciously go after and make a choice that you know this was something that

I wanted to do but kind of like to give some more background, I started at Netflix as a software engineer working on a lot of full stack type work. But then about a year and a half or two years into that job, my manager at the time left the company. And I was pretty devastated because I really looked up to this manager and they were in my mind like a great coach a great person and when I heard about them leaving the company I felt really sad and kind of you know almost lost even because now we were in a position where we didn't have a manager and there was this uncertainty about who that might be. And so after that whole announcement that, you know, my director at the time made to the team that my manager was leaving,

my director then kind of pulled me aside and said, hey, Lauren, we've been having lots of discussions with you recently about management and leadership, and we think you're ready. And why don't you be the manager of this team? And my reaction was like, are you serious? Like, I've never done management before. Yes, I have been very curious. I've asked a lot of questions. I've had a lot of like one-on-ones with different people, but I didn't feel ready at all. I thought I had a lot of like one-on-ones of different people but I didn't feel ready at all I thought I had a lot of you know again like a lot of curiosity a lot of interest in it but I didn't feel like I was ready to lead a big team so I told my director I said you know give me a week give me a week to kind of deliberate over this because I want to be very very sure so I spent

a week doing a lot of research reading reading, talking to people, talking to friends, talking to family, and just thinking, is this really something that I want? But in the course of doing all of that research, I came across this blog post by Charity Majors. And I don't recall the exact title, but I think it's something around the engineer-manager pendulum. And that was an article that really spoke to me because in her blog post, she articulates this career path that isn't very well spoken about in our industry, which is the, I guess, secret path of pivoting between engineer and manager kind of back and forth and how that was actually a viable career path if you wanted to stay close to the technology but then also develop your skills in leadership and management and so that was really the aha moment the light bulb for me of in terms

of like oh you know what actually I can do this and I then started to think about like why was I spending all this time trying to you know make this perfect decision then I came do this. And I then started to think about, why was I spending all this time trying to make this perfect decision? Then I came across this other article that was written by someone who had read a shareholder letter from Jeff Bezos, who talks about the difference between type one and type two decisions. And so according to Jeff Bezos, a type one decision is the kind of decision where the consequences are irreversible so for example i don't know if you jumped off a cliff there's no turning back from that right yeah and that's okay if you if you are really making a type one decision then you should absolutely spend a lot of time being very sure that that's something that you want to do because once you

walk through that door there's no turning back but then there are the other type 2 decisions which are more reversible so for Jeff Bezos at the time actually starting Amazon was a type 2 decision so I when I started to read about that I realized you know what why am I so paralyzed about this decision to go be a manager? Because I knew I would learn a ton of new skills that I never really flexed a lot of as an engineer. And I knew that there was going to be a path back as long as I didn't become too rusty. And that was something that constantly weighed on me as well as a manager. It was like feeling this need of, oh, I always have to be working on something in my spare time or else I'm going to get rusty and I'll never be able to go back. But that was a lot of

the thought process for me. It was really like, it's a type two decision, so I don't want to spend any more time. I had already spent a couple of days out of that week just losing sleep over, should I be a manager or not? And just going for it and going for it with both hands and just saying, I'm going to do this for the next year or two. I'm going to put in 100% of my effort and do the best possible job I can. But at the end of the two years, I need to revisit and reevaluate whether or not that's the right choice for me. And there's just no way, honestly, that at any point in your life,

I feel that you can kind of predict ahead of uh you know to to tell whether or not you will enjoy or regret doing something you kind of have to go through it in order to get that kind of information to make that decision so trying to over analyze it is actually not very helpful so it's interesting that jeff bezos laid out these types of decisions because i've also used i think it's a jeff bezos tool in some decision making in my life as well which i think it's him i could be wrong but there is a idea called the regret minimization framework where when given two choices and when it's difficult to weigh those two choices in the balance and decide, are you going to go left or are you going to go right,

he would choose the one that would, of course, you're predicting to a certain degree. So like you said, sometimes you have to live it out to know which one's true. But he would say, okay, would I regret more or less going left or going right? And he would make the choice towards the one that would reduce his potential regret. So for example, in your case, if you would have stayed an engineer then, you may have never known if you could be a great,

maybe you were born to be the best manager ever. And 20 years, 30 years back, if you just would have continued down that one path of software engineer, you may have never known what kind of a manager you would have made. Maybe you would have regretted that. In that particular context, you'd say, okay, well, I would regret more not trying

or would I regret more giving up what I have? That would be another way of navigating those types of decisions. And I've used that to some degree, and I think it's worked out pretty well. It tends to lead you towards more yeses than nos, because you tend to think, well, should I do this, yes or no? Well, I might regret not doing it, so I'll say yes. Not always the best decision decision but one that's served me pretty well one other thought to add to that though sometimes and not all the time when

you have an either or decision is to consider both you know so often do we approach and this isn't a one-to-one for every single scenario in this regret framework but you know how often does it have to be just either or why can't it just be both too i think in some circumstances you could negotiate that but i think in some cases like you know should i move to new york city or not you know like you can't both right yeah there's obvious where it doesn't fit right what i mean is don't limit yourself thinking it's either or only oh yeah consider also could it be both think outside the box right because all too often we limit ourselves and our choices and it's good because you want to sort of like reduce the amount of choices so

there's not a paradox the paradox of choice idea and uh but so often do we get caught up in either or when it actually could be both and not saying this this is case here but i want to throw that in there because it's a fun idea to consider when coming to tough decisions why not both but on that fact though i mean this pendulum means that if i understand charity's argument is that you can go into management and back out of it you know with more knowledge and you know using jared's this regret framework, do that with less regret because you did try. You didn't not try and regret not trying. You can move into that pendulum into management and back out into engineering and still cultivate and grow your skill set and your experience level to be, you know, a more valuable individual contributor later on or potentially, you know, your own boss in the future once you've decided to go back to the price geek or to your next big idea. Yeah, I think I really like the, Jared,

the regret minimization framework you mentioned. I don't think I explicitly use that, but I can see how something like that would have been super helpful for me. And also not just for me but anyone else who is you know considering a similar transition of like hey should i continue to be an engineer or should i be a manager or should i do something completely different i also like how you um you spoke about why not both uh which i think kind of talks speaks to me about Charity's blog post which is kind of doing both

like you know having your cake and eating it too in a way but yeah a lot of what she says is kind of what you touched on you know as a as an engineer you are you know honing your maker skills right and maybe some of the other skills that you need to be a multiplier on your team but generally speaking you are mostly honing those maker skills of like programming and architecture and things like that but you don't get as many opportunities to flex the muscles of communication or leadership or you know having more of a sense of ownership although I guess even as an engineer, you should have some feeling of ownership

of the product you're working on, hopefully. And so if you are considering a transition as well, I think both that regret minimization framework and the type one, type two decision could be helpful. And thinking about the skills that you'll gain is also very helpful. Because for me personally i learned so many new things that i never knew that managers had to do before um even though i

guess you know you can read as much as you want you know you can read all the books and you can do all the research but going through it is completely it's going to be completely different because no experience is ever going to be exactly the same like you come across a whole different cast of characters in your story that are very different from what somebody else somebody else's experience will be like and that just makes it you know a little bit more challenging a little bit more fun but also very educational if you know you're up for that challenge of learning completely new skills and you know actually when I did this announcement when I told all of my colleagues at Netflix that

hey I was gonna leave the company and go elsewhere to be an engineer again a lot of engineers at the company actually reached out to me to say like oh actually I would love to you know have a meeting with you to understand your thought process as well about how you navigated this engineering and manager, like these two different tracks. And one of the things I realized that a lot of people were asking me was this feeling of not knowing what it means to grow as an individual contributor. And maybe this is unique to Netflix. Maybe it isn't. But, you know, in Netflix, we don't really have defined, very well-defined career ladders. So for example,

if you join as an engineer in Netflix, your title is senior software engineer, and there are no other engineering titles in that company. So if you are very used to growth in the sense of like, oh, I started as a junior, then I'm a mid-level then I'm a senior engineer then you're not going to get that same level of I guess progression that you might get at a different company so that was something that I found that a lot of the engineers that spoke to me after were kind of really grappling against and there's this feeling that you know you have to become a manager to grow in your career, which I want to say now, I guess for the record,

that I don't think I would totally disagree with that. I don't think you need to be a manager to level up in your career. It can be helpful to gain some new skills, but I don't think it's a requirement. And I can definitely talk about that a little bit later, I guess, with some of my thought process of why I'm you know now going back into engineering. How often do you think about internal tooling? I'm talking about the back office apps, the tool the customer service team uses to access your databases, the S3 uploader you built last year for the marketing team, that quick Firebase admin panel that lets you monitor key KPIs, and maybe even the tool that

your data science team had together so they can provide custom ad spend insights. Literally every line of business relies upon internal tooling, but if I'm being honest, I don't know many engineers out there who enjoy building internal tools, let alone getting them excited about maintaining or even supporting them. And this is where Retool comes in. Companies like DoorDash, Brex, Plaid, and even Amazon, they use Retool to build internal tooling super fast. Retool gives you a point, click, drag and drop interface that makes it super simple to build these types of interfaces in hours, not days. Retool connects to any database or API. For example, to pull data from Postgres, just write a SQL query and drag and drop a table onto the canvas. And if you want to search across those fields, add a search input bar

and update your query, save it, share it. It's too easy. Learn more and try it free at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog. so another thing that you point out with regards to this decision to become a manager it does play into some of the things we just discussed is this principle you have a guiding principle that has shaped your career which is do things that scare you and this was something that scared you and so that was an indicator that you should do it i'm just curious where you learned that where that come from and how has that served you throughout your life i don't think i really formulated or

articulated this principle until quite recently but when i and again kind of going back to that quote i mentioned like you know being able to connect the dots looking backwards when i and again kind of going back to that quote i mentioned like you know being able to connect the dots looking backwards when i started to do that exercise of looking back on my i guess path to where i am today i realized like the thing that has given me a lot of success is leaning into those experiences which at the time seemed extremely scary extremely you know daunting or me feeling like an imposter and i've come to recognize that maybe eight or nine times out of ten when i do feel that fear it's because i maybe feel like i i'm not good enough to do that uh whatever that might be but i found like it's maybe this is just for me. I don't know if it's helpful for others, but I find it very motivating to be like, maybe I can prove myself wrong.

You know, maybe I can do this, but I won't know until I try. Right. And so that kind of mentality, I think has helped me out so much in my career. Like, so one example that comes to mind is with public speaking and public speaking actually used to be my greatest fear of all time. It was so bad to the point where I would get up on stage or I would go to the front of the class and give a presentation on a topic that I had spent hours and hours preparing for. But I would be so nervous that I would literally shake. Like I would physically shake and be so nervous

that I would be unable to do the presentation physically shake and be so nervous that I would be unable to do the presentation in a way that people could understand me. And so pretty early on in my engineering career, I started doing a lot of blogging about a JavaScript framework I was using at the time. And unbeknownst to me, the creator of the framework was stumbled upon those blog posts as well and i think they liked reading those blog posts because they then invited me to come and be a speaker at or to apply to be a speaker at one of the upcoming conferences for that framework the ember js framework at the time and i remember thinking to myself like way, there's no way I can do this. Like, I can't even go up to my class and give a presentation. Like, how can I go up on stage to my first conference ever?

I had never been to a conference even at that point and give a talk to like hundreds of developers. And so that was something that seemed so impossible. So like something that I could never do. And to be honest, I almost never did it because I truly didn't believe that I could never do and to be honest I was I I almost never did it because I truly didn't believe that I could do it but the person who reached out to me her name is uh Leah Silber and she was very encouraging and she kind of really you know encouraged me to you know just try it out and she would give me a lot of advice about how to do things like that so i think her

message to me was really that i would not go through this alone and i think that gave me a lot of courage to at least give it a try and that this is where i think that whole uh mindset of let me just give it a try and see what happened i'll worry about it later if if it does happen came came to to be for me. So I put together a proposal and I didn't think too much about it. I was like, I didn't think it would actually get accepted, but then lo and behold, it did get accepted. And so then that was the point

where I then started to panic. I was like, okay, now I am in big trouble. I have to prepare a talk, a 30 minute talk for like six, 700 people. And I felt this weird sense of calm, actually, when I first heard about the, I guess after the initial shock and horror and panic, I felt a sense of calm because I think I'm the kind of person who's very motivated by deadlines and some kind of stress,

which is why I think I did pretty well in college I with the constant deadlines looming over me but that was a great motivator because now I could say okay here's I have three months and I need to come up with a talk so let me work backwards and formulate a plan for how I'm going to do this and going through those steps actually really gave me a lot of confidence to prepare a good talk. Spent many, many hours preparing for it. But when I finally did the talk and I went on stage, the first couple of minutes were extremely terrifying. And the recording is somewhere on YouTube.

I'll probably link it later. But I don't know if you'll be able to see it on the recording, but I was so nervous. I was definitely shaking. But after two, three minutes in, the hours and hours I had spent practicing kind of really kicked in. And then I started feeling way more confident. And after that initial feeling of like, oh, you know what? I can do this. And just me saying I can do this in my head. I know it sounds maybe kind of cheesy but that was the

turning point for me in that particular talk because I started feeling way more confident and the rest of the talk in my mind went really really well and at by the end of it I was on high I was like so elated that I had done I at least from my perspective a good job of uh you know doing my talk that I then signed up to do another talk not immediately but i then started feeling more confident about applying to future other conferences and you know kind of doing more talks there so that's definitely been something that i've learned you know when i'm afraid of something and i'm really unsure if i can do it or not i think the the thought that I

keep coming back to is let me just give it a try and see where it takes me and you know if I don't get accepted if I get rejected then so be it right like when I was interviewing I had the same thought of you know I was scared of interviewing to be honest with you I think nobody really likes interviewing especially in silicon valley i think there's a reputation that of the interviews here being extremely obtuse and you know like involving a lot of whiteboarding and even for myself working in a silicon valley company there was this sense of hesitation and kind of uncertainty and fear about like going into that process as well, which would have kind of really held me back on interviewing. So that's another, I think another situation where I realized

maybe it's a good idea for me to not be so paralyzed by this fear, but instead use it to kind of encourage and motivate me to do better. So your do things that scare you principle rhymes with one that I've been using a bit in my life and have advised others which also sounds kind of cheesy but it's to get outside your comfort zone because nothing cool ever happens inside your comfort zone right i mean that's the story you just told with the conference talk which resonates with me and with many people who have given public speaking a try and overcome that particular fear which many many people are deathly afraid of public speaking it's one of the scariest

things there is those bodily reactions you were describing when you're doing that first talk with you know the shaking and maybe they're sweating and maybe the the back of your neck right heats up it's because you're outside of your comfort. It's not comfortable. So you're afraid, of course. You're anxious. You're agitated. It's uncomfortable by definition. And so often, going through that process matures, establishes, and produces

the interesting parts of your life. Nobody ever told... Remember the story the other night when I stayed home and watched Netflix and we saw that one show that we've seen? I watched The Office. I'm not going to go tell my friends about that, but when you get outside your comfort zone, you do

things that scare you, you produce really the interesting and the valuable aspects of your life. And so I'm with you. I mean, step outside your comfort zone, do the things that's scary, lean into your fears, and good things can come from that.

Somebody that said kind of an alternate version of Steve Jobs' famous quote, which was stay hungry, stay foolish, said stay uncomfortable, stay hungry. Because contentment will drive this, no desire to be uncomfortable, no desire to be hungry. Because if you're content, you're full. You're not seeking your next meal. You're not seeking your next adventure, your next uncomfortable scenario.

And you become stagnant, aggressive careless potentially even you know when you're uncomfortable hungry you're unsettled you know you're seeking something new something a new adventure there's nothing holding you back yeah and i have this really great uh printout of a comic from this company called zen pencils so they do these great cartoons of famous quotes um and i have one on my wall which kind of talks about a lot about what you're saying you know it's really uh you know leaning into those uncomfortable moments and you know just being determined about trying something new and struggling a little bit but i think those are the as you say you know like those are really the experiences that shape you and kind of make you a

better person obviously not every experience will result in that kind of learning but there are certain things that can and so i guess one tip i would give myself, you know, like 10 years ago would be, like, when I feel afraid about something, I should really question and try to understand, like, why? Am I afraid because I don't think I can do it? Or, you know, like, is there something else? And try to really understand, like, whether or not there is any truth to that or is it just you know my maybe my emotions or my uh insecurities like maybe coming at the forefront or and really and not to say like you should dismiss your emotions but you know if that nagging voice in your head is holding you back then maybe

you shouldn't listen to that voice all the time and yeah I think doing things that scare me I don't know if this will scale I guess to like every single decision I'll ever have to make but at least for the ones that I come across professionally a lot of the times I found it to be very helpful we do a show called brain Science and Mary O'Reese is a doctor in clinical psychology and she's my co-host on that show. And something that she says often is fear is feedback. It's not that you want to diminish it or squash it completely, that you want to, as you said, question it, examine it. Why do I feel uncomfortable here? Why do I have fear about public speaking? Some of those answers may be obvious, but specifically for you, you might get a different answer.

So fear is just simply feedback. And it's certainly an emotion as well, but it's feedback towards you rather than just simply this emotion that you should try to avoid. So what was it about management that terrified you? Was it simply the unknown, the uncharted, or were there specific aspects of it that were, quote unquote, scary, for lack of a better term? Did you identify specific things that were terrifying? Yeah, I think for sure the uncertainty, the unknown, was a big part of it. Not having done management before,

this feeling that I would be terrible, a terrible manager. I think I had a real fear about that because I guess I was in a position now where my decisions and my actions would impact not just myself and maybe a few others, but a much larger sphere of people that I would impact. And I guess that's not really necessarily something that's unique to being a manager. Because even as an engineer, you know,

you do have actually, and I guess maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but, you know, as an engineer, depending on the kind of product you're working on, or, you know, the cross-functional teams that you work with, your work does have a lot of impact whether you realize it or not and your work whether it's in the open source community or with the product that you're building for your company you have a huge ton of impact to your users your stakeholders your product manager designer you know your backend engineers and so forth so uh like going into that as a manager was scary from that perspective of feeling that you know now i would have to answer to so many more people and you know like be on the hook for every single thing that would would be bad or good and that was kind of scary but i think it was scary in a good way it was exciting scary

so i think i did i wasn't so terrified to the point where i you know i was not excited about it i was excited about it but then just really unsure about the unknown and i think the thing that was actually quite scary was this thought process of would I be able to come back? And I guess in my mind, I knew that if I kept my skills sharp, then there's no reason why I couldn't go back. But I had to really accept this notion that maybe if I did choose to go back to being an engineer, that I couldn't guarantee that it would be with the same company and Netflix. And fortunately for me,

as I was exploring this path back to being an engineer, that was actually an opportunity available to me was to be an engineer and Netflix. I was afraid before I was a manager that that wouldn't be available because then that would mean, you know, going out and interviewing and, you know, like everybody hates interviewing.

So that was something I was kind of maybe thinking too far ahead and kind of just scaring myself for no good reason. Well, especially if you enjoyed working there, you would want to question anything that would change to impact you not being able to continue there when your path changed again. It's interesting to see that the path into and out of management has to be seen as like this sort of, I think Charity mentioned it too in the post you referenced, was this promotion or this lack of promotion. I don't know what's the opposite of promotion. Whenever you go back to being an engineer, does it have to be this sort of up and down?

Can it not just be simply a lateral move into a new lane, into a new skill set and then be able to come back, you know, even at Netflix, for example? And I'll also say, I think it's very subjective because on one hand, I want to agree with Charity. I want to say that, you know, you should be seeing the engineer, the manager, like these two career paths as completely independent of each other. And as you say, like you should think about them like they're lateral moves. But the reality is also as a manager it is true and i can't deny this fact that you know you do actually as you rise in the ladder of being a manager you do get actually more influence and more influence over others who aren't at that same level so it's i don't think

it's fair for me to say like that if you're an engineer that you'd be on the i guess the same level of you know impact or influence as like a vice president of the company but it doesn't mean that you know that that's the only path to impact and in fact i think at certain companies maybe the bigger silicon valley companies they do actually have these great uh well-defined career paths uh in the engineering track where you can actually get to the level of an engineer who is at the vice president or the director equivalent of a manager.

I think at smaller companies, you probably won't see things like that. So I think all of this contributes to the feeling of, for a lot of engineers and myself included many years ago, that the only path up is to become a manager. And now having gone through that, I can pretty confidently say that's really not the case. Netflix, for example, we have very, very senior engineers

who in fact are, I would consider them senior to myself even though I was a manager. I think it is possible. It's just not very well defined and well articulated. But I think that's part of the challenge of growing more senior in any industry, like whether you're an engineer or a designer or a product manager. One of the things that I've really learned is the higher you go, the more senior you get, the more ambiguous everything becomes.

And it's harder, it'll get harder and harder to have this well-defined career path laid out for you that you just need to execute on. Because at those levels, you can't really just rely on a career path that someone else is laying out for you and i think of it this way like if you know like i when i went to art school for a while before college doing finance yes you do learn a lot about you know like art you learn about the the maker skills right like how to draw how to paint or if you're an engineer how to code how to architect and those are in some ways like the fundamental skills of being an engineer and in your early days as a junior engineer as a mid-level engineer even up to a senior engineer i think it's fairly well defined that if you work on those technical

maker skills then you will advance in your career up to a point but the the part after the senior part is the part where it gets really really murky and for a lot of engineers whether you are at a big company or small company it can start to feel like you might and i don't know if you've encountered this before adam and jared but whether you've encountered this feeling of not knowing how to grow in your career like what should i be doing next like you know you've been doing engineering for a while let's say like a decade and you're starting to question like what do I need to be doing to get to the next level what even is the next level and I think those are very good questions to ask but they're also indicative that you know like it's just very

difficult to kind of reason about growth after a certain stage in your career but I've actually trying to been to write down some of these thoughts in a in a blog post that I hope to share somewhat soon about like kind of how to think about your career and how to think about you know how to I guess growth as a individual contributor but yeah actually be curious to hear whether either of you felt at any point in your careers that same feeling of

where do I go from here? Oh yeah. 100%. Monday through Friday. Every day. My career trajectory is not normal. So I have never been inside of a large corporation so i don't have very many of the experiences that lots of people have to fall back on i've always been either in a

very small business of six people since since college since i graduated college i worked for a company of six and then i worked for myself ever since. So I've definitely wondered where to go next a lot, but never inside of a corporate hierarchy or any sort of predefined tracks. I've never had any tracks, really. Adam, you've had a little bit of that before you went indie? Only a little bit, yeah. The closest that I came to, I did a lot of freelance,

both front end and development stuff. And I think the closest thing that comes to that might be my time at Pure Charity where I worked for somebody else. I wasn't a freelancer anymore. I didn't work for myself like you had done, Jared. And so that was the time where I had a path there. And that was unique for me in particular because it was a distributed company, but it also had co-located people as well. And there was this aspect of us and them, us being the people, I guess them being the people at corporate, so to speak, or the co-located and the us being the

distributed people. And it was very divided in terms of communication patterns and stuff like that. So it made it difficult because I had risen to the amount that I could rise in that company unless I moved. And for me, moving wasn't an option simply because I love living here in Texas and that's where I live. So my ceiling was basically based upon my location and that's just unfortunate, but that was the case there. So like Jared, I don't have experience in large corporations or the corporate ladder or tracks to get to a certain position. And that's why I'm so enamored by people who have that path because it's changed over time, but it's such an interesting path to navigate because there's almost a lot of unknowns.

No one's written the book on it because it's constantly changing. And there's to some degree corporate books on it, but startups today, like Netflix has become, you know, that way, you know, by maybe managerial standards or, you know, different things like that that they do, but that's not how they began. And so not all corporations are the same, even when they have growth. But there's some degree of similarity. Yeah, I would say from people I've spoken to and just observing that having a rich engineering hierarchy track or whatever you call it,

like having many ways to level up inside the corporation and maintain your role as an engineer is relatively new and I think relatively rare to maybe to Silicon Valley, maybe to even some of the larger companies inside Silicon Valley. Because I know there's a lot of people who I've spoken to who feel like

the only place they can go in order to increase their salary or increase their influence, etc., is to go into management. Or build your own thing and sell it. Be acquired. I would say there's definitely a lack of resources about how to think about where to go next.

I do want to say, actually, I think working in a big company shouldn't i feel like it shouldn't necessarily be the goal i think you know in some ways i kind of i guess envy the you know the smaller maybe grass is greener but kind of envy the smaller kind of setup where you're in a position where you have a lot more natural sense of ownership over whatever it is you're doing and in fact actually that's probably the thing that i feel is probably lacking in a lot of the engineers that work in big corporations not because they're not naturally owners of the product because maybe they're not thinking about their time there as more than just the coding part of the job and you know this actually reminds me of something i used to say

to myself uh and i think a lot of developers say this to ourselves as well but you know there's often this joke that um you became an engineer because you don't like talking to people. I certainly had that same mindset before. And like many, many years ago, I was like, oh yeah, like this is the perfect job for me because I'm an introvert and I don't like talking to people. Right. Rather talk to computers. Yeah.

But as I've realized, you know, like when I'm talking about how your growth looks like beyond the point of view you know mastering your your engineering skills is to actually be a great communicator to be a leader to be to have influence over or not over to have influence on certain topics and discussions and points of view that is not something that you can do or get by just sitting in front of your computer all day just coding away and i think one of the things that i've seen that is the most limiting in a lot of the engineers that i've worked with in the past is that it's not really it's not about their skills it's about the mindset and if you don't have the right mindset then

you're going to be stuck for a while a long time maybe even forever if you never change your mindset that your job is more than just programming you know if you want to do a hundred percent of your time on program i mean that's totally fine but then you also have to acknowledge that maybe you won't get extremely that much further in your career if you don't you know kind of flex and hone those other skills and even if you work on like open source and if you work on a really popular library you still have to master those skills of communication and uh influence and writing skills that you don't again you're not going to get just by staring in front of your code editor all day like one

example in the community that one person who i really look up to in that regard i think is dan abramov i think he does a great job not just technically but also in terms of how he communicates with others in the in the community and you know just by seeing the way he communicates and presents himself and talks about certain topics i think goes to show that you know that growth is more than just your technical skills obviously it's a core part of your tool set but it shouldn't be the only point of focus i absolutely agree and i think the best developers are great communicators, almost to a one. That being said, there are other skills and maybe you'd say even characteristics that are stereotypical of engineers that wouldn't translate well into management.

I think of things like just obsessing over nitpicky, picayune details that a compiler requires you to be obsessed over, like correct placement of a semicolon, and just dive head deep into a problem and just relentlessly debug. And these things, did you wonder if those skills would be lost or maybe even get rusty when you move into management? Because a bad manager is a micromanager, but a good programmer is kind of a microprogrammer in a sense, right?

What are your thoughts on other skills that engineers kind of naturally have or have gained through experience that when they make the move to management are just completely lost? Did you experience that? Yeah, I definitely encountered that. And I think hopefully if someone's considering this transition to be a manager as well, that you have someone who is giving you good advice

on that transition. But what I would say, my experience has definitely been, to your point, I think there has been a lot of context switching and kind of mindset shifting that you have to do as a manager and one of the things I wish was better articulated was that or this reality that being a manager is really a completely different job and as you say you know like as a programmer your success is really determined on

how much attention you can put on the details and your ability to you know write great code and kind of really be very focused on a few big problems so you're really kind of dealing with the trees right if using that analogy of like the forest and the trees right you are really in the weeds and you're kind of nitpicking over like where should the tree be placed or how much water should we be giving the tree you're like you know what fertilizer or whatever we should we use i don't actually know if trees need fertilizer but um uh you care a lot about the details like the soil you know the sunlight and things like that but as a manager your job shifts more to the forest now instead of you managing one or two trees you are managing a whole forest of trees and not just

the forest uh you're not just managing the trees in the forest but also the people around it so like the park rangers or the people who are trying to come down and cut all your trees so you kind of have to really change the way that you operate and i'll actually say that a really good engineer would probably make a really poor manager for all of those reasons that you mentioned which is you know like you care a lot about the details and you you know maybe not saying that you have to nitpick to be a great engineer but you you know you have to put a level of care and thought into all the you know the the code that you write not to say like as a manager you don't put any care into what you do but it becomes uh much more ambiguous and there isn't something as simple like you know as a manager there is no linter

there is no compiler i wish there was a compiler for management decisions then i could you know like type check my management decisions or something like that but the reality is you don't have those tools so as an engineer you might typically be more comfortable with like oh i would rather have something more authoritative make a call for me like okay let me refer to the the best practices document in the community on how to write this javascript and say and everyone should follow this bible of how we write javascript but you don't have that for management there is no golden bible of management that people follow it's very vague it's very ambiguous you kind of

have to just go with your gut and just see where it where it takes you i would say that i've heard a lot of managers and leaders over the years just because i'm a podcast junkie so i've heard a lot and they get interviewed and i would say like i've never heard a group of people give the most diverse advice you know like even completely contrary advice you'd have one manager says this is the way you do it and it's like they swear by it it's served them well their entire career and that's their experience and then you'll have another person that says darn near the exact opposite thing and they swear by it and it served them well their whole career and it's kind of like like you said, there's best practices.

I don't know if they exist. But there is actually one thing that I think, one skill or maybe one or a couple of skills that I think do translate very well from engineering to management. And I think one of them in my mind that is the most useful is balancing trade-offs. As engineers, I think we do that very often in terms of, you know, like there's always a trade-off in the choices we make,

whether it's performance or memory usage or whatever, you know, the trade-offs you're making are. But the same holds for decisions in management. You know, like, should I hire this person? Like, you know, or should this person be let go from the team? Those are not as easy to make, but it all comes down to trade-offs and there's no perfect answer of, you know, like, yes, this person is the best person for the team and no one will ever be as good as them. Like there's, there's no black and white there. It's very much gray and you kind

of have to really weigh the trade-offs and i think that is actually something that as an engineer you kind of learn how to think about trade-offs and how to approach those kind of decisions with care and thought and nuance then going back to what i said earlier then you run the risk of sometimes leaning too much into that and then you know then you're in that analysis paralysis on a what is a type 2 decision so you're now applying type 1 type decision making to a type 2 decision and that causes you to go super slowly and you know that's just very frustrating so i think recognizing the type of decision you're making and then knowing when to apply what uh decision making framework is very very helpful and i think something that

i've had to learn over the past two years yeah well the path you're considering now is going back into being an engineer right yes that's correct. And that stemmed from a conversation, a question really that asked you what brings you ultimate joy? Which considering Marie Kondo and Netflix and... So poignant. The ironic, you know, being ironic and that's just interesting to me.

But sometimes you even hear, you know, what are you optimizing for? And it was actually, I heard this from Soraya Bark a while back. She wrote an article titled The One Question That Will Change Your Life. And she said, you know, basically, what are you optimizing for? So when you think about this, when you say, what's ultimate joy for you? What are you optimizing for?

What are some of your answers? What are you, what's taking you back from, you know for what are some of your answers what are you what's taking you back from you know those two years of enjoyment and i guess to some degree some fear in there as well because hey that's how it works discontentment but back into being an engineer yeah i think i really like that you know what are you optimizing for is a great way to put it. I think for me personally, when I, so when I had the discussion with my director, he asked me this question, what brings you, because I, you know, I had shared with him all of the kind of thought process behind like my, whether or not I would stay as a manager or go back to being an engineer and in return he asked me this question which made me a little frustrated at the time but you know looking

back in hindsight I realized that that was a really great question but his question was what brings me ultimate joy and I really struggled with it at first because you know I had really I love engineering I love programming in fact it was my hobby and that was kind of how I got into the industry in the first place but you know when I was thinking and reflecting on this question I also realized you know what there was a lot of things about management that I enjoy and I've learned so much and I really like that process of learning so how do I think about you know the next step of my career do I want to continue going down the path of a manager or do I think about the next step of my career?

Do I want to continue going down the path of a manager or do I want to be an engineer again? How do I think about this problem? And so this question of what brought me ultimate joy was I think a really great forcing question. And maybe the goal of the question, at least in my head, was not necessarily to come up with the one thing that I was going to do for the rest of the question at least in my in my head was not necessarily to come up with the one

thing that i was going to do for the rest of my life right but rather a forcing question of at least for the next let's say three or four four years what is the thing that i'm optimizing for what is the thing i want to get better at and i spent a couple of months just really sleeping over this question and you know thinking about like what it was. And I realized that the thing that I was missing the most and the thing that I wanted to continue working on was those maker skills. I felt that, you know, I had learned so much as a manager in those past two years. Obviously, I'm still not a I don't i don't consider myself a management guru or an expert uh having only done two years in it but i do feel like i've learned a lot of great

lessons that i can bring back with me in the individual contributor track but i was very excited about going back and being a maker again and creating things out of uh you know like nothing more than my keyboard and my my mouth and and you know talking to people and things like that and that's something that to me is still very magical and something that i don't want to give up yeah and i realized like you know going back to this uh blog post from charity majors that she essentially encourages you know people who are considering this engineering manager pendulum to give it about two years each time because you don't want to if you spend too much time away from engineering then you might become so rusty that it becomes almost impossible or very very difficult to go back

into it and then you're kind of stuck in maybe a track that you're not super excited about. And there's nothing worse than reporting to a manager who hates your job. I don't know if you've had a manager like that before. I've had a manager like that. Yeah, if you have one, you know, right? It's not a great experience. And I certainly didn't want to become a manager who was like that,

who hated my job and was just stuck in it. So for me, it was kind of a no-brainer. Like, yeah, I should definitely go back to being an engineer. Let me evaluate again in two to three years and see like, do I want to keep going or not? But I think for me, it's not so much about defining a career

for the rest of my life. It's just more so about, here's the next two, three years. I'll take it as it goes, but I'm gonna, the lesson for myself is that I need to keep going back and just re-evaluating every year

to see if this was something, whatever I was doing was still my dream job. And if it wasn't my dream job, then I really need to ask myself the questions of, why isn't it my dream job? And to make the right decisions that would help me correct that but again i think if you don't lean into those things that scare you and uh you know the things that you feel like you can learn from then you might not be learning and

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or you make a decision to go one way or another, which we've been talking about, sometimes a way to soften the no is to say no and then put the word in parentheses not yet. To say it's, you're saying no, but not indefinitely. And saying not yet means, well, I'm just saying no for now. It doesn't make sense now. And you're kind of making choices for the present rather than simply just this longest term view that you can possibly imagine because it's just too far out. And to make some choices today that impact your career direction in the next couple of years puts you on the trajectory. And then as you sort of look down that list of what brings you joy, you know, this sort

of list of things that brings you joy, you can begin to attach those to your trajectory and kind of constantly find yourself back to alignment rather than this long-term trajectory that you can't really predict because it's unpredictable and you feel lost because of it. Yeah, I do have to agree. I think the time boxing is very useful because it gives you a timeline of when you kind of need to reevaluate.

And before you get to that point, at least for myself i try to dedicate 100 of my interest and passion into whatever it is i'm doing for the for the now and then i kind of put off the you know thinking about the future until a year or two from now because like you say there's just no way that you can predict what's going to happen you know in five years let alone next year so there's really you should think about it but you shouldn't be you know paralyzed by thinking about what or how to optimize for that i think did you have anybody walk along with you with this choice or was this simply something that you internally deliberated or

did you have sort of a board of advisors? It wasn't mentioned in your post, I wasn't sure. I know you had some advice from the initial question asked to you, but I wasn't sure if this decision tree, this exploration was just you alone. I definitely wasn't alone. I think I had a lot of help. I guess board of advisors is pretty catchy. I should probably start referring to of help I guess board of advisors is pretty catchy I should probably

start referring to those people as my board of it right everybody's gotta have one yeah like my advisory board but I definitely had a lot of help through this decision like including the colleagues that I had at Netflix also you know some of the people I've worked with in the past that were helpful in helping me make this decision. And then, yeah, there was also a lot of time that I had to spend just on my own because ultimately only I could have, only I can make this decision for myself. So I did have to spend quite a bit of time just thinking about it,ating writing actually helped me out a lot but you know again having that like people that you can talk to is really helpful and actually I want to say like whoever's listening if you are also kind of deliberating something like this or you know if you want to

talk about your career I'm definitely open to chatting so feel free to reach out to me. Well, that's awfully kind of you, Lauren. And you're headed back to be a software engineer once again. So does this next move of yours, you've resigned in Netflix, you're going to be a software engineer, does this scare you? It is. It's very scary because in my four years working in Netflix, I have really grown to love working there. I love the culture. I love the people. you know in my four years working in netflix i have really grown to love working there i love the culture i love the people and i think the the vision and the the way that that company is going

about you know achieving that vision is very exciting to me still so it was definitely a very difficult decision for me to to leave and i guess some of you might be wondering why I decided to leave if I loved it so much. And it really boiled down to the fact that I came across an opportunity that, as you say, I felt like I would regret not doing. And I'm not ready to say fully what it is, but I can at least share that I will be joining Facebook as a front-end engineer.

And so I'll be hopefully working on something that is very personally exciting for me and also very experienced that I'll learn a lot from. And I felt like it, and not to say like there weren't opportunities like that in Netflix, but it was a very different set of circumstances that I was trying to optimize

for and that's kind of how I made that a very tough decision of like oh man should I do I actually need to leave the company to do this and I think one of the great things about the Bay Area I think and I don't know about the rest of America but it seems to me that you know in this engineering community that we have in Silicon Valley, one of the great things about it is that you never fully close the door on any one as a boomerang of you know you leave a company and then a couple years later you come back and maybe in a different role in a different level different team so it's definitely possible and i'm not gonna say it's a guarantee but i think that was also a bit of a relief for me knowing that like assuming i again didn't like burn any bridges or upset anyone as i left and i hope i I didn't, that the door would be still open

and maybe one day I would go back or maybe I wouldn't. I obviously can't predict the future of what I want to do, but at least knowing that I had a fully closed door was helpful. Well, it moved it from an irreversible decision to a potentially reversible decision right exactly right there you got it well lauren this has been a really awesome conversation i feel like you've shared a lot i'm so glad that you came on the show and talked about this transition for you all these decisions because so i mean all of us have to make decisions of this kind and i feel

like you've provided a lot of tools for folks and help along the way of maybe making hard decisions in their lives. You do share at the end three questions that you gathered from at Millie, M-I-L-L-I-E on Twitter. These are questions you can ask yourself. I just thought I would share them with the audience so that they also could think about these things before we tail off here. The first one is if you find it hard to wake up excited about going to work in the mornings ask yourself why if working at your current company is not aligned with your long-term goals or values consider making a move and if you've never thought about where you'd like to be in three years sit down and think about it there's some great things to chew on any final words from you lauren

or from you adam before we call this a show uh i will add that in my blog post i uh link to that slide deck from millie i definitely recommend reading through that it may not be completely applicable to you but i do think there are a lot of questions in there that will help you think about your career and help you it's not going to give you any answers I do think there are a lot of questions in there that will help you think about your career and help you. It's not going to give you any answers, but I think it'll give you the right questions that you should think about so that you can come up with the answers for yourself. And so that you can then start thinking about how you want to progress and get you closer to that goal that you have. Excellent. We will scoop that up for our show notes as well. Adam, final words, final thoughts.

Well, the one thing I think I wanted to add, but not take deeply, is this idea of a generative quitter. So we talked about generative cultures, Jared, but not generative quitters. What's a generative quitter? So a generative quitter is, there's three common typesative quitters. What's a generative quitter? So a generative quitter is there's three common types of quitters. This is going a little deep, but I'll give it to you. You guys have it. You know, the typical people who are bridge burners.

You got the two-week lame duck. And I don't have to explain these because they just sort of land there. Yeah, we know what that is. This generative quitter option is this radical third option where most people think quitting is a negative thing and a destructive thing. And as you've mentioned here, it doesn't have to be that way. This boomerang effect, it means leaving, ending, bailing out. But quitting is something we all do. So we have to reframe how we quit. And it's a chance to reframe quitting into a chance to refresh and renew things for the company and as well for you to take that next chapter. So there's many ways you can leave a job.

And so why not leave it away that's generative, that passes the baton well, that does the next person in your seat a service, and then also your reputation a service by just being a kind quitter, I suppose. We linked it up in news this week, and I'll put it in the show notes too, but it's a post on LinkedIn titled, How to Quit Your Jobs Spectacularly Well. That's cool. I had never heard of that term before, but it makes total sense. Yeah, so does the two-week lame duck. I don't know exactly who that is. Well, we all burn bridges around me.

I guess we don't all. Sometimes you do that. You don't mean to. I suppose maybe when you're younger and naive or maybe younger and less experienced. And we've all been, to some degree, a lame duck, whether it's a week or two weeks or that day. Maybe you're just a day-long lame duck or something. Right. Genetic quitter. Yeah. or that day maybe you're just a day-long lame duck or something right yeah i think one of the

the risks i think is also you know as you leave you leave with this huge pile of feedback that you had never given anyone before and then you kind of sort of burn bridges that way because uh you've been sitting on all this feedback it comes it doesn't come out right at the at the very end. And I think that's actually one of the great things about the culture in Netflix is, you know, the culture of feedback where it's constant, it's ongoing. So I actually felt like when I left, I really didn't have anything extra to say.

And that was kind of a new experience, I think. But I think it goes to show that, you know, you can leave well, at least I hope I left well. And yeah, I'm looking forward to reading that article. Yeah. Well, thank you for your courage to write this. I mean, to share just sort of the backstory on how you made decisions. And I mean, some of this is very personal to you and it's very much wisdom from the trenches of doing it. And why not try to spark joy in your life by making choices that make sense for your career and choosing to come back to engineering. It's always a good thing. Yep. Thank you so much for reading it and for inviting me on this podcast.

I had a lot of fun. It's been awesome to have you. Thank you. Thanks, Lauren. This was awesome. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Now it's time to go to changelog.com slash 36 to comment and share with us about your thoughts on career trajectory what you think about being an engineer what you think about being an engineering manager or moving into management and all the in-betweens of course you can comment on all our episodes at changelog.com pop up in our show notes click discuss on changelog news we'd love up in our show notes. Click discuss on Changelog News. We'd love to hear from you. You can support us by telling your friends.

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