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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: People are drawn to you for your specific skill set that only you can fill. There’s a U-shaped hole in the universe and you’ve created that gravitational pull that people find you. And I think as far as careers go, the more unique you are, the more unsubstitutable you are, the better compensated you will be and the more you enjoy your job, to be honest.

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan.

00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Hey Adam.

00:00:38 - Speaker 2: And joined today by Sean Wang, who goes by Swxs.

00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hey, happy to be here.

00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Sean, I understand you’re a former competitive tennis player. Tell me about that.

00:00:49 - Speaker 1: It was kind of my high school thing. When I was growing up, my mom trained me on table tennis back home, which is recreationally.

00:00:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe she sensed that you might someday have a career in startups and knew that this would be a critical break room activity.

00:01:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, actually it does really help in the old days when we had offices, remember those days. Now we had just had like Wii tennis or VR tennis. No, then, you know, when it came to high school, I upgraded to tennis. I was on my tennis school team, high school team, and then when I served in the military, because every Singaporean has to serve 2 years in the army, I represented my battalion at our tennis championships and we actually won, which is fun. Although I was kind of the bench person, so I didn’t actually play, but I was on the team. So I guess to say we won.

00:01:40 - Speaker 2: And you’re the author of a book on career, you run a community that’s going to tie into our topic today, but I’d love to hear about your full background and in particular the work you do on developer experience with Temporal.

00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Sure, I basically got the bit by the finance bug in college because I saw the Asian financial crisis and then the tech slump and I realized that a lot of people in finance seem to be like masters of the universe. They seem to always know what’s going on.

And also they seem to be, at least in the hedge fund world, capable of being independent of the economic cycle.

In other words, if you see a recession coming, you can actually position yourself to profit from it. Rather than just be tied to the general cycles of the economy.

So I set myself a goal of working at a hedge fund, went to college for that.

And then finally, after a long sequence of events, arrived at a hedge fund, and then realized I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like the people I worked with and for, and I was OK. I was sort of middling in my analyst rankings, but I wasn’t going to be great.

And while I was doing my finance stuff, I learned to code and basically every junior finance person that comes up through the ranks these days becomes a self-taught programmer because you have to.

00:02:53 - Speaker 2: Is that sort of like an Excel kind of automation thing or is there something further than that?

00:03:00 - Speaker 1: Do you get into data science, starts with Excel and then VBA Python.

And then for me, because I did option pricing, Haskell, because that was the company I worked at Standard Chartered where there was the house language and I just didn’t have a choice.

It was only after I left Standard Charter that I had any idea that Haskell was this sort of revered language of functional programmers.

Yeah, and so I decided to kind of go in on that.

I also read the writing on the wall in terms of public market investing versus private markets. Like it seemed like companies were staying private for longer and more wealth was being created in the private markets, as opposed to the chumps like me in hedge funds trying to trade public stock, where there was comparatively less growth, obviously not no growth, but less growth.

So I did a transition at age 30 from finance to tech, and that was a pretty scary one because just starting over at 0 from, you know, my previous career, I sort of strived for 10+ years to get there, to get where I got and then having to start over and not know anything. It was pretty scary.

00:03:59 - Speaker 2: It also sounds like something that maybe in a way takes more courage because it’s not that you didn’t have a career, you actually did have one. You worked hard, you found yourself that place, it’s probably something that Definitely pay the bills and then some I would imagine. So you know it’s one thing when you’re forced out of a career due to changing economic circumstances or age or some other thing and then you have to restart. That’s pretty hard to do, but maybe the decision has sort of been made for you by circumstance. But here you made a much more active choice to say like I don’t think this is where the future is.

00:04:33 - Speaker 1: For me, yeah, it was a very personal choice. Obviously, I think the people that do extremely well still in finance and I keep in touch with some of them. But I am pretty open about what I left on the table.

So my first year as a hedge fund analyst, I made 350K and there was a path from that to seven digits, you know, which I would probably be there by now if I had stayed in finance.

But I think actually having had a prior career, I think actually reduces that risk, at least because I had a standing offer to go back to my previous bank if I wanted to. So I knew that like, all right, I could give myself a couple of years or so, try this transition out. If it didn’t work out, I could just go back to my old job, which I loved, and I had a lot of fun with. At least just to pay as well as the hedge fund. But yeah, I think it wasn’t that risky.

Plus, it actually helps me get a job when I came out the other side of the transition because I did a boot camp in New York, the Full stack Academy, and the first employer that I sat down with was Two Sigma, which is a well known quantitative hedge fund in New York. And they liked my story. They liked that I was a former trader and then I now knew how to code. So they hired me based on that and then continued on to completely disregard my finance side and just only use the tech stuff. But it’s a story you can tell in career change.

So the way I talk about it is that you take your used experience and you know you sort of trade it in for $1 credit at the store. And it’s kind of like GameStop in the sense that they kind of rip you off in terms of how much credit they give you, but you get to at least tell a story to get your foot in the door in a more compelling way than a lot of other people who don’t have as much of a good story to tell. You know, I had people who were with me in that boot camp that were former chefs. So that guy actually got a job at Blue Apron. Wasn’t that great, you know, didn’t turn out that well, but like It helps. I think for a lot of career transitioners, that’s kind of the advice I try to give them, like, try to make use of your unfair advantages because the cards will be stacked against you. You’re up against people who have coded since they were like 12 and have CS degrees and stuff. You got to find your way to make it in this industry. And once you get that first job, everything else is relevant, you know. So that’s kind of what I say for that.

So I spent some time at Two Sigma and then started really getting active in the New York tech scene, which is a huge part of my story. I attended and spoke at every single meetup in New York and I blogged about JavaScript and React, and that got me notice. So if I reached out and I joined them for a really good 2 years, where I started to build my sort of public profile as a developer advocate and also an engineer on their CLI and the surless node ecosystem there.

That led into a job at AWS where I did kind of the same thing, but bigger because AWS Amplify is kind of like their NetLify cologne with more services attached to it. So with DiMODB and with graphfuo, with location services and mobile testing services, a bunch of really good stuff. And then I wrote a blog post about what I thought was missing in the service ecosystem and that eventually led to my job at Temporo because I concluded that Servius was really good at short-lived compute that scales to zero and scales to infinity, but it’s terrible at long running jobs. It’s terrible at asynchronous tasks and the solutions that were available today, namely AW that functions and you know other equivalents out there, weren’t really good. Like they presented too much friction for me to effectively express the kind of business logic that I saw out there that was actually worth so much money. So yeah, just essentially blogging got me the job I have today, which is pretty cool and also helped me transition from a front end career to serveless to a backend focus career now, and it’s been a wild ride.

00:08:17 - Speaker 2: You know, what you described there, the building a public presence and certainly the learning something and then turning around and sharing that is something that we’ve touched on.

Actually, I realized we’re kind of inadvertently doing a small miniseries here. We did an episode on building in Public. Our last one here was on sort of personal brand. And so I’m going to go ahead and say that this is 3 of 3 in a series where the career topic helps bring it all together, but yeah, sort of learn something and write about it or share it in that moment when you kind of can see both that you remember what it’s like to not know the thing, but now you know the thing and you can, you know, pass that kind of mental diff on to others is pretty powerful and seems like you got the sort of maximum leverage out of doing exactly that.

00:09:04 - Speaker 1: So I’m known for this essay that I wrote on learning in public, and that’s actually a piece that I wrote as an advice for my fellow boot camp grads when I was asked to go back and give a speech.

And it was pretty funny because I think it’s a reflection on the diff between my finance and my tech career.

So in finance, everything is zero sum. If you get a trade idea, you should try not to leak it before you’ve established a position and once you’ve established a position, sure, go ahead and pop your bags.

But in tech, we share our code. We get up on stage and we share our failures and outage stories. It’s just so fundamentally open because it’s such a blue ocean field. It’s still expanding so much that we don’t actually care that we’re giving up some of our trade secrets because the hope is that other people who receive that benefit will reciprocate in some way or form.

But I found that just much more fitting to my natural inclination.

But also, I think I found that my career grew much better in a healthier way, in a sense that I wasn’t trying to get one up on my peers. I was working with them and sharing what I know or did not know helped them to teach me or correct me or whatever. And that improved me at my pace of learning. So I always call it Not an act of altruism, you’re not giving back to the community so much as like this is actually, even if you’re totally self-interested, this is legitimately the fastest way to learn, which is to learn in public.

00:10:24 - Speaker 2: And tell me about Timoral.

00:10:26 - Speaker 1: Temporo is an open source workflow engine and I try to categorize this piece of software in relation to other engines, which are effectively custom purpose databases.

So if you think about a search engine, you could do full tech search on a database just by yourself, but you probably wouldn’t because search is such a well defined custom problem in the way. That you should probably adopt some custom solution like Elastic Search or Type sensor, whatever else is cool these days on it.

And similarly, like an analytics engine, yeah, it’s a form of database, but it’s a very focused database for analytics workloads which are high input and sort of a lot of aggregate reads. And so similarly, I think workflow engines are an underexplored area of custom database that have until now been typically mostly hand rolled.

But I think people are finding that there’s just so many opportunities to use these workflows, which is what we call them in a variety of situations.

And so just to explain a little bit more about what that means, a workflow is kind of a long running durable function. Imagine if to write a monthly billing subscription, all you had to do was have an infinite loop, charge your credit card and then sleep until the next month, and that’s it. So you don’t have to set a separate cron job, like the cron job is effectively automatically provisioned when you call that API for sleeping to the next period.

00:11:53 - Speaker 2: So Sean, when we were speaking before you mentioned some use cases that kind of made it concrete for me, you know, on the consumer side, you have something like anything delivery oriented or rideshare ordering something from the moment you say, OK, bring this vehicle or package or whatever it is to me, or even something like check out like e-commerce, you know, when you hit that, OK, buy this thing button on Amazon or wherever else you have essentially opened a very long running real world transaction.

And it may last days until that package comes to you or even longer if it gets lost or something like that. And so during this whole time, there is a sense that that’s an open activity, but it’s not open in the sense that I have the app open on my phone or that it’s open on my computer. It’s the sense that it’s sort of running and the system needs to keep trying to converge that again. Some completion where the completion is the delivered order or the car shows up or the things imported somehow, and then at that point, you know, then the transaction is completed more and more, I think as we have more and more of these kinds of services on the consumer side at least, maybe we see more and more of these long running asynchronous kind of user interfaces you might call them.

00:13:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so too. Our CEO was actually at Amazon when they implemented the one click buy button, which is essentially, if you think about it, turning the purchase process from a synchronous process of right, add to shopping cart and then go to shopping cart and then enter your details for checkout to, all right, click this and then register that there’s a purchase intent and let people cancel if they change their minds within the next 30 seconds, if they made a mistake or if they just changed their minds.

And after that 32nd timer, can continue to proceed with that order, but you’ve just reduced the number of clicks and you know shopping cart abandonment rates are like 60, 70%. So it’s just better user experience, at least on the surface, obviously, there are other issues with one click check out, which is a ital spies. But that happens to be in the favor of Amazon. But that’s my pitch for a lot of non-technical sort of UX type people.

I think there are a lot of user experiences that can be improved by turning sync to async.

Another example that I often like to bring up is this script, which is actually a customer of ours. And so this script is an audio editing tool, which takes transcriptions of your audio podcasts and turns it into sort of like an editable Google Doc, where they sync up your audio clips with the words that are on the transcripts and you can just delete words or add words like you would a standard Google Doc. All of that is powered by tempora in the back end because it starts Farm out work that might potentially be long running.

The script surprisingly, if you’ve ever tried to throw in like a 3 hour podcast into the script, it actually takes pretty much the same amount of time because they chop up that audio and farm it out to a dozen little API servers. I don’t think I can say what they use, but they do that transcription in parallel and they do a lot of reliability checking behind the scenes to make sure that they got that accurate.

I think people take for granted the reliability of these things. But like it’s so common for a custom engineered code to forget some use cases to have some race conditions where you would have some order go through, your system might go down or some things might happen out of sequence because you know computers. And you would lose an order. It would just disappear, vanish, and you would have no idea where it went. And this happened to the scripts, actually, we’re able to quote them because they said this in our case study. And I was just so happy to hear that because I was like, Oh, I’m not the only one. It’s not that I’m a bad engineer, like this is just the way things are, and you need a well organized and architecture system to take that problem away from you because I’m trying to build my app. I’m not trying to solve this weird distributed systems problem. So I’m very grateful that I found this, they found me actually, because of my blog posts, which is another bringing back to the career topic. I joined this company as employee 17 before we made our 1st $1 in revenue, and now we’re a unicorn company and Unicorn here being the startup slang for a private market valuation of at least $1 billion.

00:15:47 - Speaker 1: Yes, sir. I forget that sometimes I have to explain this.

To some audiences, but this is not the kind of job that you would go on a job board and go like, right, out of these like 5 very competitive offers, like I would just pick one of them.

The job doesn’t exist until you talk to them and you create the job yourself.

I named my own job and created my own job because I thought that that’s where I would be most valuable to the company. I think a lot of jobs are like that in the sense that There’s like the 20% of jobs that are listed and then there’s like the 80% of jobs that are like, you know, I just hired my friend who knows this stuff really well. So perhaps that is a good segue into the career topic. I don’t know quite so.

00:16:27 - Speaker 1: Like it’s so fresh to me that I’m still reeling from how this happened because it’s been the best career move I ever made.

00:16:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we’d love to expand on that story a little bit, but yeah, maybe now is the right time to introduce the topic, which clearly we’ve hinted at, so that’s career. And before we get into a lot of specifics here again, you’ve written this book titled The Coding Career Handbook, and it is focused, I think, on the engineering or developer side, but obviously I think a lot of this is generalizable or we can talk today about something that certainly applies to probably everyone that’s in a design or product or general tech world product development job. But as always, I like to start with a little definition. I’d love to hear what the word career means to both of you.

00:17:14 - Speaker 3: You know, Adam, I should know better by now that whenever we’re doing a podcast on a noun, I should think of my good definition ahead of time.

Yeah, I don’t know. I might call a career that course and consequences of your professional endeavors, and the reason I like that is it because it talks about both what you end up doing and the implications that it has for you personally.

And to me it also implies something that’s not super linear. Sometimes people think about career and it’s like, OK, I decide 18 and I’m gonna do this and I do it for 40 years, and this is the latter and boom boom boom, and I think the reality of careers is much more diffuse and nonlinear and probilistic now. We can talk about how that is, but that’s how I think about it.

00:17:50 - Speaker 1: And definitely echo the fact that it is nonlinear. I have a more cynical take, which is like the career is the story that you retroactively tell after you do the things that you’ve done and you’re trying to spin a narrative that’s what you intended all along.

But I think it’s very much in the vein of Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech when he says like, you can only connect the dots looking backwards and that’s definitely how I have experienced life so far.

I definitely think that there are other more air quotes, career oriented people who plan everything out. They have their 20 year roadmap for their lives.

Some of them achieve that and many don’t, but their take is valid too. I just don’t particularly subscribe to that. I think in this day and age, the careers are a lot more mobile and random than they may have been in our previous generations.

00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, I think that word early in my life, I had a negative association with that word that it makes you think of maybe corporate ladder climbers and you know, you sort of like trying to kiss up to the boss in order to like get that next slot, you know, make more money, get the corner office, have a more impressive title, and a lot of it turns into just kind of status ladder games and that sort of thing. And so I felt kind of repelled from even thinking about actively the path of my career.

But later on, I think I came to feel, OK, well, that is like a negative version of that. And maybe there’s also this way you described there, Shawna, this is the planned out thing, which is just some fields either demand that because they just require a lot of education being a surgeon, for example, it’s just you kind of have to have that plan and really pursue it. It’s not something you can kind of just dabble in and find. if it suits you. And so I think those of us that like a little bit more of an exploratory path, you know, the tech world where it is much more like an opportunistic and ever changing world, and you just try to adapt and find your place in it.

Maybe that suits us all.

Yeah, I think for me now, and of course we can also talk about the difference between, you know, being kind of an entrepreneur or founder type versus going to work at companies that already exist, but I do think they share the commonality that It’s a way to think about as a first class concern.

We spend typically a third of our lives at work. How am I gonna make sure to spend that time well? And I think again, coming to those of us who are in tech, we’re lucky enough, I mean, I think for a lot of people, a job is really about putting food on the table. It’s filling a very basic need, it’s that almost the lowest rung there on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We’re lucky enough, we’re very employable in a growth industry, and so we have the option to think more in terms of like, oh, I can get several job offers from several good companies and sure I can compare how much money I earn from them, but I can also think move up that hierarchy of needs and think in terms of like what’s the meaning that I want, how do I want to live my life, how do I want to spend my work day, and what’s the impact I want to have with that work and that’s a great privilege to be able to do that.

But then I think it’s worthwhile to be a little thoughtful about how you spend that in order to make sure that that retroactive story is the best one it can be.

00:21:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of fit with personality types as well.

So there will be some personality types that crave structure. Tell me what to do and I’ll go do it. Whereas others, they refuse to be told what to do. They need to find it out for themselves.

And so the career path for these two different types would be very different.

So I think you have to figure out what you are and no shame in either approach really. I will say that career ladders are imposed by companies partially to give you a path to career development, to give you some kind of fair rubric on like, all right, you’ve reached these requirements, you obviously deserve the next level and the next bump in compensation.

But then the, I like to call these barbarians, the people who don’t believe in structure, would say, All right, you’re constraining my growth. I could go out there and strike out on my own. And do actual things that matter in business. And if I deserve that in the marketplace, then I’ll get my reward, not some fake artificial internal metric that you made up. So I have empathy with both because ultimately, even if as an entrepreneur, if you’re someone who starts entrepreneuring because you don’t like traditional corporate structures and climbing those ladders, if you hire people, you’re going to have to establish career ladders for them because they want to know how they could grow with you and your company. So can’t really run from it.

00:22:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Different people need different amounts of structure and maybe like a rule zero thing here and successfully pursuing your career is self-know.

And of course you can’t necessarily know that prescriptively right out the gate, but in your process of having experiences working at companies, taking freelance jobs, doing side projects, you start to learn what works for me, where do I thrive, where am I energized, where do I deliver things that people seem to really like or want to pay me for, where do I struggle, where do I not enjoy the work, where do I feel my energy drained, and then learn from that.

And you know, I certainly learned pretty early that I want as little structure imposed as possible.

I’m the frontier person that likes just the wide open space where I can go and just find opportunity where it may lie.

And then there’s maybe some that like heavy amounts of structure, but I think most are somewhere in between. And I think one that comes to mind, maybe this describes you talking a little bit about not every job opportunity in a company is even publicized, which is what I usually call the entrepreneurship, right, which is that same concept of looking for opportunities, but you can only see when you’re inside the company. You’re there working at a more standard role, but then the company is, especially at a startup where things are changing all the time and you see. Some new need the company has that’s sort of unfulfilled and you know, maybe the top level management or leaders of the company should spot that and like form a new department or something, but that’s also an opportunity for someone who’s at the company, has the context and feels drawn, you know, I’d like to solve this problem and I think there’s a role here. I want to make that my job, and they take the steps to kind of create that structure, create that space for themselves.

00:23:58 - Speaker 1: I’ll be curious to see some research on the success rate of entrepreneurship like that, because a lot of times I see those ideas get shot down and then they leave and then they do the thing anyway, because yeah, it’s not in line with the company management goal or whatever.

00:24:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think sometimes being an entrepreneur is someone that really should actually be an entrepreneur and they’re in the wrong place to pursue that opportunity. I like to think sometimes in terms of venues, so you see an opportunity at the company that you’re at, maybe kind of carving out a new role for yourself at that company is a great opportunity, but maybe that actually is a thing that’s not best done there and should be done somewhere else at another company, at your own company.

And then of course sometimes there’s the even more dramatic version of that is maybe the thing you want to do isn’t even in your current field, and there you actually want to completely switch fields kind of like you did. So I think we always have to think about the work we’re doing as being inside a nested series of containers and to do great work.

We think of that as being something that’s inside ourselves or something maybe individual or maybe this is just my kind of American culture by. the kind of you know individualist perspective which is thinking, OK, the way I’m going to be successful is having great skills, but indeed is the systems you plug into the organizations and being in the right place at the right time, and I think for me part of career is following the opportunities to try to put yourself in the right place at the right time to be able to do something meaningful and have a big impact.

00:25:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, if I can synthesize and emphasize some of the things I’m hearing here, I think it’s really important to take agency over one’s career, and that’s about, like you said, Adam, understanding oneselves first, and understanding the world and what’s out there and making deliberate decisions about how you’re going to move forward in that world towards achieving whatever ends you want.

And I think you got to be aware that you’re probably gonna be facing trade-offs among All the different desiderata of one’s career, you know, the feel, the flexibility, the size of the company, the compensation. And I think importantly, it’s my belief that the world doesn’t owe you a living, and it certainly doesn’t owe you your dream job doing whatever you want, making as much as you want, wherever you want and whatever conditions you want, right? You’re gonna have to go out there and find something that works in the same way that an entrepreneur can’t just do a company that makes whatever. Sells whatever, whatever price and expect the market to accept that.

You know, you gotta go out there and find what’s desired, what’s valued, what fits with your interests, what skills you bring, and make a deliberate decision like that.

And the zero with mistake that I see people making is not understanding themselves. And the first mistake that I see them making is not taking responsibility for their own career decisions and just kind of sleepwalking into something, which sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.

00:26:40 - Speaker 1: I have a follow up question, Mark, if you think about the importance of understanding yourself, where are you on in terms of correcting weaknesses versus just betting on strengths?

00:26:50 - Speaker 3: So one of my big personal philosophies is to be honest with oneself, and I think it’s really hard to make yourself something that you’re not to kind of fundamentally change your personal characteristics and personality type, I think, as you described earlier. So I think that kind of stuff. It’s really hard to work against you. You’re gonna be going really uphill. I think there are skills that one can develop, and that’s probably worth doing, but I think you gotta differentiate between those and overall, I would lean towards emphasizing your strengths and finding a field and a job that taps into that, cause again you’re gonna be going uphill your whole career if you’re working against that.

00:27:27 - Speaker 2: I think the path I took for that was not thinking, OK, here’s a weakness, let me see if I can become really great at it, but to first of all be aware of it.

Secondly, to perform maybe some basic mitigation, don’t make it be a big blind spot or gap that you just can’t do anything about.

So one example might be, I know this comes up a lot for engineering and design types, which is like salary negotiation or negotiations generally around compensation and other things. We like to make things. We don’t like to do deal shenanigans or something, and many people feel very, very uncomfortable doing that sort of thing, and I probably count myself among them.

But for me, I think fairly early on I realized that that is an important part of being in business, about having a career. There’s going to be certain critical negotiations and you do need to be able to represent yourself and your interests. And for myself at least, it was worth taking a little time to shore up that weakness so that I wasn’t just either completely awful at it or just that it was a huge blind spot. But in no world is there am I ever going to be a great dealmaker, a great negotiator, you know, the hostage negotiator guy or whatever, what’s that book?

00:28:38 - Speaker 1: Never split the difference.

00:28:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the one.

But it’s full of advice for every reason I go, it’s hard to imagine myself, you know, doing that or anything like it, but I can know what it looks like to be great at that.

I can look for people that I want to be on the TV, you know, I can recognize the value of that skill and think, you know, it’s good to have a business partner or a colleague that has that skill and to respect that skill and hope that they can deploy it.

In service of you know our team and then I deploy my skills in service of our team, maybe skills they don’t have. So I see it as like kind of a protecting from a downside rather than long-term investing. And when it comes to investing and learning, it’s your strengths and those things where you start investing and you just see those really quick and high returns on what you’re doing because it’s something you like to do and you’re good at.

00:29:26 - Speaker 1: As a poker player, I kind of call that a leak in your game. Like you should know your strengths and what your sweet spot is, but also if you have any leaks or towels, then you probably should know about it and do the bare minimum to correct for it. You know, you’re not going to be a better player by only plugging leaks in your game, but you’re at least going to maximize on your potential value. So that’s pretty good.

One thing I often bring up, which is a wonderful piece of career advice from Julia Evans, which is to write a brag document. And this is something that is useful in negotiation in promo conversations or just in regular annual review conversations, which I think people should do more of, which is essentially don’t expect your manager to know everything you’ve done. You think it’s their job. But they have like 8 other people that they’re managing. They have their own stuff going on. They have your interests at heart. It’s not their top priority of the day, even though they might say it is. It’s for sure in your best interest to represent yourself really well, even though you feel uncomfortable about it.

But you’re also not going to represent yourself really well because you can have recency bias in all the human cognitive issues of memory and self-deprecation or being humble. So Julia Evans’s advice is to keep a fresh document that you maintain.

Of the things you’ve done and the outcomes, the quotes, the measurable numbers, preferably some, some idea of chronological order that fairly represents the kind of work that you’ve done over the year. And I think that’s a wonderful thing that you can just take to the bank or just bring up because you’ll be asked for these things at the most inconvenient times.

There’s official performance reviews, but then it’s actually oftentimes the unofficial vibe checks, I’ll call them. When you’re asked like, Leo, how’s it going? And then you know you’d have like a really crappy answer, but if you came prepared, you’d actually have a really amazing answer and that person will walk away with a much better impression of the things that you’ve done for the company and that’s just positive for you in literally every situation. So my version of this, because I’m too disorganized to keep a rag document is I keep a brag Slack channel. I have a Slack channel to myself where I just pop in stuff as they happen that I would like to brag about in the future, and Slack just keeps a reverse chronological order of things that I can look back on.

00:31:46 - Speaker 2: I love that, and the word brag is actually really interesting because, you know, when I have been in the position of offering career advice to friends or colleagues in the field or whatever, representing yourself well and honestly is something that I think is really important, and it’s one reason I like, for example, having a personal website or some kind of online profile, I guess a resume or CV. Serves some of this purpose, but people don’t tend to update it other than when they’re job hunting and it’s a very particular format and that sort of thing, having some way that you can say kind of here’s who I am, what I’ve accomplished and what I’m about, what I value, what I’m passionate about, what you should know about me if we’re going to work together in some way or I’m going to come work at your company or whatever. And I often find many folks are very uncomfortable about this, and I think there is sometimes a cultural thing. I heard from a few German folks when I moved out here and I basically just wrote a little document that was just, you know, one of these GitHub sort of short scratch pad things where I basically said, hey, I’m looking for companies to work with. This is what I’ve accomplished, this is what I’m good at, this is what I’m not good at, this is my ideal profile of company, and here’s the kinds of problems I can help you with. you think this is interesting, let’s talk. And I shared this with a number of folks, and a few folks expressed surprise and one said, well, you know, I love the American swagger that comes across in this and what does that mean? And they said, well, you know, at least where I grew up and maybe it’s especially with East Germany, it’s very much about don’t ever state your accomplishments or what you think you’re good at. Keep your head down, stay quiet, let the work speak for itself, and that any kind of accounting in that form is a kind of bragging. And even beyond the cultural thing, I think there’s a personality thing. Some folks just don’t feel very comfortable talking about themselves, but I think it’s really hard coming back to Mark’s point about agency and taking responsibility for your career. I think it’s very hard to accomplish what you want to accomplish and get the best possible outcome if someone is not taking an accounting of the things you’re good at and the things you’ve accomplished, and who’s that someone gonna be if it’s not you.

00:33:48 - Speaker 1: Exactly. One way I like to point people out to not brag, to not think about it as bragging, is to essentially show proof of work or essentially show things that you cannot fake. So if you say you’re award winning, show me the award. Is it some made up award or some award that actually matters? If you say you’re a thought leader, well, you automatically disqualified from being a thought leader. This is very common, by the way, a lot of people would say like there’s some kind of thought leader and they don’t show evidence because they don’t have any. But if you do, if you do have substance to back up your claims, and show it, then no one really can dispute with you on what the quality of your accomplishments have done.

I think honestly it’s a way to just make it easier for people to get to know you. To shortcut the awkward dance that you do when you meet people for the first time and you don’t really know what they’ve done in your life and how you should be addressing that person. So yeah, I just think basically get over it and do it interesting stuff enough that you’d be comfortable putting it on your resume, because if you’re not comfortable with that also probably show something about the scope of your ambitions and maybe you should push yourself a little bit more.

One thing I’ll mention as well, which is another anecdote that I have, because I think you mentioned a little bit about negotiation. Which is another piece of career advice that I had with a friend. So a friend of mine who I’ve been advising because he recently graduated from college and got a job at a well-known tech company, he found out that his coworker was getting twice the equity that he got.

He was really pissed. He only started a job for like 34 months and he was like, I don’t know, like. We have to save him amount of experience, like I’m doing more than him at my current job and he’s getting twice the equity and the way the equity systems work in the US like, this is locked in for 4 years. It’s kind of unfair, of course. But I told them, the problem is that you’re getting half the equity of your peers and you’re trying to renegotiate for better equity relative to your peers. I think for you, the better angle for your career is to get new peers. It’s kind of like when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When people give you peers that you don’t compare that well to, for whatever reason, you didn’t negotiate with that well, they looked at you wrong, whatever. Don’t care, just get new peers. Just make yourself in a completely different category that the next time this conversation comes around in 2 years or 4 years, it just doesn’t happen because they want you so badly for the things that you’ve done. And I think his anxiety went away when he realized that it’s not about the short term gain and keeping up with the Joneses. It’s about being in a different neighborhood.

00:36:18 - Speaker 3: I’ll point out that a lot of the queer stuff we’ve been talking about here so far is call it human stuff around the edges. It’s not OK, you should study algorithms and then react and then whatever post crass, right? I mean, I’m sure we have lots of suggestions on that front we could give them on this podcast perhaps, but I think people underestimate how important this stuff is.

It’s really important. It’s really valuable. It’s easy to form your mind, especially coming out of undergraduate where everything is like formalized tests and classes and grades.

A lot of the important career work does not look like that. It’s just dark matter that exists between people and to your experience, Sean, I think it’s really critical to speak with people who are 5, 10 years ahead of you.

In a similar journey because they’re gonna have all kinds of weird stuff that they see and all kinds of interesting tricks that they know of, and they can give you those heads up.

It sounds almost too good to be true, but you can just like email a handful of, for example, engineering, hiring managers and your career earnings go up by 6 figures easily. So I encourage people to take advantage of just speaking to people and having a conversation and get advice.

00:37:21 - Speaker 2: Maybe that advice is to kind of pay attention to the basic human dynamics is also especially valuable in a field where maybe a lot of us were drawn to it because we’re not that good at humans or, you know, we’re young introverted kids that learn to play with computers and we’re more comfortable there maybe than we were in social settings, for example, that’s obviously not true for everyone in the field, but lots of people are in that position.

But then it turns out that products are made by companies and companies are groups of people who are working together, and groups of people working together always have social dynamics, and of course the individual humans involved have their own thoughts and feelings and emotions, and you have your own thoughts and feelings and emotions and just knowing a little bit about how to navigate all that can make a very big difference for you to be able to integrate to the organization and again have the work you want to have and have the impact you want to have.

00:38:13 - Speaker 1: I have one more point to bring up in terms of sort of general career advice.

I think, yes, we want to be intentional or try to point ourselves at worthwhile problems that we think that we can solve and grow together with the industry and, but then there’s a lot of randomness and serendipity and I think being able to square the intentionality and the randomness, I think the best way that I’ve heard about it is to create luck. And it’s like, how can luck be created, it just happens to you. And I think this is one of the biggest mental model shifts that I’ve had in my career so far that I received as advice from people that were ahead of me.

I’ll bring you through sort of like a four stage mental model if you’re ready to do that. So like the first stage of thinking about luck is that people are either lucky or unlucky. There’s people that you know, like things just happened for them. I don’t know what happened, but they’re lucky and I’m not like that, so I just kind of treat them as different than myself. And I think that’s a very static view of how luck is distributed in the world.

The second stage of this mental model is progressing from that to having some agency in the matter, which is Selina Mark you brought up. And the term that is very popular for this is having a lux surface area, which is that people who are lucky have a larger lux surface area for capturing the random luck that happens in the universe as opposed to people who are not lucky.

What kind of lux surface area are we talking about? The two typical axes that people give a combination of doing and telling. Like, have you done enough that is noteworthy for people to take notice of your work and then have you told people about it? A lot of people, particularly on this podcast, are doers. And they’re maybe not so comfortable with the telling, but you have to kind of do both in equal amounts to get your message out there, to get your work out there, so that you get opportunities for future work that compounds and compounds and compounds. But you have to sort of think about it in terms of that two dimensional graphic of like surface area rather than a one dimensional lucky or non-lucky binary metric. Then the third progression in this line of thinking is that there are 4 kinds of locks, so you sort of split that two dimensional chart into like a 2 by 2.

So I kind of turn, if you imagine like a 2 by 2 diagram, the y axis, you could sort of split into active versus passive, and the x-axis, you can split into general versus individual. So, for example, general and passive luck is luck that just happens to you. It’s the same luck that a plant would have just being born where it is. A lot of this comes from privilege, but a lot of this just comes from just sheer randomness in the universe.

But active luck, for example, that in general is from you just doing random things, trying all sorts of things and seeing what sticks, kind of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? And you can sort of think about career analogies for that as well. But where things become really individual is that, for example, you sort of primed yourself throughout your career to notice certain opportunities and when it happens, you are one of maybe 5 individuals in the world that can take advantage of it because you’ve just spent all your life preparing for this. And when it happens, you really capitalize on that and that really works out for career progression as well.

And then finally, the fourth category, which is active luck, that is also individual focused is what I call magnetic luck, which is that you’ve done so much in your life and you’ve built such a strong network that you draw people to you in the sense that people come your way because they k