Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Kyle Shevlin. Kyle's a software engineer working with JavaScript, React and more. And we talk about everything, like a little bit of everything, honestly. We start talking off about our history with jobs. We also talk about how to have healthy boundaries at work. What happens to your ability to grow in that role, if you don't, and how there just is no special secret to the universe, life, and everything else. It’s a really great conversation. Hope you enjoy it.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:50] JC: Hey, Kyle.
[00:00:51] KS: Hey, Jenn.
[00:00:52] JC: So, stoked to have you here. Seen you on the Twitter, we've had a few DMs here and there. I think we agree on a lot of things in this field.
[00:01:01] KS: I concur. I mean, that's why I sent you some DMs is like, I really agree with this take, this is a good take.
[00:01:08] JC: It was good for me because like, this is not a field where people – people want to disagree with you a lot in this field. I don't think they want to agree with you very often. It's my feeling.
[00:01:22] KS: We could probably go down that road but this might take like Mark Twain said a man pardon the the genderism, but you know, of his time, a man can live two months on a good compliment. And that always struck true to me. And so, like words of affirmation mean a lot to me. So, as silly as it sounds, I go around the Internet sometimes and just share affirmation with other people. Because in some ways, I wish people would do that to me. But to be frank, your talk on composition years ago is like chef's kiss, I can't do that emoji audioly, but I think I just made up a word too. But it was so good. And I've tried to write like a post on composition a few times. And I'm just like, “I am not going to beat this. Here's the link, here you go.”
[00:02:08] JC: That makes me feel really good.
[00:02:09] KS: It's good.
[00:02:10] JC: I had to give that talk in front of some of the React team too. And I was like, “Oh, God, what's going to happen with that?” It all turned out fine, but it's nerve wracking when you don't know –
[00:02:20] KS: Andrew’s going to show up giving you like, some real optimization or something like that, in a stocky way, or something like that. No shade to Andrew. You really have to understand his Twitter to understand how he talks on there.
[00:02:36] JC: Yeah, I understand his tweets differently there. Yeah, you and I are both active on the Twitter. We're kind of like out there in the space, which means that our history in this field is sort of up for anyone to sort of look at and make decisions on. And so, you've had an experience that I've also had, which is that we haven't always found jobs to be a really good fit for us. We haven't been able to stay in certain jobs for very long. So, before we start recording this, we're sort of talking about this. What's been your longest tenure at a job?
[00:03:13] KS: Oh, that's a great question. It was either my first job which I honestly cannot remember how long I lasted. I just know I quit on my own terms, or Webflow. I at least remember getting to my two-year anniversary at Webflow. I am not shy about the fact you look at my resume, it’s not the linear path HR and hiring managers are really hoping for all the time. So, but pardon my French, but shit happens. I don't know what else to say sometimes.
[00:03:43] JC: Yeah, I mean, if you look, I think my longest tenure is a year and a half. I didn't even get to hit two years at a job yet.
[00:03:51] KS: I think tenure is a little overrated in some ways. Like you guys, especially earlier in your career. I want to be clear to anyone who's listening to this, like, if you're early in your career, and you're growing super-fast and you realize you can go get a big old honking raise by going somewhere else, that's okay. I took an 86% raise one time in my career. I went from 80k to 150k. I didn't even know like that was like an amount of money that was possible, like at the time, but that happened early. It's not going to happen as often as you get further. And I think, we were talking about it, but part of why I want to like stick around at places longer now is like as you get further, some of your goals and the things you want to achieve at work really require more time to be like influential or just to even pan out because you're trying to do things that are on a slightly bigger scale than just like, can I learn, learn, learn and upskill really quickly?
[00:04:51] JC: Yeah, those early experiences that I had early in my career were really about like, just getting acquainted with the field, getting acquainted with how things work, seeing if I was a really good fit, seeing if I could get all the knowledge into my brain, looking at different code bases, working. I worked at like consumer, I worked in B2B. So, getting like a sense of the lay of the land. And then once you hit like a certain seniority level, you're really about planning features, leading things. You can't just pop off after a year, if you're wanting to make like a big impact.
[00:05:27] KS: Or learn from your own mistakes, like get feedback on your own decisions. I realized I kind of took us a little bit off track, but I can kind of get us back to the fit thing, because I do want to be clear to people listening about that, too. It's a difficult balance to strike. But I think if you get to a place, you get to a job, and you realize, like, “Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be.” Like that happens like I straight up felt hoodwinked that my second job. I went into an interview with a bunch of “engineers”, and I thought these were like engineers similar to me, and they asked me a bunch of questions on web development, and I tell them answers and stuff.
When I took the job, I come to realize they had kind of scripted those, but none of them were web developers. I was literally the only web developer in the company. It was a really small shop. And you make mistakes. I knew within two days, that wasn't the right place to be the challenge being it took eight months to find like the next job, and I'm not shy about like how my job searches go, they don't go the way people think they should. People see the 25,000 followers on Twitter and think, I’ll just be getting the best offers in the world every single day. But the truth is, I think as you get a little further, and you know yourself better, and if you're willing to have boundaries and say, no, I think that's a big part of it. You realize, like, not every job is really right for you, or not every job is really going to help you go forward and the way that you're hoping to go forward in your career.
So, you can end up being selective to the point where people might think you're being overly selective, overly cautious, or all these things. There's just so much that goes into trying to find a good job, have a good fit. And even when you find it, it can change. The best job of my career so far got changed right under my feet really quickly, and kind of sent my whole world in a whole different direction. I don't know, again, shit happens. It's not easy.
[00:07:29] JC: Especially in startups, I had that happen. The best, well, actually, technically, where I am right now is the best job of my career. But previous to that –
[00:07:37] KS: Always applicable, right?
[00:07:40] JC: So yeah, I had this job, I loved it, it was the first time actually I ever got promoted, which was a big deal to me. I got promoted to senior at that job after six months. I mean, I should have come in as senior. But that's a whole another discussion for a whole another day. And I got a lot of the things I needed out of that job. But it was a startup. So, after a year, the culture was completely different as we started to scale up. And so, six months later, this was the one I lasted a year and a half at, I had to leave because it was not a company I recognized anymore, and I wasn't getting the same value out of it anymore. And then it took me a long time to find a good fit. I mean, that was back in I think 2016, 2017. And I didn't find a good fit again, until really now at Netflix.
[00:08:28] KS: See, and that's a long time. I wonder if people really, really understand that I feel a little, I don't know the right adjective, strange, awkward, different, and that I think there's a whole bunch of people in our industry who just like, they don't care about what they work on. It doesn't bother them a lot. They're really able to maybe compartmentalize work into one box in their brain and just live the rest of your life. And so, these people and gosh, they seem to accumulate on things like Hacker News.
I’m sorry, really don't care orange site, you want to make fun of me, please do, like link this post and rail me, I just don't care. But like they congregate in these places. And they're like, “Well, why can't you be the same way? Why can't you just take a big paycheck and not give a shit about what you work on?” And then it's like, “Sorry, I'm not wired like you bro. I want to care about what I do.” And when you spend five years in your case, or other people and you're just trying like, it's so much energy that goes into just trying to make the thing work, or try and figure out the next step that I think that energy really could have been used better in another way. If just the situation was a little different, or you were able to get this break instead of that break or something like that. I don't know. I think about this a lot.
[00:09:51] JC: I've had also the experience of I cared very much about where I was working and the people I was working with and I saw a broken system and I wanted to fix it. I put a lot of time and resources and energy into trying to fix that. I had this good conversation with my therapist the other day. She was like, “Why are you trying to fix like a failing system? Like it's failing, just let it fail. It's not your responsibility.”
[00:10:17] KS: Yeah, it's probably a little easier in times to maybe just go try and find a better system than it is to try and fix the broken when you're in. But I feel that. I think one thing I'm starting to realize, I'm coming up close to 10 years of doing this professionally. I don't want to be the hero. I think about this a lot, right? If some job is coming at me, and like, they're saying, “Oh, you can come in, and you can have all this impact and influence.” And I'm like, “There are things I want to do. There are things I want some influence on. But if you're portraying me to come be some hero to come fix some system or something, I'm not your person.” I think a lot of times that happens in this industry, though, like people try to be heroes, or people are recruited to be heroes. And I think it's really tough. If you can, bravo, can’t golf clap too. But I think most of us just want to work somewhere that at the end of the day, we still feel good, we still feel like a human instead of – I’ve been telling people, I want to feel more than that I'm just a pair of hands that happens to know how to code.
[00:11:26] JC: That hero bit too, I don't want to be the hero. There's actually, in the first season of this podcast, I talked to Jeff Lembeck about hero culture and what that actually does to like, the system that you work in, and also what's doing to the heroes. Because what you're saying about, I don't want to be your hero, yeah, you don't, I don't. I don't want to be the hero. I want to have impact, I want to make things better, especially because I work on internal tools, like that is sort of my wheelhouse is I want to make things better for the people around me and I want to have that impact. But I do not want to be the person that everyone calls for every single thing and everything rides on my shoulders. And there's resentment from other people about the things that are given to me or the way that I am treated at work. I mean, I've definitely been on the outside of that seeing someone being treated as the hero and being like, “This is unfair. This doesn't make sense.” I mean, it doesn't work for this organization.
[00:12:23] KS: It's just unsustainable. If you can't have systems where people can find the information, they need to help themselves, which I'm mostly thinking about like documentation and living in async, like an async communication world. I've been remote for like five years now and that's always a challenge, even for companies that are remote first. I haven't been anywhere that's really nailed it. But yeah, it's just unsustainable, not just for the person who's doing it, but for like the whole team.
We talk about bus factors. Someone getting hit by the bus, and like, all this information, and all this stuff is lost. I don't want to become someone's bus factor. I'm more than okay with just like, I want to be a good part of a team somewhere. I think that's okay. In fact, we're talking about career growth a little here. If you don't want to be like the hero, that's okay. Let's make it clear to the audience. I think people on Twitter, see all these people working on these really cool things, and maybe just assume that like, you have to be one of them. You don't.
[00:13:28] JC: No. You don’t. It's totally okay. And by the way, you'll probably have a better mental health, life balance. The people that you see that this is 24/7 their life, do not have a healthy balance. Like you said, being a human, you want to feel like a human at work. That includes healthy boundaries for when you're not at work, right? And if you're the hero, guess what? You don't have those boundaries. You're the hero. That's a full-time job being a hero.
[00:14:02] KS: I fully agree. I'm showing Jenn my phone, because I've never put Slack or like work email on my phone, and I never will. That's about a boundary. If you want me to do that, I'm probably going to be a bit of an ass about and be like, “Can you give me a work phone?” I need that boundary in my life. I need to feel like, I can close a laptop at the end of the day and that's okay and that's a good day. I think maybe earlier in my career, when I think there's just so much you can learn that you're just, maybe you're at your laptop all the time learning, it can have real positive impact on your career. But if you're not careful, I think it can have a really negative impact on the rest of your life.
I'll give an example. There's definitely been years early when I was making the career switch, where my wife would be like, “Hey, can you get off of that and spend time with me?” And that took discipline and I'm way better at it now. In fact, I don't even have a problem really. I just shut the laptop and go. But I think a lot of people struggle with that. Gosh, there's just so many things you could talk about when it comes to like, career growth, and keeping a balance in your life while trying.
[00:15:17] JC: Yeah, so I also like, I don't keep work email on my phone. I do have Slack. But that's because I have on call, the support rotation. So, it's helpful for me. But also, when I go on vacation, guess what gets removed. Bye. I don't want to see that. It took a while for me to have those healthy boundaries, because I was really worried early in my job, that if I was not showing this “passion” for what I was doing all the time, and available all the time, that I somehow wasn't meant for this career path, or that I wasn't a good software engineer. Because, unfortunately, that was what I was seeing the senior engineers do when I had this. It's a big impact. If you're not going to do it for yourself, at least please do it for those around you. It does matter. They see you. They take cues from you.
[00:16:21] KS: Yeah, I agree with that. I've made very clear like what hours I work, and I don't respond outside of them. And I might like, leave my phone number, if you really need to text me for something. Luckily, I've not really been in the hot path of like, prod issues, most of my career, where that needs to happen. But I think just in general, that's a good idea. Because it's unsustainable, too. Like we've talked about, I've used that word a couple times, but I kind of look at it. I'm 36, and I've got like, probably 30 more years to work, assuming ageism doesn't make it impossible for me, and who knows what the future holds.
I mean, I think it's wild in this industry that you can get up to senior engineer and a handful of years, if you're at the right place, or get hired with that title, like my history. And yet, you could have 30, 40 years to go and it's like, what are you going to do? What's your growth going to continue to look like? And so, I think I've started to take an attitude of like, I don't need to move as fast as maybe people expect, or I guess to some degree that's privileged too. I'm happy to talk about that, as a white straight male. I get a lot of benefit of the doubt, to be fair, and I don't think everyone does. I think that gets reflected and what happens to them and stuff. But I'm really trying to consciously be like, I want to make it the long haul. I don't know that I can, if I'm constantly trying to do this job based on passion. Passion comes and goes sometimes. It doesn't stay for everyone. But skills don't. I'm still skillful ad I can do this, as long as you're not trying to burn me to a crisp every sprint or something like that.
[00:18:08] JC: It's a hard balance, because you want to be engaged with the work that you're doing. You don't want to just – just doing what you're being told to do is not a good system, I think for anyone in any field. It doesn't feel good, you lose autonomy. Autonomy is one of the quickest ways that you can burn out. The lack of that is actually, burnout is not necessarily about overwork, it is really about a lack of control in your environment. So, you want to enjoy the thing that you do, but also still have it bleed out into everything else, because as you said, unsustainable. Will it scale? It will not scale.
[00:18:49] KS: No, no, it won't.
[00:18:50] JC: It will not scale. You don't put email or Slack on your phone. Do you have any other like non-negotiables about your life that help you have those boundaries?
[00:19:02] KS: I ask when I'm interviewing, I will ask often like, how many hours do you work? How many times have you had to work overtime? I'll ask a lot of questions about that. It's probably sending the wrong signal. I think people might take the signal as like I'm lazy and to some degree, they're not wrong. I'll make a joke with them. I'm like, I'm not a spring chicken no more. I've got gray in this beard. I don't have 50 hours in me even. I'm just blown away that we don't have more of the six-hour work day or like four-day work week kind of stuff. Partly because the science like just supports it.
I realize like some economists are going to be like, “Well, we can't lose 20% of productivity.” I'm like, “You're already losing it. You just don't know it or you're not capturing it. You give me an eight-hour day. I'm sorry, my brain is going to be mush by like 3 PM. I might get something out, but it's not the same thing as me working three great hours like to start my day.” I guess one of my boundaries is just I ask about hours and I ask about – I'll ask things like, “Oh, you have unlimited PTO. How much PTO did you actually take last year?” I'm not necessarily great at taking PTO, but that's more because I'm a homebody that doesn't know how to have fun out elsewhere in the world. That's my fault. But I will take a lot of days. I've been asking them a really random question.
This is going to sound weird, but people who follow me on Twitter know, I'm an avid golfer. I was a collegiate all American, like it was my life for a long time. Golf has come back into my life because of tech, because it allows me to afford it. I don't know when climate change might steal all the golf courses from me. So, I'm trying to play while I can. I've been like, “Hey, if I wanted to take Thursday afternoons off to go play around, because there's a group that I play with here that does that, are you going to have a problem with me working Thursday morning, and then maybe Thursday evening, to make up the work?” I use that as a way to identify not only can I get my life to a place where I can have more joy and happiness doing the things I want to do, but also like, tell me how synchronous you need the work to be.
Because if you're like, “No, you have to be here.” You're not prepped really to do great remote work, in my opinion, anyways. You can have office hours or something when you really need that low latency, real time chat. But in our world with a pandemic, and just the fact that we work on the Internet, come on, you really got to become masters of asynchronous communication, and how to work in that environment. So, those are kind of ways I established boundaries, so that kind of make it clear, the amount of hours I'm going to put in, what I would love to do, if you'll give me the flexibility, the autonomy to do it, as you mentioned. And if they balk at it, I joke with people one of my superpowers is saying no. So, I will say no, and I'll just bounce.
[00:21:56] JC: Right. So you golfing is like a part of your mental health and a part of your life balance. And I think we're moving beyond this idea that from these hours to these hours are the work hours, and then the rest is your free time. You can actually kind of interleave these two concepts together. That's my secret is that I don't usually work like a full – I don't even work a full eight hours usually, I'm not going to lie.
[00:22:24] KS: Nice.
[00:22:26] JC: Because my brain can't handle it. So, I tend to take breaks during the day. I will go do a workout. I need to do workouts in the afternoon or else I don't get to them, I found out. So, that's for me and that's important. Or take my dog for a walk like I get outside.
[00:22:40] KS: I walk all the time. Yes. Do it do it. Daylight is a precious, precious commodity. I live in Portland, Oregon. Daylight is a precious, precious commodity. You go enjoy it, get that vitamin D while you can.
[00:22:53] JC: It’s also like, God, you're going to feel so much better when you come back from that walk.
[00:22:58] KS: I'm not off the clock in my mind. I often am thinking through a problem while I'm walking a couple miles around my neighborhood. And you know how many times I come back and I have the answer? In fact, a couple times in my interviewing recently, I've been tweeting about it. I've been in like these LeetCode hacker rank style problems, and I'll hit like, the wall that they want you to hit. And they'll be like, “Okay, what are you going to do?” I'm like, “Well, if this is a real job, I'd get up and get a snack and I'd go for a walk.”
My whole point of saying that is like I really actually want to see how they react. Are they going to be like, “Oh my gosh, what? You're not just going to sit here and bang your head against the wall and fight your way through this problem?” It's probably why one of the other reasons I haven't done super well at those in my career. But I mean, that's reality. If I hit a wall, what are your ways around the wall? It's not to sit there and bang your head against it. It's to get up and get a new perspective. It's ask a question to somebody to get a new perspective. It just blows my mind how many people like find it strange that you might go do something other than sit at your computer, to think through a problem and get work done.
[00:24:06] JC: It's so weird, because what we're doing, when we're doing our jobs is creative problem solving. And that creative part is pretty important. And there's two types of creativity. There's sort of intentional creativity when you're like, I'm going to sit down and make something and there's spontaneous creativity. And that happens a lot in the back of your brain when you're doing something else. So, you go to wash the dishes and you're like, “Oh, I solved the bug.” You got take a walk and you're like, “Oh, I have five ways I could probably tackle this now.”
[00:24:37] KS: Absolutely.
[00:24:38] JC: You need to do that for your own mental health and also for your job to take breaks.
[00:24:45] KS: Just speaking my language. I couldn't agree more. I've got a book for the show notes like that's related to this, When by Daniel Pink. It talks about like how timing plays a role in our life specifically, like times of day and how our bodies are different at different times of day. What chronotype are you? Are you an early bird or night owl?
[00:25:06] JC: What are you?
[00:25:07] KS: I'm like most people. I'm a bit of a third bird. I used to be a night owl. But I'm definitely like getting the olds where like, I wake up earlier, and I go to bed earlier. So, regardless of type, people experience, like a trough of energy. Most of us have probably experienced this, like midafternoon. That's what I meant, like, my brain is mush. But you're talking about background creativity, that's actually when it's best. It's like, you need to go do something else during that time, because the studies indicate that like, that's when you'll come up with like the answers that require divergent thinking. When your brain is energized and ready to go, default task mode is the easiest thing to do, like default decisions.
So, you want to like have tasks in that time that are like important and easy to make, quickly kind of thing. But I don't know, it's a really cool book. I've read it a few times, and it really fits kind of in this area. It's it would be interesting, hopefully to some of your listeners.
[00:26:07] JC: Yeah, I will absolutely put that in the show notes and probably get that book myself. I am on such a bend right now have various self-help and figuring out your brain –
[00:26:17] KS: Nonfiction kind of stuff.
[00:26:20] JC: I mean, I love fiction, but I felt like I needed help. I reached a point in my career, where I was like, “Okay, I need to figure out some answers. How do I do that? Ah, yes, I’ll go to the library.” Very Hermione Granger about these situations.
[00:26:36] KS: See, I'm kind of the opposite at the moment. I'm reading some fiction because basically, all I do read is nonfiction. I've told my good friend Kurt Campbell about this. Sometimes I look at books, like we're going to get ancient here a little bit, like ancient Gnostics. Do you know what Gnosticism is at all?
[00:26:52] JC: Uh-uh.
[00:26:52] KS: Okay, so Gnosticism was like a pseudo religion, about the time of Christ where – and a little before and after. But the gist of it, Gnostic from the Greek Gnosis means to know. The idea was like, you could learn secret knowledge to escape the entrapment of the body, free your spirit from the prison of your body. And if we take that, and we just adjust it, I know I behave this way. And I think a lot of people do. I literally, I'm going to show some books here on my to be read pile on my desk. I'm reading, Designing Data Intensive Applications.
[00:27:26] JC: Yup, I got that one.
[00:27:27] KS: I've got, I've got Domain Driven Design right next to me. But we look at these books with the hope that they will give us some secret knowledge that will unlock something in our life and our career. And the truth is, yeah, you'll get a little better from reading them. But it's not secret knowledge. It's not going to be a magic key that unlocks like this prison cell of where your career is, at the moment or your life or whatever. I mean, and it doesn't have to be these books.
I'll give an example from a different one. I've read Atomic Habits, like three times. Do you know how many habits I've been able to form since reading that?
[00:28:04] JC: Do tell.
[00:28:06] KS: Zero. It's not that I can't understand the concepts of like habit stacking, or incrementally working your way up to a new habit. It's that, well kind of comes back to energy, it all requires energy. I have found during the pandemic, as much as my motivation willpower might be there for a while, the ability to actually do it long enough to make a habit form has been near impossible. I'm trying to be really kind to myself about it. I don't think everyone's so kind. And I'm not always so kind either. But my point being, we read these books to hope they'll change our lives, and I really do hope they do for a lot of people. And I hope so for me, but I've kind of grown to be like, it's okay if I don't magically transform my life from reading these materials.
[00:28:54] JC: Here's something that I actually I've been thinking about this week, because I realized that not just with these books, which I do love, and I do pick up helpful things from, but I realized that with these books, and were certain people in my life that seemed to have it together, I'm hoping that they'll share the one secret with me. The one secret. I'm like, they must know the one thing that unlocks all the things or like I'm trying to learn a new technology or a new concept and technology. I'm like, “Well, what's the one secret little thing that will unlock all of this in my brain?” And sorry, it doesn't exist. You just have to gather up things and try things out and still go through the really hard process of growth to get there.
[00:29:38] KS: Right. You mean, I can't just like do something and be an expert at it tomorrow?
[00:29:43] JC: You can’t. It's so sad, isn't it?
[00:29:45] KS: Where's the matrix plug? I need that. Come on. I don't need kung-fu. I need, I don't know, how to scale databases to millions or some item or whatever.
[00:29:55] JC: Yeah. I just need to download it. I do, I have like maybe five or six technical books right now that are all open at different chapters. And I'm not really reading them in chronological order either.
[00:30:06] KS: I'm looking at my pile here, and this is just this pile. There's a pile near my bed, and there's a pile downstairs and some bookshelves. But this pile is probably about 20 books that I've read maybe a cumulative 100 pages of.
[00:30:20] JC: Which is apparently not a bad thing, by the way. These books are still aspirational and apparently, like having a purpose in your life. I had this discussion with a friend recently because my partner buys books and then doesn't read them. And I was like, “What are you doing? We live in a tiny New York City apartment, we can't keep having books.”
[00:30:37] KS: And moving books is the worst.
[00:30:39] JC: They're so heavy.
[00:30:41] KS: They're so bad.
[00:30:41] JC: I have a Kindle. And I only have some things in like actual physical form that mean a lot to me.
[00:30:47] KS: Well, that's smart. I'm not so wise.
[00:30:51] JC: But like, she had this conversation with me. She was like, “No, the books still have a purpose. Even if you don't read them, the book still has a purpose. It's a thing that you look and you see and you think about in your life, and it helps you just like sort of think about things and give you a framing even if you actually only read a few chapters of the book.”
[00:31:08] KS: Oh, absolutely. I mean, not every book needs to be read cover to cover. Two examples I can think of that I'm looking at are Refactoring. Excellent book. I think every dev who wants to grow in their career needs to get it. And specifically, the second edition is in JavaScript, and my audience is JavaScript. So, like, go get yourself that book. If only to learn what every factor actually is, and how to do it properly. It'll change your actual way of coding. Working Effectively with Legacy Code was a really good one. You only need to read like chapter one to realize, I love the definition. Legacy code is any code that's not tested. It's not that it's old. It's that it's not tested. So, you can't update it without figuring out what it does. But yeah, I'm with you. I've probably read a handful of chapters in both of them. And I was already like, sold, done. I'll recommend to everyone, because they made enough sense. Some books could be blog posts, like might be a good way to put it.
[00:32:10] JC: Yeah, yeah. Like this meeting could be an email, there's similar things with books, sometimes.
[00:32:15] KS: Yeah. What should we talk about next? I feel like I'm taking us everywhere.
[00:32:20] JC: No, this is good, though. Because I mean, yeah, this idea that one thing's going to unlock your brain or that if you – I mean, we were talking about if you sit down at your computer for eight hours that you're producing work. I mean, these are all kind of in the same same vein to me of like, the things that you think you should be doing to get a certain output. And actually, the things you should be doing are things like taking a walk and reading one chapter in a book. It's not what you think it is, these ways to like, keep yourself healthy at work.
[00:32:57] KS: That sparks something for me that I think maybe makes sense. You're talking about people have this idea of maybe what to do to get forward, and to some degree, how you get forward is going to be different person to person, because it also depends on where are you trying to go forward. Are you trying to go forward as a manager? Are you trying to go forward as a technical person? Are you trying to just go forward to get retired earlier sometime? It's still interesting that like, you can pick a direction and you can come to realize, like the things you thought that we're going to get you in that direction aren't maybe what they are. I'll give an example. I've primarily tried to focus on continuing to grow as an IC, mostly because I'm allergic to calendars and afraid of being a manager. Maybe I shouldn't be, but –
[00:33:43] JC: No, no. That’s a healthy fair. I've talked to many managers at this point.
[00:33:47] KS: I'm not even sure I can manage my own career, let alone, my six reports come on. But the things that have made me more effective as an IC are not just like, sitting there and poring over code bases. Or even though I do enjoy them studying algorithms and stuff like that, it that's just kind of fun to learn. That tickles the math part of my brain. But the things that have probably made the biggest difference and things I didn't know before I failed at them gloriously are things like, how do you drive consensus on a topic at work? How do you make changes at work that are about process that are about patterns? Not just like, “Hey, you built this little widget? What about how do you keep people from screwing up their widgets? And how do you do it in a way that doesn't make people scared and come at you or something?”
I don't know. I've had some pretty hostile colleagues in my day, about certain things. I think things like you know, I've maintained a blog for like six, seven years now. I think learning to write well has helped me advance just because I'm able to take the problem we're working on, and actually break it down and identify parts of it that maybe aren't obvious to other people or aren't easy to be seen without doing the work of like writing about it. There are just all sorts of things that might be the ticket to moving you a little increment further along, that might not be what you think they are.
[00:35:23] JC: I feel that very much, especially because I came from a writing background. So, I also have that like. I was like, “Oh, I'm really good at this. And surprisingly, this actually helps me in this field.” And there have been obviously times in my career to, where I was like, “Well, I don't have the people skills.” I haven't like developed the muscle yet for those things like consensus building or alignment, or how to do those things. But also, was working in environments where I didn't have a very good blueprint or idea of how to even go about –
[00:35:53] KS: You just triggered something in my head, keep going.
[00:35:57] JC: To develop that muscle at all. There was no one around that I felt like I could ask how to do those things. Again, I was looking for that secret little knowledge base somewhere about how to do these things. I was like, “What do I do? Read how to win friends and influence people?”
[00:36:15] KS: Yes, the Carnegie School of Career Development.
[00:36:17] JC: Yeah. But often, I think engineers, especially as you level up, you hit this wall, where no one told you that this was going to be part of the job and you don't know what you're doing. How do you make sense of it all? How do you figure out how to do anything?
[00:36:33] KS: Yeah, even as an individual contributor, I think that's happened to me. Like you get to a point where you're just not going to code as much. Because you're going to spend that energy and that time on like, decision making or strategy. One of my friends, Chase, he has a wonderful word for these things that I absolutely love, administrivia. Trivial administration that you have to do. Oh, my gosh, such a good portmanteau. Thank you, Chase.
You were saying that and a word popped in my head that I was thinking about this morning and I think it relates to this. And I think the underrated thing that helps people maybe develop their careers and something I've been craving for years, when I'm talking about like bad fit, support. You wanted that secret knowledge. What you're really saying is, I want someone who will support me, or some people be there to be able to support me, when I can't support myself, and I don't have the tools or the knowledge. We talk in this industry about mentorship or sponsorship, really what you're saying is like, we need support. The thing I haven't necessarily seen in my career is like, I'm just imagining this is probably likely to a lot of people. But the support infrastructure really isn't there.
You have managers and stuff, but really, they're just hoping you don't quit. That's not necessarily the same thing as genuinely like creating an environment or actually carrying about like, “Oh, yeah, hey, here's the next step. Here's what we can do, Hey, I see this talent and you let's work on that or something.” And I think as you get further along, I think one of the reasons I personally think about this a lot, is like I feel like I'm at this point in my career, where everyone's expecting me to support other people, and I'm happy to do that. But without feeling the undergirding that I need, or the help that I want to get to whatever I'm trying to do, it's the classic, you can't pour from an empty cup scenario. You get drained without getting the reciprocation of being filled. Yeah, I just think about that a lot. It's been on my mind a lot. And what you what you said really triggered that, for me,
[00:38:43] JC: I have felt the same in my career, especially with, I'm luckily at a place right now, where I do have the support that I crave and need and can get it in a different way. But when I was earlier in my career, especially with – there weren't a lot of people like me, on my teams, I was usually the only woman.
[00:39:05] KS: I was going to say the only one with purple hair.
[00:39:09] JC: Well, I didn't have the purple hair then but I would have been. Absolutely. I didn't have a lot of people that I felt I could look up for and get that support from. My managers were not well equipped. My managers were also pouring from empty cups. We were just all stretched very thin. We didn't really know how to do the things that we needed to do. I think that's why a lot of the times it ended up being a poor fit. Was that friction that you felt from not knowing how to move about in this job that you had gotten that you thought would be one way. It turns out maybe to be a different or like there were things that needed to be fixed and you just didn't have the support you needed to go about making that a place where you could have stayed.
[00:39:53] KS: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're talking about managers being empty cups too. And I feel that like all my former managers, no shade. I really do mean that. I think the thing I'm getting better at as I get older is just understanding that most people are doing their best. It just might not be what you need and that's okay, if we can have the grace in there to be like, “Yeah, that's okay.” Maybe the trick is also one thing I've been trying to do. And actually, I've been doing this for years and ways probably subconsciously. It's like you try and find maybe the answers somewhere else. Maybe you're not going to get what you need via work. Your manager might not be just the perfect person to help you get to the next rung. But you never know. You might find an outside resource. That was a wonderful – keep that in. Keep that in. Don't edit that out. That was hilarious.
I think one thing people kind of get a little wrong about me is they see like how big my Twitter following is, and what they don't really realize is like, part of the reason that thing is so big, is I put so much energy into it because things weren't going right in other places of my life. I see your face, you're like, “Hey, man, I get that.”
[00:41:11] JC: I know. I know what you're talking about.
[00:41:14] KS: Right? When you get a better feedback loop from Twitter from like, saying an insightful thing or writing something, that's a positive effect. I said earlier, affirmation, you all, like those likes, unfortunately, sometimes means something to my silly little brain. But I guess my point is like success doesn't necessarily transfer everywhere. I think some people are really good at it. I can think of a few off the top of my head who seem to be able to move success from one arena to another really, really well. I won't name names, though. My jealousy can stay a secret.
But yeah, I guess where I'm going with this is like, sometimes you won't be able to get everything you need, where you probably really need it. So, it's okay to look elsewhere. Just be careful, I guess. My goal in life is not to be a successful Twitter person. My goal in life is to have a happy life, and sometimes, even the mechanism we use to find support where we need it might be unhealthy at various moments in time. So, that mute button really helps a whole lot in that regard on Twitter.
[00:42:22] JC: Yeah, I did not start out thinking, “Hey, I want to become popular on Twitter, because it will be good for me in some way.” I needed some validation, out of the job situation. I started giving talks. I was getting what I needed out of that. I did that so much that I did an ungodly number of talks in two years, because I was getting hyped from it. And now guess what, not just the pandemic, I'm slowing down on doing that, in general. I'm not getting the same level of validation I get out of it. I'm way, way more into my work life at this point, and then also my personal life. I just want to spend time with my dog.
[00:43:04] KS: Nice, nice. Yeah, I'm with you. If I have something really important to say anymore, I think it's perfectly okay for me to make a like a video or write about it. I miss conferences, because I miss people like desperately, I really do. But the amount of anxiety and work that goes into making a good talk, I think you've gotten the chance to give the same talk multiple times, I've never been so lucky. And so, it's just fresh hell, every single time.
[00:43:33] JC: Yeah, it’s a lot of hours to write a talk down, a lot.
[00:43:38] KS: You talk about background creativity, a talk uses up a lot of that. It'll be in my brain like, it was probably in my brain for months before I proposed it. And now it's like, it's actively in the back of my brain nonstop for hundreds of hours, probably leading up to giving the talk. So, I'm with you. I'm doing fewer talks. I hope there's a day where I can still go to conferences again and feel comfortable. We were kind of talking about that, about various reasons why we might or might not go to in-person conferences.
But yeah, it's interesting because like, that's a way to experience some career growth. But it's not necessarily directly transferable to your actual workplace. It gets you maybe a network, it gets you maybe more warm introductions to a bunch of places, but it's no guarantee that you're going to transfer the success of getting to get on a stage and say some cool words to some cool people. It's not necessarily going to transfer to like oh yeah, I've got that promotion at my job or something like that. So, it's one of those things that you got to be careful about too.
[00:44:41] JC: Again, you think the path to get to a certain place is this one thing and it is not. You'll get valuable things out of giving presentations and writing blog posts. You absolutely will get valuable things, but it's not, if your trajectory is like I wanted to get to like senior, I want to be staff or I want to be leading this project, that's not how you get there. We're starting to wind down by the way. We're going to be saying goodbye soon. I just want to let you know.
[00:45:10] KS: I need limits. It's all good. I guess the thing I would say then is all the extracurricular success, I'm not saying don't do it. If that's what you want, to do it. If you want to go on talk, like go do a bunch of talks, do it. If you want to start writing do it. It will have positive externalities. The amount of people I've gotten to meet, including like yourself through participating in something like Twitter has been a big net positive in my life. What I'm trying to warn people is like success, one place might not translate to another. Probably the success you need in a workplace probably involves a lot of working well with the people you're working with, honestly, like, whether that's communication, whether that's building trust or consensus about some idea.
Luckily, that's a skill you probably can always improve. It just might take time, and it might be really painful. It's definitely been painful to learn some of those lessons for me. Hopefully, you don't have to go through the same shit I have. That's my only hope to anyone listening.
[00:46:16] JC: Yeah, it's a good hope. Though, growth is always uncomfortable. Growth is always a bit painful. I think it's an unfortunate consequence. And, yeah, as you're saying, things don't translate from one area to another, like one to one, including work life to personal life. Success in one area does not dictate success in another.
[00:46:34] KS: Sometimes they’re net zero. They can't see my grimace. I'm grimacing big time.
[00:46:40] JC: We both are. Alright, so as we're saying goodbye to everyone, do you have any final last thoughts, final things you want to say, words of wisdom, a book you want to recommend, anything?
[00:46:52] KS: I don't have anything particularly wise, just find me on Twitter, Kyle Shevlin and check out my blog, kyleshevlin.com. I mostly write about technical posts. I avoid what I call duct tape tutorials where you're going to duct tape X, Y and Z to make you know this thing. I prefer to talk more about patterns and higher-level concepts. I don't know, I hope it's refreshing to you. If you get a chance to check it out. It would mean a lot to me.
[00:47:20] JC: Alright. Sounds good. Thank you, Kyle.
[00:47:22] KS: Thank you so much, Jenn.
[OUTRO]
[00:47:29] JC: Okay, Kyle mentioned some books. I'm going to be sure to put those in the show notes for you. Check those out. They're good resources, even if they aren't the ones special secret to the universe and everything. See you all next week.
[END]
Top comments (0)