From Code to Leadership with Evan Niedojadlo

Get ready to discover some of the most actionable DevOps techniques and tooling, including performance and reliability for some of the world's smartest engineers. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the DevOps Toolchain podcast, and my goal is to help you create DevOps toolchain awesomeness. Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Skill DevOps toolchain. Today we've talked with Evan all about going from an individual contributor to engineering leadership and lessons learned from AI and a whole bunch more. Evan's a really interesting guy. He's done a lot. He's always switching between different types of almost seems like roles. So really excited to have his perspective here. If you don't know, he's an engineer that's currently focused on reliability, distributed systems, infrastructure, automation, security, pretty much everything. And he is a frequent contributor to the Test Guild podcast and Automation Guild conference and really looking forward to catching up with them. You want to miss this episode? Check it out. Are you ready to level up your DevOps game and crush those quality challenges? Whether you're dealing with flaky tests, scaling automation, or trying to integrate security into your pipelines, we got something just for you. Introducing the DevOps Quality Testing Playbook from Test Guild. It isn't just another PDF, it's your go to guide packed with actual insights, best practices and strategies to help you create a bulletproof DevOps toolchain. It's built specifically for engineers, testers and DevOps teams who want to optimize their workflow and drive continuous quality throughout their pipelines. The best part? It's free and ready to download, so don't miss it. Head on over to TestGuild me DevOpsbook and grab your copy today. Stay ahead of the game, optimize your pipelines, and let's crush test those quality challenges together. Hey Evan, welcome to the Guild.

Hey Joe, it's great to be back.

Great to have you. So, as I mentioned, you're always working on something new and so I. You recently posted an idea for a new show on going from an IC to an engineering leadership type of role. So I thought maybe we'd start off there, you know, why did you go from. And when we say ic, it's individual contributor to more of Engineering leadership. I get asked questions all the time. How do I move into leadership or management? Is it the right thing for me? So maybe a little background? What led you there?

Sure. So yeah, I've been doing software for a while now, just in different tiers and levels. And disciplines, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's something I've done before. 2016, I took on a role of manager of quality, whatever we were calling the title back then. So, yeah, I mean, for me, it's a matter of switching between IC and management and leadership and all that. More recently, yeah, I was given the opportunity to take on more of engineering management role across multiple disciplines. In this case, it's managing application security, infrastructure security, so like that realm, software quality as well, and then infrastructure, just infrastructure in general. So that's something I'm doing. So given that, I mean, realistically, it was an interest to have more say in the decisions and be more part of the actual decision making because, you know, just being an IC is great. Once again, I was a manager. I was an ic. I was a manager again. Here I am again. You know, it's one of those things where it doesn't mean I stopped writing code. You know, it's not the case at all. But there's definitely more of an emphasis on process management. And I think the primary reason was just, you know, an interest of owning something. Right. Like that's. That's my interest, you know, and owning the process, having a say in, you know, approvals and these kinds of things. And then, you know, the management of where we're going, numbers of people and all that realm, you know, so that's really why.

Nice. So I assume when you first did this, I know you've gone back and forth, what are some of the biggest challenges you face when transitioning from maybe an individual contributor to leadership and maybe how you overcame them?

Sure. I think the first time it was, honestly, probably, I would say probably time zone, if anything, you know, time zone was a big, big issue. That was like before, you know, we had a bunch of remote workers, of course, spread across the world. That was probably one of the bigger issues. It was definitely time zones and perfectly timing meetings and scheduling out all of these different syncs that we had. And I say meetings, but realistically, we're trying to keep it. I don't know what the term is, like, less meetings, more confluence documentation kind of thing. Like just an idea, I create a confluence doc. If it's an architecture, if it's a new tool that we're using, migration from another tool to a new tool, these kinds of things, and then traveling to the location. Right. I've traveled and worked with teams all, you know, throughout the world at this point. But I think the first time, I want to say more so the second time I traveled was just Kind of setting a baseline of these are kind of like expectations of what we want to accomplish. And I think that was pretty great. Second time I traveled to India, worked with some teams over there, still working with those teams actually. So it's been, you know, we worked with these teams for 10 plus years now, which is rare to say, you know, know in a lot of ways. So things have worked out quite well. But those are really. It just kind of the management of just picking and choosing when we could meet and then kind of a process around how we can share these ideas more easily. Years ago we were using a different tool. It wasn't compost at the time. So those kind of, some of the difficulties, of course getting across the finish line was another thing that was a whole different process. Finishing individual projects versus being responsible for Windows. Get over the finish line was a big, big issue. I mean there's so many books you can read about that. I think one of the earlier ones that I read was the mythical Me a Month and just understanding everything from Scrum to Back in the day, my stepdad was doing xp, but Pfizer way back in the day, like so there's a lot of things I learned from him, a lot of things I had to pick up throughout the years. You know, reading books and just hearing from people and just understanding like, you know, it's really like one of the more challenging things I think of all time is estimation. So there's been so many processes wrapped around that and you know, books and still to this day talks and whole agile conferences and whatnot. So like for us, yeah, it was, it was really understanding what worked for us. That was another, I think, major difficulty. You know, you can't just say like, hey, I'm going to follow Agile now. This flavor of, you know, Scrum or sorry, Scrum and you know, move forward with that. I think it was a little more difficult than anything. But yeah, those were some of the difficulties and you know, some of the ideas we get around those.

So did you feel that because you started off as an individual contributor, you kind of knew how things worked? Because a lot of times you get management hired as management and they don't necessarily understand the technical, but you understand the technical and maybe you don't understand the people. So like, did you see that as a benefit, as starting off, maybe knowing the business and how things work before you became management or leadership?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean that was a big deal. I mean I've worked with management. My first roles, for example, like When I was 19, I left school and got a job in software, you know, and I remember a lot of scenarios where I had management that didn't quite understand the code. There's some difficulties there. And that's not a matter of not understanding the code because nowadays you can quite literally copy and paste something into an LLM and understand it a bit more and it helps you understand it, which is great. I think it's a good thing. It's helped me and it's helping other people. But back then I think it was more of an issue of when we were stuck on a particular blocker or something like that was difficult to communicate, that that was always an issue. This was the first company, things ended up getting better there and whatnot. But then I went to another company as a consultant and then you're an IC and you're dealing with companies, you're working with all sorts of different companies and what they don't understand, the technology behind it. So over the years I've really like, I think working as, you know, working in qa, working in software development, working in infrastructure. Now like over the years it's been a matter of getting better and better at communicating what needs to be done and why. I think that's pretty important. Not just doing it for the sake of doing it or you know, falling down a rabbit hole and getting really interested in specific language. So, you know, maybe I was interested in Crystal at one point or maybe I was interested in Elixir in Phoenix.

Right, I forgot about crystal.

Yeah, yeah. So like there's all these things that, you know, you could fall down the rabbit hole. And I've been guilty of that of course, you know, before particularly in like 2018, 2019, pushing Kubernetes a little bit too early. That was, you know, before we were ready for any of that. So yeah, I mean it's definitely like over the years working in the industry, you know, being hands on, actually finishing the projects, doing the projects, committing the code, committing the infrastructure as code, potentially in Terraform. But yeah, I mean that's, that's been a big deal, communicating that to stakeholders, to leadership, selling leadership on, you know, ideas and goals, you know, not just to use the technology but to use it for business impact. So yeah, I mean that's kind of like the big thing is that level of communication, you know, particularly across the business, is hugely impactful.

So what always stopped me from going into management, not necessarily leadership, because I did have some leadership roles, is having a staff or people reporting to me because I control what I do. I don't want to have to worry about what someone else is going to do or say they're going to do. So did you have any people skills or people management skills? You need to learn that maybe was something that you weren't used to?

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, especially with me. I mean, I'm the problem. That's because.

Yeah.

I mean. Yeah, I just. I mean, I don't know. Like, there's different terms for people. Introvert and all these, you know, all these different terms and whatnot. And. Yeah, I mean, I think meetup helped me quite a bit. I mean, this is something I've run for quite some time now.

That's the Austin meetup.

Yeah. Yeah. So Austin. I mean, we haven't done anything in a little while. You know, Covid definitely destroyed a lot of. A lot of those good times, without a doubt. But, you know, we did one about. I think last year we did one. But getting, you know, back in 20. God, when did we start that? 2017. Even before that. Right. Like, before I started my own meetup. That really helped me with, you know, the whole people skills thing. I know. What is the movie? God. Office Space, I think it's called. Like, there's quotes from the Office Space, which. Which are so funny because it definitely parallels to, you know, I'm not a. Not a people person, all these kinds of things, because I wasn't a people person by any means. I think playing in a band helped. Really, like playing in bands and touring, like, the East Coast a little bit. The east coast, like Rhode Island.

Okay.

Connecticut, Massachusetts and whatnot. I definitely have to do a YouTube video on that at some point, but I think that helped in terms of just being out there. Was a big piece of it.

So why is that? Because I was in a band. That helped me not be afraid so much because I would never get in front of people. But now I'm just. Yeah.

I'm in front of people. Kind of getting used to it.

Yeah. So it's like a combination of things like meetup and playing in a band, but specifically with playing in a band, it was more so like the collaboration aspect of things. When you're sitting there writing music, you know, it's big. It's just you. You have to collaborate. You're forced to collaborate. You can't just, like, isolate over in your own corner and let me write these lyrics out or let me write these notes out or tabs, you know, so that was a big thing. Or even when, like, we were recording an EP or something, you know, that Was we had to communicate and understand how the DIY aspect of getting out there and you know, finding venues to play with and collaboration with other bands and all that, that was a big, big deal. So that helped me greatly, I think because I was working in software and playing shows during the evening, which was quite fun. Now, you know, I'm older, I can't do that. I still have guitars and whatnot. But you know, good times. And then on the meetup side, you know, meetup helped as well because now like, you know, there's the band stuff, communicating with bands, the communication aspect of things. And now, you know, meetup was, hey, you're communicating with other professionals in your industry, you know, from different, totally different backgrounds, you know, in, you know, with what companies are coming from and everything else and all of that. I think that was pretty impactful. So yeah, I mean those two things really helped me the most, like get out of my shell. That was definitely a big, big part of all of it.

Yeah, good point about the band because if we, I used to be in a band, we did a lot of improvisation. So relying on other people, building up your trust skills and also listening skills. Seems like a lot of people in this industry have music backgrounds. I guess that would transcend to managing a team, be able to trust your team. Making sure you're listening to your team and being in sync with them probably would be really helpful as well, I would think.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And it's funny you mentioned that I've friends that I played in bands with that ended up in software.

Yeah.

Shout out to Joe. Yeah, Joe Thibault. Yeah, another friend of mine.

Nice.

But that's. Yeah, that's funny. Awesome.

So a lot of times people also, they just use like testing or entry level developing position just to get their foot in the door because they want to get into leadership and management, more money. So do you see that as a good enough reason to go into management or is that. I know different organizations sometimes have a technical track where you can make more money, not necessarily have to go into management to get there.

Right? Yeah, I mean for me it's a little bit different because I've only worked in startups for the most part. Like I've worked in small to medium sized companies pretty much my entire career at this point. I've even helped other startups and helped other like helped companies acquire companies by reviewing their tech stack and everything else. As far as I know a company I helped with that acquisition. Those engineers, some of them went into leadership at the company at different Large organizations like Meta, for example, I noticed that they became a director of something, but that was the leadership track. So that was a pretty good migration over there. Another person who was a very unbelievably skilled engineer, tiers at Meta, I think it was like L6, L5 or so. I don't entirely know the tier system over there, but I know they were hired quite high up in terms of financials and whatnot. I don't think they needed to go down the manager track and it was more so what they were interested in. As a result, they built out a role for them. I guess it really just depends on the organization and the skill set. But like, for me particularly, yeah, of course it was, it was a matter of, you know, financial decision as well. You know, it's like, hey, you could be an IC and stay at this rate basically, or you could go up to management and you know, here's what your new rate's going to be. So that's, that's definitely a part of it. Yeah, I mean it's just what it is. But I definitely, as far as like small to medium sized companies, I mean honestly, like sometimes you don't even see that track available at all. Like you just have a role you're hired into. Hey, do two years here and do two years somewhere else and you know, I've seen that. But I definitely am in a different situation where like I've grown with a company, this company I'm at now to the point where like, you know, these roles were built out to put me in these roles. So given the opportunity, like, hey, do you want to do this? So that's what the side I'm familiar with. But years and years of doing different roles led up to this, led up to more engineering, leadership and being able to make the decisions. But yeah, it depends on the organization. But to your point though, some of the large companies, they have entire. I mean there's a website even, I'm sure I can't think of it right now, but I think it was a company website somebody launched and it showed those different levels you can achieve at those larger organizations. Because it was more public, you know, they're more public about that. So. Yeah, nice.

So you mentioned this a little bit already. But if someone's an individual contributor, I think another fear they have is losing the technical chops. Yeah, but I guess it depends on the company. If you're small and medium, you're probably still doing both. But is that a real worry? And if so, like, how do you overcome that to also make sure you are working on your technical skills at the same time as well.

Yeah, I mean, that's a legitimate concern. You know, it's so common that it's talked about, I think for myself. I mean, right now I'm lucky enough to be able to still contribute to the code. That's definitely something I'm very much interested in doing. But you know, it's definitely a balance, right? Like, you have to. There's a percentage of it that you can do so much per day. You know, when I'm building out MVPs or architectural diagrams and basically putting on my solution engineering hat, there's all sorts of code that you write and whatnot. A couple days ago I did a demo. You know, it's fairly frequent, so it really, once again, it depends on the role. Like, I think, you know, if you go into an organization, like a large organization, I'm sure there's scenarios where, yeah, you could probably particularly like Enterprise, I don't want to call it any companies, but I definitely have seen the scenario where you can. And you will lose your. Some, not all, just like not keeping up with the latest trends and whatnot. You know, and that's. It's a good and bad thing. I mean, like, keeping up with Laser can definitely be bad. I've been burned by it before for sure. But there, yeah, it's definitely, I think for myself as well. Like, I mean, I'm. If you have the time, like I have a family and everything else. Like, you know, there's definitely scenarios where, you know, you have to. There's a life balance of all of this and you have to still have a life and everything else, like outside of just what you do every day. But I'm, I'm without a doubt, like definitely interested in building my own projects for fun. Like, it's something I've always just been interested in just by doing, you know, like I've just like, for example, like I'm building out some automation right now for a game that I played when I was a kid. Right. Like just going back to the game and using Label Studio and identifying objects in that game to click, you know, with Pygu, autogui. So like there's, you know, there's an interest you have to have. Like, you know, without a doubt, I think it's. But you know, if you're, if you're a manager and you want to go back to ic, you know, and if you have a core understanding of, you know, caching and like, you know, just computer science, Foundations and whatnot. Like it's not going to be hugely difficult if you have a language under your belt, you know, know, like it's not even like picking up a new language. I guess it depends on the paradigm of course. Like you know, if it's functional or you know, your entire background's in like object oriented languages and whatnot. But there's ways around it, you know, like. And there's of course like even apps now. What, what is. I don't, you know, I'm brilliant app or something like that. There's different apps. I mean I like the language apps personally. Like I like Duolingo and whatnot. Like, like understanding languages, but there's definitely apps out there. Like you can kind of maintain your skills, you know, or YouTube or like there's just so many, there's so much as far as resources that it's just up to the individual to maintain those skills. And if they want to switch back and get deeper into it, like hey, build out a couple projects, get up to speed and whatnot. So I think we're at a point, especially with oms, I mean we're at a point right now where if you don't do the manager track and just be a lead for quite some time and get back into IC if you want to. I'm looking at you Amazon. I think Amazon just recently mentioned they want to re architect their roles more like a startup kind of. Which is interesting, a whole other topic, but anyways they want more ICs is the point. But they're going to get lead ICs. You know, it's going to be a strange, they're going to go through some strange times. But if, you know, you can use LLMs to practice new languages. You know, for example, if I haven't worked with Ruby since 2014, you know, I could go to an LLM and talk to it about getting back up to speed with Ruby. You know, are they still. Is Ruby still using Capybara? You know, you know, all of these things you could just ask and work with and you know, build out MVPs and whatnot. Yep.

So I don't know if this is a legitimate concern and just because I'm older and I work for my own business, but as you get older, do you think there's a perception like you need to get into management because who's going to hire a 53 year old coder, you know, as an individual contributor, I don't even know if it's a real concern but like I'm saying That's a lot of people seem to be concerned about that as they get older.

I mean, I can't speak to it personally. Like I haven't seen that code yet and I've been at the same company for a long time at this point. So like I can't speak directly to it, but I've, you know, for sure, like I've read about it in the industry, you know, like I think just in general, like even outside of this industry, like it's a thing. Yeah, I mean like I said, using my stepdad as an example, you know, he worked in with Java back then. He was working with GS netbeans, Struts. I mean, I don't know how I remember this stuff. I mean I was taking me back. Yeah, I was a kid at the time. But he moved on to more director type roles and more specifically outside of tech. So there's definitely different parts of this industry at this point where you know, you could work in a technology company like Meta or Google or you could work in a company that he chose which was a university or like a factory. If you're an older individual, you could write C for industrial machine in some dusty warehouse. It just depends on what your pay requirements are. There's a lot more to it of course, but yeah, I. Personal experience can't speak to it too much. I think there's definitely scenarios where that is the case. I've talked to people at meetups who are much older than I am, unbelievably brilliant that are just in the industry. It just depends. There's. There's so many different situations involved with that. I read about a distinguished engineer at Amazon. I forgot his name but I'm sure a lot of people know this person. He like him and his wife just ride around in a, a boat all like that's where they live apparently. And yeah, and he's like a distinguished Nigeria, Amazon, done unbelievably like groundbreaking work. Like I, I can't even begin to imagine like some of the impact of that. I mean I've worked with EC2 and all that kind of stuff but like not to any of that level but like it's kind of amazing. So I guess it really, you know, it's all situational at the end of the day. But my personal experience is through family, you know, working through the industry and whatnot and like going to different, you know, going outside of deeper tech into you know, university roles and you know, that kind of thing. So.

Yeah, all right, so you mentioned LLMs, AI a lot and a lot of people think of it in the context of coding. But you mentioned something early on that was interesting. You said you were using it to help with management in a sense. Did I hear that correctly? And if so like can you give some other examples?

Yeah, I think a lot of people.

Don'T use it for other things without knowing what it can do.

Right. So like I guess not in management necessarily, you know, this is more so like process I guess. So like there was a lot of work that I had to do. I mean over the last like three years, like when I was in like the more SRE type role, like incident response type roles, there was like this process of creating runbooks and like we had to manually create these in Confluence and then attach them to an alert. Like in our case, you know, we're using an observability platform to attach them to an alert. And that's just, that's a lot of work, right? Like that's a process we had to build, you know, like we had an like the on call stuff's totally different, you know, like that's totally different thing. But like this is just a piece of where like we're looking at using KGPT to basically sit in our Kubernetes cluster as an operator and basically just be queryable. Like of course we're going to anonymize the backend data, you know, so it's not sending back all of our secrets and like all of that type of data, which is pretty cool. It's a really cool project for anyone to check out. Like there's an open source project. So like instead of using runbooks as like a design doc to eventually create automation around it, which is still a thing we can do. You know, I wanted to really use KGPT just for the sake of just you know, hey, we have these runbooks, let's replace these runbooks with GPT, you know, call it a day, that kind of thing and that the feedback. I did a demo on that four weeks ago now like maybe five weeks ago, about a month, month and a week I guess. But the reception was really good. The team was pretty pumped about that. Because honestly writing runbooks is, you know, I, I look for the, the more mundane stuff, especially on the test side. Right. The other thing I'm looking at potentially over the next few months maybe Q4 is something I'm going to personally look into is test case creation. Right. We have a bunch of automated tests, a bunch of automated end tests. That's great. But the problem is we still have to have some level of exploratory test. It's just what it is. We use exploratory testing to build out automation and all that kind of thing by walking through an application, a service and application ui, identifying areas of automation that we could do that we write in. But definitely the test creation itself. I want to take a JIRA story and, you know, have an LLM build test around that, you know, and then just maybe like populate them automatically in Zephyr or something. So that's something I'm looking into. But like, those are the things I'm looking at, you know, as far as like AI and you know, where it's applicable and stuff like that. Because I mean, personally I've had really, really bad experience building out projects in AI. Some good, some bad, mostly bad, let's say. I'll give you a direct example. Right. So I was writing a service in PowerShell and all this was doing was just taking data that existed on multiple instances and then aggregating that data and pushing it to, you know, like a Samba server and then basically taking that data and ingesting it into, you know, an observability tool that was custom built that was definitely over the top. But this is a project that had to be done. It was very bad at writing powershell, very bad at the specifics. Very, very, very bad. So that was interesting. And then more recently, like a personal project was, as I mentioned to you, automating a game that I used to play as a kid. Right. Like, it's just a fun thing for me to do, like go back to this game. Oh, it's a game called runescape.

Okay.

But it's. Yeah, it's a personal server, so it's not impacting anyone. People are not going to be happy when I just said this, but it is, you know, it's a, it's on my local machine. So it's literally a local server that I'm running of the game because the source was never released. Keep in mind, this was a. A group of people who are very much smarter than I am, ended up doing reverse engineering many years ago and took the original source and you know, use Java Reflection and did a bunch of really cool stuff to get that information. And you know, they built out multiple versions of it, but I have a version on my local machine that I'm running. And I just, you know, it's always been a fascination of mine because that's part of what got me into automation as a kid when I was probably Pascal. So like they used. It was a service that sat over this game and you could write Pascal to automate the game. It was very fun, not very ethical. And in a ways, the game was dying at the time, so a lot more people were doing this. But anyways, the thing that I'm doing now, taking the Python, writing PI auto, gui and just using an LLM to work through the process of, particularly on the object side and identify the objects and everything else, and it's not, not ideal. I think it's getting better, I think with the most recent release, at least, like with OpenAI, I think that's a.001 preview, for example. But in any case, that's my recent. I mean, over the past two years, I mean, I mean, I've been using it for these kinds of things and the team as well, like, hey, like, you know, if the team can figure out, you know, like something that it can help with, by all means, you know, like, we're not afraid to use this tool. It's just yet again, it's like, I love code GitHub, copilot, because, you know, they had the right idea for a name Copilot, because it's not doing the work. Like, I can't. There's never a scenario where I can have an LLM write me an application to deploy to infrastructure. Right now, it's just not a possibility at the moment. Maybe at some point, you know, it's possible, but right now it's like not there.

All right, so, you know, I'm an introvert and maybe this is psychological. I use ChatGPT for everything. Like I for some reason freeze up with email sometimes coming up with ideas of how to answer someone, or even I rate comments on my YouTube channel. Oh yeah, so I'll just ask ChatGPT, hey, I just got this comment. How would you respond? And it just helps me. I take in, I modify it, obviously, but it helps as a good starting point. So I can see how you could do that with management. If you have like, someone asks you weird requests that you don't know, you've never dealt with before, like, what are some options I can give them?

Oh, yeah, that's interesting. That is. That's super interesting. Yeah, I could definitely see that as well. But yeah, I think there's definitely an infamous person on the Internet, Peter Lovells, I think, but he created a tool, I think it was like psychologist, AI or something like that. I don't know how well it's doing. This person is infamous for building a bunch of bootstrap Startups, which I think is interesting because the company I'm currently at is bootstrapped. Like it's, you know, we didn't go through VC funds and blah blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. So like I just always thought it was pretty interesting. But in any case, yeah, people are trying that human level of AI and whatnot. But it's tough.

Yeah, like that's a tough one, no doubt.

Yeah.

But what I've also seen is teams using their own chatbot with LLM to talk about, hey, here's what I did today. And the manager can just query like it's in house trained on that chatbot for their information. So it's able to know where everyone's working on it just makes it better to manage projects. I've seen that work as well.

Yeah, that's a, definitely a good one. That's something we looked at in the past a couple years back, I think it was even before like the whole LLM like thing was. It was a chatbot. Yeah, I mean we had, we had chatbots at the company for a while now. Dialogflow, you know we're using, using all that. But I think more specifically in Slack we were using, we used it for a little bit. It did not take off by the way. No, really, you know it was. So we, we used a bot, it was I think agile bot or something like that where like you could, you, you do your stand up bot. Like you could basically like say like what you're doing every day. Like we don't do daily standups. Like we don't, we don't do that. Like we know we're working on Perspirant and everything else. Like there's no point and doing some of these rituals. But like for their teams, yes, but for us, no. But like yeah, that did not work.

I was like, no.

So I also have my notes something. But I never heard this term before actually. Zirp Z I R P. Oh yeah, you wanted to cover. What the heck is. What is that?

Yeah, it's all like, it's just in terms of management and like what Amazon's doing and just all the talk in the industry right now like for the past couple of years, you know we had, we had great. Like there's been like these amazing waves. You know, like back when my family was working in tech, like 99, like you had the 99 crash and you know there's a great book called, I mean I don't know if you can say it's called F Companies. It's Philip Kaplan. Great, great book. Worth checking out. Definitely worth checking out. It's like pets.com and like you know the history and everything else. So like I love the history of technology. Like I'm huge, huge nerd about like the old tech. But anyways, Zurb is all macroeconomics, right? Like zero interest rate policy. Basically that free money guy wearing a question mark suit on late night infomercials in the 90s, right? Like accident.

That's what I'm turning into. Yeah.

Hey everybody. No, that's awes. That's pretty cool. So what's neat about that is like, I mean neat, good and bad. But like it was just ultimately like for, for years, right? There's access to cheap capital, right. Like spiking, hiring, frenzies. So like, I mean on the management side, like wanted to kind of discuss it because it's like, you know, if you, what you're seeing in the industry right now, you know, like you see higher freezes and you know, all these things, right? Like I remember Meta, Google, Amazon reaching out to me for work, right? Like, and they're like, hey, you should work here. Like you know, the whole, the whole spiel. I probably would have been laid off. But it's like, right, like it's, you know, it's not. Yeah, it's tough. So like that's, that's a difficulty thing. But like I, you know, it's worth mentioning because I mean one, the interest rates yesterday, like, I guess they kind of touched them up a bit, which is a good thing, you know, I mean good and bad. But like it's good because now like hiring might pick up again for people who are like looking to get into the industry. But I think this is more so for people like, who aren't familiar like with why like is tech dead? Is AI taking jobs? That kind of thing. I think it's like, I mean I haven't personally seen AI taking roles. I see it more. So it augments teams. Maybe it could make teams much, much smaller. I've always worked in small, very scrappy teams that we just, I mean this is what we do. We go in, we get work done and that's basically it. My first role, we had a Pizza Friday every once in a rare while we were lucky and blessed for this Pizza Friday. There weren't options and stuff like that ever, right? Like it was in, you know, it was not tech was not fun for a long time. Like I'm sure you're familiar with this. Like back in the day was like there's no ball pits and everything else. Like, it was not ideal, not, not fun. I, you know, but get it. Getting back to the point, like, I think if people are interested in getting into technology, I mean, potentially don't look at the tech companies. Obviously there's financial incentive there, like real life changing financial incentives. Like, no doubt about it. But then also, if you're interested in tech and just getting into tech or just getting in the door, maybe choose a boring industry. You know, like, that's something that's a possibility as well. Yeah. So if you're interested in like stability versus Taipei and you know, like I said, it's just, it's one of those things that like, you know, because of like the larger issues, you know, we're seeing right now or over the past couple years, you know, just with like, you know, startups and, you know, all the whole financial aspect of things. Right. Like maybe choose a boring industry that might be a ticket worth looking at, you know, as far as getting an attack is concerned. When I was getting an attack, like, I definitely, like 2008 happened. That was my dot com boom, right? Or whatever they call. So that was like my issue because I was speaking of the band. I was at that company with a friend of mine that played bass for us for a show that filled in one time. But in any case, what ended up happening was that company went under because we were basically building the wicks of real estate. And in 2008, of course, that crashed and the real estate market crashed. And then we had an angel investor at the time and that was. That was it. So that was like my experience. And then after that I was like, all right, let me. You know, that was TechCrunch. We did all the fun stuff, like, anyways. But like, after that I was like, all right, what? How can I just like stay in a role, like, and then I just chose like a boring consulting company and worked there for like a year before I joined my current organization. So that's like some potential advice if anyone's listening to this, wanted to break an attack, like, these are ways to do it. These are ways to get around, you know, the nonsense you're seeing and on the economic side right now. Yep.

Great advice. Kevin, before we go, is there one piece of actual advice you can give to someone to help them with their leadership, management, type of movement roles, moving into that role and where we can. What's the best way to find our contact?

You? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, do what you want to do. Don't listen to me. But if you're in getting into more of a lead role, there's so many resources out there. I would definitely say please check out Charity Major's blog. I think it's on IC Manager. There's one back in like 2017 that's just unbelievably good. The Phoenix Project. Read the Phoenix Project. Use Audible. If you're doing the dishes like I do, or whatever chore you're doing, listen to Audible. Throw on the Phoenix Project. Throw on the goal. Read about Toyota Kanban. Understand what your goal is and what you're trying to do as a people manager, as a process manager. There's other good books like the Making of a Manager, the Manager's Path, An Elegant Puzzle, Assistance of Engineer Management. A lot of these are. I don't read a million books, but pick and choose what you want to read and then be able to digest it however you want to, whether that's through an actual book or through an audiobook. Definitely get in there and understand these things and then use an LLM. Talk about it. Hey, you know, talk about the book, the team topologies, what are the points from this book? What can I learn from this book? That kind of thing. You know, making work visible, accelerate. Like there's. There's a bunch of really solid books out there, you know, and use an LLM. Talk about that book, understand it, read the blogs, just dive in and, you know, understand how you're going to make an impact as a technical lead or manager. So. Yep. And then as far as finding me YouTube these days, I know I have a big video I'm about to release, so find me on Random thoughts tech at YouTube. There's a whole bunch of different videos on there. There's a lot more videos I need to do on there, but other than that, that's mostly where people can find me these days.

And for links of everything of value we covered in this DevOps toolchain show, head on over to testguild.com forward/p.

So that's it for this episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed creating end to end full stack DevOps toolchain awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thank you for tuning in. It's incredible to connect with close to 400,000 followers across all our platforms and over 40,000 email subscribers who are at the forefront of the automation, testing and DevOps. If you haven't yet, join our vibrant community@testguild.com where you become part of our elite circle driving innovation in software testing and automation. And if you're a tool provider or have a service looking to empower our guild with solutions that elevate skills and tackle real world challenges, we're excited to collaborate. Visit testguild.info to explore how we can create transformative experiences together. Let's push the boundaries of what we can achieve.

With flutes and lyres, the bards began their song A tune of knowledge, a melody of code through the air it spread like wild fire through the the land Guiding tester showing the secrets to behold.