Advancing Your Career from Senior to Leadership w/Principal Engineer, Stephen Shary

Good morning. No one's here yet. Good morning. Uh, Stephen, do you have— do you have snow up in Cincy right now?

Uh, I'm in Columbus. We've got about—

Oh, Columbus, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Columbus.

Yeah, we got 4 or 5 inches. It's been brutally cold, I think, for everybody on the East Coast.

Oh, it's been awful. It's been— so I have bad circulation in my feet and toes, so it's been, it's been pretty brutal for the phalanges and metatarsals lately.

Oh yeah, yeah. I love to, uh, I like— I work remote and so I do a lot of walking, especially on meetings.

Okay.

And, uh, so I walk like 5 or 6 miles a day.

I need to get better at that. You— we talked about that. We, we talked about that at Momentum. Talk about— I think that's real. I need to get out more. I get no steps in.

So yeah, I, I mean, I think I, I think I do like 14,000, 15,000 a day.

Are you serious?

Yeah, yeah. So, um, so it's like, you know, now this week it was like 9 degrees out, so it was kind of rough. Um, so I had like 2 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of gloves, long underwear, you know, I had a face mask, the balaclava. Ski goggles, you know, 2 hats on. But, you know, I was able to do like 5 miles and crunch through it.

That's crazy. And you're just—

I do, I do one-on-ones with people sometimes. I do a lot of like— there are calls where we like review stuff, and I just say to them like, can you send me all the documents ahead of time so I can go through them and come prepared to the meeting?

That's hilarious.

And They're like, they're like, yeah, we can, we can totally do that. And then my boss was like, hey, if you're like— he was like, I remember early on he was like, hey, what, what should I think about you going on walks while you're in the meeting? And my response to him was, I'm the only person that's not on my laptop doing work. I'm the only person that's actually listening to what everybody has to say. I don't, I don't have anything else to do.

That's interesting. That's, I feel like, all right, hold on real quick. Pause on that. Everybody, good morning. There's people tuning in. Good morning. Happy Friday. Once we get past Wednesday, Stephen, we get to Thursday and then Friday. Just to let you know.

All right.

You can use that in your meetings today when you walk. It's good to see y'all again. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, Taya, it's good to see you. Jason, it's great to see you. I literally just saw you on another meeting before this. Mark, it's good to see you again, 3 days in a row. I love it. JC, it's wonderful to see you as well. Y'all continue to say hey. The reason why I tell people that, again, this is networking platform. What I realized when I started this show almost 5 years ago in March, 5 years ago, um, is I wanted this to be a place for you to tune in 30 minutes a day, learn a little bit of information, apply it in your job search and your career, and network with people on the chat. Um, so if you don't comment, like, no one knows you're watching. I think that's like kind of like the, the thing that no one talks about. I think networking, obviously, and we— and, and if you've watched any of my lives this week, it's been heavy, heavy community-based stuff. We're gonna talk about— we're back on the career side of things with Stephen. But one of the things is— oh, excuse me— is networking has changed and everyone's online. And so the way to engage with folks online is like, you gotta comment, you gotta engage, you guys. You just can't sit there, you just can't watch, right? So please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Um, also true, the reason why I have amazing guests— so once you connect with them, please connect with Stephen afterwards. Tell him you said hey. Uh, tell him that you came via, um, obviously Guidance Counselor 2.0, because a lot of y'all send DMs and then no one knows where like you're coming from. So Please throw that in DMs. Also too, wanna give a shout out to Appwrite. Listen, I'm an Appwrite hero. My guy Jason Torres in the chat's an Appwrite hero. We're gonna do more stuff with Appwrite in the future. Great little product. So if you are looking to start up something quickly, check out Appwrite. It's a great little tool. Let's see here. Ricardo, it's good to see you. Jararo, it's great to see you as well. And Hema, my coworker, it's good to see you as well this morning. And thank you, Torque. And Jordan, it's good to see you. Yes, finally made it. I like Fridays. I feel like more people show up on Fridays 'cause they're not cramming down meetings. Um, all right, Stephen, let's go. Well, first off, let's get to people who, who you are, what do you do, and talk about your time at Kroger because that was like really cool.

Uh, yeah, so my name's, uh, Stephen Sherry. I'm principal software engineer. Um, I'm at a company called ACV Auctions. Um, I started in Series C and we're now post-IPO. We're a public company. So I got to— I was engineer number 16.

We're at over—

I mean, we're about 350, 360 now in terms of developers. My job before that, I worked for a national grocery chain called Kroger. They have like 16 different brands. They tried to purchase, I think, a 17th recently. That didn't work out so well. And I was one of the lead engineers on the e-commerce stuff like the order online, digital coupons, digital pharmacy. I helped grow a lot of that. I think I was engineer number 4 in that department.

Crazy.

Um, so I've done a lot of things around—

How many people did you help hire out there?

So when I was at Kroger for about 2 and a half years, I did every single phone screen for that. And so we hired, uh, I think like over 300 people. So I, I did hundreds of interviews.

I would say thousands.

I mean, it might be, I don't know. Yeah, I can, I can safely say hundreds of interviews. Yes.

Yes.

The funny thing is, is that I would meet people and they'd be like, oh, hey, how are you doing? And I'd be like, I have no idea who you are.

And they remembered you from like the Kroger interview?

Well, no, they— this was when I was at Kroger.

Oh, gotcha.

And they were like, don't you remember me? You interviewed me. And I— and it was a phone screen. I'm like, I don't. I'm sorry. I do— I'm— I do like 16 a week. Like, you know, so 3-day, basically 3-day. Yeah, that's crazy.

That's crazy. Jalen, it's good to see you this morning. Um, and, and so I met, I met Steven at Momentum Developer Conference this past year up in Cincinnati. Steven had a— Steven and I had a great chat. He came to my talk, um, gave me some critiques. He's the reason why I now do— I started doing slides, by the way. I did slides.

Oh, did you?

Uh, I did slides in somewhere, and oh, I did slides this past time at Commit Your Code in Dallas, and I thought— and I did it because of you. So there you go.

Oh, thanks.

So Stephen, lots to talk about today. If you did not, so Stephen and I went live a few months ago, check that out. I believe it's on my YouTube, but it's incredible. Talk about interviewing. We're gonna have a little bit of a different talk today, talking about basically advancing your career, going from senior kind of IC level to leadership. I know that's a big jump. Stephen's got some talks about that and kind of, we're gonna work in kind of good tech culture as well. So Stephen, it's always kind of awkward to kind of kick off this thing 'cause there's so much to talk about, but do you, Let's just dive in. Thoughts on advancing, things people should be aware of going from IC to kind of that senior leadership role?

Yeah, so I've given several talks on this at different conferences, and one of the things for folks to know is that it's very easy. The software development industry doesn't have a lot of standardization. We don't have— we don't put emphasis on certifications. In the software engineering world, certifications are almost like an anti-pattern a little bit. We used to kind of joke around with this guy that had become a Java certified developer.

You know, I used to recruit those back in the day.

But the issue that you run into is that a good software engineer can move from out of college to senior engineer in like a 3-year period. It's not unheard of for me to see someone with a resume and they're 3 years in, their career and now they're a senior engineer. And then the thought is, well, I've got 27 to 33 more years to go. What do— or maybe 40 years.

Like, I've talked about this all the time. Yeah.

What do I do, right? Like, what do I do? And, you know, it's really difficult. And I think in the past, I would say like, probably 5 to 7 years, the thing that I've seen is we're starting to see these leadership technical tracks start to pop up in different places. And one of the things that you can do is you can look at levels.fyi, is a great website to kind of look at what these different technical career ladders are. I highly recommend that you look at it. And one of the things that you'll notice is, is that if you— it allows you to compare different companies at different levels. And they're all made up. They're all completely different.

Isn't that crazy?

And, you know, someone will be a staff engineer, someone's a senior advanced engineer, another person is an architect, another person is just an engineer 7, right? And there's fellow, there's advanced senior architect, principal, senior principal, advanced senior principal.

Fellow, fellow, Eventbrite's got a fellow?

Fellow. Yep. Right.

Fellow.

Yeah. And so one of the things to realize is that the industry is trying to start to build these career ladders because a lot of times it was, I become a senior engineer, what do I do? 5 years in, you're like, I like to write code, but the only way for it to advance my career is to become a manager, right? And what I've typically seen is, is that when you become a manager, you stop writing code.

code.

And I don't— I think that there are really great managers out there. And I am really happy when I have a good manager that I work for. But I do think that is a separate set of skills. And not everybody that likes to write code and be a software engineer wants to become a manager.

100%.

And I personally have been offered management positions before. And I've Turn them all down. And so at my company, I am the— I'm at the highest technical ladder. And so I report to the CTO, and we can kind of get into that kind of stuff. But things are changing, and now there's this concept of technical leadership but not management. Like, we're starting to diverge that. And total, total plug, this is not— I didn't I don't, I don't know this guy, but there's this great book called Staff Engineer by Will Larson.

Okay.

And he— it's called Leadership Beyond the Management Track, and it's specifically for software engineers. If you find yourself as a senior engineer that's been in that role for several years and you're like, what do I do next? He wrote— his book is really fantastic and talks about these different, what he calls archetypes Which is like, hey, there are these different patterns of leadership that he's observed, and he has interviewed dozens of people at large companies to kind of understand what that is.

That's awesome. So yeah, because like I saw that kind of during COVID right? You'd have like 0 to 3 years and you're senior, you know, and I've said a long time, like there's only so much money outside of FAANG that you can get. There's only so much titles you can get. So like, if, if somebody— but, but what if somebody's watching this now or in the future and they're like, well, yeah, Stephen, that's great, but like all the companies I'm interviewing for do not value like kind of that individual contributor leadership track?

Yeah, and, and I think, you know, that's, that's one of the things that I've brought up, you know, that, that I've seen is, is that there are some companies like If you go work for a mom-and-pop car wash company and they need to have credit card processing for, you know, people swipe and they choose which car wash, they don't— they wouldn't need someone like— they don't need a principal engineer that's like, I'm going to manage how systems work in multiple regions and have zero downtime failover if we have major issues. I need to be able to, but then you think about like, I think about the, like the Mike Tyson fight on Netflix, right? They had, what'd they have? They had 60 million streaming people, right? So they went from a small amount up to 60 million very, very quickly. And that is an extremely difficult engineering problem.

Yeah, like those are fascinating to me. Like as a non— as a nerd, non-tech guy like myself, I'm like, ooh, that's interesting.

Yeah, and, and it's kind of like there are— you don't, you don't— at a certain point, like if you were a building architect, you would want to move beyond sheds and gazebos and you want to get to skyscrapers. Well, they're not building skyscrapers in the middle of a cornfield. They're building a lot of sheds, right? And so sometimes—

As you're saying, yeah, yeah.

Sometimes you got to move to these companies that are solving bigger problems. Yeah, right. Yeah. Now the interesting thing is, is that some people are like, well, there's probably only 5 companies. So there's like, what, Google and Oracle and, you know, Facebook and Meta and, you know, Amazon, and those are the only big companies out there. Like, my, my company does business-to-business, uh, used car auto auctions, and you would think, oh, that's tiny. Like, no, we facilitate millions of live auctions with live bidding happening all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it is, it is a very difficult technical problem to solve and to keep running, right? And like, I have to deal with real-time, you know, we, we do like real-time streaming of live auctions, physical auctions that you can bid on and things like that. And so we deal with a lot of that kind of stuff, and those are not simple and easy problems. So, um, yeah, so there are some companies where you will hit that, that that technical ceiling.

Well, this is interesting because I— and I do want to get to kind of like Steven's top 3 items for people moving, so give me— we'll get there in a second. But I think like what's fascinating, I see some Nashville folks in here. Garrett, um, I believe there's like 1 or 2 other people from Nashville in here. I think like that's why I think it's like the Nashville market, like there's not a lot of like really good engineers. Like there's like— there's like— there's good engineers. for sure. But I think the scale at which the Nashville businesses are trying to solve is not to that level. They, in my opinion, it's a lot of shedding gazebos, right?

Okay.

If we're talking about— because, and so that's why I'm like, don't get so— like, you may have to look elsewhere, right? I don't think sometimes if you're in a smaller city— there are some cool startups that are doing some pretty high-scale, high-availability, blah blah blah things in Nashville. But as a whole, we are a healthcare market, right? And healthcare tech, from what I've heard from a lot of people, and that's why when COVID hit, Nashville got all the top engineers left, kind of, because all these other companies with bigger problems came in and got them, right? So just kind of a tip, always be looking to kind of level up. And I think the solving of those problems, I think, is huge, kind of like what you just said.

Yeah, I, you know, one thing that I always tell people is in January, refresh your resume.

Yes.

Every year, no matter what, always refresh your resume, right? Um, and I think that, you know, yeah, there are great companies to kind of understand how to professionally do your job, like being a software engineer. And then there are these opportunities where you can move to a company where you can see that growth.

Yeah.

You know, you can say like, okay, what is— okay, like, what does that look like? Um, sometimes, like, I've talked to companies in Columbus and I realize there's not a lot of future growth.

Yeah.

Or there's no future growth for me to move to this company.

Right.

You know, kind of thing. Um, salary, salary, you know, stock and benefits and all that stuff seems to be an indicator as well because A lot of people think like, oh, really good money in software engineering, that can only come from like the FAANG-level companies. And there are a number of non-FAANG companies that I know of that pay at these, you know, uh, senior plus, like staff, staff plus, principals, senior principal fellow type situations where they're paying good money. There's not a lot of those roles because they don't need 300 principal engineers.

Right.

Yeah. You know what they're doing.

Right.

But they do get really well compensated for what they do.

Yeah, absolutely. So what are some, maybe like, gimme 3 things people should consider, people should be mindful of making that jump from senior to leadership or not. Can you kind of gimme kind of some, Stephen's 3 things to consider?

Yeah. Well, it— I will say when you move like beyond the senior engineering level, there's— it's kind of like you stop working with like handrails, so to speak.

OK.

You start like climbing up the mountain and you used to have handrails on both sides. You'd be like, hey, I have these tickets of work that I have to do and I am really good. I can grind these tickets out really fast. I can fix this bug, fix this bug, add this feature, add this button. you know, new screen, do this. Like, I'm really, really— like, there is nothing better. Like, like, no one can beat me at that. Like, just grinding these tickets. And that's really good. Like, that is a solid engineer that can come in and just do this. And what I find is, is you get to a point where you're like, I could do any ticket, right? I could fix anything, right? And then, then I say, okay, let's build something new.

Yeah.

And they're like, okay. And they're like, what's the ticket for that? I'm like, build something brand new and we need to do this. Like, like when I was at, when I was at Kroger, it was like, all right, we need to build a website where you can find any grocery item in the grocery store and add it to your cart and it tells you if it's in stock and it tells you what the price is and we need to know if there are coupons and all this stuff. And they were like, Like, and that's where people are like, I don't even know how to wrap my head around a problem that big.

Sure.

And that's where you start getting into this idea of like, okay, well, you need to be able to start taking on bigger and bigger problems that take some thought. Additionally, what I tell people is, you know, as you move into these leadership roles, no longer do I want you to write good code and good tests and things like that. Can you write what I would call the reference implementation. If you were getting into a new technology like JavaScript and you wanted to do it, we're dealing with this at our current company and we're setting up new backend JavaScript apps. What is the correct way to start one? What is it to write the code that is the perfect example of this is how it should start, this is how I should build my endpoints, this is how I should talk to a database, this is how I talk to a queue. that thing. How do I deploy this so that I know how it's running and that it's managing its memory and its CPU correctly? Then they're like, oh, and writing the reference implementation where it's like you could post this on the internet and be like, this is how you should write this type of application. That's where it's like, oh yeah, I don't know. That's where you see people are like, oh, when I want to write a book or do a tutorial, I need to understand all the edge cases of things because I can't just say, Hey, I think if you just drop in, you know, turn on this experimental feature, then everything should work. You have to understand why these things do that. And that's where that— that's so it's wider scope of things, but also like you can dive really deep in and be like, I can answer every question. I know exactly the right way to do this.

I love that and that's so good. And I think too, I think just a lot of times like You know, I think people rush, and, and I'm saying in my career too, right? And I've kind of morphed into that, right? I've morphed into like, I was the guy, I was the recruiter, I was good on the job boards, I was good at calling outbound calls, doing the metrics, doing the thing. And then now with like this team I'm at with Torque, it's like I'm having to figure out how to like cook the ocean, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's like, it's like you're trying to figure out these larger problems.

And so I would encourage a lot of you, like, if you feel like You know, you just have to have time in the seat. And I think that's like highly under— like no one talks about that anymore. I was like, I want to race to get to senior. And it's like, yeah, yeah, but it's, it's— yeah, but it's better if you can actually learn what's going on. And for me, I wouldn't be where I'm at— like, like Taylor 10 years ago or 5 years ago is nowhere where I'm at now. It's just because I have time in the seat.

So yeah, I, I mean, so I have engineers that are at the senior level and they want to become like a technical leader. So we have, we have 6 different levels, L1 through 6, and I'll have an L3, which is our senior engineer, and they'll say, I want to become an L4, and I'll say, okay, and we'll talk with their manager and it'll be like, all right, you're going to take over this application and you're going to be the person in charge of it, and we plan on making these, these changes to this existing thing and you need to keep it up and running and you need to get these features added on time and it needs to not look like a Frankenstein that you've just sewn on arms all over the place.

Yeah, that would be me as an engineer for sure.

Right? It needs to look like a coherent thing. Like there needs to be rhyme and reason to this. And you know, people will be like, oh well, this isn't a really good project. And we're like, yeah, welcome to working with other people's code.

Yeah.

You know, and it's like, you need to do this for at least 12 months, right, to kind of show this. And I usually— what I usually recommend to our managers is I say, don't give that new person who's learning the application that represents 95% of our revenue. Don't, don't do that.

Yeah, yeah.

Give them the application that represents like 2% of our revenue. So if they really struggle with this, Like, it's not gonna show up in our earnings reports. Exactly.

Right.

And, and really the technical leaders that are really good, those people are gifted the 95% revenue.

Yeah.

And what I, what I have at my company is I have probably 3 or 4 engineers that own these massive pillars of revenue for our company, and they accept nothing less than a really good job on their stuff. And they will go and other engineers that are working on the project, they'll be like, we— they'll rally troops. We need to fix this. We need to improve this. This has to be this good. And you learn, you learn a ton of stuff, right? Like, oh, I'm not going to choose all the big shiny new fancy technologies because they— no one knows how they work. And when they break, I don't know how to fix them.

Right, right.

And I realized that like the business wants me to get 50 things done next week. But if I push 50 things into the app, I'll be up every night on call trying to fix this stuff.

Right.

Yeah. You know, and so I do a lot of mentoring with our technical, our technical leaders, showing them like, hey, you should not sacrifice stability and good quality for just releasing this stuff as fast as possible.

So you've, you've interviewed a lot of people. You've been in a leadership role. You're giving some just amazing, amazing kind of stuff right now in the chat. You know, definitely has been enjoying it. What would you say are some biggest weaknesses of people that are— that like, that you, that you see with blinders that you could share where people can maybe check themselves on this, on this video?

Yeah, so one question I'll ask in an interview to kind of understand is I'll say I'll say, oh, I see that you have some leadership, like you've led some teams and stuff like that. And I was like, if I threw you on a new team, what are some best practices that you would want your team to do to ensure success and stability of the product that you're doing?

And I don't know if I could answer that appropriately. Your questions are so good. They're so good.

It, it's, yeah, it's a hard question that doesn't have a right answer.

I know.

And, and some people are like, documentation, everything has to be written down, everything has to be written down.

I'm like, I'm just a vibes guy. Yeah.

And some people are like, I want to have good communication with my engineers. Like, I want— and some people are like, I want to set my coding best practices into this. And other people like automated testing. And other people are like, I really want to get in with the business and understand what they're doing. And I— there's no I mean, depending on the culture of the company, some companies are like, yeah, we document like crazy. Like if you go work for like a DOD contractor, they're gonna be like documentation, documentation, documentation. That's huge. You go work for a startup and they're like, you just gotta get us enough revenue that we're gonna make it through the next year.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so they're like, I don't really care about anything else, you know, but we, we just gotta grow our revenue so that like we can make it to the next round of funding. So the answer changes depending on the company that you're going into. And I think you should always be honest about what you know and what you feel confident, like, I know that this works and I've done this in the past. So that is the, that is the kind of thing that I think about is like, what, what does work? And if you haven't been a leader, but you've been on a team where you enjoyed what you were doing, it's good to reflect and kind of meditate and think, What was good about, like, why did things go well? What were we doing that made it work well? You know, and sometimes you're like, hey, you have to have, you can't just have a bunch of mid-level engineers running around all making different decisions. I wanna go this way, I wanna go that way, I wanna go this way, I don't wanna go that way. It was like, hey, we had a really strong technical leader who just really guided us and gave us a lot of direction, and that made us successful.

What are, what are some, what are some other, maybe one or two other areas that as we kind of wrap up here and time flies so fast on this call, um, what are maybe just some other tips, encouragement, uh, for folks on the chat, um, or who are listening in the future just about how to level up their career with maybe some, some of the blind spots other people have that you've seen?

Hmm. Um, you know, one of the things that I think about is, um, it's really easy for folks to be, um, into disagreement. Like, I think this is the wrong idea. I don't think we should do this, right?

Yes.

And one of the first good things about being a leader is being like, I'm gonna toe the line. Like, if my boss comes down and says, we are going to make this change, and, and we'll have a discussion about why we're doing it and all these other things, You know, he came, he came to me last year and said, we need to save money, we need to save money on some of our costs, we need to do this. Okay, you know, all right, well, I'm— that's going to be my job, you know. And I think like being a good leader is first being a person that's like, when a decision is made, I will get behind it.

Yeah.

And if you're constantly like, well, I still think this is the wrong decision, you know, that's fine, but just be like, Put that to the side. I think this is the wrong decision, but I'm now going to hear— learn— I'm going to learn.

Yeah.

And, and if this is the wrong decision, I'm going to fully understand why it was.

Yeah.

And, and maybe you're like, well, everything has pros and cons to it, and sometimes the cons are like, well, we won't be able to scale to a million customers. Well, we only have 10 right now. Like, like, all right, you know, I always joke with people, they're like, what happens when we get to a million? I'm like, well, it's someone else's problem because I'll be retired from our stock. Like, that's not my problem. That's someone else's problem to deal with. And so I would say follow after that. And the next thing I would just say is like, being a positive, encouraging person is not the standard that I see in the office workplace.

Mm-hmm.

And so a lot of times what I try and do is set a culture of just being positive. Like being a leader and saying, hey, I think you did a great job with that. Hey, you like— and it's just on stuff like a really difficult bug that you're like, I didn't know how we were going to do that. I thought what you came up with was great. Like, hey, that meeting, that was the best standup we've had in months, and I'm so glad we did that. I hope you continue to do that.

Yes.

And it's just, it's just like encouraging people. And what I found is that like when I encourage and say positive things to people, they're like, oh, I want to hear more about what you have to say. And when people want to hear more about what you have to say, they're putting you in the position of wanting to hear your advice, and you're moving up, you know, and those kind of things. So I love that. That's so good.

Um, so as we wrap up, I do, I do want to go back to this phone walking thing that you're— you got going on. I think it's fascinating. So Okay, so you're out here taking calls. So do you like go outside and walk?

Yeah, yeah, all the time.

And you're just on like actual meetings with leadership just walking?

Yeah, yeah. Like, I'll— I've, I've had meetings with our CEO and our COO and CTO.

And do you find yourself— I think it's an interesting thing about being— what you said when we started about not being distracted, people thought you were distracted or something. Well, yeah, what'd you say?

So, so I'll just give background. Like, I like to walk during meetings when I can.

Yeah, some people are like, what the heck are they talking about? Yeah.

So, so something like this, I'm not— obviously I'm not walking, um, because I'm on video.

You should have just for the heck of it.

Uh, it doesn't work. I tried it one time, it was a total disaster. Um, but I'll do video off, and at this point I walk so much that my coworkers know that I'm walking, and I, I do encourage them to walk as well because they're like, oh, I'm trapped inside.

I'm like, Yeah, I gotta get better.

Go outside.

My counselor about it yesterday. I gotta, I gotta get outside more.

And they were like, where do I go? I was like, who cares? Just walk down the street.

You can go wherever you want.

I was like, just walk up and down the street 10 times. Like, who cares, right? And so like, I personally, like, I've got a 1-hour meeting loop that I can do. I've got a 2-hour meeting loop. I've got a 2.5-hour meeting loop that I— and I've got multiple different loops through our neighborhoods and stuff like that. I'll walk to parks and different things like that while I'm on a call. And the thing that I brought up earlier was at first people were like, oh, what do I think about you walking? Like, you know, are you being distracted? You're not like zeroed in. And I'm like, no, I'm actually more zeroed in than anybody because I'm not working on my laptop.

I think that's an interesting thing.

Yeah, you guys, how many times have you been in a call where they're like— I'll be like, they're like, all right, Uh, so Taylor, uh, what, what do you think about this? You know, blah blah blah. And then Taylor's first thing is, he said, I'm sorry, could you repeat that question? Right? Which means, I'm sorry, I was— I'm sorry, I was—

Yeah.

And now I'm here to answer your question. Right? I never do that ever. You know? And so like, I've got, I've got a meeting at 1 o'clock today and I'll probably go walk during lunch and at my 1 o'clock meeting and clock in. 4 to 5 miles today. And it's great. You feel good at the end of it. I will say work up to it because if I one time walked 10 miles in a day and I got to my desk at like 3 PM and I was absolutely exhausted and I couldn't do anything else for the rest of the day. And I was like, okay, that's way too many miles for me. But it's a great way. Like it helps your mental state. It helps you physically. You know, it just clears a lot of things. And I do a lot of one-on-ones like that. I do a lot of other things if people need to present stuff, like if they're going to be going through stuff. One of the things I just do is I say, hey, could you send that to me before the meeting? I'd like to review it so that I know what you're talking about when you're going to go through it. Which, holy cow, like Amazon goes a little, a little in the extreme where every meeting has to have a meeting summary you know, goals document that they make, but just asking people to be like, hey, can you provide slides if you're doing this? It just lets you go there and be familiar with the content so you're not learning it for the first time. And so you have time to kind of like think about it and come up with good questions and feedback and things like that.

I think that's— I think that's fascinating. I think it's fascinating. I think there's a whole nother chat about that, about Not everything needs to be a video. Even I've started to consider, you know, should I start really getting out there? It's been so cold I haven't gotten out of the house, which is, I think, hurt my mental capacity a little bit. But I think once it gets a little bit warmer, I think I'm gonna— I think I'm gonna take some more calls.

There is no bad weather, there's only bad clothing. That's like a Swedish— that's a Nordic saying.

That is a Nordic saying. Okay, that's fair. That's right, you sound like my dad right there. You sound like my dad.

Like, I, I have full rain gear. I, I go out in pouring rain. Do you really?

Oh yeah, just dancing in the rain. It seems I hear dancing in the rain. I love it.

No, I got an umbrella. I got, you know, I got like a raincoat on and things like that. I got my AirPods on. I'm on a Zoom call and I'm just out there walking. And I gotta tell you, like, you know, people are like, oh, I'd love to turn on, you know, the sound of rain in the background so I can like calm down and rest. I'm like, yeah, I do that, but it's real.

Yeah, yeah, you just go out and you just do it. I love it, I love it. Um, well, y'all, thanks again for hanging out with us this morning. Obviously, Stephen, we wrap up with a few quick rapid-fire our questions. First off, um, uh, if, if I told you that you could not do anything in tech tomorrow but you could get paid the same if not more to pursue one of your favorite hobbies, what would it be?

Uh, probably farming and robots doing my farming.

Nice. So like you would develop the robots in with the farm? Any type of farming? Because farming is kind of like a kind of like AI. There's a lot involved.

Uh, yeah, yeah. Not, not mega crop, like, uh, monocrop. So I do stuff like Like local backyard gardening.

Nice. Yeah, yeah.

Like maybe on an acre or 2. So I do some stuff with robotic gardening.

Do you have a garden right now or no?

Yeah.

You do?

Yeah. I think it's like 75 feet by 80 feet. Nice, man.

That's awesome. When it comes to a content recommendation, it could be maybe something you watch on Netflix and/or technical content, AKA framework, tooling, something or other you're messing with right now. Got any thoughts?

I mean, I love— I do a lot of walking, so I do audiobooks a lot.

Yeah.

So I—

you haven't heard, I like to do a lot of walking.

Yeah. So I listen to a lot of audiobooks as well. And then I also find myself doing chores while I listen to audiobooks, which is fantastic because it's like doing something useful and you're like listening to stuff. In terms of content, I don't listen to that much. Stuff I've used. I've started to use the Google LM Notebook thing a little bit where I will punch in scientific papers. So I've been doing— I'm more on the large language model software engineering side right now. Yeah, and everything's so brand new that it's like I just get piles of scientific research papers to read because it's just not out on the internet. And there's this LM Notebook thing that Google has where they'll turn, believe it or not, scientific paper into a podcast that you can listen to.

You can turn anything into a podcast.

You can turn your meeting notes Yeah, so, um, yeah, and then I have a private podcast at my company, uh, where I do training.

Yes, we've talked about that. That's awesome. I think that's so cool. I think, I think, yeah, I think that's a great idea. I think every company— I think a company should have a podcast literally just for updates instead of sending emails. I would just have a podcast for updates, and if you want to listen to it, great. If you don't, you don't. I think it's great.

Yeah, that's what we do on the technical side. And then if you want to listen to it at work Or in the shower or on lunch.

Yeah, just listen to the latest release in the shower. I love it. Yeah. Um, uh, so we're coming up on Valentine's Day, um, ish. Um, uh, what's your favorite, like, candy? Like, what's kind of like your favorite Valentine's Day candy? I don't like— you're not a big candy guy?

I'm not a candy guy at all. I'm a pie guy. I'm a fruit—

okay, all right, well, like a fruit dessert kind of guy.

Like cherry pie, sour cherry pie, strawberry rhubarb.

Oh my gosh. I, I, my wife loves cherry. Hate cherry. I think it's gross. All right. Last, last question, Stephen. The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't have them. If you could go back and tell young Stephen one piece of advice, what would it be?

I, I think you asked me this last time.

I did. I have no idea what you said though. So we're gonna ask again.

I said, quit your job more often.

Oh, is that what you said? Okay.

I love that.

We'll do, we'll roll that again unless you wanna give a new one.

Uh, yeah, that, that would be, uh, quit your job more often. Because I think people are too afraid to move from one job to another because the interview experience is so traumatic and hard, you know. Like, I, I totally feel that, you know, when I've done that in the past. Um, I, I think the other thing is, is that, um, if you feel uncomfortable or you feel like imposter, like I don't know how to do this, those feelings are not negative feelings that you should view as bad, those are actually opportunities where you're learning and growing. And so that feeling of uncomfortableness should be viewed as like, I'm growing. Like, I'm learning how to do weightlifting recently from a couple of my friends.

I'm back in CrossFit too myself.

And when you start weightlifting, it is just painful. Like, you're so sore and you're— and you, you think like soreness is bad. Like, I should not feel sore. And so I would definitely say, like, you know, lean into that. Like, ask people, like, hey, how do you feel when you do this? And some people feel confident all the time when they shouldn't, but a lot of people are like, yeah, I tried to do this and I was successful.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes on the quit your job, the biggest tower jumps. Yep, I love that. I love that. Great perspective. Cool. Well, y'all go connect with Steven. I'll tag him after we get off this. But, uh, again, Steven, thank you, my friend. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. But y'all have a great one. Have a great weekend and we'll be back next week on Monday. Um, I'm going live with my friend Tessa Kriesel, former dev rel at Snapchat, now doing her own thing. It's gonna be a great conversation. Y'all have a good one. Peace.