Episode transcript

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a new episode of the front end Happy Hour podcast. I can't believe it. It's coming up to nearing the end of the year already. We have Thanksgiving around the corner just lots happening. So in this episode, we're going to talk about various reflections on tech our careers just just in general going to talk about various things that we've been reflecting and thinking on for 2023. Let's give introductions of today's panelists. Stacey, you want to start it off?

Stacy London
Sure. I'm Stacy London. I'm a principal, a front end engineer at Atlassian.

Cole Turner
Hi, everyone. My name is Cole and I'm a senior software engineer at Netflix,

Jem Young
Jem Young engineering manager at

Ryan Burgess
Netflix. And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm an engineering manager at Netflix in each episode, the front end happier podcast, we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. What do we decide today's keyword is reflection reflection reflections. All right. So if we say this word, I'm sure it's gonna come up at some point. But yeah, let's maybe dive right into the episode. I'm curious. Like when you all look back on 2023? What are some things that you're most proud of? Maybe it's things you've worked on just things in your career, maybe it's personal. I'd be curious to hear all of your thoughts on that. One thing I'm super

Stacy London
proud proud isn't maybe the right word, because it's not really something I did. But I definitely filled out a bunch of promotion nominations for some teammates that I think were awesome. And they got the promotions. And so it made me really feel happy that those recommendations were were helpful.

Ryan Burgess
I love that I honestly, I feel good to when I'm able to fill out that form and say like, Yes, I really want this person to be promoted. So that I like that call out. Good one, Stacey.

Jem Young
That's a great one, Stacy. I'm proud. I have made it through the year. I mean, it's survived. Remember, the beginning of the year was like, yeah, it was layoff city. In in tech in Silicon Valley. It's yeah. So I'm like, I'm grateful that I made it through. I don't know if that's the right thing to say proud. Because it's some of it's just luck. But yeah, I'm proud. I'm still here. Yes.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah. I mean, that's something to be happy about. And we, you know, we've seen a lot of close friends and people that have been laid off, unfortunately. And so it is nice to kind of be able to not have to maybe have that concern. I feel for all the people that are in that boat where they're having to look for new roles. And you know, no one, I don't think anyone's like, you know, what I really love doing is interviewing. Like, I don't think that's a thing. But you know, if it is let me know, if that's your jam.

Cole Turner
I love that I'm with Jem, just getting through the year being content with where I am. This year. For me, it was all about like prioritization, where my work, life balance comes in, and really being comfortable with where I am in my career so that I don't have to stress out or go the distance. And I really, I really liked just personal growth and being unbothered by all that.

Ryan Burgess
I like that cool. So it's even just finding a balance, like have like, where you need to show up as to your like, work and do a good job. But then also, you know, enjoy life. And I think that's so important finding that balance. Totally. One thing I'm proud of and thankful for. Since you know, we're coming up on Thanksgiving is all thankful for this podcast, and all of you definitely. And I'm thankful Jim pushed me out of my comfort zone just recently, it was it was months ago that he had got me to do this or agree to it. But he and I just finished doing a front end Master's course, on engineering management, I thoroughly enjoyed it so much. It was one of those things where it's like, oh, I don't want to spend all that time putting together course material, but I forgot how much I actually enjoy it. It. You know, it's it's not easy. But being able to go up and give that teaching moments and talk through how I think about engineering management. It just felt great. So thank you, Jim, for pushing me to do that.

Jem Young
Oh, thanks for doing it. We had fun. I knew you'd be good at it. So that's what friends are for to be like, push you up just a little bit. Kind of like, I think collectively, all of you pushed me into engineering management. And be like, Oh, you'd be good at it like that. So you know, that's that's what we're here for. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
it's always good. Sometimes people like your close friends know you well and kind of see things that you may not see. Or maybe you do and it just takes that extra little kick in the ass to be like, Yeah, you should do this, and I'm thankful for that. Maybe on the technical side. I'm curious. What surprised you all in 2023 Like, you know, still a lot. It's constantly changing in front end back end, just software and engineering in general, there's a lot changing in the ecosystem, maybe what was some surprises that caught you all in 2023.

Jem Young
I'm surprised AI hasn't taken over our jobs yet. Remember, the year started is like I wouldn't get to do. But there's still, like the use cases are building up, the tooling is getting better. But there's nothing fundamentally has changed, even though like the technology has progressed really, really quickly. Maybe next year, we'll see like more of an impact. But now I'd say probably most of us use some sort of ChatGPT. And we, like we use it like casually, like summarizing documents, helping us write things like that. And we don't even think about it as like, Oh, this is weird and unique. It's just like, yeah, it's a tool that helps us do our jobs better. And that's kind of the trend I see. But I'd say it's a little surprising. I thought there'd be more, maybe more ripples. Maybe, maybe I just haven't seen them. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
I'm with you on that gym like it was a I took a huge trajectory. And I think it still has like, I mean, it's constantly evolving. I mean, I don't know that I shared the same sentiment, that's like a lot of people were worried about, yes, AI will definitely replace some jobs, I look at it in our type of work, there's still a lot of human factors that come into it. I mean, definitely on the engineering management side of things like management is very much people side of things. But I think even from a technology of like a front end perspective, or just building software, these things are tools that will help enable us to do things, they will absolutely take away parts of our job, which are just offloading that, but every time that happens, I always feel like we're able to leverage that so that we can focus on something better. And so maybe it's like, going deeper on a subject matter, or whatever that may be. But you still need humans, you definitely need humans like thinking strategically about what you're investing in for your company. What does your team need a year from now, there's a lot of things that I just don't think that AI can completely replace and be just self sufficient on its own, it's going to still need humans driving that.

Cole Turner
I like that, right. And because AI is going to be an extension of our body, it's not going to replace it, like people think AI is going to replace our jobs or replace our brain, neural link or whatever. But it really is just an extension of our arms or legs, our brain and helps us to do that initial pressure, go that distance that we need to do to do the job we actually want to do. And for me, like aside from Ai, another big surprise this year is automated driving vehicles or self driving vehicles. I think I had expected from the rush of Tesla, and you know, Chevy, GM, all this tried to get electric vehicles into the market and then tried to get towards self driving vehicles. I expected us to be in Wei Mo's and cruisers by now. And now we're seeing that the technology is a hard problem to solve. And even if you are the smartest engineer cars is a hard problem to solve and problems with like where people are on the road. We're just not there yet.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, there's there's a lot of regulations that come in to slow that down for good reason, too. So that that's a good call out Cole. And I think like, actually, I feel like if everything was completely self driving, that's probably where the safety is. It's like you you can trust that a little bit more. But you add people to the problem and human thinking like that throws a lot of that off,

Stacy London
like boys surprised about I think it was interesting is we're talking about AI is like, in the midst of this tight financial market where everyone's talking about, you know, things that are hard for companies are doing lots of layoffs, we have to like, you know, tighten the belt buckle, blah, blah, blah, they're going so hard into AI, but there's not really like, there's no proven return on investment yet, right? Like for a lot of that it's just speculation or, you know, very big r&d bets. And so I thought that that was really surprising to me to see how many companies are pushing so much money into that yet at the same time, or being like we have to be really financially, you know, stable and things are rough right now. And it's like those two have felt very interesting to me to hear coming from a lot of places.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Good. Call out, Stacy. It's like, yeah, we've seen people being laid off, but it's like, there's brand new areas of businesses just like jumping up because like, hey, we need to really invest in AI, which, to be honest, makes a ton of sense for companies that they should be thinking about that like they don't want to be left behind and it's like if they're not in innovating on that that could be really preventative for them on

Jem Young
the software side of things. Something that that has been increasingly useful is actually turbo repo. So we started using it on on our team in 2022. And we've ramped up usage in 2023. And like we're increasing even more usage, and we've rewritten our entire build system. And to fit with turbo repo, we've kind of been replacing gulp slowly but surely. And it's been such such an amazing process in terms of like standardizing how we run tasks and execute things and the speed and the caching and performance we get for free when we use every repo. So that's been surprising as like how big of an impact that's been. And that's changed my perspective on kind of what platforms are doing. Because at the end of day, like a platform is just running a bunch of tasks for people. And when you think of that, in terms of like, that's the majority of what a platform does just tasks. It's like, well, why are we investing more in how these tasks are executed, how they're written and how we're thinking about them. And that's kind of baby that's not from February, Poe itself. It's like, it's what happened when we kind of went through and rewrote the whole thing. So that's been very surprising the benefits of just thinking differently. Plus, using that specific technology.

Cole Turner
Yeah, Jim, I feel like in 2023, I'm seeing more and more of those solutions that, you know, we just talked about AI doing the heavy lifting for you turbo doing the heavy lift in terms of how your build system is cached, or offloaded to a remote server. That to me is, I think we're just seeing like cyclical trends in Tech where we start with the clients. And then we go to thin clients, and then back to Fit clients. And then we offload things on to other services, bring them back to a monolithic service. It really seems like tech is elastic in that sense. It's,

Ryan Burgess
I've even seen more, which has surprised me around like micro front ends, that's definitely come up more and more, I feel like started maybe in like a trend. And like 2021 2022 I don't even remember when it was but I'm starting to see more and more companies and teams adopt it. Cool. Even our team like we've definitely adopted module Federation, through webpack to to be able to enable teams to integrate into a platform that we've built so that it extends a lot easier for teams to integrate in that they're not having to just be in a mono repo. And it's extending that, that surprises me I honestly didn't. I understood the value that it came to, but I didn't know how much it's like how much it's evolved. So that was an impressive one. And I'm seeing a lot of the value. Some teams like you don't need it, you definitely don't. But it depends like what you're trying to achieve with it. I think there's a lot of value there. I agree. Also another trend that we've definitely been dealing with a lot more in 2023. A lot of companies obviously did this before the pandemic, but the pandemic definitely changed how we work. And you know, even this podcast is now a lot more remote friendly than it ever was before the pandemic, we always before the pandemic, we're in person. Now we're able to, you know, just adjust a little bit more and be remote. But I'm curious all of your thoughts on like, what have you all discovered, for remote work that maybe you hadn't in the past or what's evolved in your thinking there.

Cole Turner
remote work has definitely changed the game in terms of work life balance, and being able to prioritize the things in your life that matter. And when I think back to when I've done remote work in the past, before the pandemic, I struggled a lot to prioritize that balance. But I think since everybody has gone, or at least a lot of the world has now done remote work, we've gotten better at it. And we've been able to prioritize and do things that we normally couldn't in our lives. And I love that. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
I agree with you. They're cool. I think there's like more flexibility, like I don't have to do the commute as much or almost never I'm not going into the office as much anymore. And I think that has I've seen unlock a lot of things for me, especially as being a parent, I think it's really helped me have that flexibility. But I also think that it's been more difficult in ways to the different time zones that you start to work with and like people do have to be really good about setting boundaries, or that it can be really difficult for you're working longer hours because it's really easy. If someone asks you a question on the East Coast early in the morning, you see your phone or computer you like I'll just answer that. And so it does bleed out more and so you have to be really thoughtful on that side. I think one thing I've discovered too, that I need to be a little more thoughtful on getting outside. And so it's just like thinking about not commuting or having to do that. It's like Oftentimes, I'm like, wow, I've sat at my desk for a whole day and have not really moved much. And so getting out for a walk, doing those types of things, I've tried to be a little more explicit and thoughtful on that, where it's like, maybe I'll do a call with someone instead of, you know, where I'm like, can just go back and forth. Talking, as I'm walking versus, you know, sitting in front of the computer all day. So I think that's something that I've taken away that I just need to be a little more thoughtful on. just spacing out my day,

Cole Turner
I'm with you. Because like, I get so caught up in remote work, sometimes I'll be at my desk for a few hours and not realize that I've missed lunch or gotten so absorbed in a problem. So it's definitely like a double edged sword. In that sense, it can really help you in certain aspects. But it's not that silver bullet that, like remote work is what you make of it.

Jem Young
Yeah, it's a learning on remote work is made, maybe I everything you've said, you've all said, but I'll say like, I've seen the benefits of being in the office, actually, which I think people discounted too much because it was I don't blame people like they're gonna think about themselves in their, their best optimal working solution versus as a manager, now I'm thinking about like the business and how teams are actually communicating with each other, not just how what individual preferences are. And what I've seen is being back in the office has made us more productive. For for people who aren't together, conversations flow easier. Mentoring happens, social social is just like, they're like the other day, this rolled over to my team. And we started talking about books. And then we started talking about physics. And like all these other just interesting topics, that wouldn't have happened remotely. So that's been a recognition for me. It's, yeah, remote is good. And I recognize the benefits. But I think my preference is actually hybrid. I like being the office. But I don't want to do all the time, especially if kids, I don't want to make the commute, especially if I have a meeting like a day of all meetings, which is pretty frequent. It's not really a lot of point me wasting three hours of my day commuting, commuting to the office, but for the times that I am there, there, it's very beneficial to relationship building and just getting stuff done.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think I like the call that out jam, I think there is points where you need to be very explicit about like, what are the value you get about being in person, what's the value you get out of being remote. And I think a big thing that I take away from what you said is, communication is better. But trust building, I think it is easier to build trust with people when you're together. It's those serendipitous moments that you just like talked about physics, like you mentioned, or you just learn about people a little bit easier. It is absolutely possible to do in a remote world, I just think it takes a little bit longer to do that. I actually prefer when everyone's in the office, I don't think we should ever go back to that. I do think like maybe it is being a manager, Jim, that, you know, we deal with humans a lot. And so being able to, like make those connections and talk is really beneficial. But I actually don't find it as great anymore when it is hybrid, because unless you have set days where everybody's there, I am not a fan where I'm like, Oh, I've commuted. And I've got to meet a few people in the office or have some of those serendipitous conversations. But most of the time, I just sat on a video call. And that was most of my day anyway. So I do actually struggle. And so maybe there's we've seen this happen with a lot of companies where they're like enforcing certain days where you're in the office. I don't know that I like that, because it's like now taking away some of that flexibility. But in the same time, it's been very thoughtful, like, here's the days that we're together. And we're in the office for those types of moments. I like

Cole Turner
that. Yeah, right. And like, I see what you're saying in regards to like getting people in person getting that. And I hate to use the word synergy, but like, oh,

Ryan Burgess
man, you used it. I love it.

Cole Turner
I did. I'll cheers to that one. But when I reflect on, like, the times where I have gotten into person there is that the creative juices get flowing, you're able to just like go over to a whiteboard or pull person aside and talk about something. Whereas like when you are hybrid, or even fully remote, there is a little bit of stop and go. And in many cases that can actually be like an unproductive thing, because you're waiting for somebody to respond or even just to get that time together. But in many cases, I find that this double edged sword is ultimately productive because it allows us to coordinate better fare better context and align which really leans like at Netflix, that is our culture. And so it really helps us to like be a team of individuals working together. And I'll just say like, the last thing for me about remote work is as it's gone on, I really just grown To appreciate the flexibility and the agency it gives you because you know, you're a professional, you're somebody who's highly talented and you're doing your job. Why wouldn't we want to enable that? It's a

Ryan Burgess
good call a call. And I think even the explicitness, the, you know, that we've called out is really important. Like, I think that something that our org is done for, I think it was all of 2023. And a little bit in 2022. I can't remember when we started this, but we were doing once a quarter where the entire org would get together. And a lot of I've seen a lot of teams do this. And they're very thoughtful on like, what do we gain or what, what's the point of us being together? Let's have those in person whiteboard sessions, let's have that, like, get together and build relationships and spend our time doing those things. And I've seen value in that I don't think you have to do it every day. I don't think you have to do it every week, but there's some sort of cadence where it's like, we need to be together and just being really thoughtful and plan that out. I also have appreciated that now. We're blocking that off, like when we're doing that months and months in advance. So you can plan around that. And it still gives you that flexibility that you're not, you know, having to scramble Oh, my team is all going in person, you know, next week, how am I going to do that I need to travel. So being thoughtful around that has been really cool. Maybe shifting gears a little bit? I'm curious what maybe we're talking reflections. Cheers. As we talk about that, you know, what are things you wish you did in 2023, or something I did more of did less of,

Jem Young
I wish I'd kept a better track of my work life balance, where I've, I've definitely worked more in 2023, I think, than my entire software engineering career. Year by year, I think I would have liked to notice that I was creeping up a bit more. And like put firmer boundaries on like, you know, what am I actually doing? Does this need to get done? That's still something I'm still trying to work out is like not working too much. I think a lot has been asked if people in in technology in the past year, especially with layoffs just means there's less people to get stuff done. But a lot of times, like the scope hasn't changed or features haven't dropped. So we're still expected to get as much done, but with less people. So what that turned into, and I've seen this with a lot of my friends who was just like we're all working more and harder. And I wish I'd found a way to make that a little bit smarter and being more explicitly like, Hey, we're not gonna do this thing, rather than just be like, oh, yeah, we'll do it. We'll take on this, we'll take on this take on this as well. For me.

Ryan Burgess
I think that's a good one. Jim, I can echo that feeling to where it's like you just have to be really good about setting boundaries and prioritizing. That's like definitely a one that's so important. And you know, just being comfortable saying no to things because burnout or working all the time. It doesn't end up leading to anything good. And it's like, really, what extra did you get out of that? Right? Like if your team's like, oh, we spent an extra we did this on the weekend. It's like, Well, is it really that important? I think you lose more than you gain from it. So I think that's definitely a good call out. One thing I learned from you, Jim, when we were teaching the front end masters course on engineering management is like I loved your thing that you said you do a lot of reflections. Cheers. But on all seriousness, you're writing down things like looking back on project work, like what did you learn? What did the team learn? And that's something I want to practice more of. I think that's really cool to just like, set aside that time. I think that's really thoughtful, and for all of us to take away is that yeah, you kind of celebrate the wins. But also, what could I have done better learned and grown on that? That's something that I really liked that you had said that. Other things for like the podcast, I wish we did more live front end Happy Hour and been on like, at more conferences this past year. And like, I feel like the conference game started to shift like as we've come a little bit more to the pandemic. And so that's kind of on the top of my mind and 2024 two is like yeah, what, you know, how can we be in person more? How can we be doing some of those live sessions? Maybe it's maybe it's even leaning into the remote stuff and streaming more, but I think there's a lot of things that excite me around that.

Cole Turner
I love that right? Because like, for me personally, my answer is I wish I would have gotten out of my head more in 2023 like everything that you're saying. I feel like it's so easy to just get lost in your own world or be an autopilot and just fall into a routine. And I just wish I would have you know, broken that up a bit more like gotten out of my comfort zone, put myself in more uncomfortable situations. Or really just, you know, not get too comfortable in a routine that you lose or miss out on some of the spontaneity that comes with life or going to conferences or hanging out with friends and doing the live stream probably

Stacy London
take more time off, I think with all like, the atmosphere and the industry and things feeling a little stressful. I didn't, I put like maybe more pressure on myself than normal. So I definitely probably didn't take as much time, which is sort of a bad thing that will, you know, fill in a circle for you of like burnout where you don't take enough time, and then you get more stressed. And so it's like this vicious circle. So I think I probably should have made prioritize a little bit more of like making sure I take time off to take care of myself to come back and be more refreshed. But that's a hard thing to do. And you're worried about, you know, the environment and layoffs and trying to like perform really high

Jem Young
grade call outs AC all plus one that that's that is a discovery for me too, is I felt like I was taking time off. But it turns out like all a lot of time as taking off was not always work with work, but it was work related. So an example of Ryan, when you and I went to render ATL conference, which was a lot of fun. And we took off a couple of days to do that in Atlanta. That's still work related. It's like, it's still technology, I'm still talking about work to some degree, I'm talking with other people working in the same field. And I ended up like reflecting on 2023, a lot of time I took off was something to do with work, even if it wasn't work exactly. It's like speaking at a conference or doing a panel or teaching a workshop, or stuff like that. And I'm like, yeah, the actual time I took off to not think about work was very little. And I think that added up. And I should have kept a better track on that. Something I'm going to do in the future is just like, pick a Friday, take a Thursday on a Friday and just like, do something else. Go work outside go ride a bike or something. Yeah, that's good call. Stacy.

Ryan Burgess
Go be in nature. I think that's the big one too, is like sitting in front of a screen all day is just not we're not made to do that. And so I think like making sure that you are doing that. Even if you are like taking a meeting or doing something like that, like I think you can get some of that balance and still be showing up right? Like do you know, to Stacy's point? Yeah, I think more is expected of us. Or, you know, maybe there is that additional fear, like, oh, the markets not great. And it's like, I don't want to lose my job. But I think getting creative of like, wait, I still need these, like human type things that are in my life and trying to just be a little more thoughtful on that I think can go a long way. But yeah, you're right gem, like taking time off to go, you know, to a conference or speaking or whatever that is, is like, yeah, it's great. I love all those things. But it is work related. It absolutely is. Following up on that a little bit of like, you know, looking back on 23 things you wish you did more, but maybe what's changed a little bit we've talked a lot kind of hinting at it is like careers, and you know how our were operating a little bit differently. But, you know, how's your perspective on your career changed in 2023? can go?

Stacy London
Yeah, there's been some, like interesting changes at Atlassian, where they're kind of making the reporting relationships different. So there's like, managers will have a lot more people reporting to them, they're kind of like flattening the structure a little bit. And then that changes my role definition, like as a principal engineer, a lot of principal engineers roles can sort of start to drift into like the tech lead role, or sort of having more of that. Team led tech led kind of tilt to it. And some folks really want to be like architecture, you know, very deep and engineering. So they created some of these archetypes to try and like give you, you know, pathways. But that got kind of fuzzy, it's a little bit transitional right now. So some people are like, you're expected to kind of do all those things. Or maybe if you want to focus on one you can. So it's been a bit of a like, swirl about what does it mean to be a principal front end engineer, right now with all these changes? And like, how can you be effective and, and getting pulled in certain directions. So like, I'm doing a lot of like, feature leading team lady kind of stuff, where I'm helping to build up backlogs, and get, you know, information from product managers and designers and try and make sure the team can be productive and code but that means I don't necessarily code a lot, you know, and is that making me happy? I don't know. Like, I'm missing coding and feeling like they're pulling me away from something that brings me a lot of joy. I might be, you know, decent and kind of good at those other things too. But how do I balance that better and do the you know, try and make sure I can do the things that I like to do that I think has value I think that it's like a valuable thing for the car. If I can, like focus on building and making, but those are the kinds of things that are swirling around in my head at this point in my career, you're going to try to figure out how, how to find the things that bring you joy that align with what the company wants you to do, and finding that balance.

Ryan Burgess
I love that you call that out, Stacy, I think that is absolutely just a great way to think about your own career and the work that you're doing. Because things incrementally change and evolve and things that we do. I feel like I just recently had heard Jim say this when he was doing more of that, like lead, or more technical lead type role. Before moving into management, it was like less coding and just like either accepting that or not. And just looking back on that as like, what are the things that really bring you joy in the work? That's something that as a manager, there's a lot of things that even really hard, challenging things I actually thoroughly enjoy. But then there's aspects of my job that I'm like, wow, I really don't enjoy that. And I think that I don't know what the magic percentages, but like, I feel like it should be like 20 30% should be stuff that you're not super excited about. But it should absolutely be a lot more the 70 80% of it is just like, yeah, I really enjoy this. And this brings me joy in my job. And if you're getting too much the other way. That sucks. Like it's just even, you know, and maybe the company needs you to do those things. And that's the impactful thing. That's okay to not want to do that either. It's like, there's definitely things that we do that we have skills doing that we love and and want to do. And you kind of might take a step back and go, is this the right thing that I want to be focused my time. And that's a hard thing to do, though, coming into my

Jem Young
I guess it'll be three years of management in a couple months. One thing I recognize now is how difficult it is to move up. Once you become a manager. Like one, it's difficult to become a manager the transition is not easy. But secondly, to become senior manager or director, etc. is a lot of work. It's a lot. It's a lot more work than I'm doing now. And it makes me it does challenge me on like how much how high do I want to climb the career ladder on the management side. Whereas a software engineer, I felt probably more capable there. Because I could do self directed learning. I owned a lot of that myself. But management, it's some of it's just luck, actually, a lot of its luck, like being in the right company in the right organization at the right time to have a team that grows under you or be able to have managers report to you things like that. It's just you have to be in the right place. And yeah, you can angle yourself to try to make those jumps. But it's fair to reflect on like, yeah, management people leadership and what what a longer career looks like, on that side of things.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah. I mean, Jim, I think it gets back to even some of the earlier discussion we had about like, the current state of things in the industry and how, like, I think companies are looking at ways specially in leadership of like, how do we flatten orgs? How do we, you know, just put more under one leader, or just like it's, it's harder to make those jumps because there's less of those opportunities. And so you're right, that that is a problem in the sense that you kind of it's the right place, right time. And people aren't just given a different title, that you have to have some of that scope and things that are growing. And if the company is doing a bunch of layoffs and struggling with certain things, that scope isn't happening, and so that, that changes on how you can grow as a leader, well, you can still grow as a leader, but just from those like title, climbing the ladder type things.

Cole Turner
Yeah. And on that note, like I really resonate with what Jim said, with regards to love, because you can be the most skilled individual in the room. But does the room exist? Does the room as it invited you is the room and interview is the room, a tech conference. And so when, when I think about just all of the hard work I've put into my career, I also think about the moments where things didn't go my way, or I got grace, or I messed up and made a mistake, and somebody forgave me. Because you can be the smartest person in the room and still make a mistake, you can be the smartest person in the room and still get it wrong. And I just think about like the folks who are trying to break into this industry right now and some of my friends who I've seen work their asses off and wait eight 910 months to get a job. And I think about how hard it is to get a job right now and how lucky I am to have one. And that luck is not because I worked harder than my friends are. They worked any less it was because of where I started and the time I started and how lucky I was to embrace software engineering during that time. So I would just say like, what I've learned about my career since 2023, is there's no one size fits all solution that works for everything for everyone. Because what works for Jim might not necessarily work for me, and what works for me might not work for you. And so I would just say, be open to trying anything and everything and finding out what works for

Ryan Burgess
you all side. Cool. Maybe before we dive into pics, maybe we've talked about our career perspectives, but like, how is your perspective on tech changed from just across 2023? Like, have you taken different approaches, perspectives curious on this one? Oh,

Cole Turner
I have some thoughts here. You know, in all my time working across different technologies, frameworks or languages, I really feel like in 2023, the motto for me is just ship something, it doesn't matter what this framework does versus that framework, how data fetching versus routing, there's very little that actually matters between these frameworks or languages. But if you spend so much time laboring over the debate of it, you're not going to ship anything. And if you're not shipping anything, it doesn't matter what you built it in. So when you're evaluating frameworks, just write some code, like, figure it out, figure out how it feels to you, but get something out there,

Ryan Burgess
iterate and learn golf, that's one of my favorite things. Exactly.

Stacy London
And I like what you're saying about just kind of move, and, and ship, like, I think maybe once you start working in bigger companies, sometimes they might have a lot more process or procedures, or a lot of like, strict what you might think are strict checks. And I guess maybe like being more senior in your career, just always think about ways you can challenge that stuff. And so in 2023, it was just like, you know, I'm supposed to do this in order to ship this feature, maybe question it and say, Well, can we get it out to customers faster to get feedback without having to do that thing that's normally required, and see if you can challenge that. And so that for me in 2023, I think was something I thought about a lot was like, being being bold, I mean, it's hard if you're like Jr, to be bold, and question company things, because that's like rough,

Jem Young
what has changed in 2023, the understanding that technology is a business, and we all have a role in that business. And it doesn't matter how good the code you write, or how smart you are. If the kind of like Cole was saying about, you know, it doesn't matter if the room is empty, or the room isn't there, it doesn't matter how great a technologist you are, if the business value isn't there, the business need isn't there, then you could find yourself without a job or find yourself obsolete very quickly. And we, I have to think of technology as a business where everybody has a role in that business. And I have a role to play in that business too. And if I forget that and think it's all about like, the code or the frameworks or the these beautiful systems where you constructed and not think about the business aspect of like, how much is this costing? What else could we be doing? Is this the most important work we're doing? It puts puts me in a dangerous position of losing that perspective. And I think between kind of like the the drive for more efficiency from all these businesses, whether that shows up, whether it's less managers, they they feel like we're an efficient or return to office and making people come back in because they feel like that'd be more efficient, or in general, just asking a lot more people than they were before. What what that changes is just the way I think we're approaching things, and it does make me a little less cynical. Like I still want to believe like coding is magic. In software engineering is like a form of like, harnessing that magic. But, you know, I have lost some of that, where I'm like, it's a business businesses pay me they don't pay me to write cool code, they, they pay me to get something done. And it's a little sobering, but it's also like, kind of growing up, where, you know, like, my, my, my boys, they have no idea about money or how food ends up in the frigerator. It just is it's always has been. And then the older you get, the more you realize that now there's all these systems in place. There's people that do this, and these are the trade offs you make. And so I guess for me 2023 is more of like a growing up year in terms of technology where it's like, yeah, it's less fun. But it is more fulfilling once you understand that, like understand, like your purpose and your role. But it does take away some of that magic, you know, it's like when the The Disneyland ride breaks down and you see, they turn on the lights. And you see, it's like that's this magical place. It's just a machine just like everything else. So I don't know, the the sobering, sobering, cold bucket of cold water of reality is one way of my, my perspective change in 2023.

Ryan Burgess
That's interesting perspective jam. I think it's like, yeah, maybe it's been a manager. That's, that's beaten the, like, joy of coding out of you. But, you know, it's like it is trying to, like, really understand, like the impact that the work that we have as engineers, like, at the end of the day, yeah, it's how does the company make money? What are we investing in? I think that you can still find the joy, creativeness innovation, that those things still come. But it's sometimes difficult when you look in the day to day, it's it can be hard. It's like, yeah, we're shipping this thing and like, how does it make money? It's not to just jump on the cool tech that you see out there. You have to be a little more thoughtful on it. It's good call. It's a double edged sword. It's like, yes, it makes sense. But sometimes it can be difficult to think like that. So good point. All right. Well, in each EPS, the front end Happy Hour podcast, we'd like to share things that we found interesting share pics, and from share with all of you. Let's dive into pics. Cool. You want to start us off? Sure,

Cole Turner
i The leaves are falling, the weather's changing. Everything looks so much more spooky and ghastly. And if you are hungry, and looking for a really good sandwich to tickle your stomach, then I really recommend a grilled brie with apples and fig jam from Boudin bakery. And I got that delivered the other day. And it made my day. And my second pick was actually recommended by a co worker of mine. It's really interesting. So if you are a tall woman, and you find it really hard to find the crowd that is eager for you, then there's let me tell you, there's a dating app for you. It's called date up. And it's the dating app that puts Tall women first. And the tagline is date someone who loves your height. So how it works is tall people join as members. And if you are a short king, then you will join as a guest and you can potentially date up to a tall woman but how it works is you are prioritized. And I just think that is incredible. In the age of 2020 saver dating is so complicated. We have a service for literally anyone.

Ryan Burgess
Wow, that's very specific, which is I mean, that's kind of cool too is that we have those options that are available to us so you can go really narrow. Didn't know about that one. That's cool. Jim, what picks you up for us?

Jem Young
I don't know if I get top data yet for it's all it's all people call it our fellows fellow people. So it's pretty pretty funny. You came across that. I have one pick it's show I've been watching on Netflix called Blue Eyed samurai. Pretty, pretty engaging show about like a woman who is a samurai and definitely in the time of Japan where you know, women can be an escorted. I've really enjoyed the just the the storyline. It keeps me engaged. So it's anatomy so I should probably put that in there. So if it's not your cup of tea, it's pretty violent. But I've been enjoying that so far. That's my pic.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Stacy, what do you have for us?

Jem Young
I'll go for Stacy. I'm Stacy London. I'm really friendly and nice. My pick is a new router in my home because as a principal software engineer, I should have the best router so I could talk on the podcast

Ryan Burgess
does this router play music to

Jem Young
Oh music? Yeah, buy my music is the artful garbageman and variety calls it speed metal, put into a blender, toasted over warm marshmallow and it gives you a feeling of home. And that's why music pick.

Ryan Burgess
Thank you Jen plain Stacey. Unfortunately, Stacy is having some technical difficulties. Hopefully we will be able to get her back. But yes, that was a good take on it. Jim. I just have one pick for us. For this episode. I chose a photographer that I follow on Instagram. His name's Morion Mao. He does like it's a lot of like street photography, but it just like the dark tones he uses and it's just it's really cool. So check him out his Instagram. I will link in our picks section. Cool. That pretty much wraps up our episode. It's been really great kind of looking back on 2023 I didn't expect to think about it as deeply so I appreciate this topic. Thank you all for listening to our episode. Follow subscribe Whatever it is that you'd like to listen to podcasts on, leave us a review to tell us how we're doing. I want to know what we can be doing better and 2024 Love Episode ideas people tweet at us all the time on that. So yeah, let us know. You can follow us on Twitter at @frontendhh tweet at us. Any last words you all

All
cheers? Cheers.