Shots to growlers - finding the right size drink

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of Front and half the hour podcast, we are joined by very two special guests who have maybe made appearances before on episodes. Want to welcome back Shirley Wu. As someone who doesn't need much of an introduction, Brian holds, who is now joining us as a guest, because he's back from Seattle.

Brian Holt
Let's think I'm just on hiatus.

Ryan Burgess
I like that. It's great having you both back on, surely. And Brian, can you give brief introductions of who you are what you do, and I'd love to hear your favorite Happy Hour beverage. I'm sure you've heard it before. But I would love to hear it anyways.

Shirley Wu
Thank you so much. That's always such a nice introduction. Hi, I'm Shirley. i It's my fourth time on the show and I hope I can stop counting. And then I've been begging Ryan being like, can I be like a semi permanent,

Ryan Burgess
she's doing pretty good. Whiskey with her. She's She knows how to bribe him. It's

Shirley Wu
not just whiskey. i It's Japanese whiskey that I got in Osaka that I like brought onto a bullet train and then onto an airplane. This is this is some dedication.

Ryan Burgess
This is dedication.

Shirley Wu
So yeah, and then favorite hobby, our beverages. Whiskey that we're having. Okay, yeah.

Brian Holt
My name is Brian Holt, and I'm permanently jet lagged. At Microsoft, I still, every time I meet someone that listens to for unhappy hours, like man, you work at Microsoft now.

Ryan Burgess
Oh, man, you knew they're gonna get a new reg. I knew it. But you knew it was gonna happen more.

Brian Holt
It's just my favorite happier beverage is Japanese whiskey from Osaka.

Ryan Burgess
Let's give introductions of the rest of the panelists. Augustus you want to start it off?

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, sure. My name is Luca Sassoon. I'm a front end engineer at Evernote.

Mars Jullian
Hi, I'm Mark Julian. I'm a software engineer at Netflix. Jem

Jem Young
Young, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix,

Stacy London
Stacy London, front end engineer at Atlassian.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. In today's episode, we will actually be talking about what it's like to work at varying size of companies, whether it be a large company, a startup, or freelance work, or even agency work and really talk about what the differences are, what we like best what our experiences have been. And you know, should be a fun topic. Alright, but before we get started, in each episode, the front end happy hour, we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. What did we decide that keyword is salary salary? So if we say the word salary, we will all take a drink. Alright, what experience have each of you had working at startups, large companies, agencies doing freelance work? Have you done all the above? Or is it just one or two? I'd love to kind of get a sense for what everyone's been working at.

Brian Holt
Well, I've only worked at small companies.

Ryan Burgess
I feel like your career literally got bigger companies as you went, though,

Brian Holt
that's accurate. Like my internship was at a decently large company, but wasn't a tech company. And that doesn't count. So it's been more like a hyperbola. Right? Yeah. We're graphing my companies. But once I started the small shot startup, then I went to remember I want to read it. It actually was technically smaller than that startup because it was just so small, but like in terms of like, impact and things like that was definitely much larger than Yeah, and then Netflix, LinkedIn, Microsoft, yeah. Like 125,000. Microsoft

Ryan Burgess
was really small.

Shirley Wu
I've never heard I've never heard of the Microsoft actually.

Stacy London
Micro.

Augustus Yuan
Actually, really quick, like, how, what do we define as a startup?

Ryan Burgess
That's a good question. I actually would still consider Evernote a startup. I think I mean, being pre IPO, I think still should be considered a startup.

Jem Young
I disagree. So like in that vein, Uber solo startup, which like Uber could go public if they wanted to, they choose not to more, such a large, very large company.

Ryan Burgess
It's like the number of employees is there a number that makes it a startup

Shirley Wu
I think if you can still see almost everybody in the office and like recognize their face even if they you don't recognize their name, or remember their name maybe that's it

Stacy London
like that. Yeah. Or like ping pong table to employ

Shirley Wu
they're much more scientific.

Brian Holt
We're not calling these London's.

Mars Jullian
I wonder also if it has to do kind of with how much process the company has sort of like as you get bigger, you tend to have More and more process. And that can often just be like easily told by how many like C's, you have, like CEO, CTO, CFO, and then under them how many other levels there are before you get to individual contributors. I feel like as a company grows, those also tend to grow linearly.

Jem Young
So can we say a company, say under 1000 employees that his primary model is still growth? And they're, let's say, less than 10 years old? Because there are companies that are still chugging along. They're like, 20 years old. I'm like, Are you starting?

Ryan Burgess
Even 10? Feels like it's getting out of that. Even a little high on that, like, maybe, but five, maybe two, little.

Brian Holt
Let me give you a counter example. Yeah, Reddit. Yeah. Reddit is over 10 years old.

Augustus Yuan
Well, and yeah, and ever. No, it's actually we're just hitting our 10 years and like next week, actually, and so it is kind of like

Ryan Burgess
a starter?

Jem Young
I don't know. I wouldn't call it a startup. Yeah,

Brian Holt
like was it was so when I joined us in Plymouth 29. And it was Oh,

Ryan Burgess
you were definitely one of the star. Yeah, eight years? Oh, well, okay. All right. But

Jem Young
you're still under 1000 employees. So that would be considered a star. Maybe now, it's not a startup model.

Ryan Burgess
I don't, there's only 400. But then if it was the number of employees, I believe Evernote, I'm pretty sure Augustus will know better, but it's like, what 400 We're actually

Augustus Yuan
around like, 250. No, no, it's yeah, it's hard.

Stacy London
So that's more than I thought. Well, I

Mars Jullian
mean, it kind of goes back to what Jem said about a company. If they're still in like a growth mindset. They tend to be scrappier. Yeah. So,

Brian Holt
like less bureaucracy, just like everyone's just like, stuffs flying everywhere. No one knows what anyone else is doing. The London's are very high.

Augustus Yuan
So I actually just googled, yeah, I just that's that's actually what I do for my job. But I Googled what constitutes a startup. And there's this 50 100 500 rule, where it's 50 million revenue, run rate 100 or more employees, and worth more than 500 million. That's a startup or not, that's a great, that is not a starting sound like that was a great question. Yeah, that was I was like, Oh, wait, I just got to do.

Ryan Burgess
It still seems like a little loose. But we've got a rough definition of what it is. So I mean, I've definitely worked at actually all startups, large companies, consulting agencies, agencies, and I've done some freelance work.

Jem Young
I've done straight startups until Netflix, well, startup slash small business again, that weird. I think a lot of small businesses call themselves startups, but they're actually just small businesses. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. But they want to get startup because like, it's attractive and like, we're scrappy, like Maurice said, but you know, they're not.

Ryan Burgess
To be honest, the first like, agency I worked at was nine employees and total and I believe that was even the owner. But I wouldn't call that a startup. It was just a small agency agency. That's really it is yeah, I worked mostly

Stacy London
at like, yeah, big companies. Like even straight out of school. My internship was at a pretty big established company that was profitable, or whatever, you know, had, but it was a private company. It was a family owned company. But it was very big. So like, basically a sister company of SC Johnson wax, which makes it

Ryan Burgess
a little a couple things

Jem Young
to national corporate

Stacy London
nationals fine. So big. And then after that, like continually big until the job before I came out to San Francisco was the first startup that I had ever worked at. So that was fascinating. And the difference between all those prior jobs and that jobs was very, was significant. Yeah. And I don't even know like, that was like a Midwestern startup. So I feel like what that had and what it encompassed was probably still even different than like, what a startup in like Silicon Valley or the, you know, the Bay Area is is like, stereotypical.

Shirley Wu
I guess I went the opposite of Ryan. So I was smaller and smaller. So the first to one person to one person. So the first company was like, 1200. So it was like on the verge of like, it was actually when I joined it was 400. And within a year and a half, it was 1200. And so it went from startup to like Miss size within like a year and a half. And I didn't like that. So then I went to a startup. And and then that went from 30 people to 120. And now I think I just don't like big company. So I'm down to one.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, you're like, bucket. I can't have you can't have co workers.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I actually actually I started, I did a part time job at my university. But there was only three or two other engineers, but it was like for the College of Engineering and right up. I worked as a student web dev. I don't even know what you constitute that team is just to other people.

Ryan Burgess
So So I guessing like this question Brian will say he prefers the smallest micro company possible, but

Brian Holt
softest was micro

Ryan Burgess
what type of like size company have you preferred? Maybe it's not even the one that you're currently in what feels like the best size company that you like working in.

Brian Holt
So like I was joking around, but I actually thought after I was going to leave LinkedIn, I was definitely gonna go back to a small company. In fact, I had an offer letter from a small company that I had every intention of joining. So the transfer into Microsoft was actually just because I thought the position was so interesting. And to be able to whenever I move on from Microsoft hobby back to startup land, because I kind of enjoyed wearing all the hats. Like that was, that was really great. And like, I'll miss the salary. Cheers.

Mars Jullian
I wonder what I was gonna come up.

Brian Holt
I'll miss that. But I do miss like, hacking on really cool stuff. Like everything's on fire, like, like wearing all the hats. Like, I remember my first week at Reddit, I was on a sales call, right? Like, that's ridiculous. So you should not put me on sales. Anyone that knows me should not put me on a sales call.

Jem Young
I think a lot of us like me, particularly like look back at startups, like fondly, like oh, those were the days when my buddies and like, we're forgetting all the chaos in the fact like, I need a new computer. Can't get one we can't afford it or something like that. Or like, where's lunch? Oh, we don't have catered lunch, like you go out and get it and like, the working 13 hours because there's like a bug in production. Like, I don't miss that I miss, like learning a lot of new things and the people but I don't necessarily miss that like chaos.

Shirley Wu
I wonder if there's a correlation between age and the kinds of lives just

Mars Jullian
Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
At work there, or no, I'm

Shirley Wu
like age and the preference of your size of companies. So like, I'm still in my 20s, late 20s. But still in my 20s. And I want that scrappy, I want that startup, I want the little bit of chaos, because like, I just want basically have my hands on everything and learn as much as I can. My second one was a startup. And I love that because I feel like opportunities were coming my way that like really shouldn't have come my way at 24. But like I learned a lot from that. And I grew a lot from that both like technically and personally. But like when I'm 45 or 50 I want to be like at a chill as like government, like gathering pension and like not caring about anything just

Ryan Burgess
yet. I still don't think I'd ever want to be at that.

Shirley Wu
I mean, I'm also not 50 I

Ryan Burgess
think that like that's not that long from now of like even hitting that reset, like 4045

Shirley Wu
I mean, like 50 Let's put out 50 I'm, like

Ryan Burgess
30 Yeah, like

Stacy London
Oh, dear. Yeah, I wonder like, maybe it's not even like about age, it's about mentality or like, what how you perceive what's valuable to you. So not necessarily age that you just be like, if you just want to like check out and not that's like a personality trait. You're like, I just want to check. I was gonna say

Mars Jullian
like, it's probably correlates to where you are in life or sort of what's going on in your personal life. Like, how much chaos do you want in your personal life and at work and, or how much, you know, chill Do you want and either of them. So I think it really depends on kind of what you have going on.

Stacy London
There's some examples of there's some examples of companies too, though, that like, our kind of startup fee, but don't burn you out like, like 37 signals or Basecamp. Like they've written you know, their whole exhibitor base, like, you know, you can have a company that is you can have a lot of freedom, and you're working on this thing that's growing, but you like you don't have to burn out and work like 80 hours a week, like they actually still respect your, your personal life. And that, to me is amazing. And I like always have respected them for turning that whole paradigm on its head and being like, you can be a startup quote. But you don't have to do all the fire nonsense.

Mars Jullian
Yeah.

Shirley Wu
This is like a whole different discussion altogether. But I have this whole thing about how like, I feel like in Silicon Valley, we're just so obsessed with growth and so obsessed with no success means how much money can be raised. And success means how many employees can we get, but I really respect the kinds of companies that you just said, where it's, it's small, but it's small, because they know exactly what they want to do and how they want to grow. And that growth doesn't necessarily translate to like, you know, hiring in controllably. And that's a whole different topic, I think.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, no, I think like, I like steady growth. I don't like the panic of like, we just hired 30 people on the team. And it's because that to me gets chaos because there's growing pains. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I don't like being in that situation. I'm happy with steady growth because that means it's a good thing. decline is the worst. I've been at agencies where you've lost a client like a major client and the way most agencies I don't want to speak to all agencies, but I've worked Got enough that if they lose a client, and you're not at like an 80% 100% billable rate, you might not be there very long. Like they'll even if like a month or two later they get a new client. They don't they like to stay very lean and they'll cut people like they're not billable. That's really stressful. Oh, yeah, definitely. You want to stay billable at that point?

Jem Young
I totally agree with you surely like the the growth at all costs, oftentimes at right disregarding laws, is not uncommon. And it's like, Oops, we broke a few laws, so sue us and like a lot of Airbnb, Uber. All of these scooter startups, like literally all like broke the law like knowing fully

Ryan Burgess
do we start scooters around anymore?

Jem Young
That was gonna be one of my picks for the day was like the scooter startups and they're insane valuations for a scooter like

Augustus Yuan
2 billion. Yeah, something crazy

Shirley Wu
say that I went off to Japan for three months, and then suddenly come back in there, all these scooters and my friends are like, everything has changed really, is different.

Ryan Burgess
We've kind of got into this a little bit, but what are some things that you find that are different between the various companies or maybe kind of benefits to each of them? Because I think like I can definitely identify, even going right down to being surely a freelance by yourself. It's like, there's a lot of freedom to that. But like, even to the large company, there's a lot of benefits like side salary. That's an important one there. And also, the fact is, is there's a lot of resources to handle certain things on the large front, he probably don't have to worry about being cut right away. There's a little more bank and you know, they there's money, they're not being as scrappy at that point

Jem Young
organized. Yeah. So I will, I'll use this platform to go on another rant, as I like to do. That's mainly why I like to join these things. So I can have a platform to rant on the problem with startups is they will never match the salary of the companies. And especially in Silicon Valley. They can't anymore. Like they're, they're really there's a few outliers, but for the most part, they pay like half or a third of what a big company will pay you. The problem with this is that they still live here in a very one of the most expensive cities in the world. But they get all these new grads or people fresh to Silicon Valley similar like the the person off the bus to Hollywood is going to be a star, it's like you're gonna make a lot of money in Silicon Valley, and they sell this dream about our startup that sells glow in the dark fidget spinners is gonna, it's gonna revolutionize everything. But it's like, I think we all know this tale of you're not going to get rich off equity, like no one will. But they keep selling this, like the stream, which is okay,

Ryan Burgess
I shouldn't have invested my whole salary in that that was probably a bad move.

Jem Young
They sell the stream. And I've heard it over and over and over again, like go to any meetup in San Francisco, and you'll hear someone pitching their startup about the next big thing. But they people don't have a realistic expectation about like, what their expected salary is going to be what they're like, what their future is going to look like. No one tells you, you will not get rich off a startup like you just won't. The odds are so extreme that I can walk around Netflix and ask anybody. It's like, how many shares of X startup or company do you own their like 1000s? Yeah, I like I own a ton of shares of companies that are just worth getting diluted. Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Burgess
Well, where are they like we kind of went back to the like pre IPO is that you will in startup get a lot of equity. But that could be meaningless if the company doesn't get sold or IPO. That's really not worth anything. It's just paper, right? It reminds me if anyone will I wish Ryan anklam is here. But if anyone's ever seen the like, it's an old Simpsons episode, but we're like Bart has like a startup. He's exterior like skateboarding in like startup and stuff in like, literally you grab stock, like from Twitter. Just reminds me of is like there are certain companies that yeah, if you get early in like, there could be some huge value to that, like where it blows up. And You You have all this equity in an early startup. But it's I want to say it's close to like winning the lottery, like there's a big chance that you won't see anything from those stuff. I want

Shirley Wu
to also add not only is the likelihood really, really low, but even if you are at a company that's going to be that lottery, it's not like you know, you join in two, three years later, you hit the lottery, like it's you join us an early stage and 10 years later, maybe they'll and you'll get something It's like a It's a really long haul. Well thing.

Brian Holt
The days of like Paul Allen and Steve farmers are gone, right? Like they were like employee number five and you make a billion dollars like that's dead like it's long dead because investors have wised up and they have things like preferred payout and preferred stock payouts and things like that. So like you're not aren't going to get filthy fucking rich anymore,

Shirley Wu
you're bursting my bubble.

Brian Holt
It's just gone, right? Like, you got to get yours. And like that means taking the higher salary taking the more equity cheers, by the way, but like, it's, you're not gonna get rich on that anymore. Like, you need to work at a small startup because you want to be, I

Ryan Burgess
think, like part of that though, is sometimes I kind of like the equity that you do get in the mall startup, even though that it's like a big open bet that it could could pay out. I think like there is a little bit of to your point is like you're buying into something in the sense that you'd like you believe in that company. I feel like if you believe in it, even if it doesn't anything happen from it, at least you're like really invested in the sense that you're like, Yeah, this could be a big thing someday. And like, there's that energy around it. And I think that can be very, very powerful. It's not so much about like, Hey, I have this much, you know, million shares of nothing, it's that's not really the driver, it's like, I believe that this could be potentially something great. Those glow in the dark spinners.

Mars Jullian
I think sometimes they can be referred to as like the golden handcuffs, because a lot of like, I know, this happened to be at my previous company, I felt like I had to stay around my options to best and only when things got so bad that I didn't care anymore. It's kind of when I left. And I think it can especially in some employees who join you know, out of college or just not knowing quite what they're getting into it just the golden handcuffs because they seem like such a great goal to work towards, but you're not really invested in the company. And that kind of creates this weird, I don't know dichotomy within the employees, I think and it's not so much more so much about employee happiness anymore.

Ryan Burgess
To speak that to I hate most of the way the startups work is a you don't invest until you've stayed there a year, not not every startup, but a lot of them it will be like you invest at starting at a year. So you have to wait it out for a year. And it's painful, it can be very hard to stick out.

Mars Jullian
It's like a vest over for years, but none of them actually vest for a year. So I mean, there's

Ryan Burgess
no item to buy them out as options, and you pay a bunch of money up front.

Mars Jullian
And it's almost the barrier to investing in any pre IPO described

Ryan Burgess
that golden handcuffs is 100% Exactly. That is there's people who literally have these stocks that could actually be like if you let's let's you brought up Uber, that's probably one that could very well IPO. And if you have a bunch of stock there, do you buy options, if you want to leave to go to another company that could be really expensive on your taxes, or literally the upfront cash to buy it out? Like to me impossible, that's gold in the hand.

Mars Jullian
Well, the idea is to have their employees be invested. But I feel like in reality, it doesn't always work out that way, especially with the cost of living in San Francisco and also the influx of new employees. There are just so many people here now. And it's almost like, you know, it's like grabbing the toilet paper go grab new employees, we're just gonna like throw toilet paper all over the place. And I don't know it just feels a little bit empty. We should

Jem Young
I think everybody should watch the social network and like understand dilution of like, if you understand nothing about anything else like understand share dilution, when you work at a startup and like understand your company is growing fast, they just raise a series a awesome, you feeling good, you got like 1% or something which is outrageously high, even even today? Absolutely. Your shares will dilute over time when they raise a series B Series C Series II and like, Brian was talking earlier about like preferences, stock preferences, like liquidation preferences, all of the other investors get paid before you who like maybe put in 10 years and like sacrifice your mental health and all these things. Like they all get paid before you because that's the way they put their capital, they put their capital in, but you put your life in, and like, that's essentially my issue with a lot of startups now. And like I harp on them, I think there are good sides, which we'll get to in a second. But I just don't want people to move to the Bay Area thinking like, I'm gonna become rich and become the next. It's the next Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, like, whatever. It's not going to happen, like understand that. And I think when you join a startup, you can you see with your eyes open, because they'll be like, Do you want an extra 50k? Or do you want an extra 10,000 shares? You're like, well, I don't want to always take the money

Ryan Burgess
free coffee dinner, you stay till work till Oh, right.

Jem Young
I have so many stories about

Mars Jullian
I mean, that's a lot about like all of the equity and all of the money associated with working at a startup. But there are some real benefits I think you can wear, you get to wear many hats you learn. I mean, I think someone else has mentioned multiple people have mentioned before and you get to learn a lot really, really quickly do granted sometimes it's about finding the right company that won't suck the soul out of you. You know, like dinner every night till if you stay till 8pm And you're like, No, I want to have a life of my own. But I think there are some real benefits to working at startups depending again on where you are in your life and what kind of craziness or not craziness you want. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
I think there is speaking to that like just growth of the companies trying to grow quickly. Well guess what you're getting a lot of experience really quickly. And and I don't think we can really say that. That's a bad thing is like if you are doing that that's an investment in yourself, and really getting a lot of great experience. Like I do feel that that's very, very valuable. And it's hard to put a price tag on that is like, yeah, we, you know, we're making the joke about the stock and lower salary, shares. But you're learning a lot, you're learning things that you may not have you you learn quickly, you grow really quickly, too. So I think there are some benefits to that side.

Shirley Wu
So I know we've been talking a lot about startups, but I actually want to also bring up the big companies and the freelance, kind of like the two opposites.

Ryan Burgess
Those are really big differences. The opposite side. So

Shirley Wu
I mentioned my existential crisis before this, but I'm going to bring it up, which is that recently, so I've been freelancing for two years now. And I've been thinking about my options going forward. And and let me tell you, the lore of the big companies like the Googles, and the Microsoft's and the and, and I knew Netflix is not big, but like it certainly is. Yeah, it's certainly

Jem Young
like 1000 people. Yeah, I heard you were like 3000,

Shirley Wu
or something. And I was really surprised.

Brian Holt
And let's look at the market cap.

Ryan Burgess
We're all pitching surely.

Mars Jullian
We don't have any golden hands.

Ryan Burgess
We offer lunches.

Shirley Wu
Just like hearing about them. I was talking to some friends. And they were telling me about Google and Microsoft and how cushy it is, and how nice the salaries are. Cheers, cheers. I'm realizing that like, and I think maybe it's just because I've been out of full time for a relatively long time, but it's starting to look rosy again, because as a freelancer, I have a lot of freedom. And, and it means I get to choose the kind of projects I enjoy. And I get to set my own schedule, but it means also that after a certain amount, my salary is capped as an individual. Oh, yeah.

Ryan Burgess
You can only do so much as an individual is like even. I mean, that's the thing is like, even if a million clients came to me, like surely we need you, you're like, you can only

Shirley Wu
I can only I have so much time, I have only so much time as an individual. And that like, and I'm trying to wait that my earning potential there versus like if I go to a full time I cushy like really big company that pay ridiculous amounts of money. And, and that's that's really that's really nice.

Stacy London
So, my my partner, Josh, he's freelance for a long time, and same sort of thing, like freedom of what you want to work on. And like this, this sort of like, pick your great the work that you want to do, but essentially can't scale yourself. Yeah. And then you're doing like all the business side stuff, too. So yeah, you're the ability to focus on the thing that you're best at can sometimes be diluted, because you're spending time doing like accounting or whatever,

Ryan Burgess
when also trying to find that next client. Like, I think that's something to be said, too, is that really difficult to is that you're doing the work and you're stoked on it? Hopefully you have people knocking at your door for you. And that's a great problem to have that still you have to manage that 10 people knocking at your door and you're working on the the one project, and then how do you choose the next

Shirley Wu
every single call that you take is Time taken away from working on

Ryan Burgess
your notes on paper that is unpaid, like technically, hopefully, you know, you've spoken to like five people and you maybe you've only took one or two people, that's okay, hopefully they end up kind of pain out that you know, enough that it's okay to spend that time. But also then there's a point where you finish up one gig, and you're sitting and going, oh, I need to find my next gig. There's you know, not everyone has people knocking at the door saying hey surely want to meet me this cool as visual data is like Yeah, but hey, surely, I need to make

Shirley Wu
up my rate, by the way,

Ryan Burgess
Brian holds a rate I usually charged x I'm going to quadruple it

Mars Jullian
a bottle of whiskey like Oh, yes.

Stacy London
So this is super nerdy. But like all the things that we've been talking about, it's like everything has a pro and a con and like there's there's no utopia like no matter what you what kind of thing you choose. So I've made a spreadsheet for myself, where I put qualities of things that I things that I appreciate or value, and I put like weightings on those things. So when you look for a new job, you like have these weightings and you're like oh, you know, I value my work life balance or whatever like okay, that's the thing. And then you you put that on there and you say like well this company is not or this startup or this. If I freelance this goes down or this goes up Like, that has helped me make decisions because it's hard to like in your head, put all the things you value and then weight them all and then say like, I'm willing to sacrifice, maybe a little bit of my free time for being able to have freedom to work on the thing that makes me happiest and whatever. Like, I love that that

Ryan Burgess
yeah, like, I always say, I mean, I love the thoughtfulness of actually putting it down to numbers. But it will always say like, there's like the five things. And if you can get like four of them, then that's great. Like, can you salary cheers? Great people to work with, like, so colleagues type of work. Maybe growth, there's a couple I can't remember. There's like, feel like it's up coffee. Right? free lunches, free dinner. You know, all those great things. But I think there is like a core couple things that if you can check off 90% of them, then that's a pretty good thing. But I like your thought on is like valuing how important is X, Y and Z and putting a number value and if you don't hit it that well on some of them, then it's not the right fit? Like,

Jem Young
I think surely you said earlier was about what age you are where you are in life. But like that's 100% True, I totally agree to where you are determines like, what kind of risk you want to take a startup as a risk, it's not gonna pay as much. But counter counter forks I railed on started for a while you will grow, you will absolutely learn things that you would not have learned at a big company, I actually

Shirley Wu
want to say I think maybe it's because I'm highly influenced by my mom, who's in her mid 50s. And she just keeps telling me that I should go to a comfortable like, she's like, You need to go to a comfortable government job and so that you can take care of a family. And I'm like, Mother, what family are you talking about. But also I keep telling her like, I'm in my 20s. And it is the time for me to like fight and fight for everything I can do fight for every knowledge I can have get and every experience I can get. And that is the biggest reason why I think I've gotten smaller and smaller in terms of company size. Because, you know, the smaller you get, the more you have to do everything. I think that also is where I'm coming from about the where you are in life.

Jem Young
So I'll say like I railed on startups, so long, and Oh, totally justified as all my rants. But like, I would not be who I am today without working in a startup. I, when I graduated college, I knew like a ton of Java, a ton of C sharp didn't know anything about JavaScript. And I'm like, What a cute little language. And suddenly I was like, actually, this is like, way more fulfilling than doing Java apps. And like slowly emerged in the UI. And like startup, you can really find out what you're passionate about, like fast about networking, or back end or marketing or being a product manager, like you can definitely do that a startup it is it is a place to like grow and discover yourself. Like the College of companies, kind of the counterpoint is you can easily learn really bad habits that you're not even aware of especially fresh out of college, you're like I have a CS degree, teach me about the world's companies like come on in Augustus, we're gonna teach you everything. Always in my mind, but

Ryan Burgess
like, that's creepy. It's cool. I want to be

Augustus Yuan
mostly parties tickled.

Jem Young
You can we interview a lot of people that are from startups, and like they're successful startups, and they're really smart people. But their coding habits are just bad or their organization is poor, because they just never learned these things. And you spend too long with people that are just all about the hustle. And like hacking and getting code done that you don't learn like, Well, eventually, you need to like ship code that is maintainable in the long run. And at a startup, you don't necessarily learn those sorts of skills.

Ryan Burgess
Everything in engineering is a trade off. Yeah. And so I like a balance of the hustle or I don't know, grit that comes with like a lot of the startup aspect. But there's also everything comes with the trade off in the sense that how does this feature or code last long term? There's a balance of okay, do we ship this to learn something fairly quickly, and then think about it long term, there's everything that we do is a trade off. And I think to me that there's some of that aspect that it's like, you want a balance of that. I think that's that, to me is like important and like, let's take a look at startup balance and but also some of the like thoughtfulness that needs to like scale in the long term.

Stacy London
Yeah, like this thing's gonna live on other people will work on it. That Are not you.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I actually really want to echo like a lot of the points made, considering like Evernote is my first job i i actually had this like, huge existential crisis. But when I was coming out of college, I had to kind of make a decision. Do I want to work at a big company or a small company? And I guess the advice looking back now is that if you want to work at a startup, you do get to wear a lot of hats, but it's very self driven. You have to have like the passion and motivation to like, drive yourself. To like, work hard, and like also, I also kind of agree with what Ryan mentioned briefly, which is like, if you don't know what you want to do, it's a really great opportunity to try that, like, ever. No, I've jumped like three teams, I was on analytics. And I went to marketing website. And I went to the Evernote Web application, and I got to like, kind of see, like, all different parts of the stack. And I feel like my portfolio has gotten like, pretty huge, just working on tons of projects. But I also kind of look back and think that if I went to a big company, there are some like, certain fundamental like things that like, it would have been nice to have a better mentorship maybe that you could have gotten from a larger company. Like they the scale of problems they handle are like far different. So and that

Jem Young
being said, like, it's good to work with people that are passionate, about like what they do. And that's, that's like something rare, and you can't get that that easily and like to work with people that are like really love what they doing love the company. That's something that startups have, the big companies often do not have, because it's just people that are collecting a paycheck, or like, they're good at their job, they come home, they come in, they do their job, and they leave and like, that's fine. But yeah, startups out there, like friendship and family bonds, sometimes that like, sometimes you want

Shirley Wu
energy and the passion, I actually also want to say like, we've been talking about kind of startup as a place where you can really figure out yourself and like work hard. For the experiences, I actually want to kind of flip that around and talk a little bit about my first year at a startup, I was really, really into that kind of like the mission and what we're trying to do. And I worked my nights and weekends. And that's, you know, that's a lot of time. And then I realized that if I consider my most valuable asset, not as money, but as time and time is money, time is salary, it it's been a while putting all of our most valuable assets into this one startup, that's someone else's dream, we're basically, you know, putting our life and energy and time into someone else's dream. And at the end of it, like maybe we come out with, like, some experiences and some growth, but we don't come out with anything else to show for it. And so, I know, we've been talking a lot about startup as a great way to like pour everything in, and to get back a lot for yourself. But I also want to say like, we don't, we don't have to pour any more in than then on them exactly like basically what they pay for us. They they're paying me or they were paying me for my nine to five, essentially right to get my job done. And I don't need to do any more than that. And I think that's what 24 year olds really needed to learn, which is that like, I don't need to put in like, I don't need to take on the extra amount of work. Because I think at a startup, it's really easy to do that. Because everybody everything always seems like everything is on fire and everything to get done. Well, everything is and everything needs to get done right away. And I just need to sacrifice my evening and I need to sacrifice my weekend to like get this ship so that we can meet our deadline. But in retrospect, that's really not the case. And you it's kind of like what Stacy said, If a startup is asking you to do that, then

Stacy London
they're poorly running their startup.

Ryan Burgess
So we've talked about culture. What about like, the respect or the feeling that you have as especially as an engineer? How do you feel at the various degrees of companies? Does it matter? Are there differences between? I mean, I hope Shirley feels really good by herself. Like, you know, her boss treats her fairly well, I would hope but, you know, but like, seriously, though, is like the startup the large company, the agency, how does that how does that feel? Does it differ?

Jem Young
It differs awesome. This because like, I've talked to a lot of stuff, so but no one cared what I had to say until I started working in Netflix, essentially, like, I would not get as many speaking roles. If I didn't work at Netflix. Am I a better or worse engineer as I was before? Not really. I'm the same? Awesome handsome engineer, but

Ryan Burgess
higher degree. Yes, you've grown a lot. Yeah.

Jem Young
But if I worked for some fidgets spinner startup, I would get a lot less credibility just when I say something. And that that matters. Maybe not to you, but like, it matters to the world at large. Like someone's like, Oh, they're an ex Googler MLA. Oh, interesting. Does that mean they're good engineering? Not necessarily.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I see it in like, I don't know if you guys I'm sure you've all seen these, like, recruiting emails or like, X startup has a, you know, first round Google person who's now started this and I'm like, okay, cool. Sounds great. Whatever. I mean, to me, it's not a selling point, but I've definitely seen that many, many times. So I guess it does have that appeal as it gets to your point. I'm hiring. Getting that.

Shirley Wu
And also internally, though, I wonder about internally the day to day. And because there is the whole, I don't know, I've obviously been out of the workforce for a few years. But is this is there so the like back end engineers think that front end jobs are really easy kind of Yes,

Mars Jullian
really depends on the size of the company to like whether or not they value front end as like a skill you should have. My experience is smaller the company that like we're looking for full stack engineers, and like, I don't think you know what that means. Basically, like, what I've seen in my experience is like back end engineers who can put checkboxes on pages and I'm like, that's not what a front end engineer does, there's more of the role, there's interfacing with other partners blahdy, blahdy, blah, are preaching to the choir. And then the bigger the company you go, sometimes the more respect there is for sort of like the specialized skills, and you can learn, you can wear many hats in small companies. But also you can grow as a front end engineer or whatever, engineer, you are at a larger company, by going deeper into that particular topic. I actually think of it like startups, you get a lot of breadth of experience. And then when you're ready for you move, the larger company begin to get more depth in that experience and become more of an expert,

Stacy London
as well said, like when you care about making a really great UX, and like you care about users being able to do something well and easily, like the bigger companies I've worked for, at least allow for that specialization in that time. So you're like, we can make this great experience, because we have people that are like designers that are dedicated to that and front end engineers that are dedicated to that. And it's sort of like, do all the things Oh, shitty experience, but like, but we shipped Yeah, anyway. No, yeah.

Mars Jullian
No, but I think actually goes back to the it's not as much. I mean, part of it is process. But also, I mean, there, there's a benefit to specialization. Yeah, necessarily the same thing as process but sometimes they go hand in hand, just being able to, like delegate or like very clearly know, like, who works on what part of the product, it's kind of just like, will streamline things, even if it can make things go a little longer. But unlike startups, larger companies have the luxury of being like, Okay, we want to go out, we want to go out, right? We want to go right the first time as opposed to oh, this needs to be done yesterday. Good luck.

Stacy London
I'm gonna say the word salary just

Ryan Burgess
Alright, as we end the episode, I also like to share pics of things that we found interesting. Augustus, what do you have for pics?

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, sure. So speaking of startups, and like wearing a lot of hats and trying new things, I started getting like really interested in like data engineering and machine learning. So I've just like been learning a lot from that, like, I recently went to Google IO and learned a lot about machine learning. So my first pick is this site called model Zoo. So I like I think one pane of machine learning is like training models. And then like applying those models. And then the second part of it is applying those models and like using it to like solve really cool problems. Model zoo is just like a place where people have pre trained a bunch of models, and you can just use them for your apps or whatever. So it's kind of like a giant resource for pre trained models, which you should double check that they do things for a big guy, and then this this next pick, so I found it at a questionable time to am and unfortunately, not the wisest decision but it's called human benchmark reaction time. And it's really simple you just click to start and there's a red square and then you wait for it to turn green. And you click as fast as you can and it tells you how fast you click Try to just I spent like a really long time like I spent like an hour of just like trying to get

Ryan Burgess
workings of words like

Brian Holt
I guess got a few more tickets to assignment

Augustus Yuan
All right, right after this Yeah, that's

Ryan Burgess
my pig awesome Mars. What do you have for us?

Mars Jullian
So the first thing I have is something called HYAH which is supposed to block like different spam

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to Last episode this is

Jem Young
literally went had a back and forth of Ohio Okay, all

Mars Jullian
right. Well, okay, so I don't know what I did go to Vegas someone got my phone number some hotel and email and I've been getting like seven spam phone calls within an hour of each other every day in the morning anyway, so hi, I have saved my phone much so much needed battery and also me a lot of frustration and almost throwing it against the wall. So it'll help you block like different you know, spam phone numbers and scams and Gemma's either laughing or making fun of me I can't really it's usually I goes all the time. And then my second pick is actually a series on Netflix called explained which is like each episode is, I don't know, 14 to 20 minutes 15 to 20 minutes long. And it's just about different like you know, random topics and they just go through them very plainly and simply it's kind of like a how I made this type of thing but when it comes to

Ryan Burgess
what is Kpop and yeah cryptocurrency

Mars Jullian
monogamy is a topic which I actually thought was really interesting designer DNA was also really cool. So yeah if you're looking for something short and that will help you see the world differently I would recommend that

Augustus Yuan
you keep pumps life changing

Jem Young
I have thoughts on both this fix already said on higher listed last episode. Ryan I have a back and forth with the guesses I like explained my problem explained is like, they don't often provide a counterpoint. Like the monogamy one it was like all people who are like Swingers, I'm like, that's one opinion. Like, that's what I'm for against either one. Who cares. But the Kpop one, they didn't have people that are like, actually, this is not music. They'd have like real artists. Like it's not art anymore. They just have people that are pro Kpop. And like, that, was it. I do, like explain the designer DNA one is awesome. But I like I like people to argue and like, let me make up my mind. Not like here's what it is a little bit. But

Brian Holt
fuck you. I like it when everyone agrees? Yeah.

Jem Young
Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
That's what this podcast is all about. You have to agree.

Jem Young
I think we'd all agree I'm very critical and big. But being critical means like, weigh the pros and cons. It's absolutely not just like, I'm on board all the time. Anyway, so I do like to explain that designer DNA one is like particularly very good. Also, the one on the racial wealth gap is

Mars Jullian
like piques your interest in things, I think I mean, yes, definitely take it with a grain of salt because it is 15 minutes to explain some very complicated concepts. So good luck. But yeah,

Jem Young
those are good pics, though. So my first it's a long article, it's by you hongbao. And it's about the evolution of ads and tracking on the internet. And it covers like Google and their purchase of double click and Mozilla and I assume he's right. Like, I can't back a lot of this stuff up. But like he, he, or they did a lot of research into this. And it's interesting to see how like Google evolve. Like, I didn't know, they bought all these companies like when they bought double click or what Google Analytics actually purchased that from another company. They that was another company and like, over time, you see, like, almost the morality of tracking on the internet and like Google's opinion change over time, they're like, we're not gonna do this, we're not gonna do this. And then muzzle is like, oh, yeah, we're not gonna do this. And like, you see this back and forth. And it's like, a 20 year back and forth about privacy on the internet and ads. And it's like, really interesting how it evolves. It's worth reading. It's pretty long. But if you do front end, if you do anything on the internet, it's worth knowing the history of like the internet and like, why we are where we are today. My second pick is a podcast. It's called the strong web. I was on it's last Friday, it should come out pretty soon. By the time this episode comes out, should be out. But like I talked with Eric and just a fascinating conversation we had about like, Netflix culture and like exercising like staying fit as an engineer like keeping your mind healthy. It was like such a great conversation we had we went on for like an hour and a half. Like I hope he cuts it down. But it was a pretty solid episode. I'm I'm excited to hear it when it comes out. And my final pick, sorry to go on so long for my pick for Valley silicon, you know, the craziness that happens here. My pick is actually San Francisco housing prices. All right. Do you all know the median salary? You need to buy a house in San Francisco?

Stacy London
300,000 Buy a

Ryan Burgess
house by house you need 300k?

Jem Young
What are your guesses? What's your median? What what salary? Do you need to be able to afford

Ryan Burgess
house salary? 600 No, I don't think you need that. 300 400k $384,000

Jem Young
is the median salary you need to buy a house in San Francisco County.

Mars Jullian
Much to save five years to buy a house that is what

Jem Young
your salary needs to be to like afford the mortgage on a house so that the way

Shirley Wu
you see a house you mean like a single family house with like how many bedrooms and

Jem Young
one one bedroom house two bedroom house? Median? Yeah, yeah, that's we that's the reality we live in. So like when I say like, don't work for a startup for pennies, because you might get rich in the future. Like don't do it. Like work at a start up in Denver or like Portland or anywhere like that. This is real. This is real life, like buying a house here is next to impossible. Stacey, what do you have for us?

Stacy London
I have so I just got back from an awesome trip to Berlin, Germany, to go to CSS conf and jazz calm. You. So good. So good. One of the best conferences I've ever been to in terms of like, Speaker inclusion, incredibly diverse speaker set just includes inclusive of all things like it was a very, there's childcare at the conference. That's awesome. Amazing. So I've three like some pics from that. So like the conference itself, great. Beaker browser was a talk at jazz concert by Tara Vancil about the idea of like, peer to peer browsing and the idea of like removing servers from the equation and like bringing the brain back sort of the fund the web where it didn't require this immense knowledge about Massive build systems and servers to like, share things that you know, amazing talk. It got multiple claps, like in the middle of the talk. I always I feel like if engineers are willing to like, show their exuberance in the middle of a talk like this is something that's maybe a game changer. And I'm very excited about this concept. Marcy Sutton, who does amazing work with accessibility, she had a talk about empathy driven development. Her talk was super practical. She had like a React demo app that had stuff that was like, here's how you add accessibility and like live, live code that thing and she has like a great GitHub demo app that shows that stuff. Awesome. Laura, Laura Schneck. It for CSS cough, she did a really amazing talk about the algorithms of CSS, really great cartoons and just presentation style, but also just this idea of marrying the fact of like understanding how the browser parses and applies CSS, helping you to write better CSS and like these these concepts, or you don't have to know all about them, but like, they help you write better things. And I thought that was really great. So those three talks amazing. They're soon to be published. And they're not quite out on YouTube yet. But as soon as they are just happened to Yeah, they're gonna definitely share all this for free and like, watch all the talks. They're amazing. That's like a teeny tiny sampling, like my mind was blown a million times. And I don't have a music pick this week. But I have a joke that I'm going to see. DJ this Friday called function and like, I recently saw a DJ called object and I was talking to a friend of mine, she's like the only see DJs that like, have names related to programming. Oh, weird.

Brian Holt
I have two picks. One of my picks is a technology called Kubernetes. I've been working a lot with infrastructure, obviously, because that's part of my, actually, it's pretty much my job now. And so orchestrating containers with Kubernetes is really easy. Even for someone like me, that didn't come from a DevOps background. And there's two technologies that go behind it called Helm. And draft, helm is kind of like NPM for containers. So you can just like and say, give me a no container, give me my SQL container, give me a Elasticsearch container just kind of orchestrates all that for you. Which is easy for someone like me. And there's another one called draft, which is like yelman. For containers, we can just say, like, scaffold me up these kind of containers.

Augustus Yuan
Love that. Great. Yeah.

Brian Holt
And then my other pick is I didn't get to do this brand. And I wanted to borrow the old man Jem rent. Yeah. Hold them Brian rent, which doesn't. Okay, hold on, Brian. If anyone ever pitches you, they think you're gonna work for a startup within a startup or startup within a big company. It's a goddamn lie. And don't do it. I've been pitched on this, like seven times in my career. And every single time it's been just a huge one.

Ryan Burgess
The startup with inside a larger contract,

Brian Holt
hey, I'm big company X. And we were doing a startup within our company. It's like it's a play. It's just like a startup. But we're gonna pay like it's a big company. But you have all the autonomy, it was like it's a lie.

Shirley Wu
So I also have two picks, I just got back from a three months stay in Japan. So both my picks are going to be Japan related. The first one is going to be team Lab, which is one of the biggest reasons why I went to Japan in the first place. So teamLab is, I actually don't know what they are. Exactly. They're like a creative agency. And they do installations. They had an exhibit in the pace gallery in Palo Alto a few years back. But they do all of these immersive interactive installations at museums around the world. And the first time I encountered them was this exhibit called Crystal Universe. And I think you should just Google because I can't quite do them justice. But the first time I was in that exhibit, I was like, Whoa, there's something that's going on in Japan that's not going on in art museums in the western world that I've been. And so that's why I went over there. So that's my first pick teamLab and anything like that in Japan, and the second page is I don't know what vacation counts as a pic.

Brian Holt
It's been done.

Shirley Wu
So I was in Japan during late March and early April when the cherry blossom season was happening some time ago.

Shirley Wu
Oh my god is gorgeous. So I partially grew up in Japan when I was a kid and I remember all these cherry blossoms lining this STS but going there as an adult seeing all of the pink all around me seeing it in the trees seeing it you know kind of like billowing down with the wind and kind of just that that's memorable life experience that now I understand why Japan starts their school year in April on like the rest a lot of the other countries that starts in September because like I imagine in April like walking down the street going to a new school like surrounded by the pink and like it's just billowing in the wind. Like that's gorgeous. So if you can ever make it to Japan, in April, I recommend that also

Jem Young
on my bucket list.

Augustus Yuan
Definitely it's God gorgeous. Just think of those animes where

Shirley Wu
but it's a you need to like go for a few weeks because it only lasts for a week or two. It's never the same exact week of the year. So just like plan a month long vacation you know with the startups and the the big companies that the limited vacations, you should be able to do that. Right.

Ryan Burgess
So I only have one picked Netflix Original, that I watched really quickly called Evil Genius. If you ever watched Making a Murderer, I feel like if you like that one, watch this one as well. It's based off of a bank robbery in 2003, where a guy was strapped with a bomb on his neck does this whole crazy story that goes along with it. I'm not gonna say much other than that as just go watch it and follow along. It's really, really great story. I want to thank Brian and Shirley for joining us. Thank you so much for coming again. Where can people get in touch with you?

Shirley Wu
Oh, so I am almost everywhere online as s x y Wu and if it makes it easier for you to remember the sexy whoo without the E.

Brian Holt
False okay? I'm still still on fedoras at home.

Ryan Burgess
Thank you all for listening today's episode. You can follow us on @frontendhhw on Twitter, and listen to us on whatever podcast catcher you enjoy. Thank you all for listening. Any last words? Cheers