Episodi
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Show Notes
Topics: Career Advancement, Code Schools, Computer Science, Education, Internships, Interviewing/Interview Questions, Onboarding, Personal Branding, Recruiting, Recursion, Software Engineering, Web Development
Companies and Organizations
Thumbtack Braintree Bucknell University Free Code CampIntroduction
If you are thinking of going into a career in software engineering in the late 2010s, you have to navigate an abundance of choices and answer a lot of questions. Traditional Computer Science education or code school? Big company, medium or small? Startup on a cloud stack or mature company on an enterprise stack? Should you favor employers based on salary, learning opportunity, perceived caliber of colleagues, or fast growth? How to build up a portfolio? Taylor Milliman has just gone through this process and started his career. In this special two-part episode, we talk to Taylor first just before he starts at Thumbtack as a software engineer, and then get an update from him six months into his time there. What did Taylor expect from his first software engineering job, and how has it actually turned out so far? Find out in this episode of âUsing Reflection.â
Guest Bio
Taylor Milliman is a recent graduate of Bucknell University where he double majored in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science. Before starting college, Taylor had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He ended up falling in love with the tech industry, learned to code, and eventually landed an internship at Braintree. He wrote about the whole story here, which was later republished in The Observer. Now, Taylor works as a software engineer at Thumbtack on the marketplace team. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, snowboarding, cooking, reading, writing, mushroom hunting, coding, coffee, and so much more.
Links
Blog: Taylor Milliman Github: Taylor Milliman Twitter: Taylor Milliman Breakout List - Great Companies to Apply to Lambda School Recursion Chemical Engineering Sunk-Cost FallacyTranscriptTaylor Milliman
Itâs kind of just a means to an end. Whereas like now there, there is like if you put in the effort itâs, itâs pretty easy to to quickly like upgrade that and get stuff that your interested in. I think like âWhat kind of things do you think you can get that, that werenât available? Sort of pre social media?â I would say I like, I mean itâs, itâs still hard, but like you, I mean itâs still true that if you just cold email like 10 people that even if theyâre pretty busy people almost certainly one of them will respond and then you just donât know what that will lead to thatâs interesting.Host
So I had one boss who told me, âYou should also take any conversation youâre offered because you just donât know what could come of it.â And it took me, I think many more years of working than youâve been done so far to kind of realize that. That makes a lot of sense. So youâre basically just talking about itâs always worth trying to network, right?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. Or even just, just like, I think of it more as just like making friends with people, but because like the truth is I mean like when I reached out to you, I didnât want anything from you, you know, Iâm not looking to get anything probably. Iâm just looking to meet interesting people more so. But I think, yeah, itâs always worth trying to meet interesting people and then if youâre not like looking to get anything per se, itâs more just to learn what you can learn from that person. And I think itâs just like fun talking to people who, who like to think. Thatâs, thatâs really honestly mostly what it is.Host
Oh, and communicate too though, right? One thing I think thatâs interesting about this way things are now where it puts people who are less adept or comfortable at communicating probably even a more of a disadvantage. I mean this, this used to be a profession where to some degree you could hide out if that wasnât your thing, you know what I mean?Taylor Miliman
Yeah. I mean maybe, but at the same time I also feel like in some ways it doesnât. Because you can, if you are doing interesting stuff and you just put it out there, people will reach out to you. Which is just crazy. I mean, thereâs really no downside as well because I think even if no one reads it right, you almost certainly kind of clarified your thoughts on that subject in order to do that.Host
Thatâs definitely true. Like having to explain it to someone else. Right. Interesting. So anyway, thanks for reaching out at and here we are. Right. So thatâs what came out of that, that thatâs how it was. Interesting. I was the one out of the 10 that did answer. I guess at this point welcome to the show. Hello and welcome to âUsing Reflectionâ, a podcast about humans engineering, and weâre here today with Taylor Milliman. Taylor, why donât you introduce yourself and then weâll get into the conversation.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, sure. Iâm Taylor. I just graduated from college. Last summer I interned at a company called Braintree and in a few days actually Iâll be starting at Thumbtack to work as a software engineer.Host
Awesome. Maybe for folks out there who havenât heard of Thumbtack, you could just explain a little bit what they do.Taylor Milliman
Thumbtack is a two-sided marketplace for in-person services. So if youâre looking to hire a plumber or a piano teacher or any, any number of in-person services basically theyâll match you with a local professional, and youâll get a few quotes on how much it will cost and then eventually you get to go with one of them.Host
And did you have any idea what kind of role youâre going to have as you start there?Taylor Milliman
Yes. So they do team matching, uh, in the first few weeks while youâre there. So I donât really know what our work, what Iâm working on. I think generally thereâs a lot more web roles, so itâll probably be something on the website and thatâs also where my experience lies. But the truth is I really donât know. Yeah.Host
So I definitely wanted to talk to you a little bit about this since you just went through this first job search and thatâs a unique perspective that I havenât had the opportunity to talk about with any guests before in the past, you know? So as a new grad at this time, Iâm curious sort of what were some of the things you were evaluating prospective employers on? Like what aspects of the company or the people you met or the opportunity, anything along those lines. What was your framework for deciding who you wanted to work for?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say really the three things that I was looking for were is this a company thatâs growing and a place where all have a lot of opportunities for growth? Am I going to work with smart people? And am I going to be compensated fairly for that work? I would say. And the last one is really right now, I mean, itâs important, but I think itâs probably not what I prioritized. So like Thumbtack was not the highest offer that I received, but I did really feel like I was going to work with smart people and potentially have some huge opportunities for growth.Host
Right. So those first two, why were those important to you? As a reasons to join a company.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I mean, Iâd say the first is like growth is just fun, right? Youâre learning new stuff every day. The product is working if youâre growing, so youâre reaching new people, youâre providing value. And kind of the same thing is true for working with smart people. Itâs just, itâs really fun to have people that push you further, that know way more than you and that are also just excited and energized. That energy is super-contagious and I think absolutely essential for, you know, having fun at work.Host
I suppose then that during the interview process that was something you felt like you were picking up from the people who were you were meeting with?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, for sure. Like I would say one really small thing that connected, that definitely made a difference, you know, I got home from my interview and I had just short nice emails from a bunch of the people that I had interviewed with. So for sure itâs almost more about the personal connection. Like sure, you get a sense of their technical knowledge, but I think if they go out of their way to really try to sell you on the company, that speaks volumes.Host
Interesting. So, and I, and I guess that energy youâre alluding to, so thereâs something about the culture too, although thatâs hard to pin down maybe and define, but it sounds like thereâs something about that idea of being part of something where everyoneâs energized to both help each other and the product is working, so thereâs just a lot of positive energy that youâre making a difference and that things are working. That was a good feeling you were getting.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if nothing else, I learned just how important it really is. Like on the interview side too, to come with that enthusiasm. You know, thereâs definitely interviews that Iâve had where you kind of feel like youâre just getting in the way of their daily workflow. I would say like another thing, itâs a little bit superficial but I think it does make sense to, you know, look for a pedigree. Right? So where, where have they worked in the past? Things like that. I think, you know, it is definitely superficial but I think you can see trends there as well.Host
It is. But on the other hand, some aspects of the the technical opportunity can directly relate to that. For example, if youâre interested in working on a high scale platform in the cloud, itâs just kind of a lot of startup type jobs these days. People whoâve worked at the handful of very, very high scale Internet companies have experience thatâs relatively unique, right? They wouldnât really have gotten that experience almost anywhere else.Taylor Milliman
I think thereâs also something to be said [that] if you can convince some engineers to leave Google and companies like that, that speaks good things to your ability to sell your company.Host
Did anything about your Braintree internship help you better evaluate companies? Like, what do you think you learned from the internship process that helped you both understand more what it would mean to be a professional engineer and to evaluate different opportunities when you went to look for your first position?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, so Iâll start off by saying I think I definitely could have done a better job evaluating companies, right? Especially when, you know, I was mostly interviewing a private companies. And so you donât know the financial details. I think it really would have been smart to ask more questions related to that. So you actually have somewhat of an internal picture. They might not tell you, some companies might not tell you, but I think some would as well. So letâs say I still have quite a bit to learn about evaluating companies.Host
Well, I mean, youâre just starting out. You just did it once, but I mean, but also thatâs why weâre talking about it. Itâs like whoeverâs listening to this whoâs just one step behind, one step earlier than you, maybe now they already can learn from that too.Taylor Milliman
So I learned from Braintree basically in the sense of what am I looking for in general, because everyone does value things differently. And so I think I started to realize, âOK, what are the things that I uniquely value and maybe overweight compared to other people?â And then kind of filter companies based on that.Host
So what were some of the things that you realize and maybe like how did you start to realize. What are some experiences you had that were illuminating?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, so I think one was at Braintree we, we had a very heavily pair programming culture, which I liked parts of it, but I think ultimately it was a little, just a little bit too much for me. So I would say it would maybe be 70% pair programming. And maybe what I was looking for was like occasional pairing. So thatâs something that some tech does. It was actually great for the internship to have that much pairing and youâre just learning really quickly. But Iâm not sure how sustainable it would be for me in the long term.Host
What didnât you like about it?Taylor Milliman
Itâs quite draining. Just being connected to someone for that part of the day, I would say thereâs certain times where it just feels like the incorrect use of resources if youâre working on a really hard problem and some times it makes sense I think. But if youâre just kinda going through the motions and banging some stuff out it just doesnât feel quite right to me.Host
I do think though ⊠did they have a lot of, did they have a heavy code review there as well?Taylor Milliman
They did. Which I think was a fantastic introduction for me, especially as an internship.Host
Do you think that when you got to the code review stage there was more clarity because thereâd been more collaboration prior to that?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, definitely. It is this weird thing where I think I definitely had to make an adjustment when I went into your internship and I think at all companies. Basically you just, you canât move, it seems obvious now, but you canât move as fast as you can on a personal project. And especially in a financial company like Braintree, you cannot move fast and break things.Host
So do you think then that another aspect of the pairing was, you know, you mentioned it was good for you as an intern, so youâre implying it was effective for knowledge transfer?Taylor Milliman
I would, I would absolutely say that. I mean, you just pick up so much from people that are working there. I have no idea what the onboarding process is like at other companies, but I would say here it was really fantastic. I never felt like I was just floundering or, and at the same time it also didnât feel like too much handholding. Because like I said, so it, it was, it was definitely a good balance there. And itâs like engineer to engineer, so itâs much more ⊠it probably just feels more natural. You know, you just kind of have this person just talking about how they do things there and so on.Host
Yeah, itâs almost like a natural mentorship program as well. Like certain people that you pair with you might not connect as well with, but itâs almost certain that, you know, eventually youâll pair with someone that, um, you really look up to and learn a lot from and they can kind of serve a little bit in that mentor role, which is nice. And then you got to know them through this kind of actually working on something together. So a little bit sort of a more around a project or something. And yet thatâs also that kind of thing youâre describing is also kind of happening organically because of how youâre working together. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So you had said a moment ago, not to dwell too much on this, but you also had said a moment ago, you feel like you couldâve done a better job of evaluating companies. I want it to return to that and ask you maybe, what are some things you think you, you realize after the fact or that you would do differently?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. So I think one thing is that, so I mentioned like the financials and the truth is from the people inside the company that Iâve talked to I get the feeling that Thumbtack is growing very quickly, but I donât have any hard numbers and I actually really do think Thumbtack would have given me some hard numbers if I asked for them, just seeing what are the growth metrics that theyâre using. So I think that is valuable for a private company trying to evaluate that because itâs super important if the companyâs doing really well, theyâre going to continue to attract smarter people and itâs just a flywheel and youâre going to continue to move up. So I think it is quite important to kind of see like, OK, how many employees does the company have and that itâs growing.Host
So youâre really looking at that growth attribute again and then youâre wishing you had drilled down on that and got more evidence of that.Taylor Milliman
I personally do. Yeah, I think for sure.Host
You know thereâs an kind of implicit assumption that what youâre talking about, that youâre looking more at startups, in other words, high-growth companies, right? And that youâre talking about a situation where a lot of the opportunity comes from the growth. In other words, that itâs dynamic. It will be changing all the time and therefore a lot of the technical opportunity will come from novelty, right? Like new things are happening and new projects are happening and new technologies are being introduced and so on. Did you ever consider more mature companies, more mature businesses, and if not, why not? And do you think those businesses can do anything to compete for engineers like you who are interested in that, you know, more than startups?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, itâs a good question. So I mean, to be clear, I think calling Thumbtack a startup is a little bit of a stretch at this point. And I would say mostly what I was targeting was kind of that 150 to 500 employee range. So kind of mid stage, I would say.Host
But a more modern Internet era kind of company âŠTaylor Milliman
For sure. Uh huh.Host
So whatâs appealing about that? Is it just the tech stack? Is it the culture?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think whatâs appealing is theyâre already, they already clearly have product market fit there. You know, doing pretty well and youâre not going to, youâre going to have people, a lot of people above you that know a lot more than you, yet at the same time there are opportunities for growth. Whereas I would say I think I would caution people a little bit to join less than 50 employees, startups straight out of school. Part of the reason being that if these companies are considering hiring you it could say something about their ability to recruit talent. Like personally I donât have that much of a network, so Iâm just not going to be able to get into the hardest new startups I guess.Host
Yeah. And also for your first job, maybe you were thinking about a company that, like you said, they had product market fit, so itâs a little more clear what needs to be done and therefore probably youâre going to get to focus more on how to, how to be an engineer. Which is a little less maybe chaotic, a little more structured for your first role.Taylor Milliman
Right. And to your point about about big companies, I donât think thereâs anything wrong about working for a big company. I think this also goes back to what did I learn that I was looking for from Braintree? So Braintree got bought out by PayPal a few years ago and I would say there are probably universals that go along with the size of the company. But I would say in general, companies get a little more risk-averse the further along and the larger they grow. And so I was looking to go somewhere that is still more, trying to take risks, trying to really make big product changes that will move the needle, rather than satisfy existing customers.Host
Got It. That you could still be part of and learn from. Yeah. Right. So youâre just, itâs not so rote that youâre kind of tinkering or maintaining only, that thereâs some new opportunities there.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I mean to be clear like big companies are launching new products all the time, so you can, you can definitely find that, but I think it could be easier to find it at a slightly smaller company,Host
At a company at that scale you can still kind of have an idea of how the whole business works and what the whole business is doing. Which is the kind of context that I think, it seems like youâre going to drink up lot. Like you probably picked up a lot of that at Braintree. Youâre probably very excited to pick that kind of context up here at Thumbtack as well.Taylor Milliman
Yeah. Thereâs this great website called Breakout List. We can put it in the show notes, but I would definitely recommend anyone earlier in their career to check out that. Basically it kind of walks you through some of the reasons why, the good reasons behind that size company. And then also has a list for 2018 of those size companies that are, doing well and growing fast. So Iâll definitely recommend that. I used that last year and thatâs part of how I found Thumbtack.Host
So maybe weâll shift gears a little bit. You wanted to talk to me a little bit about work life balance expectations and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about career expectations. So maybe we can kind of get into that area. So more specifically some of the things youâre expecting just before you start this job. And then, you know, maybe weâll do a follow-up at some point a few months or so on down the road and sort of see what, you know, how things have lined up with your expectations. You know, it might be an interesting way to look at this. So going into this job, what are you expecting to learn for yourself kind of as a first step in your career? Like, do you have a place you want to get to from here? And then also maybe you could get into the work life and other kind of aspects of the job because youâre going from being a student to working full time. So how are you, how are you looking at that impact itâs gonna have on your life?Taylor Milliman
Hmm. Yeah. So I would say, honestly, I try not to think too far in advance. Iâd like to believe like if you just come into work excited about what youâre working on and do good work then thatâs enough, you know? And I want to maintain that kind of enthusiasm and just, uh, having fun, learning new things every day rather than ⊠I really have no idea. If I think back like five years ago, I had never written code before, so itâs hard to imagine what Iâll even be interested in in five years. Thatâs really my biggest focus is just coming into work every day and Iâm trying to do good work.Host
So to the point where we were, we were talking about in the very beginning though about a kind of personal marketing, do you think thereâs an aspect of that in the workplace too? You know, we were talking about it more outside, like youâre a social brand, you know, youâre on Github, you have a blog, you know. Not to disillusion you, but I found in my career that sometimes just coming in and doing good work and being excited is not enough and that theyâre, you know, letâs put it this way, there are elements of interpersonal communication with other stakeholders and influencers that are important. I mean, do you think about that too?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think, I think that is definitely true. And I think part of that can come from the enthusiasm that you bring, but yeah, I mean itâs definitely important to ⊠if youâre just at your desk with your headphones on the entire day, I think youâre missing out on a great opportunity to connect with some of the people around you. But yeah, the truth is, I am just so early that itâs hard for me to know how to think about these things.Host
Sure. Itâs probably something youâre going to learn a lot about quickly in the beginning because it will be all new and itâs sort of that initial curve, right? I mean, when I start a job, I still kind of have this attitude of sort of land on the ground and look around and listen more in the beginning, you know? And I would say itâs much more so even for the first time, because you donât have past experience to sort of put it in a context or itâs at least not a lot. Also I was interested in sort of, you had just mentioned that you hadnât written any code five years ago, so itâd be interesting to kind of get your point of view on how you ended up in this career.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, absolutely. So prior to college, I would definitely say I kind of had that idea that unless you start programming from a young age and youâre just this prodigy or whatever, then maybe like Computer Science isnât for you. And I think a lot of people still have this idea that thereâs some magic behind being able to program, which is not true. Yeah. But basically I took a class on a whim my freshman year, and I was actually already majoring in Chemical Engineering at the time. And then I took another class and another class. And then I decided I was going to minor in Computer Science. And then the obsession kind of just grew and grew. And then I ended up, so I actually double majored in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science. And ironically I probably spent way more time working on my Chemical Engineering class work than I did on Computer Science, even though I knew I wanted to get into Computer Science. So right there I think this is extremely classic, but I, I definitely fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy. So I felt like I had taken all of these Chemical Engineering classes and so I might as well keep going with the major. Which I think is a tough lesson to learn. But definitely if you are in college, I think just following your interest is definitely a good metric to go based on, rather than, because youâve taken a certain amount of classes.Host
Do you think itâs had any impact on how people look at your resume that you have the double major, positive or negative?Taylor Milliman
So like an interesting conversation starter. But, and I will say ⊠Iâll caveat this by saying I do think especially for Computer Science, you know, your major is a little bit less important. You could easily major in Math or Physics and I donât think youâd have any trouble getting into the field. So yeah, no I donât think it really colors my resume very much, but it is kind of a fun conversation starter.Host
But you found yourself kind of less interested in Chemical engineering and more and more interested in CS? Yeah, I would say especially when it comes to like the job prospects, a lot of Chemical Engineering is like plant maintenance, which was, it was just less attractive to me. So I knew, I knew pretty quickly probably starting like my sophomore year that all I wanted to do was, or at least I thought all I wanted to do is software engineering. Even though I didnât really know what that was like, but I knew that I liked writing code. It was something that I did for fun and I didnât do my Chemical Engineering homework for fun. So it was pretty clear, right?Host
Right. And I guess the number of ways you can apply writing code to so many different kinds of projects and out outputs, you know, itâs obviously much more of a general tool, right? So itâs not just something youâve learned just to learn the field. Itâs kind of a very different field in that regard. Right. Because itâs, itâs a hammer.Taylor Milliman
I mean it, it came in super useful for chemical engineering for sure.Host
Iâll bet being able to write better code than some of your peers probably helped to get some of the homework done more quickly too. Right, absolutely. Interesting. So I guess another interesting thing to me about your educational background was that you also did this code camp while you were in school. So I was curious about why you did that, why you thought you needed to do that and then maybe contrasting that to the I guess more traditional CS education you were getting in college.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, sure. So if you havenât heard of freeCodeCamp, itâs basically just this website, and honestly most of what it is is itâll give you a project idea that is about right for your ability level and then you build it and then you move on, and it kind of helps you create a portfolio of projects. And so itâs not, itâs not like a traditional coding bootcamp. Itâs totally free and the really cool idea on freeCodeCamp is eventually if you finish, which itâs actually quite hard to finish, but if you ⊠so I havenât finished all the projects, but eventually if you do finish, you can do work for a nonprofit. And then if you even go past that get paid work or an internship or just free work for a nonprofit. But still basically now youâre getting professional experience on your resume. If you get all the way through freeCodeCamp, it doesnât matter if you donât have any degree I can guarantee you you will be employable.Host
Right. I see. So once you kind of thought, âWow, this is something Iâd like to do,â it was part of your ambition and that this was a way to get a portfolio together and have more of a credential.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think it started out from maybe a couple of things. One of frustration of applying to internships and just not being able to get anything, and to a frustration with the curriculum that we just werenât building enough stuff in our classes. And thatâs really what I was the most interested in was just trying to build stuff.Host
I see. Right. So do you have an opinion that on how useful or, I guess, how valuable to you you think the traditional CS education was in terms of being a software engineer? Because Iâm interested, Iâm going to be interested in hearing the answer to that also a little further down the road because I have my own opinions about it. And I know thereâs a lot of conversation back and forth about whatâs the value of CS versus what software engineers actually do day to day.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, this is a really tough question and definitely one that I want to be cautious with because I donât want to make any general [statements].Host
Right. Without having worked for years. Right, exactly.Taylor Milliman
Yeah. Not only that, I think itâs also like when you are choosing whether or not to go to college or go to a coding boot camp, youâre at a very impressionable age. So I donât want to give any like broad recommendations, but I think the âŠHost
Iâm not asking you to tell everyone else what to do. Iâm actually just asking what your impression was since you did both, you know, and then, because youâre in a relatively kind of I think mainstream use case for both of those decisions. Like you werenât coding since you were a little kid. Right? So you kind of got to college age, were exposed to programming and then found yourself really liking both the CS youâre taking and then thinking, âOh, I want to do this as a job.â You kind of covered both bases, you know what I mean? Thereâs probably a lot more people in that position then were coding since they were little kids and theyâre going to be more and more of them because itâs been a very strong job market for like a decade now. So I just think from that point of view, itâs generally interesting to a lot of people, but I think you should just speak from your own experience.Taylor Milliman
So I think my own experience, Iâd say that you really donât need a CS degree. And I think I would even, I would say that I do think a lot of the traditional way that we teach Computer Science right now is a little bit broken. So I think I had a lot of frustrations with that system. Iâm not sure if coding bootcamps are necessarily the solution either, but I think ⊠I donât know if youâve heard of Lambda Schoo, but itâs a little bit of a longer a coding boot camp and I, you know ⊠models like this are really going to be, just continue to increase in popularity in the coming years because at this point Iâve just seen so many people that had never written code and then can get good enough in six months and get a job at a company. And I think youâll probably learn more the faster you just get a job at a company and start learning like that. So that would be my like overarching opinion.Host
And I guess have you seen other friends or colleagues that have gone that route and then they become employable? Right. So thatâs, it is a way into the field now that didnât exist. Certainly not 10 years ago, maybe not five.Taylor Milliman
It is definitely. I think it depends on what type of person you are. Because I would definitely say itâs harder to break in that way. But yeah, it is possible.Host
And maybe full circle, coming back to the start of the conversation about the personal marketing and the personal branding and so on. That probably helps as well to get to break in.Taylor Milliman
For sure. Yeah, I think definitely the personal personal branding is essential, especially if you donât have a degree in Computer Science.Host
If you donât have those other sort of more traditional attributes, itâs a way to, thereâs maybe new what new opportunities and new ways to get into the field.Taylor Milliman
Itâs trending in the right direction I think.Host
So what did you feel was broken about the traditional curriculum or how it was taught to you?Taylor Milliman
Well, like I said, I think itâs just not enough about building things. So I donât want to discourage people from getting into the algorithms. I think thatâs interesting and potentially useful.Host
What I think is the missed opportunity here is that a lot of the theory could be brought to life and the value of it could be demonstrated through what youâre talking about, through it being applied, combining what youâre saying with the fundamentals that are in the traditional curriculum, where if you learn these concepts by building things it would bring them ⊠the value would be more apparent and it would also answer kind of the concern you have. Like what is the point of this? And Iâm not, am I actually learning to build to be an engineer and build things, you know?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. No, I think thatâs definitely true. I also think Iâm naturally maybe like slightly overcritical of, I know I have this tendency to be a little bit over-critical because itâs like you see, you see all the places that it could be better, naturally. Whereas like, Iâm guessing that if you go the other route, like you see all the benefits of school.Host
So, you know, I had this algorithms professors who would cover an entire three chalkboards with the mathematical proof of a perfect hashing algorithm, and Iâm not going to need to understand that because Iâm going to be using hash tables in standard libraries in any modern language and platform Iâm using. But at the same time I felt like it gave me this sort of conceptual framework for thinking about problems where I could see a lot of times that things that used to look very, very different problems to me actually had kind of the same underlying patterns to them. And I found it to be very powerful after I was going to school for a couple of years, I kind of felt myself being able to see things in a different way than some of the people I had been working with already for years.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think, I think thatâs definitely true and there is a lot of value and really understanding something at its most basic level. Like one experience that I had that was huge for me was I was a TA. And so I taught, Iâve taught recursion so many times and I swear if I had just learned recursion once ⊠like looking back on that, I thought I knew what recursion was. And then like ears later, I was still learning more things about it. I think my favorite thing about kind of some of the other models is you really do get some immersion learning, which is something I feel like I missed. And parts of college it would be like, you never, you donât know, you still donât know what, what does it feel like to write code for four hours a day or something like that. And so I think for me that was the real actual value of it. Not just having a portfolio of things, but it gives you the confidence that your skills are real once you start building big projects. And the world just kind of opens up after that. I think it really, it makes your skills feel real and then that gives you the confidence that youâre you donât need to wait to become a software engineer. You can start right now.Host
So we just ended part one of the interview with Taylor recorded about six months before the second part of the interview, just before he started at Thumbtack. Now we pick up the conversation six months later and we get an update from Taylor about whether his actual experiences have met his expectations, confounded his expectations and just get another perspective on what heâs learned in the first leg of his journey as a professional engineer.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, exactly. I think like kind of the almost the saddest part would just be if those growth curves like do start to slow down. Because I mean I think weâve all felt that at certain points. You know, itâs like sometimes I look back on periods in my life and you realize how intense that learning curve ⊠I mean I think like, I still am learning so much now, but I do look back on the point where I was like, really starting to get into coding as just like ridiculous growth. Just absolute obsession. And I think those times are definitely special. And when youâre a kid for sure, thatâs like every day.Host
You can think about a depth of knowledge in a different way versus like the rate at which youâre learning and it becomes like a thing of yes, I am not learning new things about programming as fast as I was many years ago, letâs say. But at the same time, the kind of holistic way I can approach a problem and solve a problem and solve the entire problem for a business has improved a lot. And I think you accrue experience and then you can go deeper and more completely into problems, you know, and maybe itâs a different kind of growth and, you know, it doesnât need to be as rapid.Taylor Milliman
Thatâs not necessarily desirable though to always be learning at this really fast rate.Host
Right. Like itâs, you do need periods where you, you gather and then, you gather knowledge and you then apply it. And in the application you learn a great deal because youâre focused more narrowly on a particular problem and youâre applying all this knowledge to create something that is a solution to a particular problem.Taylor Milliman
Yeah. Thatâs, thatâs kind of a good analogy to bring it back into, you know, some of the university stuff that we talked about earlier, you know, it is kind of interesting. Itâs like, when you, when you are at a company, itâs mostly application. Every ⊠most of your learning is directly related to solving a problem. And I think there is definitely, no one would argue this. But thereâs definitely something to be said with long periods of open-ended learning.Host
Yeah. And so it is definitely a balance. Yeah. Thatâs a really good way to think about it. As you were saying that, I was thinking âThatâs basically the difference between going to college and Stack Overflow,â you know?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. Stack Overflow is what I like to call âjust in time learning.âHost
Itâs like âThis is not working. I need this to work for my job today.â Yeah. Like thatâs sort of the breadth that youâre going to go seek the answer to. You know, you donât need all the theory underneath it. You need to understand enough to be certain that itâs solving your problem.Taylor Milliman
Yeah. I think kind of one thing that I would love to see more of in higher education is more of like a barbell approach. So you take like some amount of things are interesting and important to learn about, but not immediately useful, which I think university does great. But then also kind of on the other side of the barbell are things that actually are immediately useful and then you can go out and apply right there. Which I think internships kind of can help you fill that gap. But I think thereâs definitely still kind of that missing piece a little bit. One gap that I see in my own skills is itâs like there are ⊠there is a collection of skills that are both useful and that you will never learn on the job. So one example for me is like really understanding how databases work, right? I use databases every day, most programmers do and you know, I learned how to query those but to really understand performance implications, how they work, query planning. I mean youâre going to have to go out of your day to day if you want to learn that.Host
Yeah. Thatâs an interesting example that Iâm really close to you personally because Iâve spent a lot in my career in data and I took a really good course in grad school on exactly that. How databases are implemented and basically it was like an operating systemâs kind of class, but all of that database implementation, you know, and databases are really ⊠thereâs a lot of similarity to operating systems. They basically re-implement a lot of the primitives, at least traditionally did implement a lot of the primitives around IO and scheduling because thatâs really the core of where their performance comes from.You could generalize what you just said to be: we as programmers use black box tools, right? Starting with the program, any programming language which compiles to some executable code, which runs in some runtime environment. You donât think about any of that when youâre writing the code, youâre writing the code. Like itâs a little story writing about what you want to happen, you know, and thatâs a black box. Any external resource you use, the network is a black box to you and the database you use, right? And so on and so on. All the protocols of the Internet. So thatâs really what software engineering is, is building these abstraction layers so that you can operate at higher layers. Think about the cloud itself. Itâs an incredible advancement of that idea and the amount of power that ⊠what it enables someone to not think about yet have these primitives at their disposal. Itâs incredible.
Taylor Milliman
Yeah. I guess that is kind of where a lot of kind of tension between these two groups comes from is basically like, like how deep behind how many layers should we peel this abstraction back? Like in, in my mind, do most people need to learn assembly? Probably not. But do most people really need to understand how database indices are created and how they work? I think probably.Host
Well you would benefit from it. So again, I come back to this, Iâve said this in a lot of my shows, but my point of view on all this is very specific to the fact that I didnât study anything technical undergrad. Later after Iâd been working for years, I sort of fell in love with programming and I was really motivated to be self-taught. Then I took a certificate, a couple certificate classes in C and C++ and, and it was really interesting actually to start with those languages because they donât hide a lot of these concerns from you. And then itâs like what you were saying where I was working professionally, but I felt these gaps in my knowledge and I went back to grad school and it filled in tremendous amounts of kind of background understanding of how things are actually working underneath and I felt like it made a really big difference in how I could approach problems and solve problems. And so itâs like you donât need to know, but knowing is powerful. But letâs just say thereâs a whole distribution of work you could do as a programmer. Right?Taylor Milliman
Huge.Host
The more you know, the more out of that distribution you can participate in.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, thatâs a great way to put it.Host
And so like, I think itâs not a either/or or bad or good. Maybe itâs cast too much in terms of status or just really these really strong opinions about âYou have to do x, y, z,â rather than it being seen as this continuum that you could just move around and then move across, you know?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. No, I think thatâs definitely true. I actually think thatâs why a lot of people donât end up getting into CS, because a lot of it is just kind of this one track go hyper-technical. And thatâs not the way that you have to approach it. Like just kind of building like fun websites, itâs really not, itâs not that technical. Like I donât want to get into the âAnyone can codeâ or whatever debate. But yeah I think thereâs a huge spectrum and the reason some people think it is just so hard is because theyâre thinking about it as this like hyper-technical thing, which is just one route.Host
And to your point, building a website, itâs a little more than that, but itâs a lot more about learning how to carefully edit these text files to get things right then needing to understand exactly what they do, and you understand what they do through looking at your page in the browser and then you get that back and forth thing. I donât think you need more than that to get started. And I donât ⊠I think youâre right, like we should be making this as accessible as possible to get started and then itâs a lifetime of learning that you can engage in. Thatâs why I enjoy it because itâs so deep and multidisciplinary and thereâs so much technical to learn, but then being good at it involves all these other aspects to do that end up in [producing] valuable software.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think itâs really interesting when I kind of bring this back to places that Iâve worked. Last summer when I was working at Braintree, like I didnât realize it at the time, but the work that I was doing was extremely technical and pretty in-the-weeds and hard and I just thought âThis is just what like all professional software engineering is; this is how it works.â It was my first internship and I though OK, like this, itâs just like super technical. And now that I work at Thumbtack, I just realized how different ⊠that it really can vary between companies in kind of the majority of roles. Itâs like really thinking about product is as big of an asset to you as your software engineering skills.Host
For sure. I mean youâre valuable in a context, you know, not in a vacuum, which is like a big other aspect of this [idea that] the only way to be a professional software engineer is to have this technical depth, because thatâs only one aspect of being a valuable engineer. Like the other aspect is youâre building the right thing, not just the right way but the right thing.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, and I think as we kind of build more levels of abstraction, the roles need to be some people that need to really understand and be able to peel back these layers. But I think more and more as thereâs higher levels of abstraction, being able to think about product and about other aspects outside of the type of work that youâre doing, itâs just going to be increasingly important.Host
You know, when we last talked, it was right before you started this first job and now youâve been been there six months and weâve kind of already implicitly talked a lot about this, but you know, do you feel like there are any specific things youâve learned so far or expectations youâve had that were not met, or things that were surprising?Taylor Milliman
Yeah. So I would say like one really big surprising thing that I would kind of tell other people is processes, company culture, how companies function varies way more than I expected. And so I would just encourage you early in your career, try at least a few places, because there are lot of differences and because I tried to ⊠companies that on paper are fairly similar, like both fairly small, both have offices in San Francisco, both kind of started within the last like 15 years or so. And I found absolutely huge differences. So to kind of dive into those, one is just like, I do think how often you deploy code just kind of permeates your life as a software engineer. And so last summer we would deploy a once a week. Now itâs like we just click a submit button and your code will start rolling out. So itâs like you can kind of deploy whenever you want to within reason. Thereâs lots of guidelines here, but I think that makes a huge difference. You know, I wouldnât say that. I think thereâs good reasons why both companies did what they did, the deploy schedules that they have. But I will say if itâs possible to go somewhere with like a really fast deploy, so that just tightens the feedback loop for you. So the quicker that you can get your code reviewed and then get your code into production, the faster your feedback loop, then in my mind, the faster youâre going to be learning.Host
Interesting. So do you think it affects ⊠thereâs this whole Conwayâs Law, which is that the organization of the software itself, and maybe we could even argue the process, reflects the organization, the structure of the organization, of the people in the organization?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think so. Iâve also heard kind of a similar quote, which is like, âFirst we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.â And so it starts out as this just kind of process thing that youâre creating. And then I do really believe it becomes part of just how you, how you plan projects, how you think about how aggressive you can be with your timelines, like all these things. Itâs definitely, I mean, itâs changed the way I work, honestly.Host
Itâs like this idea that you can decisively act to change things and fix things, right? Like right before we got on this call, you know, I happen to be on a call for my team and there was an issue and itâs after official release hours on Friday. But I know I just can just ask to do this, make a quick change, push a quick change out, all thatâs automated, all that will work, and then weâll be getting information we need to fully solve this problem on Monday. Like just knowing that you can break problems down like that and solve them by making changes to production. You know, itâs very ⊠it gives you a lot of power to help the business and then you feel good about the work youâre doing, you know?Taylor Milliman
Yeah, absolutely. Kind of another thing that I think is interesting that really surprised me was I think in the last interview I said something along the lines of being a little bit critical of pair programming basically, and now being somewhere where we donât pair program, I actually see some of the immense value of it. And so what I would say is just I really think in general, we really undervalue how educational it can be to just observe someone and learn through that. Like weâve kind of ⊠I think this actually used to be, if you go back in history, this was an extremely popular method of learning. And now weâve kind of, weâve kind of stopped using it for the most part. I do think that extreme pair programming is probably not the best fit for some companies. But instituting that, like coming to Thumbtack I just realize how, again with I think I was talking about it before, Iâm tightening feedback loops. Pair programming is one of the fastest feedback loops that you can have. Youâre writing the code and as youâre writing it, youâre getting feedback on it from someone sitting right next to you. I definitely have some appreciation for that now and I think without that at my internship I would have been pretty lost. And kind of going alongside that, one definite struggle I had was the approach at Thumbtack for onboarding. Itâs much more just like throw you into the water and see if you could swim, right? Like I donât think they think about it like that, but itâs just like, itâs moving very quickly. People have less time to pair with you every day. And so I think, itâs really interesting to see those two approaches and I definitely have a lot more appreciation for pair programming.Host
Thatâs really interesting because basically what youâre talking about alluding to this historical model of learning this way, his apprenticeship âŠTaylor Milliman
I donât like it when people portray apprenticeship as this like perfect model that we moved away from for no reason. But similarly, I think that there are places where it could be super valuable. Like another example is, does anyone really know how you learn to be a good manager?Host
Yeah, Iâve had that conversation on other episodes and Iâve been in that situation myself where I suddenly transitioned from individual contributor to leading a team with no training and no support, you know, and it happened to also be a pretty time-pressured and stressful situation for other external reasons. But yeah, itâs one of the worst aspects of our industry is how we ⊠the lack of support and training for people transitioning into manager roles.Taylor Milliman
I just have to wonder like, what if you just had this person basically shadow a great manager for a few days? Like I feel super lucky that Iâve had just an excellent manager at Thumbtack and so I always feel I should be taking notes so that if Iâm a manager, like I try to remember to do this stuff because otherwise I just donât know how you pick up those skills.Host
Do you have any other thoughts about things that have been surprising to you so far or things that have gone really well, better than you expected? Like maybe what were you most worried about going into your first job and then, has that panned out?Taylor Milliman
Hmm. Thatâs hard because, I think, when I kind of look back, I did have very little expectations. Like Iâd kind of, when we interviewed, Iâd just gotten back from this trip and I was almost really like in the mindset of like, âOh yeah, Iâm about to start work in a few days.â But I do think kind of one of the biggest concerns, and I think it is just a really hard part, is like, is the initial ramp up the first one to two months that youâre at the company, youâre working with a stack youâve never worked with before, people that youâve ever worked with before and a product that you probably donât know that well. And I think thatâs just like, itâs difficult. And I think you realize that like thatâs going to probably be fairly difficult. And most companies you joined, the only difference is you start to get used to that and expect that it will be difficult. I mean thatâs a hard part of joining a company I think.Host
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And how much of, how much did you feel like you needed skills that you have never had before? Like, in terms of workflow tools, working with teams, all this kinds of stuff, which you kind of havenât done âtil youâve done it.Taylor Milliman
One thing I will say is thereâs a number of times in my first kind of month or two where I just thought, I wonder how I would try to do this if I, without what I know, what I learned from my internship, like I probably would have gone down some really dumb, ridiculous rabbit holes if I didnât know. Like, this is how people do. Itâs like, I donât, I donât think I knew what it meant to grep for something before my internship. That might sound wild, but I didnât really know what that was. And just so many things like that.Host
Well, like basic code reading skills.Taylor Milliman
I mean thatâs the second one: just how do you navigate around a code base that is at least 10x anything that youâve ever seen before? Super helpful. But I would say for the most part, it wasnât necessarily like brand new skills. I think it was pretty similar to the ramp up for my internship. Itâs just like you kind of forget that this is pretty hard. You donât know anyone and youâre in a code base that you donât know working with tools that you donât know. So it wasnât necessarily that it was like super new, it was just that I kind of forgot that all of the different aspects that it takes to ramp up and be productive as an engineer.Host
Right. So itâs just some of it as a matter of setting reasonable expectations for yourself and keeping perspective. Right.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, I think itâs definitely something that you can get better at with time. And then also just being patient. I think definitely as a new grad, like most of the time youâre going to be questioning, âOh look what if I donât learn this, or what if I canât learn this?â Or you kind of put unnecessary pressure on yourself, whereas eventually after youâve done this a few times, you just like, this is how it goes. Like thereâs kind of the two weeks where you have no idea what youâre doing. And then it clicks and before you know it, youâre like pretty productive. Another kind of more specific thing that I was not very good at, a kind of skill that I had to pick up was like, when should you ask the question? Like when, when should you reach out? When do you decide that youâre like stuck enough that you should ask someone else a question. I mean I think, I think this is part partially a company culture thing and partially just a matter of like, you PR mo I would say a lot of people early in their career donât ask enough questions. Um, and one thing that I really liked that my manager told me it was basically itâs, itâs just a very clear guideline which is like do your due diligence, right? Like spend 15 to 20 minutes. Like think about all the things that you would think about if someone asked you this question and if you still canât figure out. Just ask someone. Um, and I think that that was super helpful for me because I think not asking enough questions can be super detrimental. And you realize once youâve been here for awhile, like people that have been here for two years, if they know someone will be able to answer that question extremely quickly rather than Iâm spending half an hour going down the rabbit hole, they donât hesitate.Taylor Milliman
Kind of another thing along those lines that I found out, I was like if you can ask someone for a higher, a high-level over view of a system, you can often dig into the details. So like if you just know like these are the three big things this thing does. Then you have the framework to kind of actually go deep into the code and all of these trunks of code into this framework of higher-level components.Host
You you have with that amount of context. Then you, if you go and do your job, which is to read the code, you have some context of what youâre looking at and things start to make sense. Much more sense. Yeah, itâs interesting. Iâve just, as I said, like we just added two people on the team Iâm on. As I mentioned, Iâve been involved with onboarding the whole lot and Iâve been trying to balance this exact thing. The balance there is that they, that theyâre going to have to go write code that like thereâs a line somewhere in there between you help them understand what they need to do and then they need to go do it.Taylor Milliman
Yeah, 100% itâs like you donât really understand something until youâre actually forced to do it.Host
Yeah. And then again to explain it to the next person so they can do it. Anything else you want to counsel people who are about to start their journey as professional engineers? Maybe letâs say youâve gone through your first leg of it.Taylor Milliman
Oh Iâm super happy with my company decision overall. I think where you choose to work matters more than I thought it did and I would also say just optimize for learning early in your career is the best choice that you can make. A big part of having fun as well I think is getting kind of a little bit too much responsibility and having to figure it out. A lot of the really fundamentals are kind of the most important thing. And what I mean by that is, the fundamentals of being good at your job, in my opinion, are one, really caring, to like taking care of yourself. And I think just those things like caring and taking care of yourself will go a long way. Actually, I think a lot of employees donât have those things. And so those are kind of the fundamentals. And then obviously like your technical skills will be important, but if you care enough, youâll figure out what you need to get the job done. -
Show Notes
Topics: Alpha Go, Data Engineering, Data Science, Information Systems, Machine Learning, Local Search, Location-Based Apps, Monetization, Natural Language Processing, Objective Functions, Optimization, Podcasting, Self-driving Cars, Sentiment Analysis, Social Apps
Companies and Organizations
Local Maximum Podcast Web Local Maximum Podcast iTunes Local Maximum Podcast SoundCloud Luminary Media Foursquare New York University - Masters in Information Systems New York University - Stern School of Business StickyMap YodleIntroduction
NOTE: This episode was recorded in April 2018. Since then Max has moved on from Foursquare to join Luminary Media as a Machine Learning Engineer.
After working for a few years as a software engineer, Max Sklar found himself exposed to and fascinated by more open-ended problems while studying machine learning and data mining in the MS Information Systems program at NYU. He created a location-based app StickyMap so he and friends could put âmarkersâ naming locations onto Google Maps. This was fun but the app didnât take off. After a stint working on local search at Yodle, he discovered Foursquare, recognized their gamified user participation would drive their map app to large scale, and talked his way into a job there as a machine learning engineer. Max spent the next 7 years doing machine learning and helping to build products at the leading edge of the industry. More recently he launched the podcast âThe Local Maximumâ as a forum for sharing his own opinions about the impact of AI and machine learning and for interviewing guests working in the field. Itâs a treat to talk to someone who can actually claim to be an ML veteran, and we dig into the challenges of and differences between data science, machine learning engineering and data engineering, and talk about the crucial role of humans in ML-driven products. Itâs equally fun to talk to a fellow podcaster about his goal of using his show to foster a dialogue with his audience and to push them to explore ideas outside their âlocal maximum.â
Guest Bio
Max Sklar is the host of The Local Maximum Podcast, a weekly podcast with interviews and analysis covering ideas in AI, emerging technology, and current events. The most recent episodes and the archive can be found at localmaxradio.com.
The bulk of his work as a machine learning engineer was at Foursquare, where his worked there included building Foursquare City Guideâs critically acclaimed 10-point venue rating system and the Marsbot app. More recently he led the development of a causality model for Foursquareâs Ad Attribution product.
He currently works at Luminary Media where he is transferring these skills to build a recommendation engine for podcasts.
Links
Facebook: The Local Maximum Podcast YouTube: Talk: âUsing Location Data with Marsbot - Max Sklar, Foursquareâ YouTube: Talk: âMax Sklarâs Yale Computer Society Talk, April 2018â YouTube: Talk: âWorkshop on Urban Data Science 2015 - Foursquare Presenationâ Paper (Co-author): âDetecting Trending Venues Using Foursquareâs Dataâ Paper (Co-author): âTimely Tip Selection for Foursquare Recommendationsâ Paper (Author): âFast MLE Computation for the Dirichlet Multinomialâ Twitter: Max Sklar Twitter - Lumnary Media Podcasts: Max Sklar Foursquare: Max Sklar Linear Digressions Podcast: âAre machine learning engineers the new data scientists?âThe Local Maximumâ Episodes Related to Topics Covered in this Episode
âEpisode 43 - Self Driving Cars and the Cycle of Adoptionâ âEpisode 34 - Data Engineering with Joe Crobak, Foundations of Smart Softwareâ âEpisode 7 - [Foursquare founder] Dennis Crowley on Inspiration, Innovation, and Future TechâTranscriptHost
Hello and welcome to âUsing Reflection,â a podcast about humans engineering. And weâre joined today by Max Sklar and Max is a machine learning engineer at Foursquare. Why donât you go ahead and introduce yourself Max and tell us a little about your background and weâll get into the conversation. Weâre gonna have a great conversation today about your career in machine learning and how things have changed and also get into your awesome podcast, âThe Local Maximumâ and it should be a lot of fun. Take it away.Max Sklar
Great. Yeah. Hi Mark. Thanks for having me on. I am a machine learning engineer at Foursquare about coming up on seven years now, which is like crazy. And youâre right, I have a podcast and this is my first time doing an audio recording on someone elseâs show since I started the podcast. So very excited about that. Iâm already finding a lot of things due to this podcast. Like I found your podcast. I like you have a lot of interesting conversations. Itâs really great.Host
So, you know, one reason I thought it was interesting to talk to you was you, youâve been in the machine learning space and had that title and been doing that kind of engineering work while the entire field essentially blew up around us, while the term data scientist was invented, while big data infrastructure, uh, became a huge part of cloud platform offerings and moved into the business mainstream. All of these trends, you know, in these last seven years, you could really say. So I was interested to start with, you know, your perspective on that evolution and maybe you could start with your personal story as we were talking about before we got on mic, just how you moved in that direction, and then maybe you could talk about what youâve seen changes in the field around you.Max Sklar
Letâs start with how I got into machine learning. I, you know, uh, it was, well, I did take machine learning as an Undergrad and that was, that was fun. I was into it, but I wasnât able, I, you know, I wasnât able to find any particular work in that. I guess what we were doing at Wireless Generation â and I think we should probably mention that we both worked together at Wireless Generation way back in probably I want to say 2008 â so that was a long time ago. Yeah. And so it was, it kind of seems like we might be going in that direction at Wireless Generation where we were doing data analysis in order to do smart instruction plans, but we never kind of got there. At least I personally never got the chance to work on that stuff.Host
Can we just interrupt for a second and maybe frame that by saying what kinds of, what kinds of products Wireless was making and who the audience was so people have a little context there.Max Sklar
Wireless Generation was, oh my God, itâs 10 years ago, Mark. Iâm trying, we were doing the front end a lot for assessments, like reading and math assessments. Mostly for a young children, if I remember correctly, it was like K [kindergarten] through three [third grade] for the most part. We had other grades too. And the point was to do those assessments. We had a good front end for it and the Palm Pilot. And then the back end would do some data analysis and you know, would tell teachers how to do instructions with the kids in order to kind of maximize their effectiveness as teachers. So that sounded really good, but it wasnât, you know, it wasnât very large scale machine learning type stuff. It was more like, you know, kind of handmade rules type stuff that weâre already given to us by the sort of, by the education industry or, you know, if I remember correctly, like the testing companies and things like that.Host
So youâd have these domain experts who were the ones formulating the rules and then the data analysis was identifying patterns that match the rules.Max Sklar
Yes. Yeah. And so it wasnât, you know, there was nothing, there was nothing to do on the engineering and product building side other than kind of taking those specs and executing on, which thereâs some interesting problems there, but it wasnât the kind of open-ended problem that I wanted to work on. And I sort of didnât know at the time. But when I got to Grad school and I started learning about more about machine learning and natural language processing, I was like, oh, these are the problems that I think are going to capture my interest because theyâre so open-ended and theyâre so, you know, you donât know. You donât know where. You have to kind of figure out where the stopping point is. You have to kind of figure out what it is youâre going to get the machine to learn.And I just always liked the idea of, you know, rather than having us program the computer and trying to figure out every single rule that comes up, just kind of figure out a way to have the computer program itself. So that way we can kind of like sit back and have it have to do its work. And it just seems to me in the long run thatâs going to be, thatâs going to get us to a place where weâre much more effective. And it turns out that in machine learning, thereâs a lot of stuff that, you know, humans have to do all the time. Itâs not that, um, you know, itâs not that computers just go off on their own and figure it all out. Although I have built some systems that do get smarter over time without much intervention. And thatâs always really cool. Thatâs always when I feel like, you know, wow. I built this, you know, a few years ago and now itâs still working and itâs getting smarter because it has more data. Iâm always just like amazed when that happens.
Host
And is that related to the open-ended idea? Are those two things connected?Max Sklar
Yeah, I mean, the open-ended idea is that itâs not just, you know, hey, you have a client or you know a company that wants a specific thing done and then you have to execute on that specific thing. Itâs kind of an open-ended research question. You know, for example, some of the things we do on an ad just to bring in some of the things we started doing at Foursquare ⊠whatâs the sentiment of a tip? Is someoneâs text and itâs like a tip and a tip at Foursquare is like two or three sentences that tell you whether a place is good or not. Little reviews that people leave, and can we automatically detect whether itâs positive or negative. You know, I donât, nobodyâs coming at you with the rules. Itâs just like what, how, how accurate can you make it? And also like, whatâs the, you know, whatâs your metric for how well youâre doing?Host
Right. And even thatâs ⊠whatâs interesting about what youâre saying there as part of the openendedness is, you know, as engineers, we need to make things precise and quantitative, right? And thatâs like how do you make that qualitative judgement quantitative enough to even define success engineered to a goal, and then measure whether youâre reaching the goal?Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah. I mean, itâs oftentimes I think thereâs an arms race between the machine learning algorithms that figure out how to optimize for a certain objective function. And then thereâs kind of working on the objective function itself and what that should be doing because, and this is probably true when you are managing an organization as well. I think if you kind of set very specific goals for people to hit, you know, letâs say, you know, you say this quarter weâre going to work on maximizing our revenue, letâs say. And then, you know, you have all your rewards and bonuses based around that particular goal. Well, you might end up overdoing it. You might end up having people you know do things that are good for the short term but bad for the long term.And the analogy Iâm drawing is itâs the same thing for the machine. If you have a certain objective function, sometimes itâll get too smart that it does well on the objective function, but it doesnât do very well on what youâre trying to accomplish. And so the objective function sometimes gets more and more complicated. A good example like that recently that we came up with at Foursquare is, you know, we have our Pilgrim technology, which is our âsnap to place.â So that takes the data from your phone and tries to figure out exactly which venue youâre in. So to give an example, like, are you in the Starbucks? Are you in, are you at the Dunkin Donuts? Are you at the mall? Well thereâs a certain issue with the mall where it was always, you know, it would snap people to the mall, but it was very bad at telling you which place exactly you are inside the mall. Even though we have those places in our database just because it was always more accurate when it just says mall. So it, and we wanted the data and the places inside the mall. And so that was a change. They had to make a change on that team and you have to make that change by, you know, fiddling with the objective function, not with the algorithm itself.
Host
I see. So a large part of the design then and the human aspect of this is trying to capture the goal, which is human-defined in the objective function, which is what the system is learning toward and optimizing toward.Max Sklar
Yeah. Yeah. It would be nice if you had one goal to work towards and then you are, weâre constantly researching the algorithm and the data and the features to get to that goal. But one thing you learn is life is never like that.Host
Right. And in fact, as you were talking about this, I was just thinking how reductionist and challenging it is to have just one objective function. You know how like you were talking about managing an organization, well, your example was the objective was motivating too much behavior towards short term gain, but of course like thatâs an example where very quickly you see there are multiple goals and they have multiple timeframes. And how do you capture that in one objective function? The nice thing about human interaction is you could set more than one goal for people and humans can think about that and, and work with that.Max Sklar
Yeah. And oftentimes thereâs a lot unsaid with humans and human learning that they pick up on that. But thatâs why, you know, thatâs why experience is valued and thatâs why, you know, human intelligence is still valued. Thank GodHost
Weâve got another minute before obsolescence.Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah, sure. We do. We have plenty of time.Host
If we want to backtrack and sort of, youâre at Wireless and youâre noticing that thereâs this opportunity to attack these more open-ended problems with data. You go to Grad school, you are exposed to those problems and youâre, you know, it sounds like you were engaged by those ideas. So then how did you keep moving in that direction?Max Sklar
Well, a few things came together at once. So I was, the grad school program I was in was the Information Systems program at NYU. What it was was just a half the classes were from the Computer Science department and half the classes were from the Business school. So it was kinda nice. I got to exercise both parts of my brain. I didnât want to do a program that was 100% Computer Science for three years because I already did that as an undergrad. And I already had a job as an engineer for several years before that. So it was kind of like, whatâs the point? Even that summer, the summer that I was in grad school, I did a design and research internship at Columbia because, you know, I was like, I donât want to do coding. Iâm going to do years of coding. You know, Iâve done years of coding.But I think when I was there, I took some classes on data mining and machine learning, both from a business school perspective and from a, and from an engineering perspective. So I took, you know, for example, Yan Lecunâs class at NYU on machine learning. But before that I took the data mining class at Stern to get an idea of, okay, you know, what are, how do people in the business school think about this? What are their, you know, what are their goals? And it was really great to kind of get both. And then at the same time I was sort of, I was learning about, okay, I had been doing a lot of, a lot in the field of local search before that. So when I was an undergrad, I had a website called stickymaps.com. Itâs still up.
Host
That was a site where what people would do is it, it was, okay. The Google maps API had just come out and I was kind of thinking, what can I do with this? And one of the things you can do with this is you can have people place little stickers on the map, I guess we call them stickers now because Foursquare Swarm has stickers. But back then we called them markers, little icons on the map, and leave messages and that was a lot of fun. Uh, I was never able to figure out how to turn a business into that. But then I also worked on local search at a Yodle, which was a search engine marketing company that I did after Wireless Generation. And so I had a little bit of experience there and I had some interest there. And so, and I got with StickyMap I really got a kick out of building something like a consumer application that a lot of people were actually using. Not that a lot of people were using that, but you know, my friends were using it. So that was kind of exciting.Max Sklar
I discovered Foursquare in the summer of 2010. Uh, the way I discovered, actually discovered it through a class that I was taking, it was called electronic communities. It was at Stern and I was assigned to work on a local business in Nolita on how to get their word out on, on the Internet, on social media. It was like a womenâs beauty salon in Nolita. They did like the nail polish art. So I was like, I donât really know too much about this, but Iâm going to give it a, Iâm going to give it a try.You know, weâve talked about Facebook, we talked about Yelp and I looked at Foursquare and I was like, oh, this sounds really interesting. Are these the people who are like competing to be mayor of, you know, the different locations around the city? Uh, I think I like overheard something about that in my internship. So I decided to look more into it. And as I looked into it, I was like, oh, this is what I should have been doing with StickyMap. You know, this is why, you know, Yodleâs product was not, was not as inspiring because it was, it was an enterprise product. It wasnât really a product to be the worldâs best, a local recommendation engine, but you know, what Dennis Crowley had done, and the team at the time had done with Foursquare was just really interesting. They made it a lot of fun and I was like, this is the way to go.
Um, and so I saw Dennis give a talk at NYU and I tried to talk to him in person, but he immediately got swarmed by a bunch of groupies asking questions. And so I just got his card and I emailed him later and itâs kind of embarrassing email because itâs about like, you know, itâs, itâs much longer than I think an email should be. But then he writes back and he, and one of his questions was, are you like a machine learning superstar by any chance? And I was like, okay, well, I guess this is, Iâve got to say yes, right. Iâve got to say yes.
Host
It sounds like the innovations you saw at Foursquare where he figured out relative to Yodle, right, was he figured out how to make this a consumer-facing rather than her a business product. And the gamification aspect made it appealing. So people were participating, which was kind of the product question you hadnât been able to figure out with StickyMap. Right?Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah, thatâs exactly true. And I mean, Yodle wasnât trying to be a consumer app and that was one of the things that was maybe a little bit frustrating to work on it because, you know, of course it was shut down a little bit after I left, maybe a couple of years after I left. But it was just like, you know, the purpose of it was to drive leads to their clients. So it was never going to be the, you know, one of the greatest recommender systems in the world. I hope Iâm not throwing them under the bus too much, but itâs just, it wasnât, the purpose of the product wasnât to be the best recommender system, whereas Foursquareâs was. So I think with my experience on StickyMap and with Yodle, I was able to identify the Foursquare product more readily than maybe other people could.Host
Right. And you could see the strengths and sort of the cleverness of the fit found in the solution they had found in the market and youâre like, yeah, this, Iâve been in this space and this is solving these problems. And it makes sense. And I think this can work. And early too. So for people who maybe didnât use Foursquare in the early days, this is like what, seven, eight years ago now already and in its beginnings, it was this idea where you would go to these different places and be the first right and kind of just say, Iâm the mayor of this place. And so there was this gamification aspect that drove usage. And then the second thing people are doing right from the beginning is sort of posting where they were and it was this sort of peer to peer network of all your contacts so they would know where you were. To facilitate social interaction. Is that an accurate description?Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah, that is accurate. And we still do that. We still have our swarm app, which is the app that we have that does, you know, thatâs the gamification aspect of it. Thatâs where people check into places, tell their where they are and they ⊠thereâs kind of games and stickers and mayorships and stuff. And the, one of the things that I added as like a hack day project a couple of years ago was you get extra points in Swarm if you actually created the venue and added to our venue database or if one of your friends did or one of your friends of friends did. And so the reason why I like that is because it encourages people to add places to our database and be first. So Iâm always really excited from the first one to like a grand opening of a place and then I add it to the Foursquare database and then later on I see, oh, you know, a thousand people have checked it.Well maybe I havenât gotten anything that big, but maybe like 300 people have checked in there. Wow. And I was the one who created it. So I get kind of a kick out of that and then I kind of see and then sort of, I see sometimes my friends, you know, created the bagel shop down the street and I was like, âWhat? You made this place? No way.â You know? So thatâs always, itâs always a lot of fun. It kind of encouraged people to create the database. So it was sort of a fun way to get the power of the crowd, which we, was kind of, we talked a lot about back then, but itâs hard to actually get the crowd to work together in a productive way.
Host
Yeah. And itâs, in fact, as you were saying that, I was thinking the same thing. Itâs hard to think of another Internet business that really you could argue solved the or, or figured out a way to tap into this crowd-sourcing idea very concretely earlier than that. Like they really did help sort of figure out that model, right?Max Sklar
Yeah. I mean, one example is kind of, you know, Wikipedia maybe,Host
Well, Wikipedia is a much more, itâs a much more narrow participation model than like the Foursquare model is actually the social graph model. You scale everyone, you get everyone to participate, you get this entire social graph to participate, and it keeps scaling. Uh, and theyâre, and theyâre not just talking to each other, but theyâre building up the value of the data that theyâre providing you. It is actually essentially feeding back to them as the value theyâre getting from the service. So this was kind of a really good fit for you in terms of you found a place that saw the world and you could say the same way you did where they were looking at this open-ended problem and had to actually devised a product which could itself help them evolve toward solutions, toward features that were valuable to the customers, toward a circular interaction with the customers. And really itâs become a platform, right. For multiple products. So, thatâs really interesting and I can see why you stayed there all this time. You know, maybe this is a good way to segue into kind of how you, you could, maybe we can talk about it through some specific examples of things youâve worked on there, but how your approach to machine learning has changed, maybe what youâve learned. And then back to our original question, how the world has changed around you, how the field has changed around you.Max Sklar
Yeah, well, definitely in terms of just having experience building and shipping machine learning models. Um, you know, one of the things that I have to be careful about, which is probably the same as general software engineers too, but for some reason I feel like itâs a, itâs an even bigger problem when youâre working on machine learning models is you know, these kind of what we call rabbit holes that you could fall into where somethingâs not working quite right. And then, you know, you spend months and months trying to fix it and youâre trying to fix this one thing and you sort of lose track of the big picture. And itâs not something that, itâs not something thatâs easy to identify when itâs happening or itâs not as easy to identify as you as you would think it would be.Itâs like, well, wasting three months of time. That sounds like, it sounds like it would be easy to identify. Itâs usually in hindsight itâs very easy, but itâs, thereâs a lot of, you know, well, I just want to add one more feature to my model or I just want to, you know, make it a little more sophisticated. So it could capture more and which are all good things to do, but you do need to zoom out from time to time and figure out, okay, what is the problem that Iâm trying to solve? We constantly asked that and then whatâs the best thing I need to do next to solve that problem? So thatâs just something that comes with more experience and screwing up a bunch. And I think itâs something thatâs true for software products in general, but âŠ
Host
Right. And, and this, I was going to tie this back to two things you said earlier. So one is the open-endedness of the problem and then the other is the objective function, the definition of a correct objective function or a useful one.Max Sklar
And then being able to ship it. Like oftentimes you get a model that you really like and then you want to deploy it in production. Itâs like, okay, that takes a lot of other work. A lot more work than, than you would think.Host
Yeah, thatâs been a lot of emphasis in the field and in the service cloud services the last couple of years is, you know, these solutions for production scale and production deployment and, and the, the idea of, you know, how do you train against huge datasets and then make predictions very quickly against the model in production. These are very different use cases, right? Kind of coming from the same source. So itâs a really, itâs a lot of challenges there. Right?Max Sklar
Right. I want to get something deployed nice and early because you know, then you know what the problems are going to be in terms of deploying it.Host
So, interesting. So you feel like youâve gained experience in being able to, define the problem more clearly and define objective functions more clearly and be ⊠and, define what is, what is the correct place to sort of, what is the correct kind of quality level set of features to reach, to be able to ship as early as possible. Those are things you feel youâve gotten better at through experience. That completely makes sense.Max Sklar
Absolutely. Yeah. And I, itâs interesting now that you mentioned it, you know, defining the objective function is one of those things that, if I were to make a prediction about the future of AI, when people think, âOh, AI is just going to take over and thereâll be no jobs for humans,â I think defining the objective function, at least at the highest level, is always going to be, the human, you know, thatâs the human job.Host
Right. And, and if you look at the extremely successful current examples, and then now weâre absolutely in a danger zone of being futurists and looking stupid later. And me speaking from âŠMax Sklar
I do that on my show all the time. So I mean thatâs one of the things that I do a lot and, but itâs, well we can talk about it later, but itâs, itâs sort of one of the things that I want to try to do, make predictions. And one of the great things is you can go back later and see where you went wrong and then hopefully do better in the next round.Host
If you look at the current examples there, like Alpha Go and a self-driving cars letâs say, the objective function is ⊠first of all, the objective function in all games is predefined and, in a certain sense, trivial, right? And in, in self driving cars, thereâs a lot of complexity, but the higher level objective function is essentially trivial also. Everyone can describe what happens when they get in a car and go from one place to another, and why theyâre doing it.Max Sklar
You know, the, the types of risks that you can and canât take is a very open question. And I mean, we still need humans to solve all the other problems too. Thatâs not automated yet either, but, but the objective function I think is it would be the last to go.Host
Right. I see. Right. Thatâs sort of the codification of the human goal that the systemâs trying to achieve.Max Sklar
Right. And I donât think, yeah, and human goals are very complicated. Itâs, again, like I said, itâs an arms race. So as the machines get more complicated, our goals are going to have to get more complicated.Host
Maybe we could also talk a little about, uh, was some changes in the field at large that have happened around you and you know, your perspective on those. We were talking before we got started about your title as a machine learning engineer relative to data scientist and that term has arisen in the last few years of what you may be see are the differences between the two. You know, some larger changes youâve seen in the field. Maybe it would be an interesting way to go on this from your point of view as a practitioner for seven years and having had the same title and having have this title of machine learning engineer, all of which are relatively unique attributes from which you can speakMax Sklar
Right, machine learning engineer really isnât my official title. It was just when I joined I wanted to have a good way to, something to put on my LinkedIn page that would describe what, accurately described what I was doing in relation to what I was doing before. So it was like, okay, Iâm still an engineer. Iâm still doing the, Iâm still doing the server side work. I can still ship my code, but I am sort of specializing a little bit more and building machine learning models and you know, solving all of the types of problems that go along with that. So that, that was just that, I donât know if it was a description that was popular back in 2011 when I added it. I kind of just made it up, but now I see it all over the place.So either it, it was there or it was just, itâs, itâs gone from sort of made up to real now. But it was really just descriptive and we were hiring for a data scientist at the time. And so what, what is the difference between the two then? Right. I mean itâs, itâs always, I donât think, I think every company does it differently, which is really hard because when you post something for data scientists, youâre going to get a lot of different types of people. So thereâs sort of the data analyst role, which is someone who doesnât necessarily go into the, your backend server code all the time. But, um, what they do is they take a lot of your data sources and they might go like in the middle of your data pipeline and take some of your data sources and they run analysis on that offline.
Um, and so, you know, a lot of them will use R and Python as well. And theyâre oftentimes really important people to have at your company. We have a bunch of them and they sort of, they can diagnose problems really well and theyâre actually more like scientists in the sense that, you know, theyâll, theyâll go through the scientific method, you know, theyâll come up with a hypothesis. Theyâll test it by writing some queries on the code and then theyâll, theyâll see if thatâs a, thatâs right or wrong. Thatâs, thatâs sort of one role. And then you have my role, which is more of a machine learning engineer where youâre actually, you know, like I said, building, building the ML models and, uh, and deploying them. Um, and the other one is sort of a data engineer who just takes the entire data pipeline and make sure that the pipeline is a whole works, kind of deploys our technology, whether itâs, you know, MapReduce or Scalding or Spark and, you know, theyâre doing a lot of server engineering and a lot of, I mean, itâs not like, you know, Iâll build the, Iâll build the pipeline and write the code for it. But there, there are a lot of people who were working on that stuff who donât necessarily get into the machine learning stuff, but they understand kind of how much, how much memory itâs going to take and how itâs deployed and where it fits into the whole system. So, I mean, all of those people, all of those groups are in roles that are kind of similar and sometimes you have to do all three jobs. But, um, I think that that the role of data scientist, if youâre hiring for data scientist or if youâre applying for a job as a data scientist, you have to ask very clearly. You know, what the mix of those tasks is going to be, and try to find out what the company actually needs.
Host
Right. So it sounds like youâre saying itâs multidisciplinary and different companies kind of have a different idea about this or different emphasis. Yeah. Right. That makes sense. Because you need all three of these aspects.Max Sklar
Yeah. And theyâre, theyâre probably more than three. I probably shouldnât do ⊠that was just three that came to mind, but âŠHost
No but then itâs like, okay, so thereâs like qualitative understanding of the data, right? And a set of goals and business goals you want to achieve, by, from, from the insights you can get from the data, right? Uh, what are the features and then what predictive value do they have? What, and then of course, what do we want to predict? So thereâs business goals there, right?Max Sklar
Yeah.Host
And, and, and an understanding of the data as an asset to achieve those goals. Thatâs kind of the first piece. You were describing the second piece of someone with, uh, the mathematical and algorithmic expertise and machine learning experience you were describing that youâve gained to, you know, turn that into an objective function and a learning system, right?Max Sklar
Yep.Host
And third piece you were describing earlier and then return to again is how do we make this repeatably deployable, scalably deployable and run, run reliably and run every day and being able to add new pipelines. How do we integrate all the data we need at scale and how do we make this something that runs really smoothly for everyone else so they donât have to care about that? Right, right. So maybe this is a good chance to, uh, switch gears a little and we can talk about your podcast. So maybe just start with what motivated you to start to do that? What, what did you think sort of you had to say or add to the conversation? You know, what interested you about pursuing that?Max Sklar
I have given a lot of talks and kind of done some instructional videos and conference presentations in the past. But it was always, it always had to be in front of a very specific audience and it always had to be, you know, about a specific topic. And I wanted to put something out there where it was a little more free to explore, you know, different issues that are, I am passionate about or interested in and to kind of do it weekly and build kind of an audience that is really interested in new ideas, and I want it to be kind of interactive. So I want to have an audience where I can put out ideas and get lots of feedback. Go back and forth and kind of just to join the marketplace of ideas, I guess.And I think, you know, a lot of good things are going to come out of it and I think me and my audience are going to learn a ton of stuff. I think that, from each other, I think weâre going to figure out how to express our ideas better. I know I am and my audience and my, my group of guests. And I hope that in the future it sort of inspires people to, you know, to execute on some of, to execute on some of the ideas that theyâve, that they got from listening to the show. And Iâm trying to interview people who are building stuff that is, you know, either interesting or some entrepreneurs or someone who looks at a problem in a little different way that you wouldnât think about otherwise. And you know, as the title of the show is âThe Local Maximum,â which kind of suggests that you want to get out of your funk, you want to, you know, you want to find something new, you want to find the better hill to climb. So Iâm, Iâm trying to build kind of a show in a network of, of audience members and listeners that weâll do that.
Host
And is the focus on the same kinds of open-ended machine learning problems that, you know, have you been interested in in your career?Max Sklar
Yeah, well, I, this is, I feel like I can leverage some of the stuff that Iâve worked on, you know, in the last decade or so. And so I have, I mean, I kind of compare it to the show that I had as an undergrad when I was at Yale. I had a radio show for two and a half years, like from 2004 to 2006. And I go back and listen to it sometimes and uh, cause I was pretty good. I had some, uh, I, it was pretty entertaining. That was called âMax and the Wiz.â Um, and it was all, a lot of it was, current events related, whether it was national stories or just stuff that was going on, on campus and in the school. And one part that we did was we would do a science and technology news segment from time to time.And so that I kind of want to go back to and see what we were talking about then because Iâm pretty sure I covered self-driving cars in 2005 and so itâd be interesting to see what we said. Iâve always been much more natural in the audio medium and so this was just a good, a good way to start that. I had so much fun doing it. And so thatâs just how I knew that this would be a good way to, you know, to, to build those ideas and get that content out there that I want to.
Host
You had a sort of specific angle or area that you felt could add to the conversation.Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah. And thatâs the difference between then and now. Then I was just kind of making it up as I went along, which was, which was fun. It was a lot of fun. But now I actually have, you know, a little more knowledge yet âŠHost
You attract an audience in a sense because they have an idea of what this is and what they can expect.Max Sklar
Yeah, yeah. And itâs coming back to the name, âThe Local Maximum,â why I picked it. Itâs kind of a triple, triple play on words there because you know, a local maximum is something that we talk about in machine learning and data science. Thatâs when, you know, you have a model that is trying to get better and better and then it reaches the top of a hill where any direction that it goes in, it gets worse. So it kind of stops and says, this is, this is as good as I can get. Iâve converged, you know, but then thereâs a, itâs actually youâre in a local maximum. It actually has to get worse before it gets better. It has to explore different ideas and thatâs a problem that comes up in machine learning. But itâs also a problem that comes up in product design and in entrepreneurship and in, in marketing and all these different areas you get to a local maximum.And the way to get out of it is you kind of have to stop what youâre doing. Stop climbing that hill and just pursue new ideas and trying to climb a new hill. And thatâs you know, thatâs what Iâm hoping to encourage people to do by listening to all these interesting people that come on my program and to throw out ideas that are maybe partially baked that Iâve been thinking about for a while, but I havenât shared publicly yet. I feel like I have some good ideas, but I donât verbalize them for years and years. I just kind of let them sit in my brain and I donât verbalize them because, you know, I feel like theyâre kind of half baked or no oneâs going to get it. And this has been a good opportunity to just, you know, go for it, spit it out, see what happens. And I feel I want more people to do that.
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Show Notes
Topics: Ad Tech, Career Advancement, Career Responsibility, Case Studies, Failure and Learning, Founding/Startups, Managing Engineers, MBA, Product Development, Social Apps, Team Leadership, Virtual Reality
Companies and Organizations
Datamarx Majikal Steams Truffle Flurry Goldman Sachs Publicis RUN New York University - Stern School of BusinessIntroductionA veteran founder of multiple app-based startups and an experienced engineer, Shashank Singh finds himself embarking on a new chapter as CTO of New York-based startup Datamarx. There he can establish an engineering culture and draw on his engineering experience, startup lessons learned and MBA training in entrepreneurship from NYU Stern. Singh looks back to reflect on what he has learned about building apps, growing a product by delighting and retaining users rather than relying on social hacks, and why social apps are meaningful to us as social animals. And he looks ahead into the future, asking himself about the purpose and meaning of his work and why he works on what he does. He also discusses what he learned about ownership and responsibility at the large and disciplined organization Goldman Sachs, the differences between working at large organizations and startups, and how engineers can maintain a healthy career track by learning more about business and pursuing varied technical work. Singh doesnât shy away from either ambition or sincerity. Why are we doing what weâre doing? Should we be doing something else?
Guest Bio
Shashank is currently CTO at Datamarx and is helping build a unique data marketplace by connecting brands directly with the users. Prior to joining Datamarx, Shashank was VP of Engineering at Publicis Media, where he helped lead the development of their proprietary Data Management Platform (DMP) and built their data pipelines. As one of the first employees of the Flurryâs Ad team, Shashank helped launch one of the worldâs first mobile-centric RTB exchanges. After Yahooâs acquisition of Flurry, Shashank worked on the integration of the Flurryâs platform with Yahooâs AdServer technologies and also helped integrate BrightRoll into Yahooâs platform. Prior to Flurry, he was a Lead Technical Engineer at Goldman Sachs, where he led a team of developers in architecting and developing the firmâs OTC derivatives trade flow systems. In his free-time he also co-founded three mobile start-ups: Truffle, Steams and Majikal. He has an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Finance from NYU Stern and B.E. in Computer Science & Engineering from MMMUT, Gorakhpur, UP, India.
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Twitter: Shashank SinghTranscriptHost
Hello and welcome to âUsing Reflectionâ, a podcast about humans engineering and weâre here today with Shashank Singh. Weâre going to talk to him about some of the entrepreneurial things heâs been doing, different startups, some of them with a social angle and, I also wanted to talk to him about the fact that heâs both a talented engineer with a lot of track record as a contributor and manager, but also a graduate of the MBA program at NYU Stern with a degree in entrepreneurship. I wanted to talk to you about the difference between running startups, trying to start startups and learning about how to do that. But why donât you go ahead and give yourself an introduction, tell the audience a little about yourself and then weâll get into the conversation.Shashank Singh
Thanks Mark for the introduction. Iâm Shashank Singh. Iâm currently CTO of Datamarx, a New York-based startup, and in my past life I have done a lot of startups. Like I have started three of my own startups. Iâve worked for startups like Flurry, which was acquired by Yahoo. I worked for an RUN Ads, which was acquired by Publicis. Yeah, Iâm a technologist, and I also did my MBA. It has helped me quite a bit to understand the business side of things.Host
So maybe letâs start there. Why did you feel the need to get deeper knowledge on the business side and how do you think itâs changed your trajectory or point of view or had an impact on you since then?Shashank Singh
Being an engineer, you always wanted to build something new. Most of the jobs I was doing before pre-Mba and my past life was like, you join a company, you have a product already there or itâs half-way there. Theyâre really some green green projects. You wanted to be entrepreneur because I wanted to make from scratch, so yeah, I decided to get my business degree just because after doing my stuff, like I tried building my own small ⊠like I ran, some blogs, also news blogs. Being a technologist is OK, you can build a product, but how do you actually take it out to the market? How do you actually think about whatâs the need of the market? How do you study the market, how do you do the first sales kind of things and learn all those kinds of soft skills and even hard skills of understanding the financials of a compan? When youâre running a company, you need to understand the financials. You need to understand a lot of things. You are wearing multiple hats every day, every hour. I think. So kind of MBA gave me that rounded knowledge around things where I can understand things. I can know what people are talking about and not be siloed along the technology. Because Iâve seen engineers getting deep into the technology stuff and they are doing. I mean, itâs good for everything that getting deeper and deeper into technology, but they sometimes lose the vision of why actually they are doing something. Itâs my personal opinion that we ⊠as an engineer we are just an enabler of a business. Like we enable, we solve a problem which is mostly a business problem or some kind of problem. Or if you make a business out of that, like Facebook or anything like technology is an enabler. You find the problem and you use technology as a tool to solve that problem.Host
So it sounds like you became more interested in the context and more interested in trying to understand what problems need to be solved. Right.Shashank Singh
Thatâs definitely there. I mean I had the skill set of building things. I was very confident that I can build but I was not very confident about like if I go out in the market, I want to be a leader, I want to be an entrepreneur, then what should I do? So doing an MBA was kind of a way of taking a shortcut maybe to learn things. And I can get more deeper details into that. Like one of the examples would be like you do a lot of case studies in [an] MBA [program], and what do you do in case studies is that you study all the companies which have failed, which have a success based on certain scenarios and all those things. And youâd discuss among the friends like what do you think worked for that company and what didnât work for that company. You learn a lot from their experiences with those case studies and then you have a certain set of tools in your ⊠Itâs in your brain like OK, what might work and what might not work. So if you do enough case studies of like 20 companies or 30 companies, then you can definitely get into the habit of thinking critically. Like right now I have right now the reputation of like when somebody comes with an idea I most most likely kill it. I would say âNo, itâs not solving a big problem.â Because I have failed myself multiple times. Iâve done my MBA where we have studied a lot of companies [and] why they have failed. When you come to me, I would most likely kill it. If you are still having that urge you want to develop after talking to me, then I would definitely say go for it.Host
So I noticed all of the things you listed at the top of your LinkedIn are all of these startup things, right?Shashank Singh
Yeah. Like I would say the startup bug actually started from 2008 or something, when the whole Apple ecosystem didnât even come up. Actually it was coming up in 2008 and I started working on a ⊠I got into IOS APIs and all those things and that made me very curious about like letâs build some system. And I was working with one of my cousin actually we were trying to make something. Thatâs where all the entrepreneurial bug started biting me actually. [Laughs] And weâre thinking about all the crazy kind of small ideas which we can actually work on your own and launch it. But then I got into finance, Goldman Sachs, which is very demanding the working there. I was there was there for four years and also did my MBA there, [so] I couldnât give too much effort to my entrepreneurial efforts. But later on, like a, I developed an app called Magical along with a few of my friends and it was collecting all the events all around your city or your location. It was a a location-based social events app. So when you open the app, you can see whatâs happening in and around your city, you can search by keywords and all those kinds of things. You can save that event, invite your friends and all those kinds of social aspects, were built inside it. And our long-term goal in that case was like, I wanted to be Google of events, actually. I wanted to cover all the events going on in the world. And we are pretty good at it. We were collecting a lot of events based on different types. Like there were Meetups, EventBrite, there were all the ticketing sites, all the concerts and everything. We were indexing it properly and it was working good. Itâs just that like Iâm more of an engineer than a marketing genius or something like after a few years of keeping it up and running, my partnerâs got distracted in their life and everything happened there. So that kind of stayed there and I had to shut down a year back. Then there were other things like Steams. Steams is a social network, anonymous social network. There are tons of them [now], but when I started working on it there were none. [Laughs] But by the time I launched it, we had Whisper in the market, we had Secret in the market and we had ⊠later on came YikYak and I was like, âOh crap, this is like ⊠this market is now too crowded actually.â And again, my marketing skills were not good enough to actually market it out to a large group of people.Host
That market was both crowded and had a lot of controversy around it.Shashank Singh
I mean, you can still see ⊠we still have Steams up and running. I actually donât spend too much time on it, but itâs working actually. Itâs there, people download, do some crazy stuff there. I wonât want to get into details of what people do there because itâs anonymous. You can imagine what happens there. [Laughs] It has kind of become a dark alley of the web, of the app site.Host
Thatâs awesome. You created your own little dark web. You should be proud. Right?Shashank Singh
[Laughs] And keeping up is not that expensive. So itâs like spending less than 100 bucks [per month] to just keep it up and running because I really want to get back on it sometime when I have some more time and have some ideas over there. So Iâm just keeping it for now.Host
Where does that benefit from what you learned in school and where did ⊠how far did it take you and then where did you hit the wall and you have to learn completely new skills that you need when youâre actually starting your own company?Shashank Singh
Yeah, I mean, all the case studies ⊠like one thing I can say like doing it by yourself is a different ballgame altogether. Like when you do it like you realize that you donât have ⊠you have ⊠if you have not raised money, or even if you have raised money itâs a different story, but if you donât have money then how do you actually market yourself? Or what tricks or hacks can you do to actually get your name out there on a dollar budget, for example? Like you donât have that much money then what you do? So I can give you an example like for Magical when we launched that I didnât have any marketing budget. Like I didnât have much actually. So I didnât do any marketing. It was more leveraging my current social network I have. And I decided doing little bit of ASO, studied how Apple search works. I mean believe it or not without doing any kind of advertisement or any kind of even posting on Twitter or Facebook or anything, I was getting like 40 to 50 downloads a day without doing anything. And I have worked with legit companies which have a marketing budget and they are not able to hit that number.Host
So that was all through trying to optimize your results in Apple App Store search?Shashank Singh
Yeah. Yeah. That is one of the things. And then you try to build the app in such a way where you can actually have some social aspect that tries to spread itself without being spammy, for sure. What people forget in life is that you get too involved in technology and you forget that that technology is an enabler of business. Technology is enabler to make you happier than actually getting too involved in that.Host
My general attitude toward this is that, you know, we, whatâs meaningful to us as people is how we affect other people, how we interact with other people. You know, the emotional truth of our experiences and, even in such an analytical profession, I think that all those aspects are still really important and that also we do engineering because like youâve been describing, you believe it has an impact on the world, not just as an abstraction. So returning to the social idea. It is something I really wanted to talk to you about because I noticed several of your businesses have a social aspect and you just talking about how social marketing, I guess you could say, you were able to organically grow the usage of this app. So what, you know, do you think that thatâs essential really to any, sort of a consumer startup these days or you know, how important do you think social is? Do you think itâs just table stakes and then do you do it just because itâs helpful to market or is there something inherently interesting to you about social, you know, when you want to do social products because theyâre interesting.Shashank Singh
Thatâs what we were taught in biology actually like humans are social animals and itâs very ingrained into our DNA that we actually talk to people, we interact, and we have some kind of social experience. So itâs a very natural actually that social network is playing such an important role right now. I mean I have other thoughts about current social network things. If youâre on the consumer side, you need to think about like how socially beneficial your app is, what problem actually youâre solving or what ⊠how youâre helping people to actually communicate more or do something meaningful, or even having a fun app. Actually, itâs, thatâs, thatâs also fine actually if youâre making a fun based app actually, but then you are solving a problem of like when somebody is bored or doing something and youâre adding some kind of fun in his or her life. Going back to the social aspect of it, I think thatâs how I came up with all the ideas like I have. Does he like to meet people and like to talk to them? So what do you do with your friends and family? You actually plan out things and you plan or things as like, letâs go to that event. Most of the time it happens you I come to know of an event when it has already happened. Thatâs where Magical can in. Like I wanted to make something and the name Magical was more about letâs create some magical moments with your friends. Most of the magical moments are when youâre at the concert or youâre at an event or something. I donât think you can, you can think of an app which is not social anymore actually. Like you have to have some kind of social aspect to it. Not just for the essential, for your growth. I mean thatâs one of the things, like you will probably not grow if your app is just siloed.Host
So what about when youâre in a crowded space or a space with really established deep-pocketed incumbents? Like Truffle? Maybe tell just to give a little context, could tell people what Truffle did and maybe what were some of the challenges there with some of the competitors.Shashank Singh
So Truffle is an app where you can actually share your best restaurant with your friends and you can plan out and you can go and have a chat, and chat is built inside it, but itâs all about sharing your favorite restaurant to your friends. The problem was like when you go to Yelp, you see all those ratings and you donât know how good those ratings are or not. You donât even know what that person likes actually or dislikes because everybodyâs taste is different. But you know, your friends like whom you hang out with like what kind of food they like and what kind of things. So you can kind of rely and trust on that friend. Or like if youâre going to a new city. I traveled to San Francisco and I know a friend who has been there or they lived there. I can just ask them and they can answer there. You donât have to experiment anymore. You donât have to actually go to Yelp or Google Maps and look at the star ratings which can be hacked and which has its own downsides. Well, so many people are actually asking like, âHey, Iâm traveling to this place and do you have any recommendations?â Thatâs the problem we tried to solve and have a place where you can actually store your list. You can save on you add your things. So automatically I feel like Iâve added my favorite restaurants in New York and a friend who was visiting New York, he doesnât even have to ask. Like if he opens the app and then New York and then he will see all my listings there. Theyâre right there.Host
I see. So the idea is ⊠youâre not as focused on mass scale but rather much more high quality recommendations because theyâre coming from a known networkShashank Singh
Yeah it was a little challenging also, like the network effects as everybody knows, like the experience ⊠we still are kind of a little bit struggling with the experience of a single user. Like when you, if you join us as a single user and you will have no friends in the app, then the app becomes a little ⊠I will say ⊠like we have featured places and all those things we built around that, but itâs not as useful as when you have like say 20 friends. 20 friends is good enough actually and you can have really good experience in Truffle. Thatâs the thing we are working on and thatâs what we want to solve. Itâs not an easy problem to solve. We are very conscious about not being spammy and we are like, there was so many opportunities. We have so many ideas we could have kind of spammed people or something, but we are ⊠I mean we are very ehtical on that side like we donât want to actually spam people without their permissions or like, like ⊠when you join Truffle, you have to give access to your Facebook or contact list or something. But a lot of companies have been built on hacking those things. Like getting the list of people and doing all those crazy stuff. You would have heard about them and we said, no, either we do it in the proper way or we donât do it. It will be fine to close down the company but not go that route.Host
Right. So this is interesting because you brought up this idea several times and thereâs such a focus, you know, I did some other interviews where this came up, like I interviewed someone who had ⊠Andrew Marsh whoâs CTO at interviewing.io now, but he previously worked on Facebook games, for example, and a lot in the gaming industry. And he talked about how that whole industry became really focused on optimizing to capture and retain peoplesâ attention. And thatâs a nice way of putting it, you know, I mean, the not as nice way to put it as just to call it addiction mechanics, which is what itâs called in the industry. So it sounds like youâre very conscious of the value of what youâre delivering to people and that itâs ⊠youâve mentioned that, you mentioned that itâs actually solving a problem for people and you mentioned that youâre judicious, careful about sort of how much pressure you put on people, right, to you to use the app. So why are those things important to you and do you think that you can still succeed in scale and like be a good citizen?Shashank Singh
I mean for me being a good citizen is the first and foremost thing. Like a lot of people actually do it going away ⊠like âLetâs do the hack for now,â donât tell anyone about it, and then get discovered, âOh we are very sorry about this,â and you have seen ⊠I donât want to name the companies, but you can go âŠHost
You can go down the route of itâs better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Right?Shashank Singh
I have heard it so many times an I would be like âNo, Iâm not going to allow that.â Yeah. So I mean yeah itâs a life choice as you do actually, like I want to sleep better at night. And so thatâs one of the things âŠHost
Right and I think, you know, you may maybe early in this, but, Like if look at advertising online advertising, which is an industry both of us are familiar with, we worked together briefly in that industr, you can see the big, big shift in the last several years of awareness in the big advertisers of some of the issues with quality, a much greater demand for, you know, better quality, better ethics reall, you could even say, and I think youâre also seeing a lot of backlash since the election and so on about some of the, you know, maybe less beneficial to society aspects of social media. Right? You know, what happens with technologies I think is that we get more ⊠we learn to live with them better. We learn how to use them better. You know, in the beginning youâre hitting yourself on the thumb with a hammer a lot. And I think the next generation or two as they grow up with mobile and social, you know, learn to use it in more beneficial ways more of the time theyâre using it. And so maybe you know, youâre just, things will catch up to you to people like you are making that decision consciously now.Shashank Singh
Iâm in here for a long term actually. Iâm a very long-term vision person actually. Like I donât care about short-term things like I donât want to succeed in like three months and then die down. If I survive, if I live, Iâm here, Iâm here for the long, long, long game actually.Host
Okay, thatâs interesting. So then do you have like deeper values or like a larger arc that you see yourself traveling on with what youâre doing with these companies and you know, what youâre pursuing professionally?Shashank Singh
A lot of times I think, âWell what are we actually doing in life?â And then think about like is this necessarily to do or not. So I always have that battle inside me going on where Iâm thinking like, âWhat are we doing, actually?â So ⊠[laughs]Host
Yeah. But thatâs the same question you were asking about the apps really, right?Shashank Singh
Yeah, exactly. So thatâs, thatâs the question I keep on asking myself. Like is this like what you were ⊠you really want to do actually in [the] long term? So Truffle I definitely want to do it long term, like we are in a long game. Same goes with Magical. Like I had to shut it down because of various reasons, but I believe once I have a little more time I will actually revive it back because I still donât see a product which actually solves that problem.Host
The challenge there that that problem may be more most easily solved by, I donât know, a Google, like someone was very big ⊠ability to build big data sets over the whole Internet. Right?Shashank Singh
Yeah. Definitely like when I was thinking about it and ⊠now I have a different approach of doing ⊠I would take a different approach to do that thing, because technology has evolved. Like you talk about NLP, you talk about AI, you talk about machine learning stuff. I definitely want to add those kind of things inside my ⊠all my previous efforts, because I see that is one thing which was lacking there and now if I add that thin it might be actually really useful.Host
Sure. But I guess the contrast I was drawing was something like Truffle, you actually are taking advantage of the fact that itâs starting out with a more boutique idea. Youâre like, the value of the product is in the actual direct relationships between the participants, right? So, so thatâs, you know, in a certain sense itâs not an opportunity big enough at the start for a huge company to go in and get, and you have all ⊠you can do it at that scale and the advantage you have is that youâre actually delivering something really valuable to passionate users.Shashank Singh
Thatâs my life-learning also, like what I have learned from all my efforts is like we worry too much about growth and if somebody asked me like how to grow, I think youâre asking the wrong question. Like a startup should never worry about how to grow, in my opinion, the first to be the first phase of their life. Actually, they should never worry about how to grow. They should worry only about one thing which is very critical, is retention. Like how do you retain the ⊠if you get one download, how do you retain that guy? Or that girl? How do you retain? How do you actually make the time they spend in your app very valuable so that they come back again. Thatâs the key. Thatâs the holy grail of actually any any APP, any idea, anything you are making. If you can do something like that, once you nail that down, you know your audience, you know what they need and you get them hooked into your app. Not in a bad way but in a positive way. Youâre adding some positivity in their life by doing something, not making them addicted, but if they think about it, for example, like for Truffle, like if they think about restaurants and they think about friends, Truffle should come in first thing in their mind instead of Yelp or anything else. Once you get that thing nailed down, thatâs when the growth comes into the picture and the full growth. If you have a very active set of users or even if itâs like a hundred users actually and they are very hooked. Theyâre using your app and they value it a lot. Thatâs when you start thinking about adding those growth features into the app. First nail down the first thing and then growth can happen.Host
So does that connect back to the social media marketing? Like how do you ⊠how do you add growth features that then help it go viral?Shashank Singh
Make it very easy to share things, so there are a lot of things there like sharing and chatting is definitely there. You can actually build chat inside your things, or if not, then make sure it plays very well with the currehnt chat services, Messenger or iMessage. Make sure your links when youâre sharing that links have enough information and it has a preview and all those kinds of things. Make it very easy to share. When you share on Facebook, it adds some value there. Donât rush into things. I would say take one thing at a time and nail it, and then weâll do the next thing. A lot of startup founders they do is they want to build the Titanic on the first day and they get lost. They take years and years to develop that thing and then by the time they launch ⊠I have done it personally. So speaking from experience, youâre late into the market, or the need has gone, or you added so many things that you cannot manage it. Like you cannot manage all the features because youâre cash strapped, strapped from developers, you are ⊠you donât have that many resources to actually manage things, so you are buying a bigger bite than you can chew. [Laughs]Host
Right. And in fact this goes right back to what you just said previously, like if youâre always focused on what is the essence of this thing that will move users, then youâre building the right things or trying to anyway, rather than building so many different things. Like youâre building less and youâre building the right things. That seems to be the target to aim at and thatâs hard to hit.Shashank Singh
Yeah thatâs very hard to hit. Yeah I think another thing that I would like to add is that sometimes, or I would say most of the time, founders always over-estimate the problem because itâs there bias â they think itâs a huge problem.Host
Right which ⊠because it got them excited enough to get started with it. Right.Shashank Singh
Yeah, so bias that I see that you over-estimated the market, even if itâs a small market or a very niche market, you think this is gonna solve a problem for humanity and the fact is that only few people care about it, [Mark laughs]. Or people are not thinking that far sometimes, actually so âŠHost
Right. I mean it can be that they might care, but itâs hard to understand. Like Iâve been at those kinds of companies too.Shashank Singh
Yeah. I mean if you look, a very good example is Foursquare. The founder I mean, he launched a couple of apps before having Foursqure as a success, and when he launched the location-based stuff, like he was way too ahead of his time actually. So that can also happen like you were thinking about something which probably people donât care, they might care after like a year or two. So âŠHost
Thatâs actually an interesting example of a lot of what youâre talking about because even though when it first came out, a lot of people were sort of saying âWhat is this thing?â There were people who were passionate about and using it early. And that was well before it was kind of understood maybe the more broadly what the utility was and even whether there was ever going to be a business there and what that would be.Shashank Singh
Yeah.Host
But he stuck with what youâre saying, which is letâs make this something that these people love and that finding value from.Shashank Singh
Yeah, exactly. You see now like they have been so many products, like youâre in ad tech so we both know like what kind of products they have made and itâs âŠHost
Yeah, theyâre actually public customer of my current employer. So itâs, I can even just say that we, you know, we help them directly now and you know, we help them leverage all that data that theyâve built up to use on the advertising side. So âŠShashank Singh
Yeah, I mean, Foursquare is one of the examples, thereâs so many of them actually. Like even if you look at current VR and AR, virtual reality and augmented reality ⊠Iâm not taking any credit for it, but my, one of my friends, my cousin and I was actually, he founded the company for VR, and I was like âYou think this is the right time to actually do it? And he was very excited about it, rightfully so. He built some cool stuff. He bought those bulky headsets and everything and I was like, Iâd look at the demo, I was pretty impressed with it and I said, but do you know how many people are going to have ⊠wear this headset,Host
This is my take on VR too, but, but itâs like Iâm just in the camp of people who donât get it. You rightly said thereâs a passionate small group of early adopters. Right. And thatâs âŠShashank Singh
But there will become people who would stick, they will stick with VR, they will figure out, figure out a use case and they will nail it and they will survive, but 99% of the companies will actually close down and shut down because they cannot ⊠they will give up.Host
Right. I wanted to also talk to you about, you know, some of your more, I guess quote unquote traditional roles in, in bigger companies. The fact that you both can compare that to being ⊠starting your own thing and also that you can compare kind of different roles within teams, right? Team leadership, technical leadership, architect, individual contributor. So maybe speak a little to both of those. Maybe letâs start with kind of what are ⊠what are some differences between, you know, working at like say an early stage company, a later stage company and on your own and you know, maybe things youâve learned in each of those situations.Shashank Singh
Yeah, I think like working for a startup is awesome, actually an awesome experience. Itâs not for everyone for sure, but what you get is actually you wear multiple hats. You decide on things, youâd talk about it and you start doing it in on the same day actually most of the time. Like you talk about things and you start doing it. Like Iâve worked for financial banks in New York and you talk about it âŠHost
[Laughs] ⊠and talk about it âŠShashank Singh
⊠years pass by and youâre still talking about it. Yeah. So âŠHost
⊠emailing about it.Shashank Singh
Yeah, emaling about it, and there will be like higher ups in the bureacracy come in and they would be like, âYeah, Iâve been thinking about this. Letâs set up some meeting for this.â Yeah, I was, I was in Goldman Sachs for like four-and-a-half years. I mean I did pretty interesting stuff there. And theyâre, of course ⊠everyone has their own story about what you wanted to do and what you ended up doing there. So working in the startup is actually that exciting, but working for yourself actually trying make a startup is like, like really different than anything else you would have to think about. So first of all, like you have to believe in the idea. Second, you have to start selling your idea if you need help because you can do few things ⊠well a lot of things, but you definitely need help if youâre thinking big. You cannot make one huge life-changing application. I mean everybody knows the technology ⊠you need somebody who can do back end, who can do front end, who can build the app, and if youâre doing everything then instead of that thing taking a month or two months to do a prototype or something, you will take years to do that. So. So you have to sell to your friends or people you like or people you think you can work with. So you have to start selling that idea and make sure to sell enough and that they start believing and it becomes their idea. Thatâs the key thing. Like it has to become their idea that only the startup and only then you can actually build out the product. Otherwise they will say, most of the time youâre going to end up hearing is like, âOh, itâs a good idea. Oh yeah, I can do something.â And then they might contribute a little bit, but itâs not that passionate, as passionate as you are. And then you will start feeling that frustration because if the passion was not at the same level then you might just seem like youâre dragging me down.Host
So itâs like what you said, where you as the founder have so much bias toward loving the idea and now youâve got ⊠youâve got to incite that passion in other people so you can get help.Shashank Singh
Remember this, if youâre looking for a partner out there, make sure itâs no longer just your idea. It becomes their idea too. Theyâre not helping you, theyâre dreaming along with you. So if you cannot get that kind of vibe or something, I think itâs not worth making them as a cofounder. Then maybe they can help you ⊠get assigned some tasks and get some help and done.Host
What about, you know, managing engineers and building teams. Probably something youâre thinking about, you know, as you look at the current startups and hoping you get the opportunity opportunity to do that with them.Shashank Singh
Right even here ⊠thatâs why I joined Datamarx. Itâs a very early-stage startup and Iâm the CTO there so I have to build the culture and this will be my opportunity to actually instill the culture which I love and which I want to actually ⊠and of course with, with the blessing of the founders. What I personally believe in is the team should be something like where like people say, but I genuinely believe in it, like everyone should be equal irrespective of you come with the 20 years of experience or two years of experience. Like people should feel equal and you having more experience should have a duty about like actually teaching people that rather than having an attitude about, âOK, I have experience. so youâve got to respect me.â You donât demand respect. You get respect by doing things actually. And it should come naturally from people. As far as managing the team is ⊠like the best way to manage is like donât manage them. Let them manage themselves. Everyone is a grown up. They need to understand, they really need to understand. Everyone needs to understand that youâre doing something for us, enabling the business or something. And if youâre not contributing enough. And I mean, if you have to always come back and give a feedback to somebody, then theyâre not the right person. Find a way to let them go or, give them a good talk about like what youâre trying to do here. And if they are still not performing, they should go. Yeah. we should not be wasting our time in managing. One thing I learned from Goldman, a lot of good things I learned from Goldman. One thing was like, you take ownership. You start giving ownership to people and they should actually take ownership. There should be a good accountability of things. Like if you own a certain things like things go strong, somebody should not come to us and this is wrong. And you have to step up and do something. Once you build a product, you own it. You have to actually take care of is as your baby, actually.Host
Right. I think of it like, at least from the engineering side, like we are the caretakers, you know?Shashank Singh
Yep. So you know that thatâs where like if somebody is not owning up their own shit actually the I think thatâs a red flag and you need to have a conversation. Iâm not rude when I talk to people. I try to be very polite and I try to sell them like why they need to step up and why this is not expected or what is expected of you.Host
Do you think that changes as the size of the company changes or do you think that ⊠like in other words, at a very early stage communication is very fluid. Everyone has the same context very easily. And you know the goals are very clear. And so that expectation of everyone owning, I think itâs totally realistic because of those things, because of the context and the goals are all very clear and the same to everyone. And the communication is easy. Do you think that changes as the size of the business scales?Shashank Singh
Definitely yes, I think so. But I think what you can do is you can end up ⊠itâs not easily done. I, hopefully I can do it ⊠thatâs what I think Iâve tried to do ⊠is you create small teams as a startup in itself actually. So if you have that team and they have independence, then you donât have to have a very big hierarchy also. Like you have a team which actually works as a startup, as an independent unit, and they can try to have that kind of culture inside what weâre talking about in a small team actually. So youâve tried to build that kind of culture inside a larger company. I tried that in the companies, but of course if youâre management is not being supportive enough, then you cannot probably. You can do a little but ⊠yeah, you can see ⊠But larger companies, yeah, Iâve seen so much bureaucracy coming in the picture. I mean that aspect is like people start ⊠people are very hungry for recognition, so people will try to grab all that engine they can and thatâs where they start stepping on somebodyâs toes, and thatâs where the friction starts, and over a period of months and years like that friction can be clearly seen and walls build up. You try to build up walls and yeah, I mean people are trying to protect themselves actually. And itâs a very toxic culture actually. And Iâve been running away from those companies for all my life. [Laughs]Host
[Laughs] Yeah, me too. Probably everyone listening also. [Both laugh]Shashank Singh
Yeah, if you see that ⊠Like another thing is like what I believe in is like try to change the culture. If you cannot, and if you think like itâs not worth actually putting that effort, then run away from that place. Thereâs no point in wasting your time and bitching about it and having negativity in your life. If any of my friends actually comes and bitch about their work to me I say âChange the job, and if you cannot change the job, try to change the place, change the culture there. And if you cannot do both of them then thereâs something wrong.âHost
Then just leave. Right. I think when I was less experienced, Iâve had a, I had experiences where identified so personally and deeply with the struggle of wherever I was and was so, you know, angry even is the word â passionate would be, you know, understating it. And all the things that were so wrong and ⊠and that is very unhealthy. You have your ideas of what, how the company could be effective, right? And then you try to foster that and nspur that and if you canât then you know, you canât take that on as your own personal struggle. You yourself, one person is not going to change a whole company.Shashank Singh
I think you can. I still believe in that, but you should give it a shot before you leave. In my opinion you should give it a shot to try and change it before you leave.Host
Okay, thatâs fair. Maybe Iâm being too negative. And, and you definitely ⊠like at smaller companies that are more open, you can definitely have a huge impact.Shashank Singh
Donât give up, in my opinion, never give up without trying. Try it. Thereâs no harm in that. Worst-case scenario, youâll get fired. Thatâs a blessing in disguise most likely.Host
Well, I mean also youâll learn from that experience I think, you know, and going all the way back to things you said earlier, youâll be true to your own values, right? And youâll be doing things for the right reason, with the right intention. And you know, weâre still, I think weâre very lucky that thereâs plenty of employment opportunity for engineers right now. So the way I actually look at this then too, is thereâs a large opportunity cost in staying at a place thatâs not working for you.Shashank Singh
Thatâs true actually. And also when you move ⊠like Iâm not encouraging the culture of job hopping every now and then âŠHost
Iâm not saying that either. Iâm just saying staying in a miserable situation and making it your own personal struggle when thereâs all this other opportunity out there, that makes no sense.Shashank Singh
And also as an engineer I see when Iâm in the company for long enough. Iâm doing the same thing every day and thereâs no change. Then also I think you need to think ⊠give a hard think. Is this, what do you want to do or do you want to learn something new or not? Because the technology is rapidly changing. If youâre not keeping up believe it or not within a few years will be totally outdated, and then you will be ⊠it will be very difficult to catch up.Host
Yeah, definitely. Like when we worked together at RUN, the reason I was there was really, I had been for several years like in leadership roles and not individual contributor roles, and I felt like wow, the cloud just happened all around me and if I donât get back to an individual contributor role and build things in the cloud, Iâm going to be totally irrelevant. Like what am I going to manage people Iâve never built stuff the way theyâre building it. Like that doesnât make any sense.Shashank Singh
I was interviewing somebody in RUN. He was a very senior guy, worked for an FX, like foreign exchange, and very senior guy, probably 20, 25 years of experience in the industry, and he was kind of a CTO in an FX company. And he was there for an interview at Run, for a similar position I had, and I gave him the same advice actually. âYou have been in finance for long, have been seeing a certain kind of industry. You have not worked on AWS, you have not worked on the cloud part of things. Most of the things you have done is your own proprietary stuff. I would say blindly accept this job because even for long term, if, if it works out very well ⊠if it doesnât work out you, you are here for six months to a year. You will never get [another] opportunity [like this]. If they are offering you a job, then take it.â And that guy joined. He was there for more than a year I think, and right now heâs working for Microsoft AI.Host
There you go. Thatâs perfect.Shashank Singh
Yeah. When he was leaving, I was telling him arenât you glad now that you joined and I was kind of pushing you to join. Because he was kind of taking a step down. But sometimes you have to take a couple of steps back to take a long jump, right? -
Show Notes
Topics: Ad Tech, Career Advancement, Cloud Platforms, Code Schools, Computer Science, Distributed Systems, Education, Hadoop, Internships, Interviewing, Open Source, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Teamwork, Team Leadership
Companies
Twitter MagneticIntroduction
Alex Huras was drawn to the tech mecca of San Francisco from his native Ontario after getting a taste of American tech jobs (and salaries) through college internships as part of the University of Waterloo co-op program. Joining Twitter in 2014 with hopes of a bright future, he has stayed through four remarkably turbulent years. And all along he has kept observing and learning. How do teams maintain enough continuity to continue to deliver value through turnover? How does a company decide what to build? How does it avoid expert-level dependencies on open source projects supported by a short list of experts? How does a new engineer learn to solve problems in a big company with complex technical challenges that have been evolving for a decade? How does a young engineer avoid getting locked into skills that will inevitably decay in value? Is it possible to articulate what makes effective engineers effective well enough to hire for it? Alex can describe the mathematical foundations and underlying structure across code, cloud systems and data, but he has also learned the hard lesson that sometimes a beautiful set cover problem fails in the real world because of a mundane failed database backup years earlier. Some episodes of âUsing Reflectionâ start out with a premise. Then there are conversations like this, in which we enter in mid-sentence and the ideas go where they will. I enjoyed the process, and I think you will too.
Guest Bio
Alex spends a lot of time thinking about how to solve problems differently; if for no other reason than as a creative outlet for learning. Through a magnificent stroke of luck; he sometimes does this in a professional capacity. As of writing, this means making advertising data more accessible and reliable at Twitter in San Francisco. Originally from Toronto, he holds an awkwardly shaped degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.
Links
Twitter: @athuras University of Waterloo University of Waterloo: Co-op Program University of Waterloo: Systems Design Engineering Systems Engineering Apache Kafka Apache Hadoop Apache Pig Apache Pulsar Yarn Linear Algebra Set Cover Problem MySqlTranscriptAlex Huras
⊠sure you have 2000 engineers and yeah, anyone can make twitter over the weekend with like freshmen, like software engineers or whatever. Itâs like great, you can do that, but there literally is an infinite amount of work to do and thereâs like this possibly extremely large opportunity and it comes down to the same thing, right? Like in theory you want to be like at the edge, at the limit being like, oh, like Iâve got to do this thing and I need to do it as efficiently as possible using pre-built tools.Host
RightAlex Huras
If anything, we [at Twitter] have the opposite problem, which is like a whole bunch of people independently ⊠like itâs so big that a whole bunch of people independently go and try to make partial solutions. Like when youâre large enough to have â I think as we were talking about this a little bit earlier â about who is in the right position to be investing in building these platforms and abstractions, and distributed queues are a great example, right? Like if youâre, if youâre a small company and spinning up your own distributed queue, like good luck with that. Youâre making a mistake. And Iâd argue that, I even even at Twitter scale or, or, or like when you have a team of possibly hundreds of people that youâre able to allocate towards that, itâs still a questionable value proposition just because, because youâre suddenly competing with the big boys, right? Like Yahoo Open sources Pulsar, like Linkedin produces Kafka, like thereâs SQS, like all this, all these like giant battle-tested, distributed queuing environments and if youâre going and spinning up your own distributed queue, you better have an extremely good reason.And I think the other, the other hidden cost here though, and weâre seeing this especially as weâre trying to hire people with this expertise in this, is like very, very few people have expertise in designing and, and like even patching Kafka. You look at the contributors to Kafka like, sure. Itâs like hundreds of people. Itâs like, yeah, thereâs hundreds of people out of an industry that is producing like hundreds of thousands if not millions of engineers like this. Itâs actually an extremely small group.
Host
And the long tail of those people are not on the core.Alex Huras
Yeah, and people are like, âOh, everyone can contribute to open source.â But some random kid out of college is not making significant patches to the Linux kernel.Host
Right, or Kafka for that matter. Like the complexity and expertise âŠAlex Huras
âŠand even the testing cost too, right? Like even within within Twitter, like if we want to make changes to the physical topology of our operating environment for something like Kafka or internally event bus, like sure, you make the patch, but in order to actually ascertain whether or not it works like thatâs going to cost you $100,000 to run that test. Like itâs not, itâs not like anyone could just spin up an infinitely large cluster and like pump petabytes through it.Host
Because the testing isnât just correctness of some function, itâs correctness at operational scale, which is a very hard problem to test.Alex Huras
Itâs like, oh, your number of file handles explodes in this case. Thatâs a problem. You just lit this machine on fire, when you own it!Host
And you just went in a circle. Thatâs why we take the battle-tested option. Just use that because like, yeah, LinkedIn already used it.Alex Huras
Sure. And I think uh, a bigger, a bigger trend. I mean, I donât know if this is a trend in industry are just like wisdom, but like if you think you have those problems, think again. Like maybe you do, maybe youâre like a unique snowflake and you have these special problems. But like in general itâs like a modeling problem. Like if youâre, if youâre hitting the limits of Hadoop, youâre probably holding it wrong.Like, oh, I want to write my own scheduler. Itâs like, âAre you sure?â Are you, what if you phrased it as a scheduling problem. Does your operating system solve this for you? Like does Aurora solve this for you? Does Yarns solve this for you?
Host
You can think of partitioning work at all these different levels. And see the commonality of it. Like from one function, one row up to data sets up to multiple jobs âŠAlex Huras
And thereâs two sides to that coin, right? The one side of, of knowing the fundamentals â and this is also something that is extremely tricky to test in an interviewing environment â and Iâd argue also kind of tricky to test even in an actual job environment ⊠because the extent to which you need these sorts of, the ability to multiply recursively and in an enormous number of dimensions analyze these sorts of patterns is possibly ⊠itâs like the path to insanity. Like itâs almost like, oh, itâs super powerful to see these patterns everywhere and then you realize, no, no, no, youâre just youâre seeing these patterns everywhere. Like seek help, right? Itâs, everythingâs a scheduling problem. Like everything is a set cover problem. Like how do you move this stuff around?Host
Well the thing is, the reason those fundamentals are fundamental because they are.Alex Huras
Because itâs math.Host
You can take a higher level view to solving the problem very quickly and not get thrown off by so many things âŠAlex Huras
By minutia.Host
Like this was so different than the last prolbem and itâs not actually not.Alex Huras
So I was trying to make my job faster so I checked the scheduler and now I actually Iâm yak shaving for like the next âŠHost
(Laughs) Right, exactly. But I guess how did we get on this?Alex Huras
I think the way that this came about was it was like what core assumptions that have governed, how performance of systems work for a long time can be changed by hardware changes and what would happen if disk, if canonically if like disk was faster than RAM, right?Host
Or as fast. Right?Alex Huras
Or maybe like comparably fast right. Like now suddenly you donât have to worry about things being persistent anymore and now all the sudden all of these tools that are built to expect a file system API are suddenly like operating like standalone applications with their own virtualization support.Host
And youâve completely broadened the window where you have fast enough access to way way way more memory at a way lower price point than you had before. Itâs like a huge architectural change.Alex Huras
Like even even now, like I mean we can spin up, most people can I think with the power of the cloud. But you can spin up like petabyte memory clusters. Itâs like, oh, most of your stuff is like volatile processing and the state that you need to persist, you persist to like some dedicated like distributed system that is like expecting to do that, not your local file system.Host
Yeah the only time you think about local disk is logs from the local process and even that we could easily change.Alex Huras
And this is, this is what we were talking about how like structured logging or those sorts of techniques suddenly become really interesting because itâs like, well why arenât you storing everything in this like mysterious high-performance distributed file system thing, right?Host
That queryable.Alex Huras
Yeah. Thatâs queryable, that has referential integrity.Host
So is this kind of like everything is Splunk? Is that what this architecture is?Alex Huras
(Laughs) Maybe. Well this is the mania, right where you see these patterns again. Itâs like what if like everything was the JVM or like parallel virtual machine or like some of these esoteric distributed systems.Host
Cool. Um, you want to actually start?Alex Huras
Yeah, sure. Letâs talk about life.Host
Alright. So welcome to âUsing Reflection,â a podcast about humans engineering, and Iâm here today with Alex Huras. Why donât you introduce yourself and then weâll get into the conversation.Alex Huras
Cool. Iâm Alex. Iâm a Senior Engineer at Twitter. I work on currently data processing systems predominantly within the revenue or ads ecosystem at Twitter. So time series analytics, a little bit of forecasting, some search index stuff, mostly spread across that domain.Host
Cool. And a full disclosure, I can say that we worked together a while back when I was at Magnetic and you were still in school at Waterloo and thatâs definitely something I wanted to talk about is the program there, but, we can kind of start back to your younger years and you could maybe talk about how you got interested in engineering. Do you remember any formative experiences that drew you to it?Alex Huras
Sure. So I guess the long story is I used to be really into, I mean it was always kind of interested in engineering or scientific or those sorts of worldviews. My father was an engineer. Yeah, like how things worked. I like building things. I like taking things apart. I think the second is probably the bigger, the bigger engineering story. I think that thereâs a Dilbert comic, right? And so that kind of naturally led to like I was interested in math and science. I think it was a fairly traditional cycle there. I think the one possible caveat there was I was really into music. It was the situation where I had to decide between going to school or college for music or systems engineering, and my father is a systems engineer and literally went to the same program and my parents were very supportive, but itâs actually, they were like, so do you want to get a job? Like at some point in your life? And, and the answer there is eventually, like I went and did engineering at Waterloo.Host
Uh huh. Do you regret that at all?Alex Huras
No, no, not at all. I think it was, I think it was a great decision. I donât necessarily think I would have been screwed the other side, but I think especially going back and visiting people that I, that I knew from back then that went into different industries, I think engineering is an excellent choice. The job market is extremely difficult for essentially everyone else right now, and so I think that that had a lot of formative experiences, especially as an introduction into software that I actually did [help me] kind of later. So I was actually a plumber for one term. That was one of the more interesting experiences Iâve had in my life and I donât regret doing it, but now it happened. I did some finance stuff and eventually kind of taught myself to code during that because it was so mind-numbing.Host
So, in college?Alex Huras
Yea. This is still a co op stuff.Host
So what were you studying? Computer Science?Alex Huras
So yeah, so I was studying something called system design engineering at Waterloo, which I like to describe as the most vague, undifferentiated form of engineering that Waterloo offers.Host
So you got to decide what it was.Alex Huras
Pretty much. I mean what it ended up being for me was five years of Linear Algebra, but it can take different forms for different people in the program.Host
OK, so how does Linear Algebra map to Systems Engineering?Alex Huras
Oh how does it not. Everythingâs a schedule problem. Everythingâs⊠Everything can be expressed as a matrix transform.Host
Thatâs actually kind of true, especially if youâve ever programmed in APL or something.Alex Huras
Exactly, right. Itâs all numbers all the way down, and so I think the exposure to software ended up just being kind of like it was interesting. And then what ended up kicking it off was I worked, I got an internship I was super excited about at a small tech startup in the barrier called Skygrid at the time and that essentially started me off on a trajectory of where the next stop was Magnetic working with you guys.Host
Uh huh, well, so you did pretty well on the phone screen you considering you just kind of taught yourself to program.Alex Huras
Yeah, yeah, I mean I was, I was like writing some what I now realize that itâs absolutely horrifying javascript at Skygrid.Host
I still remember that phone screen because I asked you the question and you said something like, âAh, OKw, I see why youâre asking me this.â And then you proceeded to answer it.Alex Huras
Right. Like use a heap or something, it was something like use a heap.Host
Yeah like all 30-minute test questions.Alex Huras
Itâs like, would you like me to implement it? Let me jump through these hoops for you.Host
I tell people that Iâm like, just start with which data structure thatâs like, yeah, most of them. And does sorting help me?Alex Huras
Yeah, do I need ordering? Like maybe I do. Yeah. And actually just to slightly tangent there, I think one of the harder things and why interviewing for more senior engineering candidates, like especially like once you can assume that people know the data structures are the next thing is like instead of it being like what data structure to use, itâs like what are the constraints like period, like and that, that question is, itâs sort of like you build your career and trying to solve that question, right?Host
Thatâs requirements. Thatâs the business. Thatâs the operating environment, thatâs the world, thatâs the competition.Alex Huras
Exactly.Host
Now youâre in the domain of the whole world where I think thatâs a big separator from a junior versus more senior. Thatâs interesting. Okay. So you got the bug. Yeah.Alex Huras
Yeah.Host
And then so what, what was your career trajectory like at coming out of school? You decided you wanted to stay in software?Alex Huras
Yeah, and I donât necessarily view it as like a, I mean within school thereâs always this kind of existential pressure of like not liking software because itâs like ⊠soft. There was, when I was in Waterloo, which may or may not be the situation now, there was definitely a strong bias against incentivizing software engineering or to, to, or like non-software engineering and primary specialists. Like essentially there is a software engineering program at Waterloo. If youâre trying to do those sorts of things in the more conventional engineering stream is frowned upon.Host
I see. Interesting. Even applying it back to these other disciplines âŠAlex Huras
Sure, and thereâs a lot of design projects âŠHost
But isnât software having an impact on all these engineering disiplines?Alex Huras
Youâd think so. And I think it just comes down to possibly the, just the personalities of the individual professors that are doing these things, many of which are not in a software environment. And the other part is like software is still kind of this, this like vague, ambiguous. Like itâs not, itâs not. You couldnât really consider it to be like an applied science, like itâs very much like, and this is something that is maybe a little bit more subtle, but there is software engineering as in solving problems that relate, that you essentially use computers to solve and then there is software engineering as in like writing code, and writing code I donât believe is like an engineering discipline. Itâs an extremely powerful tool in the same way that like speaking English is not like an engineering skill in and of itself. Right. But itâs absolutely necessary for you to be able to operate.Host
Did you feel that as like a pressure or did you just kind of feel like you were going to do what you wanted to do? Like how susceptible were you to that environment?Alex Huras
Yeah, I donât, I donât necessarily. I mean, Iâm sure in retrospect, maybe I was, but like a large part of it was the fact that like, letâs be real. The software engineer, the software engineering industry in the United States pays roughly double if not more than the equivalent thing in Canada and probably similar multiples everywhere else in the world. And so being exposed to that market, especially after I did Magnetic, I worked briefly at Facebook and like, once youâre there youâre there. Like thereâs no going back at that point.Host
So youâre like, Iâm in New York making money.Alex Huras
Yeah. Yeah. And this is the thing too is like youâre paying more than like even as an intern, youâre paid more than what your tuition is like to go to school. And so you do that at facebook, they pay you even more and then you get like a full-time offer and youâre like âWow, this is ridiculous.â And so the economic incentives were aligned, but I think the second thing is like, I donât know what it was, but like maybe 50 percent of my graduating class ended up doing software-related things.Host
Well, when was that.Alex Huras
This was 2014. Yeah.Host
Well itâs probably just where a lot of jobs were.Alex Huras
Yeah. And thatâs. And thatâs, thatâs what it is. Itâs like that was the market that was hiring, huge employerHost
Super aggressively up there Iâm sure, because Iâve worked with a lot of people from Waterloo, and I want to get into the co-op thing in a moment but, and just the level of talent and ttitude and also their preparedness because of the co-op program, itâs incredible.Alex Huras
Yeah, and so you graduate, youâre essentially ready to like you essentially have possibly up to two years of industry experience as a new grad. Youâre competing with people who have zero experience, like the stars are aligned.Host
And all the things you learn working you donât learn at all in school.Alex Huras
Sure exactly.Host
How to work with people, which is something we can get into. How to work in a collaborative code base âŠAlex Huras
So like when I wound up starting to work for Twitter in 2014, it ended up being not a huge deal for me I think in terms of like process. If anything I was kind of surprised by like how much less there was.Host
It was more casual than some places.Alex Huras
It was more casual than, for example, like what I was doing at Magnetic.Host
I seem to remember lots of like debating about whether 10:00 AM was too early for the standup.Alex Huras
Oh yeah those debates still go on I assure you, strangely not when Iâm working in New York. So thereâs, thereâs that thing and I think the, something that takes a lot of, especially in new engineers that come out of CS education or whatever into their first software job by surprise is the fact that there arenât really problems that you can just like give someone with no expertise and just like have them solve in isolation. Like thatâs not the most effective use of your resources. And so if youâre not really, I donât mean sometimes there are others problems and if so then like those are great, like phenomenal.Host
So you mean usually the scope is too broad and interconnected âŠAlex Huras
the most effective way to solve these problems is not to just like sit down on your own, on your own and just like slam your head into the wall.Host
Sure. Thatâs almost certainly true because almost everything about the solution is going to come from a knowledge within the organization.Alex Huras
Yeah, exactly. Everythingâs convoluted, and thereâs like ⊠I remember what the first thing that I had to do was figure out some, like the sum of some numbers, and this is like classic accounting problem because the sum of some numbers didnât add up to the total ⊠like two data sources, combining these things. And it ended up being this like week-long investigation,Host
Isnât that every problem in ad tech?Alex Huras
Yeah, pretty much. Itâs, Oh yeah, itâs just a haunting problem really. But essentially at the end of it it was like, âOh yeah, like the database is out of sync.â Like we lost the master, thereâs some failover that was botched like six months ago, and then this data was just lost from six months.Host
Two hours of data from six months ago.Alex Huras
Yeah, exactly. And youâre like, âOh, so what did I learn? I learned that you should just ask this guy.âHost
And the other thing, the other, the other thing I find in each dream job is you have to learn the code base, right? You have to read a lot of code and understand sort of whatâs where and map it to a mental mental model of higher level idea of kind of boxes and arrows of the system and from that to the business and then that makes sense of the names youâre seeing in the code and the functions of the things youâre seeing. And this whole, thatâs a whole process that when youâre given assignments which are like write a function or even write a little application, youâre not dealing with that scope, that breadth and needing to kind of have multiple levels of abstraction in your mind.Alex Huras
Yeah one of the things that blew my mind initially was like this concept of requirements changing over time, right? I mean whoah, whoah right? I mean like you see little pieces of this, but like by over time I mean not like while youâre developing it. I mean like youâre looking at something system and like there are these points in history where like things mean many different things.Host
Where the columns changed or the inputs we used to this thing changed.Alex Huras
Yeah. And itâs like, itâs like, why canât I get the number of impressions on this video across this four-year period? Itâs like, oh, because actually they were indexed into a different place because this team was owned but in a different place and there was an acquisition. Itâs like, Oh, a serialized, wrong to begin with and it was cheaper to just like change our worldview that it was to like go back and like patch the data. Yeah.Host
So where, what, what company was this that you started in, in your first job out of school?Alex Huras
Oh first this was Twitter.Host
Oh so you have been at Twitter this whole time.Alex Huras
Yeah.Host
Huh, interesting.Alex Huras
Itâs been a very interesting ride especially and I mean a lot of people donât ⊠Like itâs not, itâs not the experience I signed up for it, but I donât regret it.Host
Well what did you think you were signing up for?Alex Huras
Well, I mean there is, Iâm not necessarily susceptible to hype, but it was, it was definitely a small-team environment. It was essentially the remnants of Twitterâs BackType acquisition and doing a kind of a full stack ads analytics thing for Twitter. And so like within a couple of weeks there are a lot of changes. Like had IPOâd, they were going to be the next Facebook, that didnât happen. There was this giant like morale swing âŠHost
Like Iâm 22 and this is my first job and this is happening âŠAlex Huras
Yeah, exactly. And so youâre, youâre kind of like, I learned a lot about how organizations work or donât work and that I think has been invaluable, but itâs not something that like I would actively look for in a, like, you wouldnât, you wouldnât go âŠHost
I mean maybe even some chaos.Alex Huras
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean some people do this and also weâre hiring (laughs), but you wouldnât dive in and be in this really hard place where thereâs all this fresh competition and all this extra hype thatâs moving away. Thereâs like Snapchat and Instagram.Host
Right. Some people love the idea of a challenge.Alex Huras
Yeah and so that was not necessarily what I had signed up for. I had signed up for, possibly naively, for like more of the exposure to some interesting technical challenges with an environment of people that were like really neat. And to see that environment like totally shift almost annually over the next three years has been extremely interesting.Host
But that goes back to what you said about requirements changing or something like a huge difference between working and, well, all education is basically education starts with the assumption that thereâs a static set of whatever youâre going to learn and itâs static.Alex Huras
Yeah, like connect the dots.Host
This stuff is basically the start of the semester, hereâs what weâre going to learn. Whereas working, itâs like â especially Iâve been in startups now really consistently, depending on how you count, seven to 10 years letâs say â things change every day. And itâs what I find really interesting about it is you need this constantly evolving mental model of what the business is, what your job is and how to be âŠAlex Huras
Or even what resources are at your disposal. And thereâs also, especially even over â and software is super interesting here, but like even over the last three years, like industry, technology changes like the cloud âŠHost
Righ, I mean the reason I went back to being hands on was the cloud because I thought to myself, âIf I donât start building stuff this way, Iâm going to be totally irrelevant and I have to have the rest of my career.âAlex Huras
And thatâs, and thatâs ⊠essentially like Iâm, Iâm like pretty young, pretty early in my career and that still terrifies me. We interviewed people who have lots of experience, all of it, like all of the marketable experience is irrelevant. And itâs. And itâs like that is âŠHost
So letâs stop there for a second.Alex Huras
Iâm afraid.Host
Donât you think that those people could learn?Alex Huras
I definitely, they definitely can. But the question is like how do you set up, how do you set up ⊠like letâs say like you want to hire those people anyway, right? So then the question is how do you set up an environment where they can actually learn that effectively and their value proposition is commensurate with how much youâre going to be paying them? And this, I think this is also kind of like the, the dark side of software engineering in many respects is like if youâre being hired based on skills that you possess as opposed to like how you solve problems or leading teams or whatever, then those skills better be super relevant otherwise itâs overpriced. Right?Host
Skills is a very hard race to run.Alex Huras
Right. And so this is, this is the thing where itâs like I had the opportunity even at Magnetic it was like,âOh do you want to like drop out of school and weâll pay you a lot of money to like write Map Reduce jobs?â And I was like, âOh man, this would be really interesting,â except for the fact that like, that would have been an absolutely horrifying career move. Maybe I would have been super excited and like jumped on Spark, jumped on Tapestry, like all these other things, but like, if you donât, if you just set park there ⊠Like we see people that come out of Oracle or even or like some of these other companies where itâs like youâve been working here, youâre an industry master at like how to use MySql for example. Like you know everything, you know the ins and outs and itâs like, âDo we run MySql here? No. Like I guess youâre not eligible for this position.â Like unless youâre willing to be like I am, I know Iâm willing to take like a 50 percent pay cut and work on something that Iâm not good at.Host
That just came up in the last episode with my friend Corey whoâs very much a Postgres specialist and contributor and um, has made a 20-year-plus career now basically specializing as being working with relational databases. But heâs been a consultant almost the whole time. And his point was, if youâre doing what youâre saying âŠAlex Huras
You need to be consultant.Host
Yeah, the consultant fit is âI do specialize, Iâm pretty much on the cutting edge, which means Iâm better than the people in house.Alex Huras
Yeah youâre going to pay a premium for this skill set and youâre going to have to jump around âŠHost
And when you need me, Iâm gonna be totally reliable and better than who you have. And he said the key is if youâre going to focus around skills â the two things maybe are you got to try to always kind of be moving toward where you think opportunities are going to be, and you need to find things where you can be better at than most people.Alex Huras
Sure. And typically that means super nichey, or almost you can do the opposite, which is like super generalist and maximize transferable skills âŠHost
Iâm not really interested in you slinging dirt about Twitter per se, but itâs interesting to me that itâs, itâs been a volatile environment, meaning and a sense of thereâs been a lot of change going on while youâve been there. Right. Not, not trying to have a negative connotation. And itâs interesting to me that, you know, your expectations were almost immediately confounded, especially about what it would be like working with teams and all of that. So what have you seen or what do you think youâve learned about what makes teams effective in, in this kind of situation where thereâs a lot of change happening and how you can be as valuable as you can be?Alex Huras
The biggest problem that Iâve seen or rather like a symptom of teams that are not aligned properly or like not effective I guess in this terminology, is like they donât necessarily have a common goal or skill set. Like it isnât ⊠like teams with strong visions and who have people that are essentially dedicated to solving core problems. Like regardless of how they get solved, tend to be extremely effective. They survive through like heavy attrition or like the stock price dropping by 2x or whatever, and it ends up also being easier to hire for in many cases. Right? So like even over like four or five six seven years or whatever, very few teams at most companies in the Bay Area I think had been like totally stable. Right? And yet the teams that I do see around Twitter and around other places that are, have all these things in common. Itâs like theyâve got a core mission which is like relatively unambiguous and they use to actually decide whether or not theyâre working on [the right] problems. They have access to resources to solve problems with, whether this means using the cloud or like having people, and theyâre essentially, they like self-select for people that are kind of aligned. And a lot of it is like, okay, well if youâre a junior engineer, thereâs a place for you where you can actually learn from people who are really good at what theyâre doing because theyâve been so stably aligned in this direction. If youâre hiring senior people, itâs like, hey look, weâve got these junior people you want to mentor, like great, hereâs some people like make everyone better. And then strategically, even within a big organization, whether itâs Twitter or any other engineering environment, that team becomes almost ⊠You can, you can trust it more. Thereâs this a team dynamic thing where itâs like you have to build a whole bunch of trust and consistently do that and if people donât trust each other, then the team collapses and if people donât ⊠if a team collapses like you canât deliver. And so thereâs this kind of stable repetition of things that people are actually interested in, and that, that typically wins.The problem then is like, if youâre not in that position, how do you like assemble that from the chaos? Which has happened to various parts within Twitter and other companies as well. If your company is relatively flat and it has this long-standing tradition of like anarchy, then itâs going to be very difficult for you ⊠like those teams might develop organically; they might also disappear organically because they grow together and theyâre like, âWait a minute, I could just like start a consulting shop.â And then the whole team like leaves or company or whatever.
Host
And that goes back to the consistency you were just talking about.Alex Huras
Yeah, and so you need, you need some direction, whether or not itâs super top-down or whatever like it doesnât matter. If thereâs a direction and people buy into it and also realize that like the company as an abstract entity is actually like incentivizing you to be more successful than itâs like for lack of a better term, synergy or whatever.Host
Right.Alex Huras
And I have to be totally honest I have not seen that in its ideal form, but thatâs, thatâs something that weâd kind of like strive to align people around.Host
Right. So then what about you personally? How do you identify how you can best fit into that mission once you identify that that mission is there? How do you kind of keep realigning yourself?Alex Huras
Yeah, and thatâs like the big existential question that I donât necessarily have a good answer for.Host
Yeah thatâs like working right?Alex Huras
Yeah. So like my, my general answer is I just kind of like work on things that interest me and it just so happens that Iâve been kind of interested in this like data processing domain for enough time that kind of know what Iâm doing âŠHost
But I mean can you map it back to the goal of your team?Alex Huras
Thereâs kind of this weird feedback loop where like Iâm interested in solving this problem, like as long as someone, as long as someone says that that problem is worth investing in and suddenly thereâs like all these other people that are interested in the same problem, and itâs almost like I was like, we set my roadmap being letâs solve this problem or letâs work with other people to solve this problem. And itâs kind of ⊠and maybe this is why itâs super difficult, but itâs like that there is this virtuous cycle where it isnât necessarily like I have to consciously align my interests with the business. I think thatâs ideal. I think in reality within advertising, you do need that realignment when it comes down to individual teams, like the stability of a common goal being repeated for a long time can exist. Even like Twitter, weâve got like 2,000 engineers or whatever. Itâs like you donât need 2,000 engineers to have a common direction. You actually only need like 100 of them.Host
Itâs really hard for 2,000 engineers to have a common direction.Alex Huras
I mean tell me about it (laughs). And thatâs something that like Google has to address my problem too, and I think even when youâre, when youâre working through your career, I mean if youâre, if youâre in a position where you have to consider the alignment of 2,000 individuals, like youâre probably not doing software engineering anymore, and for at least where I am in my career, I think itâs enough to have some sort of local stability that you can be like, all right, weâre going to be doing this for two years and this is the, this is the vision for how weâre going to solve these problems. And like youâve got any resources that you can, that you can find or like that we can provide to solve it. And I like the restriction there being on what we can deliver rather than being like, all right, hereâs a bunch of artificial constraints like go solve the problem.Host
Yeah. And I think, I mean because Iâve also been spending more than the last year plus here on like data and have done that earlier in my career too. And one observation I can make about that is itâs somewhere between infrastructure and product features.Alex Huras
Oh for sure, yeah.Host
And so like you can be a little, your goals can be really clear even if all the different features or whatever uses of the data are less clear.Alex Huras
Sure.Host
And I think so you can be in this kind of world where youâre just like ⊠your interface to the rest of the businesses is like âI delivered this dataset and itâs consumable by you in these ways.â And so that thatâs like a very clear goal.Alex Huras
And I think the, and this is like the meta-trend for that part of the industry is like thereâs a situation, thereâs this kind of blurred line between having non-engineers be able to declaratively do these sorts of things and having ⊠and like implementing ⊠and on the engineering side itâs like implementing platforms, that youâd want almost this like global compiler that is like stitching together known data sets. And itâs like, âHow do you write that?â Itâs like, âOh I donât know.âHost
Yeah right. But that would still be something with a very clear goal that you can define âŠAlex Huras
Yes. And so the, I think the danger especially for that â and this is literally like what Iâm working on right now â but like the danger for those things is like, again, this kind of blurs the line because why would you write that yourself? Like thatâs an expensive project to undertake. Like what are the value adds? Youâre trying to essentially justify spending like millions of dollars of, of resources over multiple years trying to solve this problem. Then you have to be like, oh, is that actually a problem? And youâre talking to people who have no idea too, so itâs like, oh, like maybe people donât, donât mind writing this themselves. Maybe we were totally happy hiring engineers to do that. Like I havenât had to think about this before, but maybe it wasnât as clear as I thought.Host
Donât take this the wrong way, but youâre not drawing on 20 years of work experience.Alex Huras
No, exactly. I have no idea. People ask me these questions like, I donât know, I just work here. (both laugh)Host
Right. Interesting. I want to circle back a little on Co-op too. Maybe you could first frame it for people who arenât familiar with it.Alex Huras
So the Waterloo Co-op system is essentially, you could think of it as interspersed in your normal undergraduate degree you have compulsory four-month internships that if you donât complete them to some satisfactory manner, you just donât graduate. So in engineering at Waterloo this is required, like you canât get an engineering degree, which is a Bachelorâs of Applied Science, without completing five of six possible co-op internships.Host
So you went to school for four years.Alex Huras
Yeah. So the, the undergraduate degree is four years and eight months, so roughly five years.Host
So you go to school for almost five years and around two of that âŠAlex Huras
So the way that my undergrad worked is like you started school in, in the fall of whatever year that was and four months later you like Christmas time or whatever, like during that you have to like find a job and there were resources that help you find a job, but itâs not like one is provided for you. Youâre competing with, with all the people in Waterloo and theoretically the world depending on where youâre going and you have whatever experience you have, which after the first four months of university is effectively zero. And this is also why I was a plumber. Yeah, itâs like âIs Facebook going to hire me? No.â And so then youâre four months of working full time. Essentially youâre then rotating every four months until essentially the last year and then you have eight months of solid school.Host
And each time you have to go and get a job again.Alex Huras
Yeah.Host
Does it become more and more competitive? Does it become like a thing?Alex Huras
So yes and no. I think itâs actually extremely competitive at the beginning because most of the people are not differentiated.Host
I see.Alex Huras
At the end of the ⊠Well, especially especially in your equivalent to senior year, you are the most competitive intern on the planet and so like, yeah, sure, youâre competing with other people at Waterloo, but if a tech company wanted to hire interns, theyâre just gonna like pick you. I mean generally, I mean thatâs kind of a âŠHost
And hopefully by then youâve gotten like a blue chip ⊠like by that time youâve interned for Facebook or whatever.Alex Huras
Yeah. And, and thatâs the thing is like those are kind of like the jackpot I think in terms of software engineering, but there are a lot of other large-scale employers. So for example, the government. Yeah, government is a big hiring. Like you can do research assistant type things within universities. Thereâs lots of smaller engineering companes especially for non-software disciplines. But I think the key distinction is like when you graduate, you do graduate later than then youâre essentially people the same age group. Like about by about a year, but at that point you have two years of quote unquote real world experience and if you knew what you were going to do and you aligned yourself so that all those were, for example, like within software that is like two years of industry experience, but being, being like fresh out of school.Host
And did you find that people, especially the internships you did later, that there was an understanding that you could come back there after you graduated or?Alex Huras
Uh, yeah, I think every single, every single place I worked was like that.Host
There you go, so youâre in a good position, youâre not freaking out when you graduate.Alex Huras
Yeah and I think itâs also like, Iâm not sure how much of this is because the tech industry was taking off, but I think in general like, it is like ⊠working at a place is the easiest foot in the door that you could have working there. Right. So like I know a lot of people that were working at companies that were not necessarily converting internships into full-time offers, but you would, having worked there and theoretically performed well then youâre, youâre way better off than like any random person.Host
Oh, I mean speaking as someone whoâs had to hire people, the amount of risk that that covers is like nearly all of it.Alex Huras
Yeah, part of this is communicated actually to employers in the Co-op system. Iâm not sure how much I agree about this, but like thereâs like a public rating that you get for every internship.Host
Ooh!Alex Huras
Yeah. You may not have seen those when I ⊠but there, I mean some of them are like gamed and you can essentially like elect to not display them and some things. But essentially like the employers that are looking at the Waterloo pool as integrating into the Waterloo system have a lot of power. And so the contract that they kind of implicitly have with the university is like, you have some slots, like youâre going to fill them and you have a lot of information, like more than you would normally have.Host
Well, the schoolâs a big part of the schoolâs value proposition to the students is âŠAlex Huras
⊠is this network right âŠHost
⊠right, of desirable employers. So they are making this two-sided market that is very intersting.Alex Huras
Yeah thatâs ripe to be disrupted. Right. But, and this is, this is kind of the bigger question is like why, and I still get this today, like why does no one else have this?Host
Right I mean of course thatâs where Iâm going next. How repeatable and scalable do you think this model is?Alex Huras
If you, you were to just have the requirement that people go out and find jobs every four months. Like until they graduate that that would, Iâm not sure ⊠Like, and this is one thing that you were like Iâm not, I wasnât necessarily in a situation where I was taking advantage of the support network of Waterloo, but that is valuable in and of itself. And so like if you were a school where you want it to have internships, I think the first step is just like donât do them in the summer. Like have school in the summer. Have your interns compete with effectively n onne in the winter and fall and now suddenly all these companies have like full-time intern support.Host
I suspect even though you said you werenât taking advantage of the support, of course you were.Alex Huras
Sure implicitly thereâs like this reputation âŠHost
There is a whole infrastructure of processes that are occurring that you had nothing to do with that are still helping you get a job.Alex Huras
So for example, like my, my earlier stuff that I did ⊠like the first three jobs I effectively found on my own outside of the system. I think Magnetic, I did end up using the system for.Host
I remember that was set up and I talked to other pople that day.Alex Huras
And so like that from a recruitment angle makes hiring from Waterloo very efficient. And so like if you were a university and you wanted to implement something like this, like that would probably be a sizable investment to build up that stuff. But I think for a lot of smaller institutions, like if thereâs no reason why this cannot work.Host
You do think itâs ⊠would be beneficial?Alex Huras
I think so.Host
Itâs like, Iâve been thinking a lot about this. The job market for what we do is so broken.Alex Huras
Itâs nuts.Host
Along multiple dimensions. Thereâs not nearly enough people and yet the system thatâs currently used to find and select people has huge amount of bias.Alex Huras
Yup.Host
Itâs leaving out so many sources of people âŠAlex Huras
Sure, and I think there is a lot evidence to say that itâs not even that successful.Host
Right! And almost everyone who goes through it doesnât think it has much to do with who ends up being good or not. Many hiring managers, you agree with that too. And, and yeah. Great. And I mean I thought that it twice or at least during this conversation when you were talking about speaking to these people with a lot of experience but maybe not the right experience âŠAlex Huras
Itâs almost like a marketing problem, right?Host
Well yes. But I also think you need multiple actors in the system providing more training and supportAlex Huras
Sure, of course.Host
So like your Twitter example of like someone walks in the door who has been shipping code for 25 years but doesnât have your skills on your random HDFS cloud whatever whatever, like, so take them provisionally for three or six months and train them âŠAlex Huras
Yeah and thatâs something thatâs super interesting because like a lot of the ⊠and so as a Canadian citizen as well, like the immigration system is not set up for provisional employment into the U.S. So if we, if we, if we table the immigrationr-related discussion, which I also have strong opinions about, and a vested interest.Host
Yeah.Alex Huras
The like even internally I donât even know if people like if that ⊠Because thereâs nothing stopping companies from taking on provisional employees. Right? I think itâs very tricky for sure. And I think itâs like risk management for employment or whatever and that, maybe, maybe that gives the employer a lot of power. Maybe it doesnât. Like itâs kind of a âŠHost
I donât know. I think theyâre worried about like a training and you leave that kind of thing.Alex Huras
Sure.Host
But you know what, like you donât have that person now.Alex Huras
Yeah, exactly.Host
I think itâs up to businesses to retain people by making it a good proposition for people to stay.Alex Huras
Exactly.Host
And you start out with some loyalty. If you took someone who wasnât in a position to work for you and you gave them the opportunity to work for you, you know, you get some loyalty. Also, like, Iâve had, um, benefits that came with requirements. Like when I was at Moodyâs and they were paying for my grad school, you know, you had to say for some period of time after that or pay it back to them. So anyway, I just think that thatâs an example, and I think this example of the Co-op is another example.Alex Huras
But I think part of that is also kind of this indentured servitude model which does not like âŠHost
But the reason now reason we have that is largely because of how we pay for healthcare.Alex Huras
Sure.Host
I mean, speaking of someone who has the only wage earner for a family of four, two family members have a significant health issues and thatâs my whole life. I have to be so carefully tied to an employer for the wellbeing of my family. Itâs crazy. And so like me being relevant in the job market, itâs not an abstraction at all.Alex Huras
Well especially if you extend that and youâre like, âOh, if Iâm not tied to an employer, Iâm legally not allowed to be in this country anymore.âHost
(Laughs) Now weâre back to the integration topic.Alex Huras
No, but itâs, itâs, itâs like, this is why itâs such a huge, I mean all of these things, obviously itâs an extremely complex system. All these things are tied together, but like itâs like even as like an American citizen working at a, like an upstanding business like getting better. Itâs like if youâre still thinking about that, can you imagine itâd be like, oh, like I lose my job and like also like I could be like arrested. Right? Thatâs huge.Maybe that power distribution was OK, but we need better ways of paying people for work that they do. Part of this. I mean, part of this is kind of the quasi-toxic yet very economically interesting distributed contractor model or somthing, like the Uberâs right?
Host
Are we talking about the gig economy?Alex Huras
Yeah, the gig economy right? And this is the thing too where itâs like if you were in, and this is the ideal thing for an employer, right? You have some very, very clear definition of what a job is that you want to do. And youâre just like hire people to perform. Itâs like a machine. You hire like an Automaton to perform.Host
Yeah in fact itâs going to be self-driving person before you know it. A self-driving car.Alex Huras
This is the thing too is like even if you were in a situation where you had to hire software engineers for example, and youâre like, okay, I have some extremely well specified, like you have the test, the golden tests that says like just pass this test. Those jobs are already outsourced, like they donât exist here. And so when itâs interesting, when you, when youâre talking especially newer engineers and maybe older engineers that are kind of looking for that, like the simplicity of having predefined problems, just like, no, like if you want to do that, weâre going to pay you 10 percent of your salary. Like how do you feel now? Right?Host
Yeah so the way I look at this is automation is eating the bottom out of the every technology jobs.Alex Huras
Yeah itâs like any decision problem is on the table.Host
Like so, right. All of these are the same pressure, right? Thereâs more and more of a need for software. Thereâs not enough people, right? So thereâs a bunch of startups and initiatives to try to help solve the hiring problem. Thereâs not nearly enough being done. Education is going to change. Attitude toward hiring people from alternative backgrounds is going to change. Training to support is going to change.Alex Huras
This is also kind of my, my cynical perspective here, but like thereâs all this like learn to code initiatives or whatever and itâs like coding is not the problem. The problem is not that there are not enough people that know how to write a function in javascript or python or whatever your language. Itâs like if that was the problem, then we would have compiled away the solution. Right? Like tools will solve that problem. I mean itâs okay to use code as a vehicle to teach problem-solving skills or whatever, but like that should be the super-explicit goal. Itâs like actually this is just a trick. Itâs like an elaborate illusion that weâre presenting so that you learn math, right? Like this is like this is just a game weâre playing as a society to, to encourage you to rigorously solve these sorts of problems and that is what weâre missing. Or at least that in, in the, in the sorts of problems that Iâm solving like that, those are the people that are like, Iâm actively looking for and itâs like extremely sparse.Host
So do you think thatâs hard to teach or impossible to teach?Alex Huras
I donât think so. I think itâs just like, like video games teach this. Like this is, itâs not a, itâs not like a hard quote unquote hard problem just by the fact that it is like, it is a skill allegedly, but it has very ambiguous success criteria, right?Host
Yeah but it sounds like what youâre saying is itâs the ability to define a problem with, with precision.Alex Huras
Not necessarily with precision, but I think this, this generally comes down to like the holy grail of education, which is like critical thinking and like generic abstract problem-solving skills.Host
Yeah. Okay.Alex Huras
And so itâs easy for me to say, yeah, we need more people like that. I have no idea how to âŠHost
⊠how to produce them.Alex Huras
⊠how to produce that. Like thatâs a huge education thing and maybe the learn to code initiatives or whatever actually do ⊠like maybe thatâs like the latent function of that is it puts kids in a situation where the incentives are aligned for them to actually be better at solving problems.Host
Yeah, maybe it gets them in the door to where that is the work.Alex Huras
Yeah. And so the big thing here is like youâre a small kid, you like playing with blocks or whatever. Itâs like you start noticing that like arches are stable. That sort of thing will be with you for the rest of your life.Host
Right. -
Show Notes
Topics: Bit Operations, Blogging, Career Advancement, Career Responsibility, Computer Science, Failure and Learning, Interviewing, Learning, Managing Engineers, Mentoring, Sponsoring, Teamwork and Team Leadership, Trust, Web Development, Writing
Companies
EtsyIntroduction
For years, Will Gallego believed the way to advance as an engineer was to be better than those around him. In interviews, he focused on stumping candidates with arcane technical questions. As a manager, he still saw himself as an individual contributor, and shipped code without communicating. But then he joined Etsy, and realized that the senior engineers around him were helping themselves most of all by making those around them better. The culture of learning and blameless postmortems spearheaded by then-CTO John Allspaw shaped his thinking, and he began to see his past experience in a new light. Will focused on helping his colleagues succeed and was rewarded with a Staff Engineer role. Then he took it further, working with a recruiter friend to counsel younger engineers, and blogging about personal aspects of the engineering journey and how to reimagine the technical interviewing process. Along the way, Will discovered that paying back pays off for everyone.
Guest Bio
Will Gallego is a systems engineer with 15+ years of experience in the web development field, currently as a Staff Engineer at Etsy. Comfortable with several parts of the stack, he focuses now on building scalable, distributed backend systems and tools to help engineers grow. He believes in a free and open internet, blame-aware postmortems, and pronouncing gif with a soft âGâ.
Links
Will Gallegoâs Blog Will Gallego blog post: âOn Becoming an Authorâ Twitter: @wcgallego âReport from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity (From a workshop on conducting blameless postmortems)â Interview Question: âWhat happens when you type âgoogle.comâ into a browser?â Code as Craft: Etsy Engineering Blog Twtiter: @codeascraft Twitter: @allspaw (John Allspawâs Twitter) âWhat Does Sponsorship Look Like?â (Article about mentorship and sponsorship by Lara Hogan) Twitter: @lara_hoganTranscriptHost
Hello and welcome to Using Reflection, a podcast about humans engineering, and weâre here today with Will Gallego. Will, why donât you go ahead and introduce yourself and then weâll get into the conversation.Will Gallego
Sure. Iâm a staff engineer at Etsy. For about six and a half years now and Iâve been doing professional web development in one capacity or another for 15 years and you know, bouncing around from startup to startup. Landed at Etsy a couple of years ago and been doing back end since.Host
I know one of the things that you wanted to talk about today that is also very interesting to me and Iâve covered it on three previous episodes is issues around recruiting and hiring of engineers. So why donât we start a little earlier and your story and we can kind of work our way through some of your experiences that have led you to kind of where you are now, which is blogging about and working on a book about recruiting with the idea that a lot of the recruiting process now is not a complete gauge of a personâs ability maybe and their success. Not a good measure of what theyâll be doing day to day, and maybe not the best avenue in for the most people into the industry.Will Gallego
Yeah. I feel like when I came to Etsy it was very much a wake up of understanding that being a better engineer isnât just learning the latest technology or trying to shoehorn some new technology into your stock. Itâs trying to understand how you work with teams and how youâre trying to level yourself up by making other engineers around you more understanding, more empathetic. That team collaboration, building that together is what makes great products and therefore makes great engineering organizations. Learning about trying to be a senior engineer at Etsy, I was trying to just catch up with this large scale product that Iâve ever worked with before. Iâve never been with a company as large as Etsy in my professional career. And so trying to understand thereâs this big stack to learn all this new stuff. And I spent the first two or three years at Etsy trying to just really deeply understand that and finally had this kind of epiphany I suppose, thinking that looking around at people who had leveled up to, you know, IC4, staff engineering, senior staff engineering, higher ICâs at the company and seeing what theyâre doing, and, sure they have experience with these large- scale technologies; theyâre knowledgeable about how they work and what goes wrong and how to adapt to those failures, but most of their work wasnât just Iâm sitting front of a terminal and Iâm typing things out. It was Iâm going to be a lead dev for a team and that means trying to scale up the work that other people are doing, and in that case you need to try to train other engineers and understand what theyâre going through and in response try to adapt your understanding of what they need around that.Will Gallego
I started trying to look at other engineers who were more junior engineers at Etsy and try and help them out, and seeing a lot of them come in and interviewing myself I realized my interview practices were terible. I was giving all the terrible interviews that you kind of hear about in horror stories. I was giving esoteric trivia. I was giving very specifics about languages. I was giving puzzles of like, hereâs a graph tell me what this is, and not giving any kind of insight into that, just you know, âFreeform it. Go.â And a while back we had some practice on, okay, our interview isnât going right. We need to, as a smaller team, kind of take this apart and see where itâs going wrong and kind of tag team this. And I started realizing that, okay, the interviewer side is, itâs not accurate. Itâs not reflective of what it means to be in the org. How can we change that? And then following that, I was trying to focus on, well sure, the interview side isnât good either but do engineers themselves know what theyâre getting into when they walk into an interview room?Will Gallego
I started just typing it out a couple of notes. This is actually from a trip it took to Belgium last summer. I was at a conference for Resilience engineering. I was giving a conference talk to some colleagues about our culture around postmortems at Etsy and how we tried to emphasize adaptability in our failures. Coming home, I had about two hours sleep. I was in a flophouse kind of hotel about 20 minutes outside the airport. Uh, it was like 6:30 morning. Iâve got no sleep and I started writing down some of these notes and ideas. Going through a couple pages of it, I realize this is more than just like a blog post or even a conference talk that could I give to someone. There is more here that Iâm trying to dissect and really I understand about what my own feelings were towards pairing someone for an interview process. Thatâs kind of led me to the last couple months, and Iâve been really inspired by other people on Twitter who have been trying to help junior devs or understand their own interview practices, and Iâm just trying to piece from that.Host
One thing that caught my attention kind of from the start of that narrative was how much your perspective changed on what it meant to be senior when you came to Etsy. Do you think the culture at Etsy in any way taught you things you hadnât understood before about being part of a team team success, and how much being senior really means helping others on the team succeed?Will Gallego
Without a doubt. This all stems from the simple idea of having a learning culture and a lot of our learning culture stems from our postmortem process. The idea that you can walk into a room and know that youâre not going to feel the burden of being blamed or no oneâs going to point fingers at you if something went wrong and you were involved in the actions. You can openly speak about the events that happened from that. The idea is that if we can all understand what our mindsets weâre going into that, what our thinking was when an incident occurred and why we thought the actions we took were the best actions at the time, then the falsehood of human error being at fault just falls away. And so, stemming from that, the idea of being a senior engineer doesnât mean knowing everything and being perfect and having an encyclopedic knowledge of every single technology in your stack. It means understanding that tense situations happen. Youâre trying to do your best and as a team you need to understand what the needs of your teammates and people you donât even work with often are, and after the fact when things do go wrong, we can understand those decision making inflection points and learn from that.Host
So the post mortem was a real revelation to you. I know that blameless postmortems have become more popular. I also, my understanding is at least that partly the prevalence now of that idea was promoted by the former CTO there, John Allsapw, so I know it was a big part of the culture there. Did you have experiences with other people there earlier in your time there who mentored you, who showed you by examplet he value and a expectation around helping others level up?Will Gallego
Oh, for sure. For the first three years at Etsy I was lucky enough to sit across from Allspaw, and that was just hugely influential. This feels like one of those inflection points for me where I was able to just be in the right place at the right time and learn from people who genuinely cared and they wanted me to get better and for no better reason then seeing others succeed. That is hugely influential when you can see a culture of people who want you to win. Itâs not about trying to score points off people or be right or outdo people. Itâs trying to build everyone up. Itâs unbelievable. And Iâm so lucky to have been in that kind of situation.Host
Not to slag where you were previously, but these were new experiences for you. This kind of thing?Will Gallego
(Chuckles) Iâve gotten chewed out at previous jobs and thatâs unfortunate and you know, it doesnât do any good. It doesnât help anyone. You feel good for about 10 seconds and then you feel bad that you yelled at someone. The person feels bad for, I donât know, months, years, however long it burdens them. And you havenât solved the problem. You havenât learned anything.Host
You all were looking at your interview process and realizing there are aspects of it you thought were inadequate or could be improved. So can you share any particulars there and what actions you took to try to improve that?Will Gallego
Yeah, so I will speak to my own failures and interviews in particular because I think I got firsthand experience of course back and Iâve got the best ware stories around it. For a long time, I was using this one interview question. It was, âGiven an integer, write a function that will tell me if that integer is a power of two or not.â And this was a question I actually got from a Google interview when I interviewed, I donât know, 12, 11 years ago, something like that. And I completely bombed on it. It was a phone interview, it was just a screener, and the interviewer, gave me that question and I completely flubbed it. And then he asked it on the flip side, he actually told me the answer and said okay, well hereâs a function that would do that. Can you tell me what this function does? It was a bitwise operation for figuring it out and I completely flubbed what that was doing. And they said,âOkay, weâll be in touchâ and of course, you know, I didnât get any kind of a forward movement on that.Will Gallego
And it stuck with me because I thought, âWell these are the kinds of questions people are asking in interviews. Iâm going to use this interview in the future because now I know the answer and Iâm feeling like Iâm living on my own knowledge.â And I made excuses like, well it was a way of thinking about a problem where they can give multiple answers. And that is good, but really itâs trivia. Thereâs almost always a standard library or a built-in thatâs going to tell you this. And that kind of revelation of like, yeah, this actually isnât a good question. Asking very esoteric questions about PHP, or things like that. Just general little bits of trivia that you donât necessarily need to use every day. PHP stuff. Do you know how to read file and do some string manipulation and print out? Youâre probably okay. Can you read from a database? Great. But knowing exactly what the function is to do a key sort on an array, like php.net, you look it up, done. And thatâs why that question is just a failure as a question.Will Gallego
So I had to rework completely what it meant for me to interview people. A question Iâll give it to you that I still give interviewees today because thereâs no cheating at the question, and you can find it on the Internet too. Itâs, âYou go to your browser, you type Google.com in the search bar. Tell me what happens.â Itâs such a broad and deep question that anyone whoâs done any kind of development can tell you something about whatâs going on and no one knows the answer to every single part of that. Do you go into DNS work and tell me how DNS look-ups work? You tell me what it means to hit a server and the types of servers it could be?. Do you tell me about caching? Do you tell me about databases? Do you tell me about the front end part of it and what the screen is displaying when a browser renders Javascript or CSS and HTML? Do you tell me about the keyboard inputs when youâre pressing the keys on the keyboard and hit Enter? All these levels are each important to specific tasks in an engineering organization. Itâs a good question because you can stump someone so â you know stump is the wrong word. You can understand the boundaries of their knowledge and say, okay, well this is where theyâre strong this is where theyâre weak, and get a good idea of what theyâre doing. Itâs also a conversation. Itâs not a binary answer where youâre trying to give them, hereâs the exact number youâre looking for and if they donât get it they failed it and you really donât have too much of an insight what they were thinking and they got it exactly right. Itâs like, well, they got it right in a second, does that give you an indication of how they develop, how they problem solve around that? That kind of question is really important because I like interview questions that are conversations, not just specific answers.Host
I understand the aspect of that. Youâre describing where itâs open ended and the value in that, but it sounds like you also like that kind of question because the interviewee is more comfortable, and that leads back to I think the realization you had about the blameless postmortems, right? And the idea is that everyone, they should feel challenged but not under attack maybe you cou think of it as.Will Gallego
Yeah! Thereâs so many interviewers who want to prove that theyâre smarter than people coming in or making them feel like they have to go through this gauntlet to earn the right to work there. It just, it doesnât make any sense. Itâs self-serving and really itâs self-serving in a very short time. You make your ego a little bigger and youâre passing on good candidates or youâre building that same kind of toxi culture where youâre trying to one-up each other. Thereâs nothing behind it that I think is worth looking into.Host
Right. So maybe one more follow up and then maybe we can kind of move toward some of the things youâve been working on, you know, in regards to this. But so going back to the Google question and just playing devilâs advocate. First of all, itâs funny because as you were saying it, I totally resisted the urge to jump in and be like bitshift operator to show that I knew that. So thatâs already hilarious and Iâm even telling you now as a way of kind of getting over that, right? Which just shows how beguiling this whole thing is about feeding your ego. Right?Will Gallego
ExactlyHost
But, but playing devilâs advocate on the question itself, I understand that in almost all domains you would call a library and you wouldnât necessarily need to know the optimal way to do that manually. But I, I would argue that at Googleâs scale, maybe thereâs three or four companies where this potentially matters in the world. You know, knowing the absolute most efficient way to do anything is probably a relevant. Itâs relevant to them. So I guess my question is, do you think there are some contexts where questions that are much more technical are more relevant. Do you think that at a company like Google where they have such incredible scale, in that situation it might make sense to try to only hire people who are aware of the most efficient way of doing an operation like that. Versus many, many, many other professional situations where as you say, you would rely on, you know, a preexisting solution.Will Gallego
I would say thatâs a poor filter question. It doesnât indicate that, say I came up with a bunch of other great solutions for power of two, but not exactly using the bitwise operaation. Does that mean Iâm knowledgeable enough to do this? Was it a requirement that I have to know I should be using bitwise operations here? Did it indicate that I do know bitwise operations or not? I mightâve thought about bitwise operations in other contexts, but not in this one and still known how to use them and been capable and with the right tools operate at that efficient scale. And even flipped on the reverse on that, I donât have those skills. How hard would it be to teach someone how to use bitwise operations? I mean a day, two days, you know, thatâs not that hard. Thatâs being pretty generous I think in terms of learning how to do those operations. So it doesnât show that I can learn on the job. It doesnât showcase what skills I have. It doesnât showcase how Iâd approach discussion or how a reason around problem. It shows that, did I memorize or did I immediately come up with a solution that someone thought of as this is the most efficient way to do it. I think that we rarely in engineering have the most efficient solution to a problem right away. In web development, game dev, application development, whereever youâre doing it, our most efficient ideas usually come from, okay, Iâm proposing this as a solution to the problem. Here are three alternatives to it. Letâs debate them, letâs go through the pros and cons of them and try to fit whichever one is going to work for us the best. That is in my mind the idea of high efficiency for a company, how we can build the best product is going to do he most good for us while doing the least evil I suppose.Host
Right. So that totally makes sense from a product point of view. And from a purely technical point of view asserting that any one solution is the most efficient along any axis of measurement is irrelevant. Whatâs relevant is measuring performance, right? Thatâs the engineering part of this. Thatâs an engineering part of the job is ⊠right. I mean, you know, letâs say you need to do some division on a webpage. Well, you would measure in different browsers, right, and you would see which is the most efficient way to do it if you needed to be that efficient, you know, and, and I think a lot of the time, again, thatâs not as important as it might be in that situation. This is interesting how this really simple question is raising all these issues, right?Host
I think there are like cultural signifiers attached to these interview questions and in particular this one I happened to know because the first language I learned was C, and for whatever reason those operators, like every intro C book I read, you know, at that time, like they cover those operators. And so itâs like this thing of when theyâre asking that question, I think theyâre really kind of asking are you a C/C++ person or are you some other kind of person. Different languages in part because of their history and culture and who used them, and in part because their strengths and their, where they way they lead you, the inclinations they lead you toward, and therefore the use cases that are most often used for, you know, have really different domain concerns. Like as someone whoâs spent a fair amount of my time professionally in both Python and C++, there are so many things you think about it in C++ that you just donât bother with in Python around efficient use of memory and most efficient, uh, you know, like everything, every hoop you jump through to avoid allocations in C++, you just write the most readable code you can write in Python.Host
I think this question is actually an example of the cultural aspects of the interview questions. So does bias come in on questions not just to show how smart you are or emphasize traditional computer science, but also, I donât know because you sort of favor one approach to software development over another?Will Gallego
100 percent. I think bias is not necessarily, âI think Iâm better than this person,â or âI am trying to prove something.â Sometimes itâs just these are tools that I am very comfortable with and there is the assumption that Iâm doing my job, I think Iâm good at my job, so if someone else were to be in my shoes in this job, I think they would require these exact same tools to do this job. And we donât necessarily always favor people with outside information or new experiences that would be good for our job that we donât possess, and so to try to find that Venn diagram of what I know, what they know and the overlap there and then try to incorporate stuff that they know that I donât into this position and say, âOh, thatâs really great.â Thatâs not really part of our typical interview process because we want to go in there and feel like we asked a question, we know the answer to what theyâre going to say or we have, you know, the teacherâs book with the answers in the back. So if anything comes up well weâre okay too. We want to feel comfortable in interviews as much as we can and feeling knowledgeable and in control of the interview is part of that.Host
Maybe another way to approach this question is, then what should be part of the interview process? Like what, you know, this is probably where you landed sometime after kind of having these realizations is okay, so I see all these things that are wrong and you had these conversations that at Etsy around, you know, what should we change. What do you think the right approach to interview content is and what do you think the interview should cover and what do you think it should be evaluating?Will Gallego
My ideal questions are ones that can understand what a candidateâs abilities are in terms of things they do know and how they can build off of it and how the gap between what they know, what I know and what is necessary for working in this company can all kind of be bridged. When I asked the question about âType Google.com in a browser, what do you get,â Iâm trying to see what they know that I might not know. âWow. They were really good at understanding TCP connections or the difference between SSL and tls and they have experience with that.â Maybe I ask them âOh did you upgrade your back-end servers because of that?â And so I started building a conversation around that, and all the times we discuss things in our engineering culture weâre trying to round-table ideas like that. And thatâs why I like interviews that can bring that dialogue to the forefront. And so is this person someone that I can share ideas with; are they coming in with ideas that I know and ideas that I donât know and really bolster what weâre missing from the org. Not just be another cog exact clone of what we already have.Host
So then you had this realization that you needed to start helping those around you more. What are some things you did to do that? And I guess itâs worked. I see you relatively recently moved into a staff engineer role. So your efforts and shift in emphasis there and so on were recognized. What did you start to do in particular to help those around you and then maybe you could lead into, you know, what youâre doing with your blog and the book youâre working on and how you think you as a person can kind of help a wider range of people.Will Gallego
Take a step back and realizing Iâm not going to be able to know everything and do everything is such a revelation point I think in an engineerâs career, that no matter how smart you are, no matter how good you are with anything, you canât do everything in a given a fixed amount of time and so you need other people around you. Youâre not going to scale a company on one engineer. I donât care how smart they are, I donât care how amazing they are. How fast they can debug things, how perfect their code is, no one is going to be able to build and entire product, and entire company on their own. So with that in mind, itâs in your best interest to have a company in which you have engineers who can elevate themselves and do better. So if I can spend an hour of my time too write down a runbook, update a Wiki, give a closed doors talk inside my company to other engineers and impart information to them and then they get better and then as an org we are more successful, itâs in my best interest. So to be purely selfish in that context, but thereâs also something to be said about all the times that Iâve been given chances, given my first job coming out of college where I thought, you know, Iâve got a CS degree, I must be good at this. Then walking into interviews and just completely bombing on them. And then I first get a job in a startup and realizing my CTO at the time was taking care of me and trying to help me level up. I need to do the same thing in my career as well. I need to help out those around me.Will Gallego
And so what does that mean for someone is a senior engineer to help level themselves up in that context. It means understanding when people are having problems before they even know it. When they do have problems and they come to you how to respond to that? It means when you are butting heads with someone to recognize your own failures, when your own you idiosyncracies are getting in your own way and try to move past them as best you can and try to minimize that and and understand when youâre going wrong. So part of that is mentoring other people and sponsoring, which are two really important distinct things at a company. When those other people get that sponsporthip, they feel like they can grow and they pass it on â going back again to elevating conversations and the abilities of everyone around you and scaling up.Will Gallego
Part of this also was understanding that I can get better at this by helping people who arenât at Etsy as well. So I started doing mock interviews and I started trying to reach out. We have a mutual friend in Kainne Hansberry whoâs a a recruiter, and I reached out to him and said, âHey, if you have people who are having trouble getting into interviews, getting their foot in the door, talk to me. Iâll set some mock interviews.â And I was giving tips around that trying to understand what problems people were going through. Were they feeling like they donât know everything and theyâre feeling, you know, that burn of imposter syndrome that was just preventing them from getting any kind of traction in landing a job and moving past that. Understanding theyâre coming from a previous job and they might be burned out. How do they take care better care of themselves? Little things like that are things that weâre just not educating people on how to approach those problems. And so I got really fired up about tha, and I really wanted to avoid problem of other people falling into these traps. The hurdles that Iâve run into over the years. I can write down and say, âHey, watch out for these problems,â and somebody else can avoid them and level themselves up faster than I can.Will Gallego
I have no doubt that people Iâm talking to are smarter than me and are going to go further in the industry that I am. They just need the right direction to do it. Iâm not going to be the smartest engineer in the world. Thatâs okay. I want to help people so they can be better engineers. Thatâs a really great feelings to be, again, a little selfish about it too. That makes me feel like Iâm producing, and thatâs one of the reasons I got into engineering in the first place. I want it to feel like I was building something and making something more than myself. And it doesnât always have to be just I wrote down these lines of code.Host
Right. Then have you ever considered management? What do you think about that contrast where youâre trying to have an impact on all those around you, but still being an individual contributor?Will Gallego
Yeah, management is tough. We donât give nearly enough credit to good managers. Thereâs been the idea that you do a good job being an engineer for a while, youâre an IC and youâre typing code and youâre building stuff and then you hit a point and they say, âOkay, we want to promote you. Youâre now a manager.â And youâre doing very different things youâve been doing in the past and I donât think managing is for everyone. I think management is a really tough skill to build. I think that senior level ICâs need to have some part of them that is manager-like. You need to lead a team. You need to know how to run an architectural review. You need to understand how to run a postmortem. You need to understand how to people-manage in one-on-ones with people if theyâre having tough times, and thatâs again part of the senior management or senior engineering I should say. As for myself, I was a manager in my previous job to Etsy and I wasnât good at it, because was doing engineering stuff. I was lone-wolfing too much. I was just going off in the corner and typing in code and dropping it on the server and being done with it. I wasnât doing enough collaboration with other engineers and I just didnât have the skills for managing other people. And that might have scarred me a little bit for management, but I think at some point Iâm always going to want to have hands on a keyboard and Iâm always going to want to try to problem-solve technical issues, and I think that if you want to really be a manager that you need to dedicate yourself to people around you and just do that. Itâs really tough to build in IC time as a manager too. So I really wanted to focus on how I can elevate other people as an IC.Host
Yeah, I mean I can definitely relate to that. Iâve been in both kinds of roles in my career and Iâm kind of back on the individual contributor side the last few years now and there are big trade offs. So you know itâs very rewarding to help other people as you say, but itâs very hard to resist the urge to try to keep your hand in and do each job poorly when youâre a manager. Like keep trying to contribute instead of only focusing on the team, and I think thatâs a sign that youâre not ready to do it or itâs not for you if you canât make your whole work the success of everyone else. Your whole work. So I definitely relate to that.Will Gallego
I donât want to discourage people from that too. Like there are people who are junior devs right now who one day want to be CTOâs and they should absolutely focus on the path for them. I just want to make sure thereâs an opening for the IC who just wants to be really good at developing or architecting a really slick front end app or etc. etc. That sort of thing too.Host
Right, and it sounds like Etsy is doing a better than the mean kind of job of with these different levels of IC and these different expectations of having a wider and wider impact while still being considered and expected to be an individual contributor.Will Gallego
Yeah. We explicitly have two tracks, one for ICs and one for managers, and having that laid out in front of you and saying, âI can still make progress without having to worry, am I going to be locked into this position forever?â You know, thatâs really helpful. Itâs inspiring and makes you want to do good at your job.Host
Right. And also itâs interesting how the higher levels, itâs really a lot about types of contributions that are more like what a manager would do. Like in a certain sense, youâre really trying to become more of a force multiplier for those around you. Right? Itâs a given that you have a level of skill where you can contribute at a senior level.Host
So then maybe you want to also talk a little about, you know, moving beyond just the workplace and youâve started a blog on this stuff and youâre working on a book on this. So if you want to get into some of the specifics of what youâre trying to cover with those efforts.Will Gallego
So all these ideas Iâve been bouncing around my head and writing notes down. Iâm trying to, you know, expand upon them and, I was saying, about six or seven months ago, I finally wrote two or three pages down coming back from a conference. I thought, âWell, okay, this is more than just, you know, a quick blurb.â And the ideas around that were trying to get beyond teaching engineers who want to break into the industry, okay, memorize, merge sort and quicksort and know, you know, how to rebalance our Red Black tree and, you know, these important algorithms and important parts of computer science, but theyâre not necessarily what youâre going to be doing on your day to day job, and not going to be, you know, âWait, you memorize this. Now put it aside and save it for the next time you have to interview.â Itâs an exercise in a memorize-and-then-quickly-forget-it so you can actually do what you want to do.Will Gallego
I would love to approach this as the idea that I donât want people to just squeak by an interview. I want them to build foundational skills that will allow them to hold strong conversations with their coworkers and to be able to learn fundamental skills in their job that [so that] the interview process itself almost feels like a side effect. That youâre a good engineer and therefore, yeah, you get an interview, but youâre also a good engineer. That should be the focus, not just how do you pass the interview. So many interview books focus on how do you get your foot in the door, how do you just get into the company and ignore being a good engineer. Now, there are solid points that these books bring up. There are algorithms that you should know because, yeah this company is going to ask you about it, or this is the structure of, you know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. etc., and if you want to work at those companies, it would help to know what the interview is structured is going to be like.Will Gallego
But there are how many countless jobs that arenât at those big companies. And how does knowing the structure of the other companies help you with a small startup? How does it help you understand what itâs like to freelance? How does it help to understand should I worry about what kind of benefits this company is givin me? Should I worry about being a remote engineer versus a local engineer who can commute an hour-and-a-half to the office each day? Understanding what it means to be discouraged and try to get in the industry and understand that when youâre learning something, when youâre first trying to be an engineer, thatâs going to carry with you for the rest of your career. People who are senior engineerâs people have been 15, 20, 25 years still in the industry, theyâre still learning. Theyâre still struggling. Theyâre still trying to build up themselves as engineers as well. It doesnât stop there, so to understand the entire learning process as a memorized and forget defeats the purpose of what it means to be an engineer and how to be someone who can collaborate and work with other engineers to do the best job. Itâs not just you have to be this mythical 10 times ninja Jedi engineer. You know all these falsehoods that we kind of throw at people. You have to be, otherwise youâre worthless as an engineer, thatâs not the case. You know, I would take three good engineers who can all work together over one amazing engineer whoâs â I donât want to say amazing, you know, I would say good at programming something â whoâs impossible to work with, who you know, snaps at people and wants to be left alone. That doesnât do any good for a company. So focusing on what it means to be empathetic and kind, and as cheesy as that sounds, who wants to care about other people around them to work with them. That goes so much further than knowing an esoteric algorithm.Host
It sounds like really what youâre trying to work on here is more of a, a distillation of the experience of the senior person to give to the junior people. The thing that this reminds me the most of, I would say is like âThe Pragmatic Programmer.â It really has a lot of the point of view youâre talking about. And I think itâs some of the same life lessons, but itâs also maybe a different angle in the sense that itâs more professional and less personal. And certainly less focused on some of the specifics of the interview process and what it means to be working somewhere. Itâs more like good engineering values, what are good engineering values. Thatâs part of what youâre talking about, but itâs also just what does it mean to be like a good person as an engineer, which really I think is an aspect of what youâre talking about thatâs relatively unique and hasnât been covered. And frankly in the current environment, you know, thereâs so much talk about toxic aspects of tech culture the last few years, and very public embarrassing stories about that, across some of the largest and most revered companies in the industry. I mean, I think itâs a very relevant topic to pursue. Yeah. So, I mean really I wish you the best and promoting these ideas and, and Iâm happy to have been a small part of that.Host
So is there anything else that you want to cover or you think we missed or youâd like to talk about?Will Gallego
Sure. I would say first and foremost I want to make sure people, especially if theyâre a junior engineers looking to break in, take care of yourself. And that means so many different things. It means donât let companies push you around. Donât let companies tell you what you have to know. Understand when youâre working two jobs where you have try to update a Github and do a portfolio and try to do open source work and do blogs and conferences and speaking ⊠like, you get to decide what it means to be an engineer. You donât have to listen to anyone say youâre not living up to the ideals of what it means because youâre not doing what Iâm doing. If you didnât get a formal education, if you didnât go to bootcamps, if you learned this on your own, thatâs okay. If you did go to a college, thatâs good too. There are so many different paths to get into engineering. Thereâs no single one right way to get in and to understand that you need to build on what it means to be an engineer for yourself, for your own personal goals.Credits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Ad Tech, Alpha Go, Amazon Web Services, Applied Mathematics, Churn Modeling, Kubernetes, Ethics of AI, Google, Hydrology, Machine Learning, Managing Engineers, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Open Source, Product Development, Prof. Robert Williamson, Real-Time Bidding (RTB), Social Responsibility, Teamwork and Team Leadership, TensorFlow, Trust, UX (User Experience) Design
Companies
ElementAI mldb.ai Datacratic IdiliaProjects: RTBkit
Introduction
As a boy, Jeremy Barnes learned from his hydrologist father who was collecting data from small devices in remote terrain that small amounts of data can support useful models and make lives better. These themes shaped his career, as he spent the first two decades studying machine learning and creating systems that created value by creating new knowledge. After founding and selling two startups, and learning the power of open source software to âput ideas into the public recordâ and influence an industry with RTBkit, he is embarking on a new challenge. As Chief Architect at ElementAI, he is part of applied research and product design efforts shaping a future of AI that accounts for human users, promotes transparent AI decision making and human trust in AI systems, and is explicitly pursuing AI for Good, starting with a foundation by that name. Jeremy looks back on what he has learned as an entrepreneur, engineer, data scientist, team member and leader, and looks ahead to his own future and the future we are all building.
Guest Bio
Jeremy Barnes is a Montreal-based engineer, researcher and entrepreneur in the domain of artificial intelligence. Since arriving from Australia in 2001, he has founded and served as CTO and CEO of several companies in AI, including Datacratic (to iPerceptions) and mldb.ai (to Element AI). Heâs currently the Chief Architect at Element AI, where he is responsible for building out the core artificial intelligence platform and ensuring that the research, product, customer projects and other activities all fit together to enable a broad, practical and humane application of recent AI techniques. Element AI advances cutting-edge AI research and turn it into scalable solutions that make businesses safer, stronger, and more agile.
Notes
05:30 - AI for Good Lab - London 06:00 - His role is to investigate AI as a driver for economic behavior which drive impact on society, especially for corporate actions 06:30 - AI needs to solve problems which are good for society 07:00 - Trying to give users a strong voice in AI in products 09:00-10:00 - AI systems can discover/predict things humans havenât found before, surprising, but wonât be trusted unless decisions are explained and system build trust. Alpha Go example. Element AI encourages companies to do both of these things - humans in UX process and design products with explicable decisioning that can earn trust. Even great product if untrusted will fail 10:00 - Applied research group. Consult with strong companies. Create products, structure and design there but no data. Customer data completes the product for that customer. 12:00 - Inspired by hydrologist father collecting data in the field 13:30 - âData is not something that comes to you. Itâs actually something that you need to go and get.â 14:00 - Learned you can create good models from small amounts of data 15:00 - Diabetic, realized he was learning from observation, from data, without new effort 16:00 - Idilia - NL as a service 16:30 - Design data collection mechanism, tepresent problems in data, and let algorithms solve problems 17:00 - Learned a huge amount at Idilia and realized it would have a huge impact 18:30 - Can small amounts of data still solve some problems? Or is this era where big companies and their data dominate? 20:00 - AI misconception that data is fixed - âeither you have data or you donâtâ 21:00 - Itâs actually a continuum between modeling and the amount of data, you can apply models from large data sets to smaller problems or do more involved modeling and still get good results from smaller data sets 21:30 - Churn modeling - zero-sum game, itâs actually about competing better. Better solution is actually to deliver a better product, rather than use AI to perpetually steal customers. Use AI to design a better product. 23:00 - AI is still just another tool for product development, not a replacement 24:15 - âPeople will do almost anything to try magic bullet solutions, just to see if they work. ⊠That doesnât mean they are actually solving a real problem. It just means they tried enough things that something worked.â 25:00 - Real value is creating new knowledge. Neural networks donât create new knowledge. âKnowledge ⊠is the basis of all competitive advantage.â 26:15 - RTBkit 27:00 - Startups that are solving new problems, inventing new IP 27:30 - Market timing very hard to get right. Idillia 7-10 years too early. 28:00 - âMissionary workâ - explaining that your product idea is the future. Fed his ego but recognized as an anti-pattern 29:15 - Tensorflow - open source but really an extension of a corporate entity - Google 29:30 - Open source is a way to put an idea into the public without needing perfect market timing. Put the idea into the public record. 30:00 - RTBkit maybe a year early. Changed perception in the industry that you can and should own your own bidding process. Project not vibrant but had an impact on the market 31:00 - Kubernetes as Googleâs masterful attack on AWS by making workloads portable in and out 32:00 - Google has become very good at using open source as a weapon and to create a moat 34:00 - Kubernetes at a right level of abstraction. It reduces lock-in and actually enforces competition among the very large companies. 35:00 - But big companies using open source this way hurts all the startups in a market. 36:30 - What have you learned about yourself as a leader? 37:00 - Started out career thinking I was best at every aspect of the work. Learned humility from those around me. 38:30 - Recognizing I can have the most impact by supporting everyone else and connecting their work 39:30 - How do you create the conditions for a team to thrive? 40:00 - In teams that work well you need to build up trust, safety and communication. You need to make sure the team is able to take risks. 41:30 - âI do struggle to have a career plan for myself ⊠I love to learn. I love what I do because I get to learn and have fantastic people around me.â 42:00 - ElementAI a chance to work with larger companies. Larger companies have entrepreneurial initiatives also. 43:00 - Learn how to deliver AI innovation at scaleLinks
TechCrunch: âElement AI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions, raises $102Mâ VentureBeat: âWhy Element.AIâs $102 million round is just the beginningâ AI4Good Philip K. Dick Bob Williamson Home PageCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Career Advancement, Career Change, Code Schools, Computer Science Education,Learning, Podcasting, Social Responsibility
Companies
Cogo Labs MadefireIntroduction
A funny thing happened to Max Mautner after he landed a job as a technical analyst: he noticed his job actually involved writing lots of code. Soon afterhe realized programming was fun, there was high demand for programmers, and hecould get paid more if he could work his way into a position with âengineerârather than âanalystâ in the title. Two jobs later heâd achieved his goal andis now a lead platform engineer at Madefire, creators of an innovativepublishing platform combining animation and comic books. As he leveled up Maxremained a keen observer of how to improve as an engineer and advance hiscareer. He also noticed many of his friends and colleagues had likewisefollowed a non-traditional path into engineering, so he started to the podcastâThe Accidental Engineerâ to âmake his friends look good,â and to inspireaspiring engineers with the stories of those who had pivoted into the fieldbefore them.
Maxâs insights will equally help those thinking of pursuing software engineering and those already in the field who are taking stock and plotting their next move.
Guest Bio
Max Mautner has held roles as a systems software engineer, a financial trader, an email spammer, and a friend.
Like âUsing Reflectionâ, Max profiles people in tech at The Accidental Engineer with an aim at persuading others to enter the field who might otherwise be deterred!
His favorite food and drink are pickled herring and Diet Pepsi.
Favorite programming language? Python
Favorite stimulant? Espresso
Links
âThe Accidental Engineerâ Podcast: https://theaccidentalengineer.com/ https://maxmautner.com/ âThe Accidental Engineerâ episode with Spencer KlineCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: 8086 CPU, Code Schools, Computer Science, Diversity, IBM PC,International Business, Java, Managing Engineers, Mentoring, Recruiting,Software Engineering, Teamwork and Team Leadership, Trust
Companies
PureWow IBMOrganizations
New York On Tech - Home New York On Tech - Host an Intern New York On Tech - Volunteer to Teach or Become a MentorIntroduction
His dad an IBM salesman, Tony Jackson grew up in a houseful of gadgets andcomputers, so taking computers apart, reassembling them, and programming thembecame second nature to him. Later, enrolled in international business incollege, he realized majoring in computer science could lead to a career doingwhat he loved and ânot working a day in his life.â Jackson went on to join IBMhimself, spending 9 years coding for Big Blue and partner companies beforemoving into a variety of engineering and management roles. As a manager, hehas focused on sincerity, honesty and mentoring, and Jackson speaks proudly ofthe relationships he has forged and maintained over many years and many jobs.Tony also volunteers for NY On Tech, an organization that teaches classes andarranges internships for high-school students from backgroundsunderrepresented in tech. Jackson explains why itâs both doing good and goodbusiness for businesses to work with NY On Tech to both tap into its pool oftalented interns and to learn to draw and retain candidates from a wider pool.All the way through, Jackson speaks with an energy, optimism and candor thatare infectious.
Guest Bio
Tony Jackson is a VP of Engineering at PureWow and a Member of the Board ofAdvisers at New York On Tech. He started his software engineering career atIBM. He has since held lead software engineer, senior software engineer,architect and web developer titles at Prudential, USA Today, the FederalReserve, Everyday Health and Bloomberg, prior to joining PureWow. He is alsothe founder and CTO of the technology consultantcy Ranjax Media SolutionsInc., based in New York, N.Y.
Links
IBM PC 8086 CPU International Business Java Version HistoryCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Architecture, Automation, Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, BuildingInformation Modeling (BIM), Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, GeneralStructural Analysis (GSA), Hypermesh, Managing Engineers, Rhino, SeismicEngineering, Structural Engineering
Companies
ArupIntroduction
Even the word we use to describe very tall buildings, âskyscrapers,â isintended to conjure a kind of mythological wonder. But, like any technologythat seems magical when insufficiently understood, skyscrapers are products,the result of design and engineering. What does it take to build a building?How are the many engineering and design disciplines, people, companies andgoals reconciled, aligned and coordinated? In this episode we talk to David deKoning, a Senior Structural Engineer at the venerable international designfirm Arup, and find out. David also shares interesting insights on the uniquebusiness structure and culture at Arup, and discusses the two phases of impactthat digital technology has had on design, first digitizing and automatingwork, and then transforming documents into data that can be modeled andmanipulated. Itâs a fascinating journey into a complex field that affects ourlives every day and literally creates the skylines we marvel at.
Guest Bio
David de Koning is a structural engineer, the Technical Lead of ArupâsMontreal Building Structures team, and the product manager for gsapy, a set ofPython bindings for structural analysis.
He has been involved in the analysis and design of new and existng buildings,including Tim Hortonâs Field, the new Mexico City Airport and the tower of theSagrada Familia in Barcelona.
He views every project as an opportunity to develop relationships, and toinvestigate how technology can change our work and the structure of our teams.He looks for every opportunity to harness technological change to increase histeamâs skills and to provide more valuable insights and services to Arupâsclients and society.
Topics and References
181 Fremont - A San Francisco skyscraper designed by Arup Arup - Key Speech - Speech by Arup founder establishing the core values of the company Autodesk AutoCAD - Design software Autodesk Revit - Design software Building Information Modeling (BIM) - Data and model-driven approach to building design Electrical Engineering Hypermesh - Design software General Structural Analysis (GSA) - Structural Engineering software Rhino - Design software Seismic Engineering Structural EngineeringLinks to Arupâs website describing primary building engineering services:
Electrical Engineering services Mechanical Engineering services Structural Engineering services Seismic Engineering servicesCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: AS-400, Consulting, E.F. Codd, MySql, Open Source, Oracle,PL/PgSQL, PostgreSql, Relational Databases
Companies
IBM IBM - Rochester OracleProjects: PosgreSql
Introduction
As a kid, Corey Huinker had already decided the âtoken economyâ of earninggold stars from from teachers felt pointless, and the only way his parentscould coax Aâs and Bs from him in high school was to pay him. Later, at hisfirst internship at IBM, he learned two important lessons: staff employment isno guarantee of job security, and contractors can make more money than staffemployees for doing the same job. Three years into his career, attracted tothe idea of earning an honest wage for honest time spent, he struck out on hisown as a software engineering consultant. Along the way he learned thatspecializing and being better than most people at something is a key toconsulting success. Corey chose relational databases and has since madeseveral contributions to PostgreSql.
This episode offers a great chance to frankly consider the tradeoffs ofconsulting vs. staff, and to learn how to survive and thrive as a consultantfrom someone who has been doing so for two decades. Itâs equally a chance toconsider the enduring strengths of relational databases with an expert. Andfinally, itâs a fun conversation leavened by Coreyâs unsparing observationsand dry wit.
This is Episode 14 of âUsing Reflection.â
Guest Bio
Corey is the owner of Corlogic Consulting and yes, itâs a play on his firstname. He has a degree in Applied Math from University of Wisconsin - Stout. Hehas made multiple feature contributions to PostgreSql, contributed toPostgreSql core, and spoke several times at the PostgreSql PG Conf in the U.S.and Europe. His inspiration to get into programming came from a Big Trak hegot for Christmas one year, and too many hours playing SimCity. He spent his19th birthday working for IBM. He has performed comedy improv, been a rollerderby referee, and pursues interests in history and urban planning.
Links
Business
IBM â90s layoffs (Business Insider history) Quora: âWhy did Oracle buy MySQL if they donât even make money out of it?âDatabase Theory and Concepts
E.F. Codd (Wikipedia) Coddâs 12 Rules for RDBMS (Wikipedia) DB Transactions (Wikipedia)Database Procedural Languages
PL/PgSQL (Wikipedia) PL/SQL (Wikipedia)Commercial Relational Databases
PGXN - PosgreSql Extension Network A Brief History of the IBM AS/400 and iSeries (IBM archives) IBM DB2 (IBM product page) Microsoft SqlServer (Microsoft product page) MySql (Product home page) MySql Transactional and Locking StatementsCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Power PlanDevelopment, Recruiting, Social Responsibility, Solar and Renewable Energy
Companies
JobRobin BCI Solar Clean Energy Associates SunPower SungevityIntroduction
Brad Jester remembers crying as a kid when his brother left the faucetrunning. And he always loved to build things. By studying environmentalengineering and then working in the solar energy industry, he was able tocombine his desire to do environmental good with his passion for engineeringcreation. Brad has a fascinating story to tell about working in various solarand energy companies in California, and in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Weâll learnwhat drove him, and also discuss the fascinating, highly dimensionalcomplexity of large-scale energy projects, which consider factors such asgeography, climate, weather, politics and regulation spoken and unspoken, realestate, materials, construction, and much more. After more than a decadegrappling with this complexity, Brad recently made a personal pivot, startinga tech recruiting startup JobRobin that is using Data Science to help recruitData Scientists. It may seem like a big change, but itâs all one arc to Brad,and he tells us why.
Guest Bio
Brad Jester is founder and CEO of JobRobin, a recruiting platform currentlyfocused on the Data Science market that is developing new approaches torecruiting using data and visualization. Before that he spent about 10 yearsworking for energy companies in the U.S and Asia in various leadership andfounder roles, including Sungevity and Sun Power in the the U.S, Clean EnergyAssociates and aaaiiirrr.org in China and BCI Solar in Hong Kong, which he co-founded. Brad has a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering fromCornell University.
Links
Civil Engineering Environmental Engineering Solar Energy Construction Permits in Southeast Asia Doing Business in ChinaCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: AdTech, Analytics, Founding, Managing Engineers, Open Source,Recruiting, Startups, Teamwork and Team Leadership, Time Series Databases
Companies
Imply MetamarketsProjects: Druid
Introduction
Whatâs it like to work at one of the largest tech companies in the world,Cisco, then be in the first 10 at Metamarkets, a high-growth tech startup? Toco-create a successful open source time series database, Druid, and then co-found and become CEO of a Valley-based, venture-backed startup, Imply, that isbuilding and selling a product on top of the open source project? In thisepisode weâll find out, as we talk to Imply CEO and co-founder Fangjin Yang.Why is being an engineer first a key to managing product development and tobuilding an engineering team? Why is the data market so complicated, and whatis different about Druid? Why should everyone work at both a big and smallcompany?
Guest Bio
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, makers of an event analyticsplatform built on the open-source Druid data store. Previously, Fangjin was alead engineer at Metamarkets and the co-creator of Druid. He was an earlyengineer at Metamarkets, which was recently acquired by Snap, and also took onmultiple non-technical roles for the Druid project, including community andbusiness development and marketing. Before that Fangjin was a softwareengineer at Cisco Systems. He holds Masterâs Degree in Computer Engineeringand a Bachelorâs Degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the University ofWaterloo.
Credits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Addiction Mechanics, Embedded Systems, Facebook Games, Founding,Game Development, Gaming, Managing Engineers, Recruiting, SocialResponsibility, Startups, Teamwork and Team Leadership
Companies
interviewing.io CrowdStar Fifth Column Games Tivo Visual Concepts ZyngaIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Andrew Marsh, for a lively and intenseconversation about his 15 years in gaming and why he left the industry to co-found engineering interviewing platform interviewing.io. Andrew wanted to co-found a business that scales by serving its customers needs, which he felt wasno longer possible in gaming. Andrew also describes his approach to strategyand management, one that relies on a rigorous but constantly evolving model ofhis business that in turn supports his insight and intuition. And he arguesfor the advantages of interviewing.ioâs two-sided marketplace solution to theproblem of engineering recruiting, because the solution is driven by data andby the employer and employee market participants and is therefore open toexpansion. Andrew is the rare technologist who can earn a patent for last-minute code written to save a Tivo feature, and also converse for minutes at atime in fully formed paragraphs.
So buckle up and enjoy the ride. Itâs a fun one.
Guest Bio
Andrew Marsh is the Co-Founder and CTO of interviewing.io, a platform forsoftware engineers to anonymously practice technical interviewing withexperienced interviewers and get introductions to prospective employers. Hepreviously worked for about 15 years in the video game industry, as founderand CEO of Fifth Column Games, Lead Engineer and Lead Designer at CrowdStar,Senior Software Engineer at Visual Concepts and Lead Gameplay Engineer atSecret Level. Andrew has also held positions at Tivo and Lawrence BerkeleyNational Labs.
Links
FarmTown Farmville Mafia Wars Mob Wars âMoneyballâ Paul Graham - âNews From the Frontâ (Essay about the relationship between prestige of college degree and success of tech entrepreneurs) A (Brief) History of Spam Filtering and DeliverabilityCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: DotCom Bubble, C++, Computer Science, EdTech, Founding, Goal-Setting, Machine Learning, Managing Engineers, Mobile Development, Palm,Social Responsibility, Startups, Teamwork and Team Leadership, Trust
Companies
Placedapp Wireless Generation Exit Educational Assessment DIBELS TPRI Nomic Robert HalfIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Aaron Boyd for some entertaining nostalgiaabout what high-flying DotCom consultancies told their clients, and moreserious insights about how to manage successful teams and, especially, how tobuild successful teams by hiring high-performing, high-character team members.After riding the dot-com wave, Aaron joined ed-tech startup WirelessGeneration as employee number 7 and left a company with 300 people that wouldsoon very successfully exit to News Corp. He was then a Principal at big-dataplatform Mortar Data, which exited to Datadog, and engineering lead at Nomic.During this journey, Aaron discovered the principle that effective goal-setting is a key reason why companies and teams succeed or fail. This timearound, Aaron is applying that hard-won wisdom, and his insights into whatideas can translate into successful products, as co-founder of Placedapp,which is building a recruiting database integrated with Gmail.
Guest Bio
Aaron Boyd is the co-founder of Placedapp, a smart candidate database forrecruiters that lives directly inside GMail. Previously he was lead engineerat Nomic, where he led engineering, including planning, architecture andhiring. Before that, Aaron was a principal at big-data startup Mortar Data,which was acquired by Datadog, and held the positions of lead mobiledeveloper, producer, and director of application development at WirelessGeneration, which he joined as employee 7 and which was acquired in 2010 byNews Corp. Before that Aaron was a senior associate at web consultancy Scient.
Links
DotCom Bubble
Dot Com Bubble ScientSoftware Engineering
Mobile App Development Content Management SystemsEngineering Management
Engineering Career Framework Goal-SettingRecruiting
Contingency Recruiting Applicant Tracking SystemsCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Ego, Hobbies, Home Automation, Guitar, Hardware, Internet ofThings, Social Interaction
Companies:
Keen Home Inc. Amano MagneticIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Vijay Parikh, Lead Engineer at smart homeautomation startup Keen Home Inc. Vijay shares his unique perspective on theburgeoning new market for smart home devices and other consumer hardware, aperspective based in part on a previous long stint in his career working onparking garage firmware. Yes, parking garages. Youâve almost certainly neverthought about it, but parking garages have kiosk computers tracking cars,payments, open parking spaces and more. Vijay breaks it down for us, andexplains why he came back to hardware because he believes the cloud iscommoditized and cloud plus custom hardware will drive the next wave ofinnovation. He also shares wisdom and amusing anecdotes from working abroad,playing guitar and building competitive pumpkin launchers (trebuchet).
Guest Bio
Vijay Parikh is Lead Engineer at Keen Home, Inc. He has previously heldpositions as Platform Director and Senior Software Engineer at Qualia Media,Software Engineer at Magnetic and Lead Software Engineer and Software Engineerat Amano.
Vijay is an avid amateur tinkerer, guitarist, and photographer, and for manyyears has participated in trebuchet competitions.
Links
Commodore64 Apple II Arduino 3D Printing Home Automation Trebuchet Eddie Van Halen Andres SegoviaCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: EdTech, Failure, FinTech, Founding, Game Development, Gaming,Learning, Play Testing, Social Apps, Startups
Companies:
Nvstr Amplify Electronic ArtsProjects: TileWild
Introduction
In this episode we are joined by Hayden Cacace, Director of ProductEngineering at Nvstr, and former gaming startup co-founder. This is a reallyfun episode in which a unified theory of living, learning, understanding andgaming emerges from Haydenâs active mind and enthusiastic conversation. Haydentalks about software as a holistic understanding of human needs answered bytechnical creation. He emphasizes the importance of understanding systems forall of us in a world that is increasingly connected and growing in complexity.And he describes how gaming is a journey of commitment and mental disciplineinto a world combining art and an interactive system of rules, and therelationship of this journey to education and all learning. Where does gamingend and life begin?
Guest Bio
Hayden Cacace is the director of product engineering at Nvstr, an early-stagestartup where he designs and builds software to make intelligent, self-directed stock market investing accessible to everyone. Hayden has worked as amanager, product architect, game designer, engineer, tech lead and founder fora variety of companies, large and small, on a range of projects in educationtech, and console, PC and mobile games.
Links
Nvstr EA Amplify TileWild YouTube trailerCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: EdTech, Failure, Founding, Learning, Mechanical Engineering,Robotics, Startups
Companies:
Brooklyn Robot Foundry Wireless GenerationIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Jenny Young, Owner of Brooklyn Robot Foundry.Jennyâs story starts in her childhood garage in Ohio, building things with herdad and learning the joys of failing, solving problems and ultimatelysucceeding in making machines do things in the real world. And Jennyâs storycontinues in the present day with her running a successful business giving NewYork City kids that same garage experience â building robots, failing,learning, succeeding. Along the way Jenny got her pilotâs license, became amechanical engineer, ran one project and then another and then somehow foundherself in project management without feeling like it was a choice she hadever made. So she walked away from the office to return to the garage, thistime to host classes full of kids becoming âlittle inventors and creators.â
Guest Bio
Jenny Young is the owner of Brooklyn Robot Foundry, a place that empowers kidsthrough building. She has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from PurdueUniversity. She grew up working alongside her father in his garage shop anddoing arts and crafts projects with her mother. From an early age she wasexposed to the joys of building and designing things from found items. Priorto starting the Foundry, she worked in the educational technology and medicaldevice fields as a project manager and engineer.
Show Notes
02:52 - Brooklyn Robot Foundry 05:27 - Design Engineering 06:02 - âIâm going to go back to to doing something with my hands, and back to actually making things.â 06:07 - âThat was really what made me start the business, that I really just missed engineering.â 06:57 - âIn New York City there arenât garages, there arenât spaces and places to be able to break things and put them back together and to create.â 07:12 - âI wanted to be able to create that space, that suburban garage for city kids ⊠so they could be not so much consumers of products but be more of users of products and creators of products and modifiers of products so that they can really understand how the world works and whatâs inside these things that engineers make.â 07:56 - Mechanical Engineering 09:17 - Manufacturing Engineering 10:29 - Electrical Engineering 10:30 - âWeâre kind of bridging the gap between mechanical, electrical and software engineeringâ 10:59 - âYou make a snowman with a light-up nose. Thatâs the simplest project we do with a 2-year-old.â 11:32 - Arduino 12:25 - âWeâre not just programming on the computer for a program thatâs running within the computer, weâre programming the computer to run something thatâs in the physical world.â 13:11 - âFor me it was always really important for me to be using my hands and thinking about physics.â 13:25 - âItâs kind of like being a sculptor or like being an artist where you are working in the physical world but making sure things stay stay put, but maybe theyâre going to be moving or maybe theyâre going to be lighting up, and you can use a computer to control those things and do what you want.â 13:57 - âI feel like if youâre really good at software, and really good at building things in the physical world, man can you do some sweet stuff.â 15:08 - Sikorsky helicopter transmissions 16:57: On ending up in project management: âIt felt kind of inevitable and totally out of my control.â 17:33 - Limor Fried 17:54 - Adafruit 18:08 - On returning to engineering: âItâs been really good for my brain, really good for my creativity âŠâ 19:02 - Remembering what if feels like to fail 19:17 Introversion 23:02 - The loneliness of being a founder 24:57 - Bootstrapped, took no funding 25:42 - âItâs this incredible creative experience where everybody makes these pretty junky robots that only sort of workâ 25:57 - âIf I had investors, they would say, âYou already have 250 robots, you donât need any more. Why donât you start expanding the business.â⊠But I donât have to, because itâs mine and I think itâs really fun. And I also think itâs a differentiator to the parents.â 27:57 - âThe mission of the business is to get kids back to taking things apart, understanding how things work, understanding that itâs OK to fail, and itâs actually really fun to fail.â 28:21 - âThe goal is for them to feel empowered and to understand basic electronics and basic mechanisms and basic coding so that they can say, âHey Iâm good enough at doing this that I can create my own thing.ââ 28:38 - Public school education emphasis on standardized testing and getting one right answer 30:54 - âAnd then maybe your last wrong answer is actually a better answer than what you thought.â 32:42 - IKEA 33:17 - Inventors class for advanced students where they design and build their own robots 33:55 - âWeâve just made a little inventor, a little creator, and thatâs great.â 35:00 - âThat upbringing shaped the way I look at physical mechanical things but it also just shaped the way I look at life. Iâve never been afraid to try something with the fear in my head, âOh, youâre going to fail.ââ 36:17 - Retaining girls as customers as they grow older. Letting children make robots with an appearance that appeals to them.Credits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Data Visualization, Javascript, Machine Learning, Open Data, OpenSource, Software Engineering, Social Responsibility, Teamwork, Team Leadership
Companies:
Plotly Accompany.ioProjects: PivotTableJS, React-PivotTableJs
Introduction
In this episode we are joined by Nicolas Kruchten, Head of Engineering atAccompany.io. Nicolas looks back on his 15 years of working with data toreflect on the social and human aspects of analytics, machine learning anddata visualization. He discusses the motivations and impact of some his manycivic data projects based on Montreal Open Data. We talk about visualizationas metaphor and âUI for your data,â and touch on Nicolasâ successful opensource project PivotTable.js, which brought this venerable analytical toolfrom the desktop to the browser. Nicolas also shares what he has learned abouteffective communication through his varied experience in roles as a civil andsoftware engineer, data scientist and head of product and head of engineering.
Guest Bio
Nicolas Kruchten Head of Engineering at Accompany.io, which builds data-driventools teams and companies use to improve their culture. Nicolas has previouslyheld positions as a Senior Software Engineer, Head of Data Science and Head ofProduct. He was Director of Technology for Engineers Without Borders Canadaand graduated from University of Toronto with a Bachelorâs of Sciencespecializing in Civil Engineering. He is the creator and maintainer of thePivotTable.js project. He has beenblogging since 2010 at nicolaskruchten.com,often presenting data analysis and visualization projects based on MontrealOpen Data data sets. You can follow him on Twitter@NicolasKruchten.
Links
3:13 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kruchten 7:30 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/tags/Montreal/ 8:00 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/mtlelection2013bysection/ 9:15 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2014/01/mtlelection-ternary/ 10:38 - https://www.wired.com/2010/11/ff_311_new_york/ 10:40 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2015/06/montreal-311/ 12:55 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/mtl311/ 13:39 - https://medium.com/visualizing-the-field/why-people-leave-their-data-viz-jobs-be1a7ab5dddc 14:55 - http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf 15:55 - https://www.ft.com/content/21a6e7d8-b479-11e3-a09a-00144feabdc0 21:05 - https://medium.com/@dominikus/the-end-of-interactive-visualizations-52c585dcafcb 21:54 - https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/ 22:13 - https://pivottable.js.org/ 23:30 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2016/02/html5mtl-pivottable/ 24:50 - https://react-pivottable.js.org/ 27:00 - https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management 28:10 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2017/09/feedback-log/ 36:30 - https://steveblank.com/?s=out+of+the+building 37:00 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2015/04/mtl_housenumbers/ 37:30 - http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2016/07/direction-angrignon/ 39:00 legal: http://oiq.qc.ca/Documents/DAJ/Lois/TheCodeofEthicsofEngineers.pdf moral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_EngineerCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: Computer Science, EdTech, Failure, Founding, Learning, ManagingEngineers, Mentoring, Recruiting, Security, Software Engineering, Startups,Teaching, Team Leadership, Teamwork, Trust
Companies:
Handy Amplify Wireless GenerationIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Kulesh Shanmugasundaram,VP of Engineering atHandy and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the NYU Tandon School ofEngineering. Kulesh describes an arc from award-winning Ph.D. securityresearch to founding a company based on that research, and on to technical andthen senior engineering leadership positions at Amplify Education and Handy.It has been a journey from computer science, a study of the domain of themachine, to software engineering, a âteam sportâ and social activity ofengineers working to understand and then solve human problems. Kulesh observedthis split from the start of his graduate research on the famed ILOVEYOU emailworm, an attack that was equal parts technical and social. And he has gainedwisdom about the social aspects of computing in each step of his career,learning to keep workplace teams aligned and close to stakeholders, andobserving what causes teams of talented students to turn on each other. Kuleshalso offers insights on the three types of software problems, how he uses hisâbad memoryâ to good advantage, and the differences between teaching andmentoring.
Guest Bio
Kulesh Shanmugasundaram is VP of Engineering at Handy, a marketplace forhiring home services professionals. He is also an Adjunct Professor ofComputer Science at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He received hisPh.D. in Computer Science from Tandon in 2006, winning the Pearl BrownsteinDoctoral Research Award for best Ph.D. thesis and earning second place in theInternational ACM Graduate Student Research contest. Prior to working atHandy, he served as Senior Architect and then Director of Engineering atAmplify Education, an educational software company. Prior to that he co-founded two companies, network security vendor Vivic Networks and softwarelibrary vendor Digital Assembly.
Links
Handy Amplify NYU Tandon School of Engineering ForNet: A Distributed Forensics Network, K. Shanmugasundaram Ph.D. ThesisCredits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. -
Show Notes
Topics: COBOL, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Mainframes, Mentoring, .NET,Software Engineering, Teamwork, Team Leaderhsip
Companies:
ThomsonReutersIntroduction
In this episode we are joined by Joe Cavanaugh, programmer analyst for ThomsonReuters. Joe describes a journey that started with working on mainframe COBOLprograms written the year he was born and evolved to leading dev ops effortsfor a company division. Along the way, Joe has helped start and grow amentoring program, gained insights about the connection between a teamâsmaturity and the maturity of its processes and product, and learned aboutcraftsmanship by comparing his woodworking skills to those of his grandfather.
Guest Bio
Joe Cavanaugh is a Software Engineer with Thomson Reuters, a company whichprovides the intelligence, technology and human expertise you need to findtrusted answers. He is leading the companyâs efforts to provide a betterContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery experience. Joe previously wasa COBOL programmer working on an IBM mainframe, a .NET engineer working inSilverlight and C# for 2 years, all at Thomson Reuters. He is also proud to tohave helped grow a company internship program from just a few students workingon the mainframe to more than a dozen students working on a variety ofprojects. In addition, he co-founded âInnovation Daysâ initiatives as well asconferences on campus. When not working he is chasing his daughter, playingvideo games, watching football, fishing, or just hanging out in ruralWisconsin with friends and family.
Credits
Host: Mark S. Weiss Intro and Outro Music: âFlorida Songâ Copyright 2016 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. Ad Intro Music: âWoozyâ Copyright 2015 by Photographs (Mark S. Weiss). All rights reserved. All Interview content Copyright 2018 by Using Reflection and Mark S. Weiss. All rights reserved. - Mostra di più
