Episode 131 - Rethinking Management Structures in the Remote Work Era with Jeff Meyerson
Management hierarchies are essential in the corporate setting. It fosters each employee’s accountability, which ultimately keeps the organization together. However, for some people, following these structures may prove difficult. In the end, they leave their corporate jobs to pursue other fields, specifically remote jobs that offer freedom and flexibility. How does this shift impact productivity?
In today’s episode, Jeff Meyerson, host of the Software Engineering Daily Podcast, talks about engineering management structures. He explains the concept of holacracy and programmer anarchy. He also tackles going out of the corporate world to pursue podcasting and do remote work. Jeff and Max also discuss his 2016 article entitled “10 Philosophies for Engineers.”
Tune in to the episode to learn more about engineering management structures and remote productivity!
About Jeff Meyerson
Jeff Meyerson is the creator and host of the Software Engineering Daily Podcast. In his podcast, he provides technical information on various software topics. Jeff was an engineer for three years before he left his job to start podcasting full time.
To know more about Jeff, you can visit his website. You may also connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn and listen to his music on Spotify.
Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home Podcast
Listen to the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast to stay up-to-date on technology news every day in just 15 to 20 minutes.
Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
You will learn about management structures and the concept of programmer anarchy and holacracy.
Why is podcasting a contrived form of socialization?
Discover how working remotely affects employees’ productivity.
Resources
Software Engineering Daily Podcast by Jeff Meyerson
You Are Not a Commodity, a talk by Jeff Meyerson
Six Degrees Podcast - Episode 39 (Fred George - Programmer Anarchy)
10 Philosophies for Engineers by Jeff Meyerson
Related Episodes
Episode 128 on work during the pandemic
Episode 35 with Camille Fournier on The Manager’s Path
Episode 34 on Data Engineering with Joe Crobak
Episode Highlights
Engineers Becoming a Commodity
Engineers are now doing work associated with maintenance or highly-defined tasks.
Although there is creativity in doing those tasks, many people are reaching their local maximum. Moreover, there are more exciting things they can pursue outside that maximum.
Decision Conflicts in Maintenance Jobs
It is easy to maintain something you originally wrote. However, it’s a different story to continue a work built by people who may have already left the company.
If you can shift your mindset to enjoy that kind of work, you can have a fruitful career.
If you want to build a routine, the assembly line mindset can be good for you.
Engineering Management Disillusionment
Management oversees the engineering processes and creates hierarchical structures. There is no alternative to these systems when it comes to running modern businesses.
So far, no models are successful in subverting the hierarchies necessary for running large organizations.
Holacracy: A System With No Hierarchy
Holacracy is a form of management with no hierarchy. Instead, it provides a structure of accountability.
This procedural management style that aims to replace the hierarchical notion has been proven not to work after Zappos’s trial.
It’s a system wherein you replace the hierarchical notion with some sort of procedural management style.
Getting Out of the Local Maximum
You can escape it at any time by doing something on your own.
There are plenty of ways to escape. You can either work, retrain yourself, or start a business.
However, because these systems essentially lend structure to your own life, there is a downside to running away from corporate structures.
You gain more and more autonomy when you rise up within a company.
Programmer Anarchy
Programmer anarchy is a case study with a concept that engineers can manage themselves. The structure is similar to holacracy.
The idea is if you hire good engineers and incentivize them properly, you can just have them do the necessary work.
It can be a solution for people who do not respond well to management.
Interviewing Engineers vs. Interviewing Authors
Jeff started podcasting full time five years ago. Before that, he worked as an engineer for around three years.
Authors go on podcast tours when they have finished writing a book. On the other hand, engineers come on the podcast to share unfolded knowledge from their brains.
Every software podcaster has a different style that changes the information expanded from the guest's brains.
Podcasting as a Form of Socialization
Podcasting is a contrived form of socialization.
For Jeff, being a solo podcaster for five years has its pros and cons. He doesn’t recommend doing five shows per week.
Remote Work Today
It works for specific types of people under particular circumstances.
It does not work for people who need socialization.
Right now, we are unrealistically remote. Our current situation is not a real test of what a remote company can do.
The end of the pandemic will give a lot of revelations about work set-ups.
10 Philosophies for Engineers
Jeff wrote the article in 2016 when he had a “negative resentment mentality.”
You have to go through tough times to reach a point of creativity in your career.
The only way to learn how to be a leader is through servility.
Data Engineering Stack & Machine Learning Tooling
There are tons of data strewn across organizations.
These means of piping data allows data scientists and data analysts to do research and make reports.
5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode
“There is creativity in those maintenance tasks and in those well-defined tasks, but for many people, they, you know, as the title of your podcast says, are reaching a local maximum. And there might be something more exciting or more appealing outside of that local maximum.”
“But what I will say is, coming from a position of being five years into ‘escaping,’ is there is a super big downside to running away from those corporate structures.”
“So I have my own style of doing things, The Changelog has their style of doing things, you have your style of doing things. And that changes the information that is being expanded on from the guest’s brain.”
“This (the pandemic) is not even really a true test of what a remote company can do because we’re too remote right now. We’re unrealistically remote.”
“If you want to get to a point of creativity in your career, you're gonna have to work really hard, and you're gonna have to go through some servile periods of time most likely—because the only way that you learn to be a leader is through servility.”
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To expanding perspectives,
Max
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 131.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
You've reached another Local Maximum. Welcome to the show. A couple of quick updates before we get to the main event today, I am now securely moved into Manhattan. So finally I, you know, I had a bunch of episodes ready to go. Now I'm here, I don't know exactly what I'm going to do the next few weeks. But I'll think of something, I'll think of something fun, I promise. And I actually did work out of the Foursquare office once last week. There was no one there. I mean, there was me and a few other people. So it was kind of strange, but we are, I don't know, maybe a few episodes away. That's a few weeks away where I can do a show on the new software. We're cooking up to the new app. It's called Mars Bot for AirPods. And I'm really looking forward to that. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to introduce that to you folks on the podcast, but I'm gonna think of something and everyone should try this. I'm really excited to see what people do with it.
Today is gonna, have been trying to get it out for a while, you know—today is going to be big on podcast recommendations. Because we are also sponsored by the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast. We're now sponsored by them, the new sponsor, which is a great way to get your technology news. So check that out as well.
Today's guest is Jeff Meyerson, and he's got to be one of the most prolific software podcasters in the game. A daily episode for five years, every weekday with tons of stuff to learn every single day with—I believe a guest every single day. You know, from a company or from an open source—everything down the line in terms of software. We're going to talk not only about that, but also about the way in which engineers can become commoditized and how to find creative work, and thoughts on remote work as well.
He did a talk last year called You Are Not a Commodity. And I thought that was a really interesting topic for people who are in the engineering field or in the sciences, and are looking for a job that doesn't feel, I don't know, that doesn't give you dead eyes, that makes you excited in the morning. It is a very hopeful talk, about what's going on, about what the future could be like. So I thought that would be a great jumping off point to have a conversation. Without further ado, my next guest is the host of the popular engineering podcast Software Engineering Daily, Jeff Meyerson, you've reached the Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.
Jeff Meyerson: Thanks for having me.
Max: So I have a feeling, there are some people listening now, software engineers in particular who are not satisfied at their work. Maybe they're being pushed into an uncreative job, maybe they're being micromanaged. There's a lot of mediocre management out there. And it's not just terrible for them, it means that the rest of us don't get to enjoy the product of what they could be building in a better environment. So let's talk about what happens when engineers become a commodity. What is the assembly line mindset that you talk about when it comes to software? And how did we get into this?
Jeff: I think we got into a place where engineers are largely doing work that is associated with maintenance or highly defined tasks. And there is creativity in those maintenance tasks and in those well defined tasks, but for many people, they, you know, as the title of your podcast says, are reaching a local maximum. And there might be something more exciting or more appealing outside of that local maximum. They knew how to look at it or knew how to pursue it.
Max: There's a lot of interesting things that happened in maintenance jobs. I mean, I find that it's like, it's one thing when you're maintaining something that you originally wrote. And another thing entirely when you're coming in and maintaining something that is, you know, was built five, seven years ago by people who are no longer at the company. Some of those jobs can really pull your hair out.
Jeff: That's for sure. I have pulled my hair out before.
Max: Yeah. And sometimes it's better than others, you know. I think, well, how do you avoid that? Because in some ways, I think you can avoid it. Like the stuff gets written, and then five to seven years later, they realize, “Hey, things have to be changed. The people who wrote it aren't there anymore. And we need to hire someone who does this.”
Jeff: It's an unavoidable part of engineering and there are plenty of jobs that offer this kind of work. And some people like this kind of work. I think it's actually, you know, if you enjoy that kind of work, or if you can shift your mindset into a place where you do enjoy that work, you can have a very fruitful career. It can be very relaxing, it can be, you know, routine. And routine is something that I think I have underestimated in the past. So if you want to build a routine, then the kind of assembly line mindset is quite good. You can live on the assembly line for a very long time. And it's, I don't say the assembly line in a derogatory manner, I just mean, it's assembly lines are important. They're necessary functionality in the world, and we need people to operate those assembly lines.
Max: Sure. I mean, I've had, you know, I've done refactoring projects where you know, at the end of it, you have like this, you know, clean, very usable code and you can be proud of it. But those are the times when like, you know, management or whoever gives you some kind of space to do it properly. It's more of a problem when they're like, “Oh, you know, we've got to get this out quickly. And we just want you to fix the problem. We want you to don't pay attention to all the horrible things that you see along the way” type of a mindset.
Jeff: Exactly.
Max: Yeah. So I have to say my career, even though I've been a part of some exciting things, I've been increasingly disillusioned with engineering management, with career ladders, with titles, you know, all that junk. And there were times when I felt I needed to worry about these things. And like, I hated myself for worrying about them, but I felt like I had to at certain points. And yeah, I can't be the only one. So you talk to a lot of engineers, how common is this disillusionment?
Jeff: Management is there to oversee the engineering processes and create a hierarchical structure. And unfortunately, there's just no way around the hierarchical structures when it comes to running modern businesses. We don't really have an alternative to it. We can't do holacracy, we can't do programmer anarchy. We can't subvert the hierarchies that are necessary to running these large organizations at least. We don't have any models of success thus far.
Max: So wait, what is holacracy?
Jeff: Holacracy is a form of management that was written about by some management scientist and then was tried by Zappos. And it's a system where I think there's no hierarchy, there's just the structures of accountability. And you have to do all these, you have to do some paperwork, you have to do some ratings of your co-workers, or ratings of yourself, something like that, where you replace the hierarchical notion with some sort of procedural management style. And it doesn't work. Zappos had a lot of trouble trying to make it work.
Max: It sounds like Orwellian a little bit like, “Oh, you no longer have a manager, you have structures of accountability.” And you know that sounds like it could be a nightmare. It's almost like everybody watching everyone, like, almost like a totalitarian state or something like that. I don't know, sometimes there's a fine line between anarchy and—but anyway, that's more political stuff. So for people who feel like they're stuck in a local maximum, or they're stuck kind of being a commodity. How do you get out of that?
Jeff: I don't know that I'm the best person to comment on that because my own way of getting out of it, which is software podcasting has had its pros and cons. And so the thing is you can…
Max: I’m doing something similar. So that's very helpful to me.
Jeff: Well, sure, but you also have a job.
Max: Right, right.
Jeff: And what I'll say is, you can escape it at any time. You just have to go and do something on your own. And there's plenty of things that you can do on your own. At the bare minimum, you can consult, you can work on Fiverr, you can work on Upwork and find engineering jobs. You can retrain yourself, you can become a podcaster. I wouldn't recommend it. But there's plenty of ways to escape. You can also start a small business or you can start doing one of these other things with the intent of starting a small business or starting a startup eventually. I think these are the obvious ways to escape.
But what I will say is, coming from a position of being five years into “escaping,” is there is a super big downside to running away from those corporate structures. Because corporate structures lend structure to your life, and it's something that I would caution people against running away from the corporate jobs quite as fervently as I was a fan of running away five years ago.
Max: I mean, yeah, some of us, I mean, some of us can't stand it. I mean, I sort of am in a situation where I've almost been able to secede from the engineering structure at my company. But that is a rare thing. And I know it's a rare thing, because I wasn't able to do it for like a decade or so.
Jeff: That's great.
Max: Yeah, but who knows how long I could last?
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, you can have these kinds of middle ground sort of positions, like you have an advisorship at your current company. And being an advisor allows you to have a lot more autonomy than you would have in many of the other roles within a company.
Max: Right, right. Yeah. So one thing I've been thinking about, so here we talk about, you know, commoditize software jobs. And you talked about how people can, you know, start getting put in boxes, like JavaScript engineer level three or something like that. And I feel like there's kind of an upside and a downside. The upside is, if you put that on your resume, they'll automatically be a market of like, you know, HR departments and recruiters looking for those specific people. But if I'm something unique, you know, how would they even know what they're looking for? So how would you, have you found anyone who's been able to, you know, go their own, like go into like a unique route?
Jeff: No examples come to mind immediately. I think when you rise up within a company, then you have more and more autonomy. You can become one of these influencer engineers, you can become one of these highly trusted engineers that has done so much work cutting their teeth, that you have autonomy within a company.
Max: Yeah, I mean, I got that. And then I found this problem, I’m at this one company for a long time, I have all this autonomy. But now I feel like I can't get, I'm not stuck there per se but if I go to another company, I wouldn't get that.
Jeff: Yeah, you do compound interest within a company.
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So we talked about being independent of a corporation. You mentioned programmer anarchy, I want to talk a little bit about that. That one sounds like, I don't know exactly what that is, but that sounds exciting to me. That sounds like what I want. What is that and what are the—has that been tried?
Jeff: Programmer anarchy is a bizarre case study that I read about one time. I heard a podcast about— the concept is that engineers can manage themselves. And if you just hire a bunch of engineers, they'll figure out what to do with regards to design work, they'll figure out what to do with regards to KPIs and OKRs. It almost sounds like holacracy. If you just hire engineers, and you make sure that they're good engineers, you make sure that they're passionate, you make sure that they're incentivized to work properly, then you can actually just have the engineers run wild and do the work that's necessary.
It worked for this one particular company that I heard about, I don't remember what the company does, but it's an interesting case study. Because it's just the idea that if you fire everybody else, you fire a lot of the managers, or demote the managers to becoming engineers, you fire the QA people and they get replaced with more automated processes, you fire the, I don't know, the database administrators and the engineers figure out how to do the database stuff themselves. And it's just complete anarchy, but the programmers get the work done.
Max: So, in some ways that sounds like my wild fantasy. But in other ways, I mean, look, we need like database engineers and people who do, you know, the production work, and stuff like that. You know, there are certain areas in engineering where I'm just like, “My brain doesn't doesn't work on this.”
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, it's been so long since I worked at a company. I don't even know if I'm a credible judge of whether or not programmer anarchy is possible. But it worked in this one case, I thought it was an interesting example.
Max: Yeah, no, it is interesting. It's not like I would come in tomorrow and suggest that we adopt this. Although I feel like it's a good inspiration to say, “Hey, maybe give your engineers a little bit more autonomy.”
Because I can't tell you how many times, you know, someone comes in, someone from outside the team and an engineering manager usually. Well, they're kind of two types of engineering managers. There's one who's like, embedded in the team doing the work with the team. And then those, in the couple cases I've had that worked out well, but then when somebody comes in, and they're just like, “Oh, I have an idea. Try this out.” I can't tell you how many rabbit holes I've been forced down, and then just, you know, sort of wasted a lot of time. But it's time wasted where it's very frustrating time wasted. It's not like, “Oh, I tried this thing that didn't work.” It's like, “No, this guy told me to try this thing. And I listened to him because he's, you know, he's a, in some kind of position of authority.” And now it just kind of ruined my day or even ruined my week.
Jeff: It happens. Yeah. Some people don't respond well to management, and perhaps some place that offers programmer anarchy can be a solution to that.
Max: Yeah. So when did you leave engineering and start podcasting full time?
Jeff: Five years ago.
Max: Five years ago. And how long were you an engineer before that?
Jeff: Two and a half years, three years.
Max: Oh, okay. You're very good at talking to engineers, man. I listen to the show all the time. And so, obviously, you found the work and the subject matter interesting. Otherwise, when you went to podcasting, you probably would have chosen a different topic.
Jeff: I do. I do like talking to engineers.
Max: Yeah. What do you find, when you talk to an engineer, what do you try to get out of them? Like, what is the, you know, what is your approach to doing that kind of interview? It's a very different type of interview than when you're interviewing an author or somebody who's used to, you know, someone who's kind of used to being on podcasts?
Jeff: I actually don't think it's so different. Authors have something that they're very good at, something that they focused on for a long period of time recently. And engineers are similar. You know, authors go on these podcasts tours whenever they have finished a book. They've been studying finance or climate or literature. They recently wrote some, you know, fictional book and they come on a podcast to talk about it. Engineers are similar. You get an engineer who's focused on tuning a database or fixing a distributed systems problem that they wrote a blog post about. They come on the podcast, and they have so much knowledge that has not been unfolded from their brain.
And so, my goal on each show is to find that little thread that they may have touched on in a blog post or in an experience. And just pull on that thread, and pull, and pull, and pull, and pull, and pull. And leave something out of what I'm pulling instead of just asking them to talk, you know, to blather. So I look at myself as kind of a refiner of that threaded knowledge that's coming out of the person's brain.
Max: I feel like engineers oftentimes have so many stories to tell that just aren't told. You know, before I started my podcast, I was never asked to be on a podcast. I did a bunch of tech talks, but that's kind of like a whole different, it’s a whole different animal. Sometimes it's not that different. But I just started off interviewing my friends at work, at Foursquare. And people who listen to the show will know like, you know, episode two and three, we talked a lot about the Foursquare tech stack. And it's just like, you know, nobody is, well, you know, there's you and there's a few other people, but there's so few people who are getting these stories out.
Jeff: There's more and more every day. And you know, I think similar to how different stylists make clothing differently, everybody who is a software podcaster is pulling on that thread. It's pulling on the engineers thread that they're interviewing. And they're weaving together that story in a different way. So I have my own style of doing things, The Changelog has their style of doing things, you have your style of doing things. And that changes the information that is being expanded on from the guest’s brain.
Max: Yeah. So you said before, you wouldn't recommend podcasting. What did you mean by that? I'm sure, I mean, I'm having a great time.
Jeff: What I wouldn't recommend is five years of five shows per week.
Max: Right. Okay.
Jeff: The intensity
Max: Gotcha. You still do five shows a week?
Jeff: I do. I'm a hypocrite.
Max: Well, you just think it's a lot of work?
Jeff: The work isn't the issue. I was at a point where I have realized that podcasting is not socialization. Podcasting is a contrived form of socialization. And so I'm, you know, the pandemic has put this into stark recognition that you need real-world interaction and, preferably, working with a team. So being a solo podcaster for five years has, you know, had its pros and cons as well, that's all I'm saying.
Max: Yeah, no, I know. I'm happy with doing it once a week. You know, I'm still trying to grow the show. But with a job, I feel like if I did it once every two weeks when I have something to say like I'd have to wait too long to say it. But if it were more than one week, already with a job, it's a lot, but it's manageable. I feel like any more would be way too much.
Jeff: To each their own.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So I want to ask your opinion on remote work because I know you've spoken before about, you know, the opportunities that are available to people who do that. And if you asked me about remote work six months ago, I would have—maybe not entirely 180 degrees of different opinion—but I would definitely emphasize different things. And, you know, my take on it today would be so different. Now, we see Google saying their employees will be remote until next year. So what are your feelings on that? What are your feelings on remote work today?
Jeff: It works. It also doesn't work. It works for a specific type of person under a specific type of circumstance. And it doesn't work for people who need socialization, who need the water cooler chatter. Those people are having a lot of trouble adapting. It also doesn't work necessarily for parents who have kids at home that are, you know, screaming and crying all the time, and you know, you try to get away from that at the office.
Max: Yeah.
Jeff: I think it works for forcing a company to develop printed strictures and video-based strictures around how their company actually functions, how the assembly line works. If you don't document it, if you don't have processes in place that are fine-tuned, you don't have the social pressures and the social structures of an in-person environment to reinforce those undocumented strictures.
Max: It's really easy to get distracted over, you know...well, I mean, I guess the situation over the last six months has been different. It's like, I'm living in a studio apartment here that ends next week by the time this goes out because I'm moving. But you know, it's just like, it's hard to get new ideas and to stay focused when you're in the same room for like 22 hours a day.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Max: And I would have said, six months ago, I would have said, "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if I could work from home once or twice a week?" Maybe that still would be nice, but now I'm really feeling the pinch of, you know, we're trying to do creative work. And I met up with some of my co-workers in person the other week, and we're like, "We just got more done in this conversation than we did in like a whole month of talking on Zoom."
Jeff: That happens.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, do you think there'll be some, like some types of work where...I can't imagine like Google and all these other companies where they're doing entirely remote, like, do you think they're gonna be hurting in some areas? Where are the engineers going to be, like, way less productive? I feel like there's some areas, maybe it's just in, like the sort of creative stuff where it's just gonna go dead. I feel like that's gonna have such a negative impact on the industry. What do you think?
Jeff: I don't know. I'm sure Google is tracking this internally. I'm sure Microsoft is tracking this internally. I think there's no way that these companies are as productive today as they were back in the good old days of pre-COVID mostly because everybody's undergoing some mental health issues right now.
Max: Yeah.
Jeff: You know, this is not even really a true test of what an all-emote company can do because we're too remote right now. We're unrealistically remote.
Max: That's a good point. It's not like they, you know...it's one thing if they said, "Hey, Max, we're going to work remote this week." And I'll be like, "Oh, great. I'll go to the coffee shop." It's like, no, no, no. I'm working remotely in my apartment, and then I see like, windows getting smashed outside. Yeah, I'm not really getting a whole lot done.
Jeff: Exactly.
Max: Yeah, that's a good point. I haven't really thought about that that much. This is not remote the way remote should be if that's a good way of putting it. I feel like, I don't know, I think maybe we can get into that as, you know, offices opened back up and kind of becomes an optional thing over the next six months. I'm sort of interested in seeing, like, you know, okay, it's optional to come into the office for the rest of the year. So a bunch of us are going to come in, we're going to have, you know, a good time while we're there in terms of like, you know, socialization, like you said. And then people who need to be home will be home. People who don't want to take the risk will be home. And then, I don't know, we'll kind of see how that works, but that should be an interesting thing to look at.
Jeff: I mean, I can't wait until this thing ends because there's going to be a lot of revelations. I'm sure everybody's in the same boat there. Until then, it's quite a test of will as far as it's been concerned, for me at least. It's, you know, you wake up every day and you kind of expect things to turn a corner, and then they just don't turn a corner. So it's yeah, I mean, it's just our generation has never really had to deal with anything like this, and so it's a very trying time.
Max: I mean, yeah, even most of my older relatives have said, "We've never had to deal with anything like this." Even though they've had to deal with other stuff, but nothing like this. Yeah, so let's see. I want to see, is there anything else….I know you had, I was looking at some of the articles that you wrote in, this is in 2016, but was that like the "10 Engineering Philosophies"?
Jeff: Uh-huh.
Max: Let me pull that up for a second. I'm sorry, I know this was a long time ago. Do you remember any of that?
Jeff: Well, you know, so my writing in 2016 was very much rooted in resentment. It was a negative resentment mentality. A feeling that I did not have the opportunities for creativity that I wanted. And I wrote this article, "10 Philosophies for Engineers," and it was popular. People liked it. It was also a very disgruntled post, and I think in the intervening four or five years, I've become a little bit more measured feeling like, you know, if you want to get to a point of creativity in your career, you're gonna have to work really hard, and you're gonna have to go through some servile periods of time most likely. Because the only way that you learn to be a leader is through servility, and I've really felt that in my own career. But with that said, the post I think was inspirational to some people who had a little too much servility and were looking for a piece of inspiration.
Max: Yeah, no, I felt that way too. And even though I've been disillusioned with some things—I mean, I still look back at all the things I built very positively—but there's one thing that I would really like to be able to detach is like how I'm feeling at work in any given month and like how my mood is just in my life, and I've been...I don't know if this is just an engineer thing or if this is everybody or if it affects engineers more, but if I have a really soul-crushing job that month, it affects the rest of my life in a very negative way. But there's something about coding where you just get in there, and if you kind of drag your feet to the office, and you're like, you have to build something you don't want to build today, it's just, it really is—I can't describe it. I mean, maybe it's just the same in every profession, but I feel like we get it in a special way.
Jeff: Yeah, I think it depends for everybody. I mean, programming is such a wide spectrum of different jobs and management structures and humans and preferences, that there's just a lot of different ways to navigate your career.
Max: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. So you've gone in a very different direction than most engineers do. I'm still holding on to that role, but I've also gotten to a very different direction. So hopefully I'll bring this up again, and maybe I'll find some people who have done some creative things with their careers. I'd like to get more of that on the program. Tell me a little bit about what you're interviewing on your show these days. Like, what's your favorite interview that you've done in like the last, I don't know, six months?
Jeff: It's hard to pick out one, but I would say the biggest issue right now, at least in terms of what I've covered, is the data engineering stack and machine learning tooling.
Max: Yeah.
Jeff: Basically, everybody's got tons and tons of data, and it's strewn across the organization a bunch of different places. So you want to catalog that data, you want to have all these different means of piping data from one place to another and aggregating it, and then eventually serving it up to data scientists and data analysts in a way that allows them to do research on it and allows them to have reports. And it gives the machine learning researchers a playground that is amenable to their research and their experiments. So that area is very interesting to me because the scale is so tremendous, especially in a company like Netflix. The scale is tremendous, and the pipeline's that they have to build are works of art.
Max: Yeah, those pipelines can get very complicated. You know, the last one I worked on, I would say, was like the Foursquare attribution product. And it was just like, I used to have it in my head, like, I'd be able to take someone in for an hour and then fill up a whiteboard, like a whole big whiteboard with like lines and arrows and things like just for my—there's no way I could do that now—but it was like a whole roadmap of stuff.
And it was very crazy how, like, if a change was made, you had to make sure that the data went through like every step. And it's not a soft problem, and it's, I don't know, I find them difficult to test because there's such a long lag time between, "Okay, I wrote something, some code that's in my pipeline." And now I have to, "Okay, sure. I could run it over some test data," which, you know, sometimes is a good test but sometimes isn't. You know, but then I have to make my test data, and it's way more time consuming than say, like a server engineering, which is kind of what I'm doing now where I'm like, "Oh, let's hit the endpoint I just built," and, "Oh, it didn't work." So it doesn't work.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, those works of art are fun to play around with.
Max: Yeah. Alright. So I will definitely invite people to subscribe to the Software Engineering Daily Podcast, especially all the engineers who listen to Local Maximum here. Where else can we find you?
Jeff: You can find me on Twitter. I think that's the best place. I'm @the _prion. You can find me through the @software_daily Twitter account, the Software Daily Twitter account. And you could also find me on Spotify if you like music. I write a lot of music, and my name on Spotify is The Prion.
Max: Oh, very cool. What type of music do you write on there?
Jeff: It's like electronic music but pop music.
Max: Alright, I'm definitely gonna check it out. I'll put it on the show notes page. I actually read somewhere, you automatically generated some of that music. Did I read that right?
Jeff: I think you're thinking of somebody else. I didn't automatically generate it.
Max: Alright. Or, no, you collaborated with people across the...no?
Jeff: Oh, yeah. I collaborate with people on Fiverr. I hired musicians on Fiverr.
Max: Yeah, yeah. That's what I heard. Okay. I thought differently. Well, that's pretty cool. I mean, you know, having sort of a band, a distributed band or something.
Jeff: Exactly.
Max: Something like that.
Jeff: Exactly. Yes.
Max: That's pretty cool. Alright. Yeah. We talked about, you know, remote creativity actually working in some cases. Maybe that's an interesting case. I'll definitely check that out. I will link to all that on the show notes page for this episode. Jeff, thanks for coming on the show.
Jeff: Thank you, Max.
Max: Alright. That's our show. I do not know what we're going to be getting to next week. But I'm hoping that Aaron is going to interview me on an obscure mathematical topic before long because it's going to be the product launch season soon and political election season very soon, and the podaverse is about to light up. So, you know, I don't know, say what you want about 2020, but I'm very happy that I have a podcast right now in 2020. Alright. Have a great week, everyone.
That's the show. Remember to check out the website at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, or ask a question that I can answer on the show, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. The show is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher and more. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe to the Local Maximum on one of these platforms and to follow my Twitter account @maxsklar. Have a great week.
