CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have AJ O'Neill.
AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo. Coming at you live from sunny Pleasant Grove. I assume it's sunny outside. Looks like it from here.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Amy Knight.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from a steamy Nashville.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Dan Shapir.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Hello from really sunny Tel Aviv. It was sunny. I walked my dog today, so I know that it was. Now it's evening, but yeah, hi.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right, I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week we're gonna be talking about work-life balance and Amy had somebody request this and I think there's a little bit more nuance to the message you got. So Amy, do you wanna just kind of read that off?
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AIMEE_KNIGHT: Sure, yeah. I mean, I feel like this topic obviously can encompass a lot of different things, but yeah, somebody reached out to me on LinkedIn actually this weekend and said we should talk about this. We use it as an opportunity to do that. He was talking about like personal projects and stuff like that and what to work on, which is kind of an aside from the conversation, but I know for me, like the topic, you know, we talk about burnout and all kinds of stuff. And I know for the time that I've been in the industry, it's definitely been a very interesting road. There's a lot of different opinions on actually. Dan, I know you messaged me about this a lot. You know, there's definitely been like a lot of pressure, especially when you're entering the industry new to put in a lot of hours. I think, you know, there's just a lot of nuance there and no, no, there's definitely like a lot of balance that you have to figure out and it's probably different for different people.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I definitely messaged you about it. I think that
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'm not good at it.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, by the way, I think that my particular issue with you was actually less about the hours that you work. To be honest, I don't know exactly what hours you work. It was more about the fact that I think we talked about it that you never take vacations.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I don't. Yeah, and it probably was an big issue at my last job, less so than the job I'm at now, like typically because I really enjoy what I do. I don't mind putting in extra hours, but my last role, I was in, it was a great company, like no bad feelings. I love the people there and they're amazing, but just the nature of work sometimes is you have to like take on roles that aren't exactly what you necessarily signed up for. And I ended up doing a lot of like leadership type stuff. And I just, I worked a lot of hours and dealt with a lot of various personal issues between coworkers and that really burned me out. And it definitely like affected my personal life and stuff where people were saying sometimes my mood was affected by work and just constant messages, you know, 5am to midnight. And it's just, it was a lot. And my takeaway was that, yeah, I don't necessarily know if burnout is always a thing with like code people agreed with me on this, that burnout a lot of times has to do with more people issues.
DAN_SHAPPIR: We have a couple of issues kind of intertwined here that you kind of set it yourself.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, there's a lot. Y
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack. So there's the one issue which is how many hours you're working and whether or not you end up working on weekends and whether or not you can take some time off occasionally or you know, stuff like that, or if there's a lot of pressure. And there's another thing, which is, are you working on stuff that you enjoy working on? So, like you said, for you, it seems that it was kind of a mixture of the two, but you're also kind of saying that even if you would, would have worked the same amount of hours and the same amount of pressure, but just worked on, let's say coding and rather than managing all those people things, eesh.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, it's stressful man. I have a new respect for managers after that job.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, so the question is again, you know, it might be that even if you'd worked a lot less hours, but would have been just forced to deal with the managerial aspect, it might have potentially burnt you out even sooner. So there's kind of like a question of whether we're talking about burnout as a result of the amount of work or the type of work Or both.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: So here's, here's the one thing I say, well, hopefully maybe frame our conversation. I've been actually thinking a lot about this recently as I look at my career path and then, you know, people that are entering into the industry. And this was just the case for me. So when I entered the industry, I was just in a like personal situation that I wanted to make it to like mid-level developer as quickly as possible because I knew just kind of like. The situation I was in, the clock was ticking and I needed to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. And so I put in a lot of hours. One of the talks I give, and I'm not exaggerating, I would show up to work 90 minutes early, stay 90 minutes late. I treated Saturday like a regular work day where I was at my desk eight o'clock and sat there until, you know, I think maybe I didn't work quite as long on Saturdays and then Sunday was a half day. I let myself have half a day off once a week and I kept on that for a really long time. And I would say almost like four or five years. And it, well, maybe three years.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Still the same.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Definitely still did a lot. It wasn't until I would say about a year and a half ago that I had this realization that my life was becoming, I was becoming, I was identifying and people were identifying me by Amy's career and not Amy. And like I had kind of like lost myself in my career, which is great, but it was not healthy. And it was almost like I had to step back and reset expectations with myself and also reset expectations with the, you know, employers at the time because there was like this persona around me that I was just this like workaholic and I'm still like, you know, I enjoy it. So I don't mind. I'm not quite as bad, but I really had to like step back and reset priorities with myself because it was hurting relationships and just hurting a lot of different things. And so like to wrap that all up, I just feel like at some point in your career, you have to decide like what it, what's important to you and adjust your schedule and priorities accordingly.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I do want to put a kind of butt in here a little bit on that because to some degree, if there's something you want, then I feel like there's nothing wrong with working at it. The other thing is, is that I found at least for me for in my personal life and my professional life, a lot of this boils down to, I kind of do a thing until I figure out, you know what, this isn't what I want. And then I adjust, right. And that's, that's what you did. And so, you know, and then I'll do whatever I adjust to until that's not what I want. Right. And then I adjust again. So I don't know. I mean, the hindsight is definitely helpful and I think it's good to give people advice along those lines but I also don't want people to think that at any point you're going to have it all completely right and in the bag and go, okay, you know, I'm kind of achieving that balance or that level of whatever it is that I thought I wanted because at some point either you're going to change your life circumstances are going to change. And even if you were getting it right, what you're going to, you know, it's not going to fit anymore. You're going to have to adjust anyway.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I totally agree with what you're saying. I definitely think that at all times you kind of need to be thinking about what are you working towards? What's the goal? Is it worth the effort that you're putting into it? But if I can even step back, like before that, it kind of, I have a problem with this framing, as it were, that if you're a junior entering the industry. And especially if you're entering kind of late, which I think is going to be fairly common with everything that's going on in the economy now. A lot of people are gonna be forced into changing careers and stuff like that. And we discussed some of these things with Danny Thompson when he was on, I assume the episode will already be out by the time this one is out. It's difficult for me, or I don't like the assumption that if you're kind of coming into the game as a junior and a bit late, then you have to work like crazy, like a crazy person for several years because otherwise you can't make it.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I want to push back on that too a little bit. I understand where you're coming from, Dan, and I wish that that was the case. But I also think we do a disservice to people who are entering the industry by saying that doesn't like that shouldn't be that way because the reality of the situation is by and large that's true.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: One other thing I'll add to that is that I believe that there are work situations where you don't have to be in that position. And there are other work situations where you do and you can probably find those. But yeah, I think those are further. They're harder to find as junior developers because the company wants you to become they want you to level up as quickly as possible. And so they have the incentive to push you to do that work and to put in the time so that you can contribute at the level that they want. The flip side is that, yeah, I mean, if you just wanna learn to code and then you just wanna collect a paycheck, yeah, who's to say you can't just find that position somewhere, but I don't see too many of those.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but how long does it realistically take you to level up? I mean, okay, I can't
AJ_O’NEAL: depends on mentorship.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It also depends on what you want.
AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah.
DAN_SHAPPIR: But if you've got improper mentorship, you can work super hard for years and years and you'll never level up. What I'm trying to say is if your goal is to quote unquote level up, I can see that taking a couple of months, I can say, okay, I've got this new position. It doesn't even matter if I'm a junior or not. I'm joining a new
AJ_O’NEAL: defining level up as making an increase in income at your current job.
DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I'm defining Level Up as establishing my position within that organization, or getting to the point where they're starting to appreciate me for what I want to be appreciated for, or I'm starting to contribute at the level where they're expecting me to contribute at. And when you're coming into an organization, and you know, obviously it's more challenging when you're a junior and you don't have experience, but it's also often true when you're a senior and you're joining a new organization, there's going to be a lot of stuff that you don't know, there's got to be, there's going to be a lot of dynamics that you're not familiar with. Uh, you want to establish your credibility and stuff like that. It's, it's perfectly understandable that, and obviously you want to make yourself as, you know, established as possible because obviously when, if, you know, push comes to shove and people start getting laid off, then usually the tendency is to go with the new people. So you want to be in a position where as quickly as possible you're considered to be like a contributing member of the organization. So I can definitely appreciate that like the first couple of weeks, months, maybe a year, you're going to be working harder. But Amy was talking about three years or four years. Four years, that's not leveling up.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, I maybe misspoke a little bit there. It was probably more like three years. Now, I will say after the boot camp. Now, I definitely did a lot before the boot camp as well, but it was definitely a solid like two to three years where I did like the Saturday, and like a half-day Sunday thing.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm going to make a somewhat of an extreme statement, but I'll make it nonetheless. If you're working like 12 plus hour days, including weekends, then you had better have some stock options or something.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: But the thing is, it stinks. I don't think it's healthy or good, but it kind of just is the nature of things. And I just think with the economy right now, and I graduated seven years ago, it is a little bit different now.
AJ_O’NEAL: So I want to, I want to butt in here for a second. So first of all, I think the moral argument has to go off the table, like whether it's good or healthy or whatever, because, and I think the people that get this, get this, but like I've done things in my life where I put every moment of my life into it. And when I achieved the goal, I then only then realized that it was something I absolutely didn't care about or didn't want. Like I got stuck in this mindset of like, I'm going to achieve this goal and I'm going to prove to myself and ostensibly the world, you know, whatever. They're like, I can achieve this goal. And I think sometimes you only know whether or not it was good or healthy once you, once you get there. Cause the, the, the litmus test is when you get there, will you feel accomplished? And there's other times, there's other times when I've put my whole soul into something and when I achieve it, I feel great. And at the top of the mountain, there's like a great view and a breath of fresh air, so to speak. But I also don't, my experience is that plenty of people are pardon my French, mediocre, and they get by just fine. And they accomplish the goals that they have for their life because their career is not their life. So the question is, I mean, again, this has been said a number of times, you gotta get specific about like, I want to earn $70,000 a year, $100,000 a year, $130,000 a year because I want to buy a house within five years, be able to support a family with three children, be able to have a boat next to a lake. I mean, that very specificness of a goal I think has to be in there. Because just to say like, I wanna be a mid-level developer, senior developer, like why? Why put in more effort than you have to in one area of your life? If the satisfaction you get is in another area of your life. That said, I love coding. I wish everyone wanted to be a senior developer, but not everyone does.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but, but realistically, okay. Let's say that my goal is to earn, I don't know, 130 K a year.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I was going to say, I hate that goal already.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. I hate that goal as well, but let's say it's a goal. It's a goal that. Let's say it's a goal that I've selected because I've done the math. I see most people don't do that way, but you know, I'm a developer, so that's how I go about stuff.
AJ_O’NEAL: I don't think most devs do that by the way.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I've done, I've done the math and in order to, to live, to have the standard of living that I want to have to pay off my student loans, whatever.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Now I like the goal. I like that better. Usually it's a status thing and that drives me nuts. I want to make $130,000.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. Yeah, but I agree. It's probably most people, but most people don't set this type of a goal for a couple of reasons. First of all, you have effectively zero control over it almost because you can work hard, you can make yourself invaluable to the company, but at the end of the day, if they don't want to pay you that, then they won't. You switch jobs six times every six months. Yeah, and then you certainly get what you want. By the way, that's a whole different discussion about the fact that a lot of times the only way to actually get a raise is to switch jobs. So you're literally working your pardon me ass off, trying to impress everybody with the fact that you never take vacations and whatnot, and you never get a raise because they take you for granted. And the only place that you manage to actually get a substantial raise is when you switch jobs where they have really no idea how many hours you put in. So So you're kind of impressing the wrong people to begin with. My point is that if you're an employer and you're expecting your employees, especially employees in a, in a discipline where you're supposed to be creative, if you're expecting the people to work around the clock, you're doing it wrong.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think I agree. Now the one other thing that I want to throw out on this is that a lot of people, yeah, they just kind of go, okay, I could be making more and then they go find a new job. And what I want to push back on a little bit there is that if you're a little bit more deliberate and you start talking to people and getting to know people in the community and start asking, okay, you know, what would I reasonably expect to make as a senior developer at the company you work at? And they're telling you something within the ballpark of what, you know, then you have, then you have a goal. Then what you do is you try and make yourself an obvious hire for that company. And then you ask for the salary you want. And so instead of jumping jobs every six months, you target what you want and then you work up to getting there and you can definitely do that. I did that a couple of times before I went freelance and it still works. So I'm just going to put that out there.
DAN_SHAPPIR: By the way, do you ask for what you want or do you ask for 20% more than what you want?
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I asked for 20% more than what I think they will give me is typically what I do. And then I'll negotiate down. But the other thing that I want to put in is that if that's something that you decide you really want, then, you know, then you can do the work. But the other thing I also want to just kind of drive here is, Amy talked about going into work early and staying late, but for some people the time trade-off isn't going into work early and staying late, putting in the time, but it's going to work for eight hours and then coming home and spending two hours doing extra learning at home so that they can level up so that they can get whatever position or job or raise they think they want. And so there's that as well.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. But I'm going back to my point, regardless of whether you, where you spend those hours, like there are, there are always exceptions. And I know that these exceptions have happened to me as well, but realistically, regardless of how many hours you work at the place, you're unlikely to get raises of more than five to 10%, unless you know, like you're bumped up to a whole new level and made, you know, super manager, whatever, because the previous manager quit or something. But otherwise, you're not unlikely to get high bumps. If you're the 20% bump, that's going to happen when you switch jobs. And when you switch jobs, the fact that you had worked at your previous employers for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, is going to make zero difference.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yes.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: That kind of brings me to a question, which is the person who messaged me, I think, kind of talked about this in his question was, so this time if, you know, and I should say too, there's a lot of people that don't have the luxury I had of going in early and staying late. So let's say you do, how do you spend that time? Do you spend that time leveling up on the technologies that they're using at work? Do you spend that time, you know, exploring other things? Maybe there's probably not like a right answer. In my case, I was spending the time leveling up at, you know, the technologies that we were using at work so that I could be, you know, more valuable to the team there.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm working on some stuff around this, right? I'm actually working on refocusing, uh, devchat.tv and it shows to be around, you know, sort of junior-ish people who want to move up in their career. Right. It, I'm getting more and more focused on that momentum. So what do you want? Right. I mean, is it the salary? Is it just a better position at a better company? Is it some of these other things? Is it to move up in the company you're at? Right. And so, you know, then it's, okay, well, what do I need to do? What do I need to level up on so that I can go to my boss and make the point that I should get a raise or what do I need to level up on or do in order to, you know, demonstrate to, you know, the company that I think I want to work at that I'm the right fit for them. And so a lot of it is not just then what skills do I have? But some of it is going to be, how do I put this stuff into my GitHub profile? Or, you know, do I put YouTube videos out there or do I write blog posts so that people can see what I'm capable of so that at the end of the day, when I show up and ask for that raise or ask for the salary, that's 20% higher than what I was getting at a new company, you know, that they can go and they can look at my body of work and say, well, this is an obvious yes, right. But at the end of the day, what do you spend your time on really, really, really depends on what you want.
DAN_SHAPPIR: So, so I have like thoughts about some several things that you guys have said. I think that you talked about putting out more hours at work, spending more time on things that are directly work-related versus spending more time on, you know, on building, let's say your personal brand or whatever, by working on side projects, making videos, contributing to open source, whatnot. Some of the stuff, by the way, that we discussed with Murad Stern on that episode when he was on. And I think it kind of depends on where you're trying to take your career. Because realistically, if your goal is to level up within your own organization, then unless it's like a really big organization. Working on external projects probably is not the best path. I would think especially smaller companies could care less about the fact that you've got like videos and contributing to open source.
AJ_O’NEAL: I beg to differ on that one, but I'll let you finish first.
DAN_SHAPPIR: My experience at least that smaller companies, most of the smaller companies that I've been at were like startup situations and stuff like that. And, or, and they were kind of busy, like either trying to survive or trying to, to break to the next level. And, you know, we were bootstrapping all the time and we didn't have time to, to muck about with, with the external things, unless it was part of the description of the company. So for example, if it's a company built around an open source project, then you're kind of involved in that open source project, but, but that's really because that's what the company is about. Working on open source projects that have nothing to do with a company, from my experience, that doesn't help you a whole lot with advancement within the company, especially in smaller companies. It could be helpful in bigger companies, but then transitioning between departments is kind of almost like transitioning between companies. On the other hand, it definitely can help you if you're thinking about growing your career outside of the company. Because like I said before, the fact that you're putting in a ton of work within your company, doesn't, won't really necessarily help you when you're trying to go somewhere else. So that's one thing that I wanted to say. The other thing is that rather than, if I'm trying to advance within the company or securing my position within the company, rather than trying to be the guy that puts in the most hours, I would try to identify the place or the niche where I can make myself invaluable to the company and recognized for that specific contribution. So maybe I become an expert in topic X, like, I don't know, let's say the company has a really difficult and problematic deployment process. So maybe even if it goes beyond my job description, I really study up on DevOps, I streamline the deployment process, I make sure that everybody is aware that it's me who's done it. Or maybe I make myself kind of invaluable to that process. I'm the one constantly improving it and making it evermore streamlined. Obviously, be careful of streamlining yourself out of a job, but usually, that doesn't necessarily need to happen in tech and go about it that way rather than just, you know, be the grunt that puts in a hundred hours a week doing grunt work. Digging trenches because anybody can drink, can dig trenches.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I just want to back up for a second what Dan's saying because it it's true, right? And companies tend to operate on certain patterns of behavior. And so it's pretty easy to see what they're rewarding other people for what kinds of initiatives, what areas they care about those kinds of things. And so you if you're trying to level up within your company, and move up there, then yeah, it's pretty easy to figure out what they're going to reward you for. And if they if they don't have a a history of rewarding people for certain types of behavior, you can try a few and then if they're just not going to, then maybe it is time to move because they're just not going to appreciate the work you're putting in at all anyway. Um, but yeah, if you're, if you're going to try and get another job, if you're looking for that mobility, then yeah, you definitely want to be focused more outward.
AJ_O’NEAL: So I work, you know, I do mostly contract work. And in the past few years, I've worked with a number of smaller companies, the opportunities that I have, are because of what I have published. Because of the blog articles that I've written, because of the open source software that I have created and that has become popular, because of the extracurricular, so to speak, activities that I've done, like videos on YouTube and stuff. Like the reason that I have my employee is because of doing those things. I don't know that this is the majority of the situation, but you definitely hear about it. So I'm not, I'm not pushing this as like, Oh, this is going to happen everywhere. But just as a, you know, well, the flip side thing can happen too. I've also worked with, uh, people where providing the solution clearly, efficiently and effectively was an affront to their pride. And it got knocked down pretty much on the basis of inadvertently making them look bad. And so while I, so I agree with what Dan said about like identifying what needs to be done, you know, figuring out where the value is and getting in there and providing the best value that you can. And I think that's like, I think that's the mentality that you should have, but just to warn you, there are times when you do that and it will blow up in your face for no good reason, because sometimes people like their processes to be inefficient and terrible because it's their way and their thing. And, and they don't want to concede to someone who's not, I mean, I guess like if you've worked at the company for a couple of years or something, then maybe you, you know, you get the street cred from the grunt work or whatever, but sometimes you definitely can get pushback from, from people that have been in the company who may be less knowledgeable or experienced than you in certain areas that's very, you know, clear, but still get that kind of pushback. I'm, I'm not in the camp of you should try to do everything you can to advance in your current company. I don't think that you shouldn't. I'm just saying, I don't think that that is like, you know, you've really won a big one if you, if you stay in advance, I think that I, you know, it just depends on what your goals and your values are. If you like the idea of loyalty and you want to really work at that path and grow your self-marketing skills to be able to get more value where you're at. I think you learn a great set of skills if you're figuring out how to do that. I think that's awesome. But I think that investing in the things that you're interested in, which again, like if you're not really that interested in code and you're just trying to get on this career path to get money, to get a lifestyle, to get in the right situation, this may not be you. But if you're really interested in encoding and you want to see where the opportunities take you. To some degree, follow your interests. Some of your interests will be dumb interests that don't actually profit you any. I know plenty about that, but some of your interests are things that other people will be interested in too, and that will avail you to opportunities. So I think that, like me personally, I would not recommend to someone that they spend 12 hours a day at their job, five or six days a week. I'd recommend spend the time at your job and learn tangential technologies and learn what you're interested in and get become as expert as you can and as differentiable as you can in something that you really like.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I totally agree with that. Also, I would like to add is that sometimes you do need to work or expect it to work that 12 hours or 13 or whatever hours a day, because it's, it's literally part of the job description. If you're, like I said, if you're, uh, found a founding a new startup then you're probably going to be working like crazy for a while. If there's an emergency because production is down, then you're going to have to work like crazy. But the whole idea of a panic mode exists when there are periods of time where there isn't panic. If it's constantly panic, that effectively means that it's never panic. Because if you're constantly working like crazy, it means that when you actually do need to work like crazy, you can't give more because there's not more to give. So that's that. And the other thing is, you know, Amy, again, I assume that it worked for you, but for a lot of people working so many hours and never taking a day off, that can really impact your health. And that's also something to take into account. It can impact your health. Like you said, it can impact relationships. You know, at the end of the day, you work to live. I don't think you should be living to work.
AJ_O’NEAL: I argue. Well, again, I wouldn't put the word should there, but I live to work. I love it.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, okay. But that's great. But that's great because you've defined that like part of the things that you enjoy in your life your quote-unquote hobbies is that you like to code, you like to solve programming challenges. You would theoretically, if tomorrow you were to win the lottery and you could retire and not work at all, you'd probably just sit at home and bang away at interesting code. And that's perfectly fine. It's great that you have a hobby. And if your hobby is apparently very similar to the things that you have to do to make a living, then you're really lucky. The fact that you still need to switch gears every once in a while I would think.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, like Dan, I agree with what you're saying. My stance is just like, I do think that there are room for like all kinds of different people. Unfortunately, though, well, maybe it's not unfortunate, but it's just the nature of what I've seen is that the people that do tend to like enjoy doing stuff in their free time tend to be the people that are...You know more sought after and stuff like that. So it depends like depends on what's important to you like is having job security and being sought after something that is important to you then you know might make certain decisions if It's not then you may make other decisions and I don't know my personal take is just like be understanding of all different types of people.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I agree, but again going back to your particular Situation or the one that you described when you were working at the office for 13 hours a day. Did that make you more sought after?
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yes.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Did it or did or were you more sought after because of the conference talks that maybe you were giving and the people that you were assisting with at boot camps and stuff like that, which was totally outside those 12 hours at work.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I think that there was like another junior that he was a CS grad but he was more of the personality of like not really doing stuff on his own. And when we started off, he definitely had way more knowledge than I did. But over time, I think I became, well, not I think I know that I became more valuable to just the team.
DAN_SHAPPIR: And then you left the team.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Jamison, it's Jamison's fault. No. Um, I mean, I think I stayed there for almost two years, but unfortunately so one of the big reasons why I left was not necessarily because it was the company, it was because... So a lot of people may or may not know I was a military spouse and that's why I got into programming is because the marriage I was in was not working out and I was trying to be able to provide for myself if my ex-husband left. And so I was trying to... He was saying that he was going to and so I was trying to get on my feet as quickly as possible. The reason why I switched was because I needed a remote job because we were about to get moved from Baltimore to somewhere else. And so I knew that I was not gonna be able to stay at that job.
Are you stuck trying to figure out how to get to the next stage of your developer career? Maybe you're just not advancing fast enough in the job you're in, or you're trying to break in in the first place, or for whatever reason, you keep going to interviews and it's just not working. You wanna land that dream coding job, but it just doesn't seem to be working out. Well, Johnson Mez has written a book for you called the complete software developers career guide. He walks through each stage of the development career and all of the things that you need to do in order to move up, keep learning, keep growing, and find that next job that's going to get you where you want to go. So if you're stuck and trying to figure this stuff out, go pick up the complete software developers career guide. It's the number one software development book on Amazon. It's sold over 100,000 copies so far. I actually have friends of mine that reach out to me and go, hey, do you know this John Sonmez guy? Cause his book is awesome. So go get the book. You can get it at devchat.tv slash complete guide. That's devchat.tv slash complete guide.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Again, I totally agree that there are situations in your life where you have to make sacrifices. It could be working longer hours. It could be spending doing stuff that you don't wanna do. It could be reducing your expenses. There are a lot of potential sacrifices that people can make. I totally agree with that. So, you know, so again, going back to your situation. The question that I'm asking myself, and you guys are more familiar with the market in the US and in particular with how it is for juniors coming out of boot camps. Do you think that for a junior coming out of a boot camp or even let's say potentially going into a boot camp, they need to realize that the sacrifice that they're going to have to make after they finish the boot camp and once they have found the first position that they are able to find, that they're going to have to work like crazy for several years?
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I think like Chuck was saying earlier, like in a perfect world, it would be beneficial to have balance. But more often than not, the people that I've seen get to mid as quickly as possible because those junior jobs are really hard to come by. Especially with COVID, they're just not as in demand. It's the people that put in an ungodly amount of effort are typically the ones that are more sought after.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, and just to add to that, I mean, Dan said, you know, when they get that first job, but even before that first job, what I'm seeing talking to a lot of boot camp camp grads as they graduate from the boot camp, a certain percentage of them, yeah, they get that job as they graduate, but a lot of them, they've got to go out and they've got to do the work to essentially keep learning and show that they can do the work before they even get the job, right? And so they may be working eight hours a day at, you know, some other thing to pay the bills while they're, I guess, you know, self-teaching to finish their education so they can get that code job. And so, you know, if you're working an eight-hour job and then you're spending another couple hours, you know, every day learning and leveling up and putting stuff on GitHub and contributing to open source and doing all the stuff that you have to do just to get found. I think there's a season of life where that's reasonable to expect. And you know, in that first job, again, you know, you get in there and you do the work so that they're happy they hired you. Now, you know, do you have to do that for three months or six months or a year? I think it depends on the place you're working and how far you want to go and what your ultimate goal is. I've seen places where, yeah, you know, the new people come in after a learning curve, even the juniors at two or three months they can settle in and they can just work. And I've seen other places where they kind of hard drive everybody and those different cultures appeal to different people. And so they'll drive the people out that don't want the laid-back environment because it drives them nuts that everybody else isn't driving hard. And then the other places will drive people out because they don't want to be there all day and all night and they don't want to feel all that pressure. I don't know if there's a right answer here, but I think there's a realistic expectation at least initially that you're going to have to do some work just to prove yourself so that you can get that first job.
AJ_O’NEAL: So one thing that I think people don't focus on that I wish that they would. So I recently went through a bunch of intern candidates and not a single one of them could write documentation, not one. And that is something where if you want to level up and distinguish yourself from other people in a way that is clearly visible in an interview, have no, like no markdown. And look at projects that you use. You know, look through your list of NPM modules or whatever. Visit some of the Readme's. Figure out what the best things they do are. I'll give you a hint. It's when they include one of those animated giffies where they show here's how you use the product, or they've got like screenshots of what it is, or they have a link to the demo site of what they've built. And they have instructions on how to install it that don't require you to already know the framework that you're in. Like, just knowing how to put a README together so that you can demonstrate that you know how to communicate and that you actually know what you did is, I mean, that's, it's not, like 10x is not, it's like 100x. Like find me the person that can write documentation and I take them on the spot because then I know whatever they learn, they'll be able to communicate to other people and it's a net win for everyone.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's almost like a, just like a maturity thing and just being like careful and meticulous. And I don't know, I see that as like a maturity trait. It seems like, I don't know, sometimes like older developers tend to kind of get over the like flashy whatever persona and just, you know, it's about enabling everybody on your team to do good.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, but if I, if I'm going to do, if I'm going to push back a little bit. So I obviously I'm not going to argue with the fact that having soft skills is way underappreciated in our industry.
AJ_O’NEAL: I wouldn't call that a soft skill. Sorry.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I, I, well, it's a, it's the ability to communicate properly with other people, not just with a computer, whether it be through documentation or even verbally or or or whatnot. It's usually these, you know, people that have the ability to communicate with other humans are actually the ones that tend to have the best software careers for my experience, at least.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I agree. 100%.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Everybody has this story about this genius who could not talk with anybody else. And he was just sitting in the corner and coding all day. And then he miraculously created the next Facebook. But you know, I won't say this never happens, but the majority of cases, it's not that.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, and he couldn't get much further than creating it on his own. He couldn't scale it without building a company around it.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Exactly. But that has nothing to do specifically with work-life balance, or if anything, it's those people who tend to have a better work-life balance because they have a greater appreciation of interacting with other people versus somebody who's just stuck in front of a keyboard and a screen all day long and literally is trying to prove themselves by the amount of code that they're able to bang out. Where, by the way, that's like the worst way to actually try to measure productivity, is to measure you by the amount of code that you're able to bang out. It's literally digging ditches and probably digging ditches where there shouldn't be any ditches. You can't... Look, being a developer is not exactly like being a lawyer. It's not billable hours. You know, you need to put in the hard work. Like I said, if there is a crisis, then show your willingness to work around the clock until it's resolved. But I think that the expectation that if I just work like constantly all the time, regardless of what the situation is, and then my manager will miraculously recognize me for my effort, that's just not going to happen, at least according to my experience.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I agree with that too. The other thing is that a lot of people have this idea that if I show a lot of loyalty to the company, it'll show it to me. And I have never, ever, ever worked for a company except for the one I own that showed me any or reciprocated any of the loyalty I showed to it.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. I think I've seen it recently written on Twitter, uh, in the context of, I think it was the layoffs at Airbnb or something. The company is not your family. Don't assume that it is. Your family will never let you go because times are a bit tough and your company will let you go like that because they have to and because that's the type of the relationship that you are with them. So certainly work at a company where you enjoy working if you can do that, you know, work with people who are fun to work with, but never make the mistake of assuming that your company is your family because it isn't.
AJ_O’NEAL: I just want to cry now.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Why?
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No, I totally agree. It's interesting how many times I have wound up in that situation where, yeah, you know, I thought, okay, you know, these people, you know, blah, blah, blah, this company, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it turned out that at the end of the day, that wasn't the case. And it wasn't because the people weren't good people or that I had any kind of miss, you know, they had any, they didn't care about me. It was just, yeah, when it came right down to it, they were trying to make the decision that made the most sense for everybody. And that meant that, you know, they made a decision that didn't benefit me the way that they sometimes even promised that they would. DAN_SHAPPIR: Exactly. And, and probably the problem was your expectation that they would. Because again, the company is not a family. It's not, it's not the same thing unless maybe it's a family-owned business.
AJ_O’NEAL: But that's not what they told me when I signed on.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. That was a whole story with, with Airbnb, I think it was. But again, it's true with a lot of companies where it was like a, where a family type company where everybody loved everybody and people would hang out together and everybody was friends and stuff like that and everybody was then shocked when 25% of the people were laid off but you know what they had to do it and those people that were laid off were no longer part of the family and again the fact that they had happened to work 80 hour or 90 hour weeks before they got laid off did them absolutely no amount of good after they were laid off.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Boy, that sounds like a very, very familiar story. The last place I worked at was, well, yeah, we put in, we're, we put in 80 hour weeks for like a month. And of course they gave us bonuses for it. And then, yeah, we got, we got laid off.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, you know what, at least you got the bonuses.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, at least we got the bonus, right? And a severance.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. And you know, sometimes they sell you on a dream. I, I, I worked like crazy for startups because like I said, I had stock options. I had some vested interests in the success of the company. And going in, I was aware that because this was a startup situation, I'm going to be working like crazy. And I did. And sometimes, you know, I was lucky enough that a few of the startups succeeded. Most of them, of course, did not. And then your effort kind of goes to waste. Then it was something that you kind of signed in to. If you're going to be working at a company like a re as a developer for a retailer and that company is not going to explode all of a sudden. It's not going to be the the next Twitter or well Twitter is not maybe a great example now but Facebook or something. Then again if you're trying to buy job security I can understand you working like crazy I might just say that it probably won't buy you job security. And the fact that you're working like crazy is not going to make that huge of a difference to the company at the end of the day.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah. Just like one little tiny nuance. I mean, it kind of depends too, I think a little bit on, you know, if you're new, you probably have not been exposed to like a production application and the bootcamp only takes you like so far. So I do think some of those extra hours are individually beneficial, not just to the company, but to yourself as you're like exposing yourself to things that you have never seen before.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, the other thing is, is that I see a lot of people what they're looking for is they're looking for either way to move up. But sometimes it's just job security, right? And Dan's making the point that you put in more hours doesn't necessarily mean job security. But I find that job mobility is a form of job security, right? I mean, I lost my first programming job. I went home, told my wife, we had a discussion as to whether or not we were going to still go out to dinner for our anniversary that night, because it was our fourth anniversary. And then I went in a bunch of jobs, got a phone call about 2pm, drove down at 3pm, got interviewed for an hour on the way back home to go pick up my wife for dinner because we decided we were going to go out. They called me up and they said, Hey, we want to hire you when can you start? And my answer was, of course, I'll be there tomorrow. But and yeah, well, the other part of the story is, is that I had been podcasting for a year and a half at that point and been doing screencasts for a year. And so they, I literally walked out the door. The guy looked up my body of work, even though I only had a year's worth of professional programming experience. And that's when he called me back and said, you're hired. And I wound up being a team lead within two months of that company. So, I mean, it, it does matter, but it's that kind of job mobility, right? It's that visible, you know what, this is the kind of person we want, or this person has the skills that we want and we can verify it by what we're seeing here that is a form of job security. And I find that that more than anything else has been the story of at least my career where, you know, whatever I contributed to the company at the end of the day, if it came down to me or the bottom line, I was gone. And if, you know, if things got a little bit tough or tight, then I was gone. Yeah. You know, because I cost too much or because I, you know, I was the newest person or whatever. But then having that experience and having the exposure publicly then it was really easy for me to go somewhere else and say, you know, you, you, I want to work here and then have them go watch a video that I made or listen to a podcast that I had done and then go, well, you obviously know what you're talking about and then hire me, even though I didn't have as much experience as they said they wanted.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Basically what you're saying is that if you're going to put in those extra hours at the expense of your, you know, we're talking about the work life balance at the expense of your life then at least do it on stuff that will be beneficial for your personal brand?
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yes, that and I may be biased that way, right? Because that's what's worked for me. But I can tell you over and over and over again that it's worked for me.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Amy, when you got to your recent job, because we spoke about the fact that you switched positions not that long ago. What do you think enabled you to get that that position and you did it when I think COVID was already starting. So it was already a bit of tough times. So what made you do that?
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I actually was a recruiter from the company I'm at that reached out to me and she had reached out to me like, I don't know, like a month and a half prior and I hadn't responded. So then... I don't know, like I have a combination of, I think it was a long time ago when Dave Smith was on the show, he said like he purposely interviews, you know, once a year or something like that, just to like keep his skills sharp. And it's like, you know, it never hurts to like have conversations with people and stuff like that. And I don't know, some people, maybe I'm just lucky, blessed, whatever you want to say. But so I reached out to the recruiter because we just weren't hitting our numbers at work. And I have a really low-risk tolerance to finances and stuff like that. So I figured I'd have some casual conversations and the role was just like a very niche role. So it was at MPM, I did a little bit of SRE stuff there and this team needed somebody with a little bit of DevOps experience, but a good bit of just application experience, like building out dashboards and stuff like that. And so it was like the perfect role because I had like the mix of what they were looking for. Unpopular opinion, I think sometimes it does help to be a woman. I didn't think that going in, like I truly think that they like me for my skills, but you know, various people in the company have said like, you know, we really need a woman on the team and stuff like that, so. So I- Did I answer your question?
DAN_SHAPPIR: Yes, and I, just to comment that I do think you need to take your advantages where you can get them. I mean, I never want to be hired because of, you know, just my gender or whatever, but you know, I always want to earn my role. But I'm just saying that because I think sometimes it is a little bit simpler.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: We both of you, you don't want to be hired for anything other than your competence. But I also agree with Dan that take your advantages where you can get them, even if they're unfair.
Back when functional programming was making its resurgence, I found it really interesting that a lot of people were moving over there. And it almost felt like it was on hype and I didn't really understand the power of functional programming until I learned Elixir. Elixir is a functional programming language. It's built on the Erlang virtual machine and it really does some interesting things and makes you build apps in a different way. But what's really fascinating about it is the speed of the applications, the ability to distribute work easily and just how it manages the functional programming and all of the nice things about it so that you don't have to worry about side effects and a lot of the other things that come out of functional programming. Plus pattern matching in Elixir is a killer feature. If you're looking for a new language that you wanna learn that is going to make a difference for you and give you the opportunity to challenge some of your thinking and find a new way of doing it, Elixir is a great way to go. And we have a podcast now on Elixir called Elixir Mix, and you can find that at elixirmix.com.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Let's go ahead and do some picks, and then we'll wrap up. AJ, do you wanna start us off with picks?
AJ_O’NEAL: Oh boy. Do I ever. And I got some good ones today as I do every time, of course. So if you've not been using blurp.com that's B L E R P.com, then you've been missing out. What is blerp.com you ask? Well, it's like Giphy's, but for sound.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Oh, sorry.
AJ_O’NEAL: Monster truck madness. Hear them roar on blurp.com. No. So I've got a buddy who's been working on this for a couple of years. And it's like I said, it's like Giphy's, but little either just straight pictures. Yeah, I think you can upload a picture with a sound, but they're little sound bites. I wish there was more integration for this with platforms like Slack and stuff, because sometimes I just wanna play the item catch sound, which is, ba-da-da-da, and stuff like that when, you know, like there's something good happens, but I mean, it works, you get the little play button but it doesn't, it's not the same as if, the way it should be. So I hope more people will use sound bites and encourage platforms to integrate them better because I think the world, as much as I don't want sounds to automatically play, I think the world is a good place with sound and it's definitely fulfills that useless need of sounds that are unimportant and convey happiness. The number two thing that I'm gonna pick, so let me post this on the chat here as well, is Curly. So curly is a wrapper around curl that basically gives it syntax highlighting. So it gives it kind of the it parses some arguments similar to the way that HTTP IE or HTTP or however you pronounce that thing, which I haven't actually used, but it references in their readme that they try to make some of the argument parsing similar to what that is. But it other than that it parses any string that has a colon in it as a header or and any string that has a equals in it, it converts to, it does JSON by default. All of the options pass straight through his curl. So there's, there's one-to-one. If you, if you don't take advantage of the light upper level of parsing that it provides at all, you can use it just like curl. It's a hundred percent drop and replacement, no problems whatsoever, but you can take advantage of its of its kind of syntax sugar that it provides and and not put as many dash dashes when you do things and JSON is the default for it and it's just pretty so curly check it out and I linked to the web install dev where I've put up a little cheat sheet of showing how to use it and then, of course, you can see the github repository as well and I hope that by the time this comes out I'll have been able to identify. There's an issue with it running on Windows. And I'm going to see if I can bug the author a little bit since I am a Go developer, see if I can get a patch in before this goes live so that it is truly as cross-platform as we all desire it to be. It works for some people on Windows, but it doesn't work for some other people, according to comments. And I'm one of them.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Dan, what are your picks?
DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, I wanted to verify if I'm on mute or not. So I have two picks for, for today. One is technical and the other one totally not. And you know what, because the technical one is more fun, I'll start with the one that isn't. My pick that isn't technical is just asking people, I know that some people are gonna push back on that, but I don't care. People please wear masks. We want this COVID thing to be contained, at least until somebody develops some sort of a vaccine. It's gonna take a while. And it seems like more or less the only thing that can keep it sort of in check is wearing face masks. And I understand that it might infringe on your rights and or you might just not like it or whatever. Well, you know what? People also don't enjoy driving according to the speed limit. But we do that because even though nine times out of 10, if we speed, nothing bad is gonna happen. Occasionally it causes an accident and then people get hurt. So take the same approach wear your face mask even if you don't enjoy it, even if you don't like it, help stop spread the spread of the disease or the containment of it until we are able to hopefully eventually develop a vaccine for it. So that's going to be my first pick.
AJ_O’NEAL: There is a vaccine by the way.
DAN_SHAPPIR: There is what appears to be a potential vaccine that initial tests are showing promise, that it's totally successful, it's still going to take months, at least, until it's generally available. So we still have to contain this thing for several months at least. And that's, again, assuming that it's indeed a successful vaccine without terrible side effects and whatever. So my technical pick is going to be GPT-3. There have been some amazing demos on Twitter in case you haven't seen it, just go into Twitter and do a search for GPT-3. So stuff like people basically describing a web user interface and this machine learning thing, either generating React code that implements it or CSS that implements it or whatever. It's as if you've kind of, instead of being a developer, you're kind of a product and you're specifying the product that you want and something generates, and this thing generates the code for you. Obviously, it's not really a replacement for software developers, but it has the potential, I think, over time to kind of raise the bar on what we consider to be high-level programming languages that will enable us developers to work at potentially higher level of abstraction than we're currently able to work at. An example of that is actually somebody integrated it with, with Excel, I think, where they added a GPT-3 function into Excel and you put in that function in a cell and mark the cells that are supposed to be the input and mark a cell that shows what your output should be like. And it figures out the formula for you. So instead of just, you know, writing a sophisticated formula that gets the information that you want, it's actually able to either develop and create the formula for you or go out to the internet and search out the result and put in the result for you. So they were like showing mapping the state names into the population. And then they added another state, put in that GPT-3 function there. And it automatically figured out that what they wanted was the population of the state or the area of the state or whatever, based on the other content of that spreadsheet. It's, it's pretty quite, it's quite amazing seeing all these demos. I highly recommend it. It really excited me. So those would be my picks.
CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Now I've got to jump off in a minute, so I'm going to go next and then Amy can finish up after I bail on you guys. So I've been reading a couple of books that I'm just going to shout out about really quickly. The first one's a marketing book. It's called Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson. And he basically talks about how to build sales funnels. It's an awesome book. I've kind of been binging on the stuff that he's put out there. I've also been reading the book, The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, Robert Iger. Up until recently was the CEO of the Disney Corporation. He talks about his career up through ABC and then into Disney. So anyway, it's really, really interesting. A lot of interesting lessons if you're looking for lessons you can learn as far as like building or running a business or being a good manager or things like that. There's a ton in there. I also finished a fictional book, The Black Prism by Brent Weeks. It was awesome. It was more or less on par with like Brandon Sanderson. I mean, Brandon is kind of in a world of his own, a league of his own. The Black Prism is probably one of the better fantasy novels I've read. Really, really enjoyed that. And then the last one is High-Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard. And I'm kind of going back through that one just because there was so much there, but if you're looking to level up your performance and things like that, then check out that book. And that's it. That's the, those are my picks. I'll let Amy go, but I've got to jump off for that other call. So.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Bye Chuck.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'm going to do for my pick a story touching on what we ended uh, the conversation with to hopefully, I don't know, provide some detail to what we're discussing. So one of the jobs that I had the manager for the role at the time kind of, uh, told me how, you know, they had like tons of applications and this is how he decided who to give like a first interview for and that was based on the cover letter. There might be like, I might be missing a couple of like the details here, but the TLDR was basically that I think he selected like all the people that provided cover letters for their application or like a very thorough cover letter. And it turns out that most of the people that provided cover letters just happened to be more minorities and women. So there's, there's that. So I don't know, provide a cover letter, uh, like a, a thorough, carefully, uh, constructed cover letter. So that's one of my picks. And then, uh, another one. Oh man. I don't know. I've been trying to pick a couple here. I'm going to pick, because with Cloudflare going down, I don't know when this will come out, but it was like last Friday, I feel like there's a lot of stuff that people don't necessarily know about just like how the internet works. So it's a blog post on Medium. That's a pretty good intro. It has like over 3,000 claps or whatever, and gets into a little bit more detail about how routing works and stuff like that. So that'll be my other pick. And that is it for me.
DAN_SHAPPIR: I think the episode that we had with Joav Weiss, just came out today as we're recording this. Other, except the fact that it was really interesting talking about bundling, also kind of discuss some of the basic operations of the web in a way that was really interesting for me. I think we talked about, if you recall, we talked about HTTP one, HTTP two, and uh, then GZIPing and CDNs and stuff like that. I found that to be really interesting. Anyway.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: I guess that's it. I guess, I don't know. I guess I'll wrap us up and we'll see everybody next week.
DAN_SHAPPIR: Bye bye.
AIMEE_KNIGHT: Bye.
AJ_O’NEAL: Adios.
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