Episode 223: The Six Month Autonomy Rule
In this week's episode, Adam and Ben discuss the notion of "If I'm still telling you what to do in six months, then something went wrong", a take heard in a recent episode of Lenny's Podcast.
How can a company orientate itself to encourage autonomy throughout the career of an engineer? What are reasonable expectations of a junior engineer? These questions and more are discussed in today's episode.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Ben: with ai, I often hear it discussed as having junior engineers at your disposal.
[00:00:05] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:00:06] Ben: But the thing is, with a junior engineer, the time and effort you put into training them up pays off. Meaning that that junior engineer becomes a mid-level and a senior engineer, et cetera, and, and now you're no longer handholding them.
[00:00:20] Ben: So it's like all of that investment comes back to you and pays dividends
[00:00:24] Intro
[00:00:44] Adam: Okay, here we go. It's show number 223. And on today's show, we're gonna talk about an episode of Lenny's podcast. then Ben heard a thing and he wants to talk about it. So we're gonna dig into that. Basically the quote is, if I'm still telling you what to do in six months, then something went wrong.
[00:00:57] Adam: So we're gonna, we're gonna unpack that and talk about it as we do. But first, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails again, just two of us tonight. But this time it's me and Ben. How are you, Ben?
[00:01:09] Ben: Doing very well, sir. How are you?
[00:01:12] Adam: Uh, you know, I'm good. I'm bad. Carol's stuck at work tonight. Couldn't make it. And this time it's Tim sek. So, uh, just the two of us, uh, looks like it's my turn to go first.
[00:01:21] Adam's Fail
[00:01:23] Adam: I'm gonna go with a fail.it's gym related. Ne I feel like, especially in our discord, there's a, there's a subset of our listeners that are.
[00:01:31] Adam: Fitness minded and, uh, at the very least, supportive, if not also on the same journey. and so, I feel like this kind of fits into our community at least. and here's my fail. I, I'm a typical American. I just wanna buy my way out of every problem. I, I'm feeling kind of stuck in the gym and for weeks now, I've been slightly obsessively looking at, like Facebook marketplace ads.
[00:01:55] Adam: I really wanna buy myself a combination hack, squat, leg press machine,
[00:01:59] Ben: that's the, I get those ads all the time.
[00:02:02] Adam: and man, like, it's not a cheap piece of gear.
[00:02:07] Ben: it is not. And the, and the I'll, I'll only interject here because I have also gone down this rabbit hole a little bit. And the, the things that I see that are these kind of combination leg squat, hack squat machines, a hack squat for people who, most people I'm sure can visualize a leg press a hack squat is basically like a, uh, like a leaned over squat with pads on your shoulders.
[00:02:30] Ben: It's kinda like if you were sitting on the leg, press backwards. that's probably poor visual anyway.
[00:02:35] Adam: Yeah, kind of, or, or another way to describe it, if you know what a Smith machine is, you take a Smith machine and you like lean it back 45 degrees and you're doing squats in that leaned back Smith and it's got like back support.
[00:02:46] Ben: So those ones are definitely, I don't wanna say the low end, but on the range of fitness equipment that does lower body work, those are likely. The, you know, good price for combination of functionality. 'cause then if you start to look for something that is exclusively just a leg press, like one you'd find in a gym, oh my gosh.
[00:03:05] Ben: That starts at like $2,500. It's
[00:03:08] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even looking for one that comes with like the selectable plate loaded thing, like, or selectable,
[00:03:15] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. This is just like a 45 degree angle. You
[00:03:18] Adam: Right. And, and it's got, what, what do they call it? Like a weight horn or whatever on it where you just put on your plates, it's plate loaded. yeah. So, all the ones that I'm finding like the, the cheap end is like 600 plus.
[00:03:31] Adam: I'm like, man, for, for a home gym, that's a lot to drop down for, for a machine that I'll use for two exercises. And that I don't know for sure is like the thing that will get me through my rut. So actually kind of on that topic here, here's where I'm feeling, where I'm feeling stuck. 'cause you're the gym head, you're, you'll tell me maybe, if this is real.
[00:03:51] Adam: I feel like I've kind of reached the point with my squats, especially where my quads are not the limiting factor. Now I, that's definitely not a hundred percent true because my quads are still growing. Actually my quads. Look the best they've ever looked. and, and you know, I'm getting real definition and, and like, I can actually flex my quads and my show my kids and they're like, wow, that's awesome.
[00:04:13] Ben: that's.
[00:04:14] Adam: but in terms of like adding weight, right? The strength, um, and the, like the, I'm getting the hypertrophy, but I'm not getting any extra strength and, and, and I'm feeling like the, the limiting factor is like my, it's either core or like just systemic, right? I'm kind of like at that point where putting that much weight on my back is, is just completely destroying me fatigue wise in a single set of 10.
[00:04:41] Adam: and, and I, I don't know, I, maybe I'm not a hundred percent there, but I'm getting close to that or something.
[00:04:49] Ben: I mean, so one thing you can try is just changing the rep range, you know, going down to sets of five, for example.'cause then it's just less fatiguing on the nervous system and it's, and it kind of, you can leave a little in the tank, I guess.
[00:05:07] Adam: So that's the thing is the, the program that I'm running, I'm trying to always be, I, I mean, I could do that and, and in order to stay on my program, I would have to increase the weight, right? So the, the program I'm on is, trying to always come within like two reps of failure of like actual drop it on the ground.
[00:05:27] Adam: nearly hurt yourself failure, which squat is not the easiest thing to fail on. I do have, you know, safety bars and stuff, but, when you're working out
[00:05:35] Ben: psychologically it's a hard one to fail under.
[00:05:37] Adam: Yeah. Yeah.so yeah, I can think about that. I, I, but.
[00:05:41] Adam: The, the other aspect of it is, you know, I work out in the middle of the day.
[00:05:45] Adam: I'm very fortunate. I, I, work from home and I have the flexibility in my schedule to just be like, you know, to leave at 11 and come back at one. And during those two hours have done like a 90 plus minute workout and scarf down some food real quick and then made it back to my desk and then just make up for it in other, other times.
[00:06:04] Adam: But, I don't know where I was going with that.
[00:06:06] Ben: were you gonna talk about maybe going to a gym occasionally or something?
[00:06:09] Adam: No, that's never, that's never been on the, on the radar for me. I mean, I did at one point go to a gym, but that was before I started, like, when COVID happened, I was like, okay, well, uh, my gym shut down and like, well, uh, I'm not gonna drive like a half hour away to go to the gym. That's just like,
[00:06:26] Ben: Yeah, well, so I have a, I'm, I'm still a member of Planet Fitness and, uh, planet Fitness. For people who are not familiar, it's basically a, um, it's actually quite a nice gym, but it's a very inexpensive gym in the way that they keep it inexpensive. It, they don't accept credit cards. So it's like a direct money transfer from your bank account, I guess, which has no fees.
[00:06:51] Ben: So I think I pay like, I don't know, like $13 a month or something. it's so cheap and because of that, I almost never go, which is probably also how they make their money. but when I do go, it's usually on a Saturday and it is, it is almost specifically to use the like, best machine
[00:07:08] Adam: Mm.
[00:07:09] Ben: and, um, yeah, it's tough because, okay, so then I also have.
[00:07:14] Ben: I've been battling knee pain on and off, primarily in my right knee for many years. And, um, one of the ways that I kind of work around that knee pain is by keeping my feet out in front of me, maybe more than you might normally kind of put more emphasis on my hips and sort of take away some of the emphasis on the knees.
[00:07:36] Ben: just from like a movement perspective. So one of the things that makes me nervous about buying a leg press without actually being able to try it
[00:07:44] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:45] Ben: is that, you know, you don't, you don't necessarily get the, the, the, the where your feet would would would rest. You don't necessarily get the same size of plate that you would in a gym.
[00:07:55] Ben: And I'm, I'm nervous that I'll end up having to actually get into an uncomfortable position in order to do it and then I know I won't use it. So that's like another issue that, that, that's another big point of hesitation 'cause it is so expensive.
[00:08:08] Adam: Yeah. And that's the other thing about, you know, you, I said the machines start at like 600 bucks for one of these. Convertible does both exercises things, but then you start getting into, like when you're, when you're on the quote unquote low end of what you're spending there, it's like you, you're into trade off land, right?
[00:08:23] Adam: The pads are smaller, the foot plate for the leg press is smaller. Maybe it's not as well attached, so it's got a little bit of like wiggle in it or something.
[00:08:31] Ben: You know what? I am kind of curious in, but it, it's also just one of these things that is weirdly expensive is a belt squat machine.
[00:08:39] Adam: Mm, yeah.
[00:08:40] Ben: So it's for people who
[00:08:42] Adam: you have a, you have a power rack, right?
[00:08:44] Ben: Yeah,
[00:08:45] Adam: and you have some basic woodworking skills. You can drill holes
[00:08:48] Ben: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can probably not hurt myself.
[00:08:54] Ben: There's, uh, there's a channel I can send you a guy, does like DIY stuff and, and what you're talking about, a belt squat would be relatively easy to build yourself outta wood. All right. Yeah, yeah. Send that to me. So I'll just for the listeners, a belt. So if you think about a traditional squat, you have a bar primarily on your resting on the back of your shoulders, you know, kind of on your trap neck, shoulder area. A belt squat is essentially, instead of the weight resting on your shoulders, you have a belt around your hips and the belt is attached to a wire, and then you're kind of standing on a platform.
[00:09:28] Ben: This is the traditional one. and there's a weight sort of below you. So it's almost like a combination deadlift squat kind of a thing. But the idea is that it takes all of that systemic stress off of your back. Rests shirt, you just squarely on your hips and then you can, they actually have a lot of the belt squat.
[00:09:47] Ben: Machines have handholds. You can even really steady yourself. But, you know, it's, it's just one of these things where at some point you just, it's not that you just get bored of, of the things you do, but your body adapts and you're also get bored of stuff and things hurt. You gotta work around injuries and, and tweaks and little pains and there's a, there's a ton of opportunity out there if you, like Adam said, if you just wanna throw money at the problem,
[00:10:13] Adam: Oh my God. Yeah. So why don't we bring this back around to tech?
[00:10:17] Ben: Okay. I, I'll just say one thing, one more thing. 'cause I, I, I had read this little thing about when Dwayne Johnson, when Dwayne the Rock Johnson, when he shot Jumanji out in Hawaii, apparently he had like his whole home gym shipped to Hawaii. I don't even know how that's possible, but it's, I mean, that's awesome.
[00:10:37] Adam: I, I am not at all surprised to hear this. It's a, it's a very, uh, American thing to do. American Movie Star.
[00:10:43] Ben: Awesome.
[00:10:44] Adam: Uh, so that's what's going on with me. I'm struggling in the gym. Uh, what do you got going on, Ben?
[00:10:49] Ben's Fail
[00:10:49] Ben: I'm gonna go with, this is a failure. It's not really a failure 'cause I wouldn't say it's my fault per se, but it's just one of these things that I thought was working well, and then all of a sudden I realized it wasn't working well. So, to paint a picture, I have my VPS, my virtual private server, which is where I just host some personal things like my blog and a couple of other little side projects.
[00:11:08] Ben: And then I have been using CloudFlare not just as my domain registrar, but also as my DNS, and then as part of the DNS that CloudFlare offers, you can proxy your traffic through CloudFlare itself. and I, I, so there's, there's like gray clouding, which is I think when it's just the DNS and then there's the orange cloud, which is when it's proxying through CloudFlare.
[00:11:31] Ben: And, and the benefit of doing the proxy through CloudFlare is one that they can step in in cases where you're getting a DDoS attack because they control the pipe essentially going into your servers. also it kind of hides the location and identity of your server because you just see CloudFlare from an external perspective.
[00:11:51] Ben: You don't necessarily see the IP address of my server because it's proxy. Also, in theory it could make access to your site faster because one, CloudFlare has amazing infrastructure. So if you can get to their fat pipe, you know, in Australia, then theoretically that fat pipe continues all the way to, Virginia, which is where my VPS is also, They also have something where they can like dynamically route you because they control the infrastructure so they can like route users to better points of presence. Anyway, there's a lot of benefits to proxying, however, it turns out, as I have just recently discovered that if the, uh, um, what do they call the, the cert bot thing?
[00:12:34] Ben: The, the Let's Encrypt. So VPS, my managed hosting has a let's encrypt feature where you just basically say enable SSL for this site and it just magically works. apparently it really only magically works when Let's Encrypt can access your server. so what I think has happened on a couple of my sites, and it hasn't happened on all of them, which is why I'm still a little cloudy here, no pun intended.
[00:12:58] Ben: so I think what happened is the Lets and Encrypt bot failed to, to reallocate the certificate. 'cause that's due every three months I think. Then in order for it to reissue the SSL cert, it has to be able to access the site on the non SSL port. And I think, 'cause I was proxying through CloudFlare, CloudFlare wouldn't let me do that.
[00:13:21] Ben: Or I think like CloudFlare kept trying to hit the server 'cause with end to end encryption, but the SSL certificate had failed so it could no longer proxy traffic to the server. So in order to get the Let's Encrypt bot to start working again, I had to turn off the CloudFlare Block proxy, let, let's encrypt run, and then turn the proxy back on, which is just a pain.
[00:13:41] Ben: It was like one of these things where I thought it was just a one button solution and now it works forever.but apparently nothing works forever, which is, I mean that, that in and of itself is like a whole show topic, whatever. so that was one failure. And then this is like a sort of like second, this is more of a humbling than it is a failure per se.
[00:13:59] Ben: So previously on this podcast I talked about when I was at Envision, one of the things that I was really proud of was I sent out millions of emails, which for me was very impressive. You know, like from a personal perspective. Uh, and those millions of emails took me a week to send out, you know, throttling them over a certain period of time per day and like iterating over a set of users.
[00:14:21] Ben: And today is July 8th, and in the US, I don't know if this is global, but in the US today starts the, uh, Amazon's Prime Week. So today, tomorrow, and Friday I guess, or Thursday or Prime Week. and I got an email about it this morning as I assume like hundreds of millions of other
[00:14:40] Adam: you and 300 million
[00:14:41] Ben: Yeah. And so like, it just puts it all in perspective that I was very proud of myself for, for shipping.
[00:14:49] Ben: You know, like 7 million emails over the course of a week. And here Amazon has the infrastructure and the wherewithal to ship. You know, I'm, what is, what I'm assuming is many, many millions of emails that all were delivered, I'm assuming within the span of like two hours globally. I mean, I'm just guessing, but I have to imagine to keep it relevant for Prime Week, they have to all send and arrive, you know, within a relatively short period of time.
[00:15:15] Ben: And I don't know, that's just amazing.
[00:15:18] Ben: It is, speaking as somebody who regularly sends, you know, half million, uh, recipient emails, you know, that's just a normal Wednesday for me. That's, you know, like a, a, a single couple of hours on a Wednesday for me. But imagine, imagine like your boss comes to you and says, Hey, on uh, Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM these 200 million people need to receive an email.
[00:15:42] Adam: and that's like, that's, that in and of itself is not that much of a problem. Like you can buy your way outta that problem to some extent, right? You upgrade
[00:15:50] Ben: an American Adam,
[00:15:53] Adam: well, but you, you know, like part one of the restrictions that my company faces with our email delivery pipeline is imposed on us by our email service provider.
[00:16:04] Adam: that it is like a API rate limit effectively, and. They use that to control how much mail we can send. I think that's kind of a, from a, an abuse standpoint, right? They don't want us sending spam, basically. And so the, using that rate limit is kind of how they do that. And we, you know, we had to work up to our current rate limit in terms of like gaining their trust.
[00:16:23] Adam: And also, you know, I think that the, just to gain access to the infrastructure that can do the speed that we're at, and then, you know, there are multiple tiers above us, you just, it, it costs extra money to be able to use that. So, you know, first you have to earn the trust of the email service provider. Now Amazon is probably their own email service provider.
[00:16:42] Ben: But even so, so I think, um, so I've talked about in the past we used postmark at, uh, envision. I think actually, uh, PAI uses POSTMARK as well, but you can look in the PA in the POSTMARK documentation and it will say, you know, we only ever send. Emails from these like 11 IP addresses so that you can have services, get, uh, white listing them, that kind of stuff. So even if Amazon is running its own infrastructure, presumably there's still a reputation problem to consider that, you know, if something tripped on Gmail and Gmail, let's just assume handles like a quarter of the, of like all internet email. I mean, that's just a wild guess based on nothing.
[00:17:26] Adam: That's what US nerds think. It's probably, you know, at least half of all nerds. But then you gotta remember like everybody's grandma that started on a OL is still there and
[00:17:36] Ben: But, but you know, like, like they can't risk, I assume the idea that Gmail suddenly says this, uh, subnet or something. I don't know networking terms, but
[00:17:45] Adam: I imagine they have their own, like these are our golden calf email servers, right? Like, we're gonna deliver our prime day emails through the, these IP addresses and nothing ever else will use those IP addresses because they need to protect that reputation so that they can do that. Sending. They probably, honestly, they probably go around to Comcast and Gmail and everybody's like, Hey, here's a million bucks.
[00:18:08] Adam: Keep us on your white list. Here are the IP addresses. You know, like something like that
[00:18:12] Ben: Yo, can I just say, okay. So that mentality that you could actually just engage with vendors. I, I feel like that's a, a thing that sort of separates tiers of developers. You know, like I'm still very much in the world where I'm, my perspective is I was given a set of tools and I will just use those tools to the best of my ability to get my work done.
[00:18:34] Ben: It, it would never occur to me in a million years, and this is probably half because I'm just a introvert and the idea of talking to people's awful, but it would never occur to me to be like, oh, maybe I should just compile a list of all of the major email service providers and reach out to them and make phone calls.
[00:18:49] Ben: That's, that's like real leadership mentality that that's even an option on the table.
[00:18:56] Adam: Right. I. Yeah. So I mean, uh, the, so, but one of the things I was heading toward there is sending that many emails and having them delivered within a certain timeframe is a very attainable problem. I'm sure there's a lot of technical ability that goes into that. There's a, they're probably spending a lot of money, whatever.
[00:19:13] Adam: The thing that it makes that more impressive to me is if they have the ability, and I, I can't say one way or the other, whether or not they do, but if they have the ability to make a last minute change, right? So we're sending a hundred million emails and I want them all to arrive within two hours of 8:00 AM in the person's local time or whatever, right?
[00:19:34] Adam: and, at the last minute we decide to change the content of the message, right? swap in a different subject line or a greeting or whatever, like the, it sounds like such a trivial thing. In my experience, again, not working at Amazon Scale, but you know, not working at Ben scale either. in my experience, in order to be able to deliver the messages that fast, you kind of have to pre-render everything and just kind of have it sitting there, flat files ready to go so that you can just open a file, send it, delete it, open a file, send it, delete it, sort of thing.
[00:20:06] Adam: That's an interesting thing too, 'cause I know you have that whole S3 lambda pipeline situation.
[00:20:12] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our initial, like, okay, so what is it Cunningham's Law? No. Whatever. One of the Gall's law, one of the laws of, of computer science, you know, a complex system invariably is found to have evolved from a, a naive system or whatever, a simple system.and, uh, yeah, I mean our, our very first implementation was super naive.
[00:20:34] Adam: It was just like. CF mail tag goes into the cold fusion mail spool, and we were doing like our, our peak was like 600 a minute or something like that. We're like, okay, I think we need to come up with a better solution for that. Mm-hmm.
[00:20:52] Ben: that's the thing though, that I love. so my. Approach was that naive approach. I just, I said, all right, what happens if I grab a thousand users out of the database at a time with a limit and an offset, basically?and, uh, just tried running them through CF mail and you, and, and I started with saying, okay, I'm only gonna get a thousand at a time and I'm only gonna do it for this timeframe of a, of a five minute window to see what happens.
[00:21:18] Ben: you know, like, like inside the loop, I'll, I would say like, okay, if I'm still within that five minute window, continue, otherwise break out of the loop kind of a thing.and then I ran it and it just worked. And I was like, oh, okay. They're like, it worked fast enough that I didn't have to come up with a more sophisticated solution.
[00:21:35] Ben: 'cause the volume, it's like, it, it fit into the volume that we were aiming for. So it was just a, it was a happy accident. 'cause I don't know what I would've done. And, you know, I, it, I've only thought about that pre rendering because you've talked about it specifically. I'm not sure that that would have occurred to me.
[00:21:53] Adam: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm with you in terms of, uh, it's a little humbling to see what some other bigger organizations are doing. But the other thing is too, you know, I'm sending, let's call it, less than a hundred million emails a month. Probably more like 30 million, 30 to 60 million emails a month.
[00:22:12] Adam: Across 20 ish, different, organizations, right? So 20 different schools when you add them up for me, lands in the 30 to 60 million emails a month range.
[00:22:23] Ben: of
[00:22:23] Adam: It is a lot of emails. And, uh, if you squint just right, they're all legitimate. Like these are people who ostensibly went to school at that school and haven't unsubscribed, you know, like, so they, they are kind of, opting in.
[00:22:39] Adam: they, they could very easily unsubscribe if they wanted to anyway. yeah. And so to, to see the, the difference in scale, that's where I was headed. Uh, my organization is seven people total, three people full-time, tech, right? And, and so then compare that with Amazon, right? You know, the, the people, their teams for, for what they're doing.
[00:22:58] Adam: It's gotta be dozens of people just for the whole prime day marketing situation.
[00:23:04] Ben: I mean, I, I'm almost certain I've heard them say they have like thousands and thousands of engineers working on problems, let alone, I mean, you know, they talk about Amazon as a massive company, but you have to imagine a lot of those are manufacturing. Plant workers and the, you know, the people packing stuff up and organizing all the infrastructure.
[00:23:27] Ben: But just the web engineers, I think there's many thousands of them.
[00:23:32] Adam: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Without a doubt.
[00:23:35] Adam: Okay.
[00:23:35] Lenny's Podcast and Hiring Insights
[00:23:36] Adam: So, Ben, this is far from the first time that you have mentioned Lenny's podcast to, to me specifically, and, and on this podcast. And honestly, I've gotten to the point where I'm kind of all caught up on podcasts and I'm, and between books. Uh, and so today officially I'm subscribing to Lenny's podcast.
[00:23:53] Adam: So you've done it, you've convinced me. I'm.
[00:23:56] Ben: Get the, get my checks, my royalty checks rolling in.
[00:24:00] Adam: Oh, you know, if it's, if it's that good where you're constantly bringing it up, it's gotta be, there's gotta be something
[00:24:04] Ben: It's okay. So for people who aren't familiar with Lenny's podcast, Lenny, uh, he was an engineer and product manager, I think at, Airbnb. And, uh, I think some
[00:24:16] Adam: look at me, dude.
[00:24:17] Ben: No, no, no. I'm thinking, I think he was a, a, a at Airbnb, you know, worked on some very sophisticated stuff and then ended up doing this podcast as sort of a side gig.
[00:24:28] Ben: And then it ended up, I think he had to start to make more money from the podcast, and then he did from his day job. So this is now what he does full time. Um, he writes a, I believe, a newsletter as well on, was it Substack? Whatev, whichever that big newsletter services,
[00:24:43] Adam: man. Can, alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull a Ben, I need a minute. I'm
[00:24:46] Ben: Yeah, yeah, go for it.
[00:24:48] Adam: Substack. So. There are multiple reasons that I dislike substack newsletters in general, fine, go for it. platforms that allow you to create a newsletter and, and, you know, build that infrastructure for you. And maybe even have like a, marketing channel built in, right?
[00:25:05] Adam: Like when you're on Substack, there's easily, there's a network there, right? So you can advertise other Substack newsletters on your Substack newsletter, I believe, and that
[00:25:14] Ben: I, I literally have no idea what Substack looks like.
[00:25:18] Adam: I don't know how much I wanna get into it, but, the, I will say, I'm, I'm trying to avoid direct making a direct accusation here, but I have seen on video the, do you know what The Verge is? The, the news organization.
[00:25:32] Ben: Yeah.
[00:25:33] Adam: Okay. They also, there's a, one of the Verge, publications is called, Decoder, it's a podcast. The, the editor in chief of the Verge has his own podcast, it's called Decoder, and he brings on CEOs and they talk about CEO EO stuff, uh, not just CEOs, but you know, higher ups.
[00:25:49] Adam: and, uh, he had on the CEO of Substack relatively early on in their, uh, startup journey, and basically like got the guy to just stare blankly in response to a question that was like, are you going to allow racist content on
[00:26:10] Ben: Oh yeah, yeah,
[00:26:11] Adam: and so for me, at that moment, like the guy was like, all you had to do was say, no, we're not gonna allow racists on
[00:26:16] Ben: just, it was just a softball question.
[00:26:18] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, and he did this. So the Neli Patel, uh, the guy, the host of, uh, the, the Decoder podcast and the editor in Chief of the Verge is Brown, right? If you can't tell from his last name, Patel, he's, I believe Indian. Or, uh, you know, some, vicinity of there. And, it's just, it was freaking, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor, from that.
[00:26:43] Adam: And then, you know, Substack, I, I think they take a big, chunk of your subscriber, uh, money to, it's like a Apple 30% sort of thing. And, and they're providing basically like email services in a blog, like,
[00:26:56] Ben: So I, one of the other podcasts that I listen to is the Hard Fork, which is from the New York Times and it's, I can't, I'm terrible with names, but I think one of the co-hosts is this guy Casey Newton, and he was a big substack writer. And had the same concerns. And it was basically, I'm so tired of my newsletter showing up next to suggestions for Nazi newsletters.
[00:27:20] Ben: So he started his own basically competitor to Substack, I think it's called Platformer.
[00:27:27] Adam: Okay. Now do you have my interest?
[00:27:30] Ben: Yeah. And it was, it was that same exact concern. He's like, I just, the content there is ridiculous.
[00:27:36] Adam: Yeah. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Substack is at like two and a half strikes. and I don't necessarily go out of my way to avoid them, but I definitely am not bringing them my, my business. I'm not trying to start using their stuff. So to hear that there's a, a better
[00:27:51] Ben: to, to circle back to Lenny, so Lenny's podcast sounds kind of like this, uh, decoder podcast he interviews, it's a, it's a full interview format and it's all heads of product founders, CEOs, basically all the, uh, kind of executive leadership levels. He'll, he'll. He'll interview. And I just find it fascinating 'cause a lot of these people have had really interesting career paths and they've worked at, you know, amazing companies and they've gone through crazy growth.
[00:28:24] Ben: And what's so fascinating about it to me is one, just the insights, but also how often those insights are contradictory from other people who have been interviewed on the same show. And it's like, you know, how much of it is luck and how much of it is sort of, um, survivorship bias where because your company survived, you attribute the things that you did to its success kind of a thing.
[00:28:47] Ben: It's just fascinating. So I, I take it all, not with a grain of salt, but as a source of inspiration more so than a source of truth. And one of the things that was mentioned very recently, and I cannot remember for the life of me, who it was offhand, in one of the interviews, the guy being interviewed, Lenny asked him about how he thinks about hiring.
[00:29:07] Ben: And what he looks for. And one of the things that he mentioned that stuck out in my mind is that, if I'm still telling you what to do after six months, then something's gone wrong.basically saying that the, the, the meter of success for him is kind of the go getted ness of the person and the personal drive and the, initiative that people have and that he doesn't want to be handholding people and helping them do their job after six months, that they should feel autonomous enough and I think aligned enough with the business to sort of move off in a direction, not independent of the business needs, but so that they have such a deep understanding of what the business needs, that they can just go off and do the things that the business needs.
[00:29:52] Ben: That's a lot of needs at one time, but, um,
[00:29:56] Adam: So my, my gut reaction is, that's a very interesting statement and I'd love to unpack it. It sounds like the most obvious piece of missing context is. Was he discussing hiring at any particular level
[00:30:12] Ben: Right. Right, exactly. That's a hundred percent. Uh, that, that's the feeling that I always have with these interviews and the way people talk about stuff. And we've talked about this on the show before, just how important words are. And what I mean by that is that when you say something without the necessary context, your having faith that the person you're talking to understands the words that you're saying, to have the same meaning that they have in your head.
[00:30:39] Ben: So there's kind of an implicit bias to, to what is being said that is kind of unspoken. And I, I had the same feeling. You know, can you hire someone who's lower down in an organization and expect them to be, independent after six months versus head, you know, hiring a head of marketing and expecting them to be independent in six months.
[00:31:03] Ben: Like yeah, if you're the head of marketing, I better not be telling you what to do. That's why I hired you.
[00:31:08] Adam: it, it's, to me, it sounds like a strategy that only really works at that like director level, right? Any higher than that. And those people are looking to the CEO or, or you know, whatever, some sort of like near top of org chart entity for direction, right? Not necessarily give me the strategy to give me goals, but like what direction do I need to be pointing in, right?
[00:31:29] Adam: What's the, the, the thesis of the company over the next five years, right? And I'll let that be my guide, my North star for the things that I'm choosing, but I need you to point the ship right. In that case. And so that, I think the way I read into that statement, it kind of contradicts the, what he's trying to say, right?
[00:31:51] Adam: I still need him to lead me, right? But at the same time, like on a day-to-day basis, I don't if I'm that person in that, like that uh, CTO level, I.
[00:32:00] Ben: So Avery, it makes me think of, I think this was a different interview. I don't think it was the same one, but someone also had a phrase, I think this was also from Lenny's podcast. 'cause again, it's just very
[00:32:10] Adam: That's the only podcast you listen to.
[00:32:13] Ben: Someone had something, where they were talking about the, the, uh, importance.
[00:32:19] Ben: The entire company was on the same page about what it was that they were trying to do. And I think it was the CEO or the CTO had this phrase that he would say, which is that we might be wrong, but we're not confused. And the idea was that everybody's on the same page about what it is that we're trying to do.
[00:32:37] Ben: And that might turn out to not be the right idea. We better all understand that it is the idea today so that we can all operate in the same direction. And I think that's, that kind of a mentality maybe baked into this, into this conversation where I want everyone to understand what the business needs.
[00:32:57] Adam: Right.
[00:32:58] Ben: So even if you make the wrong decision, at least you're making it based on the right information.
[00:33:05] Adam: You know what phrase that makes me think of, Ben, and I know it's one of your favorites. It's disagree and commit. Uh, so the, the, you know, we're, we might be wrong, but at least we're not confused. What that sounds to me like is we've got a clear mission and whether or not everybody is a hundred percent, aligned with that mission, we are all driving toward the success of that mission.
[00:33:28] Adam: and so the people that aren't a hundred percent aligned with it have had to maybe disagree and commit to, to move in that direction.
[00:33:33] Ben: Yeah. So, okay. One other thing that just occurred to me to is that I. I think part of this mentality is not just from what does success look like from the person who hired, but what does success look like from a level of comfort that the person who was hired has? Because this idea that you can start to operate, let's say, independently, for lack of a better term, autonomously, or you know, self, self-directed, I think that has to come after some sort of sense of security that it's okay to make mistakes.
[00:34:10] Ben: Because I think a big part of wanting to have someone higher up tell you what to do is because you're afraid that if I make a decision on my own and it turns out to be wrong, I'll either, you know, look like a fool, or I'll be fired, or I'll be held accountable in a way that seems unfair. So I think you have to be able to create an environment where say, okay, you know, look, we're all just doing our best and we're gonna discuss things and we're gonna get on the same page.
[00:34:35] Ben: And as long as we're rational. Consistent, then, you know it's okay to make mistakes and we, we learn from our mistakes and we keep going. But it, if you don't feel comfortable, I mean autonomy is, is, is for Naugh. If you don't feel comfortable that you're in a safe environment,
[00:34:53] Ben: Safety is, like psychological safety is, I think, maybe the most important thing about, being able to excel, having the, the freedom to excel in a job. let, let, let, let me throw this at you now because this also makes me think of ai.
[00:35:09] Adam: Of
[00:35:10] Ben: doesn't these days.
[00:35:11] Adam: Dammit. We almost made it
[00:35:12] Ben: I know. Uh, okay, so, okay.
[00:35:16] AI and Junior Developers
[00:35:16] Ben: you step back and think about this phrase, if I'm still telling you what to do in six months, then something went wrong, then that implies that leading up to that six months, there is a much more handholding and, and leveling up of people and training them and getting them comfortable with the mission of the company, with the culture of the company, et cetera.
[00:35:35] Ben: And with ai, I often hear it discussed as having junior engineers at your disposal.
[00:35:42] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:43] Ben: But the thing is, with a junior engineer, the time and effort you put into training them up pays off. Meaning that that junior engineer becomes a mid-level and a senior engineer, et cetera, and, and now you're no longer handholding them.
[00:35:58] Ben: So it's like all of that investment comes back to you and pays dividends if you invest all this time into, into, babysitting babysitting's, not the right, I don't know what the right word I'm trying to come up with.
[00:36:10] Adam: Yeah. Providing context. Training your
[00:36:11] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Like if you're, if you're handholding, directing, corralling, babysitting your AI agents, and presumably they get better to some degree as the kind of working context becomes, I don't know.
[00:36:27] Ben: I
[00:36:28] Adam: what are you talking about? New models being released over time or just
[00:36:32] Ben: more like,
[00:36:33] Adam: to use the same one?
[00:36:34] Ben: my understanding, and this is all theoretical, I haven't really done any of this stuff yet. You've done, I know you talked about last episode, some of the Gemini stuff, but at at work we're starting to play around with Claude Code, and part of how Claude Code works is that it builds up a, like a, like a agent read me, I think in for Claude code, it's Claw md and that's where it just starts to put information about it. The context in which it should operate. Like, oh, you know, only use tabs instead of spaces. Uh, you know, if you're gonna run a linting program, it should be this linting program. Like that could, like these assertions about how the code should be written. So in theory, the more you use these and the more you fine tune them, the better these sort of, uh, instruction sets get, and then the agents become more powerful.
[00:37:22] Ben: But I have to imagine that you're still babysitting them there, there's no point. I mean, maybe there is, maybe I just don't understand this, but like, there's no point where over time it feels like the, the arc of the agent autonomous and the arc of the junior engineer autonomous, like those will begin to diverge because eventually the junior engineer can operate not only asynchronously to you, but completely independent in that you don't even have to tell it what to do.
[00:37:51] Ben: It's become so aligned with the business. It can make decisions about what we should be working on when it's safe to go in and refactor where I should be focusing my attention. And the agent will never be able to do that.
[00:38:02] Adam: Right.
[00:38:03] Ben: So,
[00:38:04] Adam: it's there. You're, you're
[00:38:05] Ben: yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's, I, yeah, I, I heard it right as it was coming outta my mouth.
[00:38:11] Ben: It's was the junior engineer in that case,
[00:38:13] Adam: yeah.
[00:38:14] Adam: but that's, that's, that's the part that I'm failing to reconcile with, I think that's a really insightful thought. you know, I've been one of the people that has kind of parroted that line that, like right now what we have is very akin to having a small army of junior developers that you can say, okay, I want you to work on this, you to work on that. And that's a useful metaphor in a way to think about like what kind of tasks I try to delegate to it, and.
[00:38:37] Adam: How I encourage it to do it the way I would want it done. But I think that what you're, what you've just brought to the table here is a, a very insightful thing in that I'm not sure many people have thought about, you know, okay, as I'm investing in this junior developer, the person version, not the AI version, they are becoming a better developer.
[00:39:01] Adam: They're learning how our company works. Like, okay, yeah, maybe they're taking, metaphorically, maybe they're taking notes in a, in a, you know, company md, right? This is how we work. they're using the style guide, whatever, but also like they're just, they're, they're, uh, building new neuron pathways in their brain and getting better at the work and, developing other skills, the soft skills and the, not culture, the like office politics and all these other things that.
[00:39:31] Adam: Maybe one day we'll be able to build that into our tooling as well. But like right now, you know, okay, so you, you could either hire some junior developers, uh, that are meat bags and, and, and invest time in them, or you can spend that money on licenses for AI tools and, pay people to become prompt engineers or whatever.
[00:39:55] Adam: I think the long play is still on people being the better outcome.
[00:40:01] Ben: Yeah. Well, I, I
[00:40:03] Adam: you don't get like the, the, the investment in the working with AI isn't going to compound, like investing in people would.
[00:40:15] Ben: I agree. And also, and maybe this is subjective, I think that, uh, there's, so I, okay, I'll speak only for myself here. I get a lot of value in the toil itself. And what I mean is I find I have a lot of creative insights and aha moments when I'm struggling to do something I've, I trip over something and I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, this isn't working.
[00:40:45] Ben: There's gotta be a different way, you know, you talked about earlier in the show, pre rendering these emails, flattening them and getting them an S3 or, you know, and be able to queue them up essentially so you don't have to do processing at the time of send.
[00:40:58] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:41:00] Ben: It's like maybe an AI could have suggested that, but I have to imagine that was a heavily iterative lifecycle, you know, spanning maybe several years where you finally came up with this solution that works really well.
[00:41:13] Ben: And
[00:41:14] Adam: And the, the, the part that took that much time was us growing with the system and our understanding of the problem space changing and evolving too. Like, oh, okay. In order to make it more performant, we need to separate rendering from sending.
[00:41:32] Ben: Well, okay, so earlier the show you mentioned goals, GA's, GA's law, which just to refresh the listeners here, it's that a, I don't know, it's like a complex system can only ever exist, can only ever evolve from a simple working system and that a,
[00:41:49] Adam: complex system is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system
[00:41:52] Ben: yeah. And so this,
[00:41:54] Adam: one that works and one that works. Add that onto both sides, but
[00:41:56] Ben: that feels at least. On its face a little bit at odds with this idea that I can say, Hey, Gemini, or hey Claude, or Hey Windsurf, I'm building an app that does such and such and it goes off for 20 minutes and generates, you know, 134 files. That, that feels like you're trying to build that complex working system from
[00:42:18] Adam: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:42:19] Ben: And I don't know, you know, maybe, uh, laws just stop working at certain economies of scale, right? They talk about, uh, Einstein's, uh, quantum theory. I, I don't know, I don't know anything about physics, but they're like, oh, maybe things don't necessarily work at these, like massively atomic, minuscule scales.
[00:42:36] Ben: Like maybe it's just a different level of physics or something. Uh, you know, maybe we're just reaching those points where things that made sense at one scale just no longer seem legitimate anymore. I dunno, I could just, there's just like rants on top of rants. I. But it's just, Lenny's podcast is fascinating.
[00:42:53] Ben: Like this is the kind of stuff that goes, it's like I'll be listening to Lenny's podcast and then I miss half of it because someone will say something like this and then I find myself just spinning off into a rabbit hole and,
[00:43:04] Adam: later, you realize you haven't been
[00:43:06] Ben: yeah, exactly. It's like getting to the end of the page of a book. She'd be like, what?
[00:43:10] Ben: What did I just read? How did I get here?
[00:43:13] Adam: I had to stop reading physical books almost entirely because of that problem.
[00:43:18] Ben: Oh man.
[00:43:19] Adam: You get to the bottom of the page and you're like, I remember nothing of what was on that page.
[00:43:24] Ben: also, okay. Sorry. I'm just, stuff is streaming into my head and I'm just saying it out my mouth now. the other thing is, is kind of what you were talking about before about investing in junior engineers and just getting them up to speed with the politics of the, of the company and the team culture and the way the code works and it's built.
[00:43:40] Ben: You know, if someone paged you in the middle of the night and they said, Adam, we have an emergency. you know, Princeton can't accept alumni gifts. Like I'm sure you would have in your head some set of here's where it's likely to be happening. If it's not there, it's probably here. And if it's not there, it's probably here.
[00:43:59] Ben: And I have this, this mental map in my head of where I can go to look for this problem because I've, you know, marinated in this company culture for the last decade.but if you vibe coded, and I know that's necessarily what we're talking about here, but like if you vibe coded solutions on top of solutions, on top of solutions, and someone said, Hey Adam, this thing's not working. I, I don't know if I would have any instinct about where something isn't working at that point.
[00:44:28] Adam: no, I totally agree. I think that, uh, we have to be really careful with how we use these AI tools, and that's kind of how I think about the way I use them too, is, a lot of times, or I would say like 90% or more of my usage is I'm writing code. I know the direction that I'm going, and I might pause for two seconds to think about like, how do I wanna write this loop or whatever.
[00:44:48] Adam: And the, a AI tool jumps in and says, oh, were you, is this what you wanted to write next? And I'm like, actually yeah, sure. Tab complete. Okay. Done. And then I just keep going. Right? So it's, it's down there at that like line of code level where it's doing most of the work for me, instead of like, make a big change to this whole file or debug this problem.
[00:45:08] Adam: Like I've, I've tried to throw it at that and like I discussed last week, like. You know, I've had varying levels of success and it's, it's impressive the, abilities it has to try and put the puzzle together. And I imagine if you, if you hit it just right, if you've got the right stack trace to, to find the, the problem, and it, and it can figure, you know, it has whatever else it needs and it, and you're just like, here's an error message.
[00:45:33] Adam: Stack trace, and here's the code Repo go nuts. And, and it fixes it and it runs your test. Like, I, I can only imagine how magical that must feel.
[00:45:42] Ben: it, it's so magical that when people are describing it, I can't even imagine the logic that the, that the code agents are using under the hood to make this work. And, and I've heard people describe it as a, basically a loop where it just keeps trying stuff and then looping and testing stuff. But I don't know how to reconcile the magic of what it's doing with the simplicity of the way people describe it, where it can start using tools and, and I don't know, it's just bonkers.
[00:46:10] Ben: It's like a, it's a level of abstraction that I can't connect with yet.
[00:46:14] Adam: If statements all the way down, buddy.
[00:46:16] Ben: Yo, I freaking love this statements, man. Gimme a switch statement any day of the week.
[00:46:21] Adam: Uh oh. Now you're getting, you're opening a can of drama worms.
[00:46:27] Ben: I did have one.
[00:46:28] Using Pseudocode with ChatGPT
[00:46:28] Ben: Uh, so I was actually thinking of putting this as my triumph and my triumph and fails, which is that one of the ways that I have started to feel comfortable talking to chat GPT is that I will, I will have it only talk about problem spaces in terms of pseudo code. And it really doesn't want to do that.
[00:46:48] Ben: It keeps saying, you know, like, oh, you know, if you want me to write this in Python, just let me know. If you want me to write this in JavaScript, just let me know. And I'm like, Nope, we're just staying at the pseudo code, you know, loop over this and then check this kind of stuff. And I have found that to be really nice because it creates this sort of safety blanket for me where I still feel like I'm doing the technical implementation, but I'm using it as that kind of rubber duck.
[00:47:15] Ben: thinking buddy, like almost a pair programming where that person's not on the keyboard.
[00:47:21] Adam: Yeah. Another way that I found it to be. A nice little helper is like, you know, we, even though we've been doing this, I think combined, the two of us, we probably have like 50 plus years of experience coding for the web, right? or more the, even though we have all that experience, I don't have the entire corpus of JavaScript syntax and how each function works memorized.
[00:47:47] Adam: Right. Like, I still have to look up the difference between slice and splice. and like, I, I know the difference. I don't remember the syntax differences.
[00:47:55] Ben: Or there's like a sub string function and a sub stir function.
[00:47:59] Adam: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:00] Ben: on. I know those are
[00:48:00] Adam: like, yeah. Okay. What's the, what's the difference between the two? so, so, like one of the things I did today is like, I had this, this tool that's doing some data aggregation, and I decided, like, it, it looks at the, the amount of history historical data available in the database table, and then based on that it's like, okay.
[00:48:18] Adam: I know the data only goes back to this month and year, and so it's gonna go month, month by month, and, and check, okay, is there data for this month? If so, aggregate the stats about that month and then recurs, and then it'll find the next month because it, it excludes any month that are already aggregated.
[00:48:37] Adam: So it goes down until it hits the, the floor of that, uh, where, which is like, you know, it's gone back as far in time as we have data available, which sounds great in, in theory, but then this process has been in production long enough now that like, it's, it's doing that and it's doing that. It only runs once a month, but it's, it, it's doing that every month, right?
[00:48:55] Adam: So last month. Maybe if that was the first month that we ran this, like, okay, cool, it has to go and it, and it uses Recursion to get all the way to the bottom. And it, and it actually had work to do on every month for the last five years of data. Cool. It worked. It did its job. And now this month it has to do the latest month of data that's now available and then it has to go through five years worth of months running queries to say, oh, is this data aggregated?
[00:49:19] Adam: Is this data aggregated? So one of the things I wanted to do was say, okay, let me just say there's like a six month limit, right? Uh, now that everything, all of our historical data has been aggregated, we will only ever look at the most recent six months because maybe the process broke and we wanna be able to recover gracefully.
[00:49:36] Adam: You know, like if we missed last month sort of thing. Could I have gone to MDN and looked up the syntax for this and like come up with a good plan myself? Sure. But it was also easy to just like highlight the function, hit command eye and say like, make this also stop, if it's or never do more than six months.
[00:49:54] Adam: I don't know exactly what the
[00:49:55] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, I know what
[00:49:56] Adam: something like that. And the code that it wrote, it was like three lines and I changed the way it worked a lot, but it was like, it, it only added three or four lines. And I was like, oh, that's a really clever way of using that JavaScript data object. Cool. and, and so, uh, that gave me the inspiration to then go and reorganize the code and, and, come up with a solution.
[00:50:14] Adam: Solution that I really liked, which is probably the same solution I would've come up with, but it would've taken me an hour of like reading the different date functions and like, uh, okay, maybe if I try this, maybe if I try that. So that's been really useful for me as well.
[00:50:26] Balancing Control and AI Assistance
[00:50:26] Ben: I think the, the common thread that I'm hearing here, at least I think I'm hearing, is that we both wanna still feel like we're the smarts behind it.
[00:50:35] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:50:36] Ben: You know, like we're not, we're not deferring the decision making, we're still using it as the, help me think this through, but then I'm gonna go and change some stuff anyway.
[00:50:47] Adam: Maybe, I mean, I, I would, my gut instinct here is to push back on the word feel. I, I have no emotional connection to the code. Like, yes, I, I'm proud of having, I'm proud of having written it, it is still my life's work, but, I don't, I don't have, I don't have to feel like I, the feeling part is not important to me. Like the, the tool does a job and I, I feel like it's good at a certain thing, and maybe I have to, like that example I just gave, you know, maybe I have to like prompt it and let it do its thing and then use the output that it gives me as a.
[00:51:23] Adam: Inspiration or like a, a reminder of tools within the language that are available to me and then go and sort of rewrite it to be smarter or, or cleaner or whatever. But
[00:51:35] Ben: I, I feel like we're on the same page ish. You know, for me it's like, um, I am not an individual that has self-control when it comes to food. Okay.
[00:51:46] Adam: with what? According to, or you said when it comes to food.
[00:51:49] Ben: Well, I, I'm, I'm gonna use food as the basis for this metaphor here. if I open that bag of chips, I'm eating that bag of chips. Like, that's, that's where I'm at. You know, so I just can't have food in the house that is gonna be problematic for me. unless it requires a lot of work to prepare, because my laziness is more powerful than my lack of self-control.
[00:52:08] Ben: especially if something can only be made with a dish that is not dishwasher safe. Forget it. I've never used that, so I, I'm so worried. I think that it will be a slippery slope for me that if I start deferring too much, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna start deferring way more than I really should.
[00:52:30] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:30] Ben: I, and I don't have any reason to believe that's true other than it is true when it comes to food.
[00:52:36] Ben: And so I, and I'm, I, it just makes me cautious and I feel like I'll be losing part of me that I have control over. I dunno. It's, it's so many complicated feelings happening at one time is the problem
[00:52:49] Adam: S
[00:52:49] Discussing Lenny's Podcast
[00:52:54] Ben: o let's, let's circle back to the, the Lenny's podcast. the show topic.
[00:52:55] Adam: yeah. I'm still telling you what to work on in six months, then something went wrong. the, so for me, uh, uh, there's an element of truth to this, right? Like, I, I, I kind of, maybe, maybe that was the, the intent all along was to, to just illustrate.
[00:53:12] Adam: He's looking for ambitious people and people that will take initiative and, and follow the leaders. but if it was more literal, then I have questions.
[00:53:24] Ben: Yeah. Well, and I think, again, you know, they say, uh, one of the things, so when I was going through, when I was preparing for interviews back in December, January, et cetera, I mean, I would, I didn't do that much prep. I. but I would occasionally look at, you know, what are the questions that people typically ask or, you know, what are questions that I should ask in an interview?
[00:53:47] Ben: And one of the ones that kept coming up is, you know, what does success look like in this role over the next 3, 6, 9 months? And the thing that I like about this take on what does a hiring success look like is that it gives me something, it gives me more of a, a principle than it does an outcome.
[00:54:08] Ben: Meaning, you know, like success isn't, I've sent 3 million emails. Success is I'm comfortable enough to be able to act independently or, or, you know, act with conviction about what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, that's, then I can look at any specific decision and say, does it roll up to this more abstract, philosophical goal?
[00:54:29] Ben: And if I feel like it does, then I should be based on this statement. Comfortable moving in that direction without having someone to tell me to do it. there's something very nice about that from a, from the lower down perspective as well as from the higher up perspective.
[00:54:46] Adam: You always have the best insights Ben.
[00:54:49] Ben: I just, you know, I, I'm just trying to take what other people have said and make sense in my mind.
[00:54:55] Adam: Yeah, I, I couldn't find anything to disagree with in there, so,
[00:55:00] Ben: Boom. Well then let's end out on that then.
[00:55:03] Adam: okay.
[00:55:04] Ben: it. I'm going home.
[00:55:05] Adam: Yeah, I win.
[00:55:07] Patreon
[00:55:07] Adam: Alright, well then this work episode of Working Code was brought to you by buying your way out of every problem. Uh, welcome to America and listeners like you. If you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.
[00:55:21] Adam: Our patrons cover our recording, editing and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo.
[00:55:29] Thanks For Listening!
[00:55:30] Adam: You guys rock. Uh, we have some stuff to talk about on the after show. I know I've mentioned many a times, the Jump Run app that I'm working on and, uh, I'm pretty sure I mentioned on at least the tees, if not the, in the main show.
[00:55:43] Adam: that I was gonna have a meeting with a potential customer to talk about, like, would it be a good fit and would they be a good partner for like, the first person to come on besides my own drop zone and, you know, help me build the product. So I, I've had that meeting. We'll discuss the outcomes of that meeting.
[00:55:58] Adam: And then we have some TV stuff that we wanna get into. my, my wife and I just finished watching Mrs. Maisel, the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I know you've seen Ben. and yeah. And then you have on here the agency, which I don't know anything about it, so we're gonna have to dig in just a little bit on that.
[00:56:13] Adam: But, uh, if you'd like to hear the after show, uh, the way you do that is by becoming a Patreon of the show. You can go to patreon.com/workingcodepod, uh, throw a few dollars a month our way, and we would greatly appreciate it. That's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you again next week, and until then,
[00:56:30] Ben: Remember folks, even when Tim's not here, your heart matters.