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Leitura de 28 min

Learning in Public w/ Shawn Swyx Wang (part 1)

Summary

In this first part of a two-part interview, host Jonathan Cottrell speaks with Shawn ‘Swyx’ Wang about shared perspectives on tech culture and critical thinking. Wang introduces the concept of ‘naked emperors’ in tech—widely accepted truths that collapse under scrutiny, using the ‘Five Whys’ problem-solving method as a prime example. He argues that while useful in manufacturing, the ‘Five Whys’ oversimplifies complex software systems where failures have multiple interdependent causes.

The conversation explores why developers often gravitate toward absolutist platitudes and how personality and generational biases shape our views of technology. Wang suggests that developers swing between embracing new trends and venerating established methods, often influenced by what was popular when they first learned to code.

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on why developers should care more about business strategy and impact. Wang notes that while developers are deeply interested in technical patterns and code quality, they often show little interest in how code generates business value. He attributes this to the fuzzy, probabilistic nature of business outcomes compared to the deterministic world of code execution.

Wang outlines four key components of effective strategy: a mental model of present reality, a vision of the future, a plan to bridge the gap, and clear policies for decision-making. He emphasizes that senior developers and engineers should focus more on ‘choosing problems’ rather than just ‘solving problems,’ as strategic problem selection ultimately drives greater impact than raw coding productivity.

Recommendations

Articles

  • Naked Emperors in Tech (blog post) — A blog post by Shawn Wang that critiques commonly accepted but flawed ideas in tech, using the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ fable as an analogy.

Books

  • The Coding Career Handbook — Shawn Wang’s book, which covers principles, tactics, and strategy for developer careers. Available at learninpublic.org, with a 30% discount coupon mentioned in the episode.

Concepts

  • The Five Whys — A problem-solving method from Toyota that involves asking ‘why’ five times to find a root cause. Critiqued in the episode as being overly simplistic for complex software systems.
  • Lavers Law — A human tendency mentioned by Wang where things slightly ahead of their time seem odd, while old things are venerated as beautiful, highlighting our historical bias.
  • Regret Minimization Framework — A decision-making platitude mentioned as another example of an absolutist idea common in tech that may oversimplify complex choices.

People

  • John Allspaugh (kitchensoap) — Referenced by Wang regarding complex systems, specifically the idea that complex failures have complex, simultaneous causes rather than a single root cause.
  • François-René de Chateaubriand — A French writer quoted by Wang: ‘You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light,’ used to critique contrarian negativity in tech.
  • Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean — Top individual contributors at Google mentioned as examples of engineers whose impact comes from choosing important problems, not just raw coding output.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to Shawn ‘Swyx’ Wang and his background — Host Jonathan Cottrell introduces guest Shawn ‘Swyx’ Wang, highlighting his transition from finance to tech via a bootcamp, his roles at Netlify and AWS, his moderation of the ReactJS subreddit, and his recent book ‘The Coding Career Handbook.’ Cottrell expresses excitement about their shared perspectives and hopes to explore areas of disagreement to avoid monoculture.
  • 00:02:54 — Discussion on tech culture, monoculture, and contrarianism — Wang and Cottrell discuss the tendency in tech to either follow popular trends or intentionally reject them to appear countercultural. Wang references a quote by François-René de Chateaubriand about not being superior simply for having a negative worldview. They explore how generational biases and ‘fashion’ in technology shape developers’ perceptions of what’s ‘correct’ or outdated.
  • 00:07:09 — Explaining the concept of ‘Naked Emperors in Tech’ — Cottrell asks Wang to explain his ‘Naked Emperors in Tech’ blog post. Wang relates it to the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ fable, where no one points out an obvious truth for fear of appearing incompetent. He argues tech has many such ‘emperors’—unquestioned platitudes that harm newcomers who take them as gospel. The goal is to encourage more critical examination of accepted wisdom.
  • 00:10:21 — Deep dive into the ‘Five Whys’ as a naked emperor — The conversation focuses on the ‘Five Whys’ methodology as a prime example of a ‘naked emperor.’ While useful for linear manufacturing problems (like Toyota’s assembly line), Wang argues it fails for complex software systems where failures have multiple, simultaneous causes. He references John Allspaugh’s writing on complex systems to explain why searching for a single root cause is often misguided and unconstructive.
  • 00:15:38 — Wang’s wish: more questions about tech strategy — Cottrell asks what Wang wishes people would ask him about more often. Wang says ‘tech strategy’—how code creates business value and money. He observes developers are deeply interested in technical patterns but often disinterested in business impact, which ultimately affects their careers and income. He attributes this disinterest to the fuzzy, probabilistic nature of business outcomes versus the clarity of code.
  • 00:22:26 — Defining strategy and the problem of choosing problems — Wang defines strategy as ‘the problem of choosing problems.’ He contrasts strategy in games (infinite runs of a finite game with clear rules) with strategy in life (one run of an infinite game with changing rules). He argues top engineers aren’t necessarily more productive in raw output but are better at applying effort to important problems. He outlines four components of strategy: a model of present reality, a vision of the future, a plan to get there, and clear decision-making policies.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2020-12-07T10:15:00Z
  • Duration: 00:27:05

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] In today’s episode, we talked to another person who is dedicated to learning in public.

[00:00:09] Today’s guest is Swix.

[00:00:11] Swix used to work in finance and then he kind of went to a boot camp, eventually found himself

[00:00:17] at Netlify and now at AWS.

[00:00:20] He is known for being the ReactJS subreddit mod for quite a while.

[00:00:28] Now Swix has recently released his book, The Coding Career Handbook.

[00:00:35] You can find this at learninpublic.org.

[00:00:38] If you listen to this episode and the next one, you’re going to get a coupon code

[00:00:42] that will get you 30% off that book.

[00:00:45] So stick around.

[00:00:46] I guarantee you Swix has a lot of wisdom to provide for you in these episodes.

[00:00:52] Thank you so much for listening to Developer Team.

[00:00:55] My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal on this show

[00:00:57] is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers.

[00:01:02] Let’s get straight into the interview with Swix.

[00:01:06] Welcome to the show.

[00:01:08] Thanks for having me.

[00:01:10] Thank you for joining me.

[00:01:11] I know that we’ve kind of gone back and forth on Twitter just a little bit and I appreciate you

[00:01:18] committing to take the time with me and talk about a lot of things.

[00:01:23] I’ve got some really good questions for you.

[00:01:25] I feel like we have some very similar ideas about the world,

[00:01:30] which is a very big topic to have similar ideas about.

[00:01:33] But I can’t help but read the content that you write especially and think,

[00:01:39] oh man, I feel like he’s in my brain a little bit.

[00:01:43] Or I feel like I could have written this same idea, maybe not as eloquently as you have,

[00:01:50] but that I could have walked down these same pathways.

[00:01:54] I’m really excited to talk about some of those ideas with you

[00:01:57] and hopefully we’ll find something that we disagree on so it’s interesting.

[00:02:02] Yeah, I would like that too.

[00:02:04] I think a monoculture is not that healthy and maybe we all are drinking from the same well.

[00:02:13] We can definitely explore some diversity of ideas.

[00:02:16] Yeah, I think that monoculture is definitely a problem and it can be easy also on the flip side

[00:02:27] to try to reject culture just offhand, right?

[00:02:32] To say, oh everybody’s going that way and it is certainly in vogue to choose a countercultural

[00:02:39] path, whatever that is, whether it’s in a framework or

[00:02:43] in some personal belief or something, just so you can maybe artificially increase the

[00:02:50] diversity of the pool. What do you think about that idea?

[00:02:54] The idea that we are intentionally trying to go against the grain.

[00:02:58] It’s not anything new, but I’m interested in what you think about that.

[00:03:02] There’s a hipster streak in tech for sure, but I think most people are doing the right thing

[00:03:10] by being part of the majority. There’s definitely people who like to dunk on things a lot

[00:03:16] and just because it’s popular, they’ll just automatically hate it.

[00:03:20] Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not.

[00:03:22] The quote that I always use is from, I can’t, I don’t speak French so

[00:03:27] pardon me, but it’s Francois-René de Chateaubriand and it’s,

[00:03:32] you are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.

[00:03:36] Meaning that you might feel like you’re better than everyone if you just shit on their stuff,

[00:03:44] but actually you’re the bad person.

[00:03:51] People have this sense of status, they want to show that they’re smart or

[00:04:00] they make different choices than the majority, but just don’t put others down.

[00:04:05] That’s kind of like a baseline.

[00:04:08] Yeah, I feel like this also goes through multiple evolutions where you swing back and forth,

[00:04:13] especially as I get older. I feel like I’ve swung back towards that,

[00:04:18] towards the majority and the wisdom of the crowd, general mindset.

[00:04:24] But then there’s also this other part of me that says, well, maybe I’m just

[00:04:27] being the old guy who says, get out of here with your new stuff.

[00:04:32] Right? And so I don’t think that I will personally, that I will ever find the,

[00:04:38] oh, here’s my one way of doing things. And I think that’s, at least for me,

[00:04:43] I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s okay to kind of flip back and forth between those

[00:04:48] mindsets.

[00:04:49] Yeah, there’s also an element of fashion. So you know how the songs that we listen to are

[00:04:55] mostly shaped by what was popular when we were in high school or college.

[00:05:01] And then we listen to that essentially the rest of our lives.

[00:05:05] There’s also this tendency of people to think that what they learn when they learn to code

[00:05:12] is essentially the correct state of things.

[00:05:15] And then old stuff is obviously bad. And how did anyone ever use that old programming paradigm?

[00:05:24] And then new stuff is just terrible. Real programmers would do exactly what they do.

[00:05:29] So it’s a very generational thing. And so that’s a mental bias that people need to

[00:05:37] overcome because it’s a very natural one.

[00:05:39] And then the other element that I always like to pull in is this law, which is like a human

[00:05:45] law, it’s not a physical law, called Lever’s law, L-A-V-E-R-S. And it’s this idea that

[00:05:52] things that are a little bit ahead of their time look a bit odd to us or offensive,

[00:05:58] but then things that are old, we suddenly venerate as beautiful.

[00:06:06] And we’ve got to be mindful that we’re just at a point in history.

[00:06:10] And we are nothing special. Whatever is hot now may not be hot in the future.

[00:06:18] So we should basically just stop judging everything as much.

[00:06:22] I’m curious if you think there’s some degree of personality involved in how much you weight

[00:06:30] those things, the progressive side of things or the new uncomfortable things,

[00:06:37] kind of gravitating towards that versus gravitating towards the old things that,

[00:06:41] like you said, we see as beautiful. Is there some piece of personality in that,

[00:06:46] or do you think we’re all just on a different point on that time scale?

[00:06:50] And so what’s old to me is not necessarily old to you,

[00:06:53] and what’s new to me is not necessarily new to you.

[00:06:56] Yeah, I agree with that.

[00:06:59] These are exactly the reasons why I feel like we see a lot of things very similarly. You talk about

[00:07:05] these various laws and biases. And one of the things that you wrote about recently that I

[00:07:09] want to talk about is actually your Naked Emperors in Tech post. And this is such a

[00:07:15] cool, I say cool, it’s such a thoughtful piece that you wrote. And one specific

[00:07:24] emperor or naked emperor that you talk about is the Five Whys. But before we get into that,

[00:07:29] I want you to kind of explain what you mean by naked emperors in tech, if that’s okay.

[00:07:34] Yeah, sure. It’s a little bit of a clickbait title, but I just like the sound of it.

[00:07:39] But it’s actually a reference to the Emperor’s New Clothes, which is a classic children’s tale

[00:07:45] where there’s people who trick the emperor into wearing clothes. And they tell the emperor that

[00:07:53] these clothes are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. So not wanting to appear

[00:07:59] stupid or incompetent, he doesn’t say anything. The advisors around him didn’t say anything.

[00:08:04] And he goes out on a parade around his town or city. And everyone knows that only the stupid or

[00:08:10] incompetent would see the clothes as invisible, so they don’t say anything. And it took a child

[00:08:16] to look at the emperor and not know anything and just say, hey, the emperor’s naked. And then it

[00:08:22] just broke this wall, right? Everyone realized that it’s not them. It’s just that everyone was

[00:08:28] also operating under this sort of illusion. And the moment someone said something, it kind of broke

[00:08:34] that Nash equilibrium. Sorry to bring in some game theory, but it kind of broke that trade off.

[00:08:42] And then everyone was able to acknowledge the truth that was staring them right in the face.

[00:08:47] And I think there’s a lot of naked emperors in tech because there are a lot of things that people

[00:08:53] say as if they’re true, just absolute truths. And they say them over and over again. And then we hear

[00:08:59] them a lot. Therefore, we start believing in it ourselves. But then they also fall apart

[00:09:04] with a little bit of inspection. So I think that people, especially developers, should be more

[00:09:10] demanding of the truths they hold dear because we’re pretty exacting people normally. It’s just that

[00:09:18] when we communicate, we tend to be very lazy because we’re humans. So I tried to point some

[00:09:23] of these out. It’s definitely a cover for some of my hot takes. But I try to focus on things where

[00:09:32] there’s a real chance that everyone is thinking something and not saying it because it’s either

[00:09:39] not polite or they don’t want to look incompetent or they want to look rude. They’re just thinking

[00:09:46] about it, but then they say the thing that they’re supposed to say. But it’s harmful to people who

[00:09:51] come in and take those things as gospel truth because then they feel like they’re trying to

[00:09:59] point out the naked emperor, but then they feel like they’re just noobs. So maybe they should just

[00:10:04] shut up and deal with it like everyone else around them is dealing with it. So I think it’s harmful

[00:10:10] from that point of view. So I’m trying to make the case that we should point out more naked emperors.

[00:10:16] Yeah, this is really interesting. The one that hit me the hardest was certainly the Five Whys

[00:10:21] because it is the Toyota method. It’s this thing if listeners, if you’re not familiar with this idea,

[00:10:30] is that you continue asking or inquiring down a single line of reasoning. If there’s one reason,

[00:10:37] one primary reason that you can come up with that something has happened or one reason, primary

[00:10:45] reason for making a particular decision. Well, you can continue tracing that back and eventually

[00:10:50] you’re going to get to something more core, whether it’s core to your humanity or core to the problem.

[00:10:59] The idea is theoretically that you can find kind of the root cause of a problem or the

[00:11:05] root cause of a behavior. But as you point out, this isn’t always true and almost certainly there’s

[00:11:13] more than one answer to each of these whys. It’s much more like a tree of whys rather than it is

[00:11:20] Five Whys. But I’m curious what you think about that. I’d say that’s true. But also, you know,

[00:11:27] something I did not point out in my post. I mean, have you tried working with someone who

[00:11:31] tries to apply the Five Whys religiously? They always were probably pretty annoying,

[00:11:37] pretty annoying. And they always work back to like, oh, the system’s ruined. We need to like,

[00:11:41] tear up everything and rebuild the system from scratch. Like, what are we supposed to do with

[00:11:45] that? You know, like, like, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re a Fifth Why is like, there’s no ethical

[00:11:51] consumption under capitalism, then you’re in a pretty bad and depressing place, and no one

[00:11:56] wants to work with you. And so it’s not very constructive is what I’m trying to say. So

[00:12:03] there’s that. And then there’s this overly simplistic thinking that there is a single root

[00:12:07] cause for everything. So I lead to John Alsop, I don’t actually know his name. It’s kitchen soap,

[00:12:13] his, his, his, his blog post, where it’s basically saying complex system is constant complex failures

[00:12:21] have complex causes. They need a number of things to go wrong all at once. And it’s not the fault of

[00:12:26] any individual thing. It’s just a combination of all of them that that cause complex failures. And

[00:12:32] most of the things that we work on are complex failures. So Five Whys does work. If you’re

[00:12:36] assembling a car on a manufacturing line, but maybe let’s not apply that analogy so strictly

[00:12:43] to, you know, developer organizations to dependency chains that are 1000s of modules

[00:12:51] wide. It’s not so simple. And let’s not stop pretending that it can be so simple by repeating

[00:12:59] things that have been essentially out of date for like 60 years, and we still repeat them.

[00:13:04] Right. Yeah. And, you know, for what it’s worth, a lot of these things that you point out are not

[00:13:11] so much a method, like the Five Whys is some of them are just platitudes, like there are no stupid

[00:13:17] questions. The the idea that we should always the second was, or the third one is regret

[00:13:23] minimization framework, the idea that we should always choose the option that is most likely to

[00:13:29] avoid regret. And, you know, the many different things that we say in tech that are absolutes.

[00:13:38] And I think that the common pattern here is that the absolutism is likely,

[00:13:48] it’s the thing that makes it easy to say, right, it’s the thing that says, oh, this is,

[00:13:53] here’s a black and white rule or a black and white platitude, a thing that you can always follow,

[00:13:58] always rely on. And things just aren’t that simple. They are much more complex than that.

[00:14:05] There’s certainly a gradient of answers or a gradient of realities within each of these

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[00:15:31] started. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Tea. So I want to

[00:15:38] take a step back and ask you a question I’d like to ask all the guests who come on the show.

[00:15:43] What do you wish more people would ask you about? Oh, that’s a great catch-all question.

[00:15:49] I wish that… So I’ve only ever been asked this once on a podcast. I’ve done quite a few podcasts,

[00:15:57] but I’ve only ever been asked about tech strategy once on a podcast. And so,

[00:16:04] you know, one of the things that… Tech strategy? Tech strategy, technology strategy. So

[00:16:10] developers are very keen to define themselves and to discuss technical issues around code,

[00:16:17] but then they’re very uninterested in how people make money from that code.

[00:16:24] There’s obviously a subsection of people who are very interested in money,

[00:16:27] but developers are very strangely not very interested in the business impact as a whole.

[00:16:33] Developers are not very interested in the business impact of the code. They are very keen on,

[00:16:38] oh, look at this functional pattern, this design pattern. This reduces errors. That’s great,

[00:16:48] but there’s only so much that the outside world actually cares about that. And there’s definitely

[00:16:55] a lot more that impacts our careers and our incomes, to be quite honest, when it comes to

[00:17:02] making money from your code. I feel like that’s something that should be very interesting to

[00:17:09] people, but it’s consistently… These are things that I write about. In my book, I have

[00:17:19] a section on principles, a section on tactics, and a section on strategy. And I get a lot of

[00:17:23] questions about principles and tactics, but not so much on strategy. And I think that’s people

[00:17:27] shortchanging themselves or just not seeing themselves in the total context of why they’re

[00:17:33] paid so much and how they can make some more. Those two things are not at odds because developers

[00:17:42] are very valuable things, but I think it’s up to you to figure it out. No one’s going to tell you

[00:17:48] because we’re too busy figuring it out for ourselves. And so I feel like I have a unique

[00:17:54] perspective because I used to be in finance. I used to be a hedge fund trader. I used to invest

[00:18:00] in tech stocks and I constantly think about this. So yeah, I do wish people asked me more about that.

[00:18:08] Well, I have a question as a developer, as a career long, this is what I started doing.

[00:18:13] And at this point, I’m in more of a managerial position than I was in a software engineering

[00:18:20] position or than I am. And my question is, what do you think is the reason for this? Or maybe a

[00:18:33] better way to phrase that is, do you think that engineers are actually disinterested in this?

[00:18:42] Or do you think that there’s something else going on?

[00:18:45] I think, yes, they are disinterested in this as a whole. Again, there’s very significant

[00:18:53] exceptions. As to explain why, it’s a little bit difficult. It’s probably a number of reasons.

[00:19:01] And there’s no five whys. But one of them would be, for example, that it is hard to prove. You

[00:19:08] can’t just run it in a terminal and see the result. It’s more of a fuzzy economics,

[00:19:16] hand wavy type of thing. So people don’t like that because you can have conflicting answers and

[00:19:23] not know which one is right until you try it. And then even then it’s probabilistic. This is

[00:19:30] 20% more likely to be right. What are you going to do with that? Whereas I think in code,

[00:19:35] it’s a lot more clear sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. That’s definitely one of it.

[00:19:42] And then there’s the other part, which is that there are a lot more juniors than seniors. And

[00:19:47] for junior developers, you are not concerned about any of that yet. You’re just trying to

[00:19:51] make a living writing code for a living. So it’s perfectly fine to not be aware of that.

[00:19:57] But I think as you go up, then you’re evaluated more and more on your business impact. Then you

[00:20:01] start to think about that. And then the people who are in senior management or senior ICs just

[00:20:09] don’t talk as much. They do talk. They’re not as frank or open sometimes. So there’s just less

[00:20:20] people who are publicly discussing this stuff. Yeah, it strikes me that software engineers in

[00:20:28] particular can climb into very high level positions in companies very quickly. And so

[00:20:35] what you were doing three years ago, because you loved it and because it was fun, it was like

[00:20:42] putting, you know, it was the first time that you had a chance to create with a computer.

[00:20:47] A short three years later, people are asking for you to be, you know, concerned with much higher

[00:20:53] level things. I say a higher level, a higher layer of concern. And in your mind, or at least

[00:21:01] this was my experience, in my mind, you know, I was still enjoying the coding product. Like I was

[00:21:07] still enjoying and learning and feeling like that playful sense rather than what seemed like a more

[00:21:15] serious idea that I had to turn around now and instead of using this for play, it’s now, you know,

[00:21:22] I’m a grown up now, right? I have to use this for real money. And I think the perhaps false

[00:21:30] promise that a lot of developers buy into is that, hey, you can come and play for the money,

[00:21:36] right? That’s, you can come and do the thing that you really love doing,

[00:21:40] and money will just find its way to you, right? There’s other people who are responsible for it.

[00:21:46] They’re going to funnel it your way. They’re going to pay you to do the thing that you love.

[00:21:50] And while that in some ways has borne out to be true for a lot of people, right? A lot of people

[00:21:56] actually do get to kind of, you know, sequester their concerns away. For a lot of people who want

[00:22:04] to make this a long term career, they absolutely would benefit from saying, hey, wait a second,

[00:22:09] let me take my layer of concern up out of the code for a minute and look at, I don’t know,

[00:22:17] we can dive into this a little bit more about what it actually looks like to think about strategy.

[00:22:22] I’m curious to, you know, what are those kinds of pieces? Well, what are the types of questions?

[00:22:26] What are the things that I should be looking at to go from those more tactical things,

[00:22:32] those code design things to strategy? I present this problem in a few steps.

[00:22:40] So I hope that you can follow along with me. There’s a loose logical chain. So where I like

[00:22:46] to start is that most developers are familiar with strategy games and they think that that’s

[00:22:51] strategy, but we are kind of being sold the bill of goods there because strategy and games, they

[00:22:57] kind of offer you infinite runs of a finite game. There’s a start and an end and you can run them

[00:23:03] over and over again to get better and better and better. But strategy in life gives you one run

[00:23:08] of an infinite game. Misinformation outnumbers information and the rules are constantly in flux

[00:23:15] where strategy and games, the rules don’t change and you have almost perfect information.

[00:23:19] So we’re very, very poorly prepared. And by the way, strategy and games is an analogy for

[00:23:23] programming, right? We like statelessness. We like to rerun things. We like reproducibility.

[00:23:28] Life doesn’t have any of that. And so it’s a very, very difficult thing to transition to.

[00:23:34] And I think one of the reasons it’s important is that realizing that when you study highly

[00:23:39] productive engineers or top engineers, it’s not so much the output that they,

[00:23:45] the raw numerical output. I actually have a quote from somebody at Google who talk about Sanjay

[00:23:54] Gemawat and Jeff Dean, who are the top individual contributors in Google. They actually are not

[00:24:00] that more productive than a SWE3, like a junior engineer at Google. But the insight is that they

[00:24:08] really apply the productivity to things that matter. And it’s about choosing problems more

[00:24:13] than being like a code wizard that just blows through a hundred times more tickets than other

[00:24:21] people. Your primary unit of output is not your tickets. And we’re trained to do that because

[00:24:28] that’s how we’re incentivized and managed. But really it’s about picking important problems.

[00:24:33] So strategy, my definition of strategy is the problem of choosing problems. Strategy answers,

[00:24:40] what should we be doing? Strategy defines where to play and how to win. So that’s kind of where I

[00:24:47] want to set the level. We are not used to playing this. The rules are very different. And we are

[00:24:55] so used to solving problems that we’re not good at all at choosing problems.

[00:25:03] And so I think that the four tools that we kind of need to tackle that, and this is not my definition,

[00:25:09] it’s actually something that comes from a bunch of people who study strategy. So I’m kind of just

[00:25:13] rephrasing what they have. You need a mental model of present reality. So like where you,

[00:25:19] your competitors and the larger technological landscape are. You need a vision of the future,

[00:25:24] where you want to go. So where you are, where you want to go. You need a plan from getting from here

[00:25:29] to there. And then you need a policy for choosing what to do and what not to do with a clear

[00:25:35] rationale and understanding of trade-offs. So that’s kind of like the four-part

[00:25:40] breakdown of strategy. And then you can try to map that to things that you can actually do

[00:25:45] to execute that. Does that make sense? Yeah. Can we go back through those four

[00:25:50] things just in a straight list? Yeah. The easiest one is the mental model of present reality.

[00:25:57] Are you looking around you and having a clear-eyed view of where you are,

[00:25:59] where your competitors are and where the larger technological landscape is going?

[00:26:07] Is that too much?

[00:26:10] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea, the first part of my interview

[00:26:15] with Swix. Hopefully you found it as insightful as I did. I’m excited to roll right into the

[00:26:21] second part of this interview in the next episode of this show. And if you don’t want to miss out

[00:26:27] on that, make sure you subscribe and whatever podcasting app you’re listening to right now.

[00:26:32] This episode and every other episode of Developer Tea can be found at spec.fm.

[00:26:36] Thank you to today’s sponsor, Leno. Head over to leno.com slash developer tea and click on

[00:26:41] the create free account button to get a hundred dollars. That’s a hundred dollars in free credit

[00:26:46] that goes a long way on Leno. Thanks again to Leno for sponsoring today’s episode.

[00:26:51] Today’s episode was produced by the brilliant Sarah Jackson. My name is

[00:26:54] Jonathan Cottrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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