Improve Your Chances In Your Engineering Job Search Using the Scientific Method with Brian Pulliam

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cutrell continues his interview with career coach Brian Pulliam, focusing on practical tactics for engineering job searches and interviews. Brian demonstrates how to translate a company’s core values into compelling interview stories, using Calendly’s four values (Start with Human, Find a Way, Focus Wisely, Strive for Excellence) as a live example. He shares detailed stories from his experience at Zillow and other tech companies, showing how a single narrative can illustrate multiple values depending on how it’s framed.

The conversation emphasizes the importance of preparing stories that cover common interview themes while remaining flexible enough to “snap to” different questions. Brian stresses that candidates should aim for concise answers and actively check in with interviewers to ensure they’re providing the right signals without rambling. This approach helps interviewers gather comprehensive data points while assessing whether they’d want to work with the candidate.

Brian and Jonathan also discuss the transition into a new role, touching on Michael Watkins’ “The First 90 Days” concept of negotiating success with your manager. Brian shares a personal example of pushing back on taking on additional direct reports early in a new position, illustrating how to align expectations and protect your ability to perform at a high standard. The episode concludes with Brian explaining why he took an 84% pay cut to become a full-time coach, highlighting the non-financial components of a fulfilling career.

Recommendations

Books

The First 90 Days — Michael Watkins’ book about successfully transitioning into new roles was referenced multiple times, particularly the concept of ‘negotiating success’ with your manager early on.

People

Simon Sinek — Brian references Sinek’s idea that leaders should give teams problems that ‘outsize their resources but not their intellect’ to create excitement and motivation.

Tools

Unblocked — The episode sponsor, a tool that helps engineering teams get context about codebases by surfacing information from GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence next to the code.

Websites

refactorcoaching.com — Brian Pulliam’s coaching website where listeners can book introductory calls. He offers a 10% discount for Developer Tea listeners who book three or more sessions.

Topic Timeline

00:00:00 — Introduction to job search tactics and company values — Jonathan introduces the episode as part two of his interview with career coach Brian Pulliam, focusing on practical job search tactics. He mentions they’ll discuss how to take company values and turn them into interview material. Jonathan shares a disclaimer about his coaching arrangement with Brian and mentions a 10% discount for listeners.
00:02:14 — Snapping stories to interview questions and preparing for value-based questions — Brian explains the concept of “snapping” prepared stories to fit interview questions, even if they’re not exact matches. He reveals a “worst kept secret”: candidates should convert every company core value into a “tell me about a time when you demonstrated X” question. Brian expresses surprise at how few people prepare for these obvious, publicly available value questions.
00:03:48 — Live exercise with Calendly’s four core values — Jonathan proposes a live exercise using Calendly’s four core values (which he’s joining). Brian immediately demonstrates how to answer a “Start with Human” question with a story about an engineer named Steve who had performance issues due to an untreated back injury. The story shows how Brian created accommodations that turned Steve’s performance around.
00:09:09 — Analyzing the story’s flexibility and coverage of multiple values — Jonathan analyzes Brian’s story, noting how it was prepared but pivoted to fit the specific question. He emphasizes that good stories can cover multiple values by highlighting different facets. They discuss how to achieve “code coverage” for common company values like teamwork, excellence, and integrity with a limited set of stories.
00:11:57 — How to reference company values subtly in interviews — Brian advises mentioning company values subtly rather than overtly. He shares an example from Zillow’s “Turn on the Lights” value, suggesting candidates might say “I have a turn on the lights story” before telling it. This shows awareness without coming across as junior or trying too hard to score points.
00:15:03 — Second value example: “Find a Way” with a technical story — Brian answers a “Find a Way” question with a story about reducing address validation time from three hours to 20 minutes at Zillow. Instead of a six-month engineering solution, he discovered a batch job could run more frequently, achieving 80% of the improvement with zero code changes through conversation with operations.
00:20:53 — What interviewers learn from the “Find a Way” story — Jonathan analyzes what the “Find a Way” story communicates: outcome orientation, problem-solving beyond coding, root cause analysis, and Pareto principle thinking. He notes stories reveal how candidates have worked in previous environments, giving interviewers “meat on the bone” for further discussion about team dynamics and culture fit.
00:23:56 — Third value example: “Focus Wisely” and thinking about global maxima — Brian addresses “Focus Wisely” with a story about lending his team’s resources to a struggling sister team at Zillow. He recognized their project would have 10x more impact than his team’s planned work. After convincing his PM and leadership, his team helped the sister team succeed, which also gave his engineers more impactful resume material.
00:30:38 — Follow-up questions and demonstrating deep story understanding — Jonathan role-plays as an interviewer asking follow-up questions about the “Focus Wisely” story, specifically about risks of resource sharing. Brian explains the context: the teams had recently split, missed working together, and shared domain knowledge. He also notes growth organizations often work in “away team” capacities, making such collaboration culturally accepted.
00:38:32 — Contrasting example: Recognizing organizational bottlenecks — Brian shares a contrasting story from a crypto company where he discovered millions of users were stuck at payment method setup—a bottleneck 10x more impactful than his team’s features. This illustrates recognizing system-wide constraints rather than optimizing local maxima, though he couldn’t convince leadership to reallocate resources in that case.
00:40:22 — The importance of concise answers and interviewer check-ins — Brian emphasizes that candidates are 90% more likely to talk too long than not enough. He advises providing concise answers then asking “where would you like to go deeper?” This ensures interviewers can gather all needed signals across their question list. Rambling risks only covering your weaker areas while leaving strengths unshown.
00:43:46 — Passing the coworker test in interviews — Beyond demonstrating competence, interviews assess whether people want to work with you. Brian notes that concise, engaging communicators who make interviews feel like conversations often get remembered and referred for future opportunities, even if they don’t get the current offer.
00:47:53 — Fourth value example: “Strive for Excellence” in platform work — Brian answers “Strive for Excellence” with a story about improving Zillow’s CI/CD pipeline. As a new TPM, he discovered teams hated the system so much they paid for alternatives. He refactored the system, reducing commit-to-deploy time from up to 45 minutes to under 3 minutes while handling 10x more volume—raising the bar beyond what was explicitly requested.
00:53:58 — Setting excellence standards and the pit crew analogy — Jonathan asks how Brian determined what excellence meant for CI/CD times. Brian explains gathering data from 25-30 engineering teams to find reasonable expectations. He created a “pit crew” analogy: his team enabled “race car” engineering teams to iterate faster. He asked his team what would make them proud enough to put the work on their resumes.
01:03:00 — Advice for starting a new role: Contribute beyond code — Brian advises new hires, especially seniors, to move beyond a scarcity mindset of “how quickly can I ramp?” He suggests observing people, product, and process during the first weeks, documenting observations, and discussing them with managers to calibrate expectations. This helps align on what success looks like beyond just code output.
01:07:44 — Negotiating success and a personal example — Discussing “The First 90 Days,” Brian shares how he negotiated not taking on 7 additional direct reports early in a role. He framed it around performance ratings: doubling his team would likely lower his potential rating. By asking if his manager wanted his success ceiling to be lower, he successfully pushed back while showing strategic thinking.
01:18:31 — Why Brian took an 84% pay cut to become a coach — Answering Jonathan’s signature question, Brian shares he wishes more people asked why he took an 84% pay cut (from ~$500k) to become a full-time coach. He explains his perspective on career fulfillment has radically changed over five years, and he wants to help others find their version of a “rich life” that isn’t solely financial.
01:21:05 — How to find the right coach and Brian’s coaching approach — Brian directs interested listeners to refactorcoaching.com or his LinkedIn. He emphasizes interviewing multiple coaches to find the right fit, as different coaches offer different approaches. Brian’s coaching leverages his decades of tech experience and belief in applying the scientific method and A/B testing to career development.

Episode Info

Podcast: Developer Tea
Author: Jonathan Cutrell
Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
Published: 2024-08-14T07:00:00Z
Duration: 01:26:05

References

URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/developer-tea/cbe9b6c0-7da4-0132-e6ef-5f4c86fd3263/improve-your-chances-in-your-engineering-job-search-using-the-scientific-method-with-brian-pulliam/fe373344-25b6-4715-a618-74631771e864
Episode UUID: fe373344-25b6-4715-a618-74631771e864

Podcast Info

Name: Developer Tea
Type: episodic
Site: http://www.developertea.com
UUID: cbe9b6c0-7da4-0132-e6ef-5f4c86fd3263

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey everyone.

[00:00:13] Welcome to part two of my interview with Brian Poliam.

[00:00:16] Brian is a career coach in the last episode.

[00:00:19] We talked about what does that really mean and why might it be useful?

[00:00:23] Uh, how could you integrate coaching into your career?

[00:00:27] Uh, some of Brian’s ups and downs in his career, as well as, uh, some advice, uh,

[00:00:33] around your candidacy in your, um, you know, in your job search as an engineer

[00:00:40] or an engineering leader in this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit more

[00:00:44] about those tactics in your job search and how to, for example, uh, take the

[00:00:50] questions or sorry, take the values of the companies that you are applying to

[00:00:55] and turn them into material for your interview.

[00:00:59] Uh, this is super, um, extremely helpful.

[00:01:02] If you don’t listen to any other episode about interviewing, uh, I

[00:01:06] recommend you listen to this one.

[00:01:08] Uh, Brian is such an, uh, an incredible, um, coach for me.

[00:01:13] And I’d love for you to check out his coaching, uh, just a disclaimer.

[00:01:18] We said this on the last episode as well.

[00:01:20] Uh, I did agree to have Brian come on as part of my payment for my own coaching.

[00:01:27] So Brian is not compensating me with anything other than his own services.

[00:01:31] I do believe in, uh, in Brian’s ability to coach.

[00:01:35] Uh, Brian didn’t tell me to say any of that, but he did ask me to mention

[00:01:40] that he’s offering listeners of developer TA 10% discount, uh, when they book

[00:01:45] their initial discussion with, with Brian.

[00:01:48] Uh, you can do that at refactor coaching.com.

[00:01:51] Make sure you mentioned developer T and you’ll get 10% off of a coaching package,

[00:01:57] which is three or more, uh, sessions with Brian.

[00:02:01] Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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

[00:02:14] Yeah.

[00:02:14] And even if the person who’s asking you doesn’t ask that exact question,

[00:02:19] you know, if it’s close enough, they’ll usually let you paraphrase it.

[00:02:21] They’ll say, you know, well, what comes to mind is not X, but it’s X prime.

[00:02:26] Yep.

[00:02:26] So let me tell you that story and then I’ll ask you if you want to go deeper,

[00:02:30] if you, or if you’d like a different example, like how does that sound?

[00:02:32] And they’re like, yeah, sure.

[00:02:33] Yeah.

[00:02:33] It’s kind of going back to your direct.

[00:02:35] Yeah, go ahead.

[00:02:36] Going back to your, uh, your discussion about the color palette.

[00:02:39] It’s like, uh, they’re going to ask a question that fits on the full

[00:02:43] gradient or, or, or the full color wheel.

[00:02:46] And you have to snap it to the closest one, right?

[00:02:48] Like you’re going to snap it to you.

[00:02:50] And, and most of the time, interviewers would rather you snap to.

[00:02:55] Then to say, well, I don’t really have a good story, right?

[00:02:58] Like, I don’t really know what’s the intent with asking that story, right?

[00:03:01] Yeah, exactly.

[00:03:02] You got to think a little, you got to put your big brain on, right?

[00:03:05] And you got to say, Oh, you know, I mean, I’ll, I’ll share another

[00:03:10] like worst kept secret, you know, if a company is big enough to have

[00:03:13] a company values page or like a core values page, you should ex you should

[00:03:17] convert every single one of those core values into a question that starts

[00:03:22] with, tell me about a time when you demonstrated X and you should be

[00:03:27] ready to ask that question.

[00:03:29] And I mean, I don’t know what your experience is, but I’ve been

[00:03:32] flabbergasted by how few people are prepared for answering those questions

[00:03:38] that are effectively like an open book that are sitting on a homepage that

[00:03:42] anyone can go look at even before the interview.

[00:03:46] I’m going to do this live right now with you, actually.

[00:03:48] I think it’ll be a cool exercise because I haven’t announced this yet.

[00:03:52] Um, and by the time this episode comes out, I will have started my job.

[00:03:55] So it’s okay.

[00:03:56] Um, I I’m, I’m joining Callen Lee, which you already know.

[00:03:59] Um, they have, they have four values that are on their careers page, right?

[00:04:05] Uh, value number one is start with human value.

[00:04:07] Number two, find a way by number three is focused wisely.

[00:04:11] And finally, by number four is strive for excellence.

[00:04:14] And all of these can be very quickly turned into multiple

[00:04:18] versions of a question, right?

[00:04:20] Um, which one do you think, uh, w which one should we pick for, for the, uh,

[00:04:25] for the answer, we probably do all four.

[00:04:27] Yeah, we can do all four if you want.

[00:04:29] All right.

[00:04:29] So start with human.

[00:04:30] Tell me about a time when, uh, you had to make a decision on behalf of one of

[00:04:36] your reports to support them in a personal situation.

[00:04:41] That would be a good start with human, uh, uh, question.

[00:04:46] All right.

[00:04:46] You’re probably not going to get that necessarily, but, uh,

[00:04:49] something along those lines.

[00:04:51] Yeah.

[00:04:52] So based on the work we’ve done, you know, I’m going to have an intro

[00:04:56] sentence here that you, that you’ll recognize, uh, Jonathan, uh, which I’d

[00:05:00] say, you know, Hey, I I’m the kind of person who thrives in an environment

[00:05:03] where, where leaders are seen as people focused and where they can create an

[00:05:08] environment where success is more likely.

[00:05:11] And, and so when I think about your question about taking a human forward

[00:05:16] approach to a decision for a direct report, it reminds me of a, of someone

[00:05:21] who I will call Steve, it’s not their real name and Steve had a performance

[00:05:26] problem and it was pretty glaringly obvious Steve was forgetting things

[00:05:31] five minutes after we talked about something and it, and it seemed like

[00:05:37] it came on suddenly.

[00:05:39] And, uh, the inexperienced leader in me would have taken a very

[00:05:44] different approach to this.

[00:05:45] They would have said, Hey, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not meeting the

[00:05:48] bar, what’s going on, you know, I’d get frustrated, but the experienced

[00:05:53] leader in me took a different tactic, right?

[00:05:54] I, I leaned in to my curiosity and I said, Hey, Steve, uh, in my next one on

[00:05:59] one, like I’m observing these things as facts, uh, and it feels like your

[00:06:05] performance is different than it used to be.

[00:06:08] Uh, is there anything going on in your, in your life?

[00:06:12] Like what’s going on?

[00:06:13] Like, you know, have you noticed these things as well?

[00:06:16] And the story I heard afterwards, uh, I will never forget, you know, Steve, as

[00:06:20] it turns out, grew up in rural China.

[00:06:23] Uh, so as they went into, it’s definitely not Steve and, uh, and he

[00:06:28] was in a horrific car accident when he was about five years old and giving

[00:06:33] how remote of a village he grew up in, he never got medical treatment for it.

[00:06:38] And so his back healed in ways that create severe amounts of pain for him.

[00:06:44] So much so that it’s hard for him to focus.

[00:06:47] So now you can see where this is going, Jonathan, like, you know, HR will

[00:06:52] tell you and I both as leaders, like, wow, you need to separate performance

[00:06:55] and medical issues, like completely.

[00:06:59] But in this case, they’re intimately tied together.

[00:07:02] And so I had to say like, Hey, I’m wondering, now this is before

[00:07:07] COVID and I said, what is it that we could do to your working situation

[00:07:13] to accommodate, to make reasonable accommodations for you to go address

[00:07:18] this, because I feel like this is interfering with your ability to do your

[00:07:23] job.

[00:07:23] Like, do you think, what do you think?

[00:07:25] And I got Steve to sort of admit that, yeah, this is a, this interferes

[00:07:29] with my ability to focus at work.

[00:07:30] And I said, well, let’s fix that.

[00:07:32] And, um, this is maybe three years before COVID.

[00:07:36] And, uh, we had him go remote.

[00:07:38] We had him take a medical leave of absence, right?

[00:07:41] You know, short-term disability went and got his, uh, his back looked at.

[00:07:46] And then he only came into the office like once a week after that.

[00:07:49] And it turned out that sitting prep prolonged periods at his desk and not

[00:07:52] being able to do like physical therapy.

[00:07:55] Like every two to three hours, you know, not everyone feels comfortable laying

[00:07:59] on the ground in the office and stretching in front of other people.

[00:08:02] I, I don’t care, but, but, you know, but other people do and creating that

[00:08:08] environment for him completely turned his performance around.

[00:08:11] And, and as of the day that I left Zillow, right?

[00:08:15] He was still, uh, he was still being a successful engineer.

[00:08:19] So I think there’s a case there to say, lean into what I learned from that is to

[00:08:25] lean into the curiosity of understanding why something is happening and not

[00:08:29] making a judgment call and not calling Steve a slacker or, or assuming that

[00:08:36] it’s even intentional, but to better understand like the whole person and

[00:08:41] then see what you could do in order to create an environment where success is

[00:08:44] more like, cause that’s what a good leader would do.

[00:08:48] And as an interviewer, I’m sitting here, I’m taking notes.

[00:08:51] I’m like, man, this is great.

[00:08:53] As, as somebody that you’ve coached, I know behind the curtain, I just heard

[00:08:58] the, uh, the L, uh, at the end there.

[00:09:00] Um, should we, we can talk about that if you’d like the, the, the response

[00:09:06] that we have laid out with this question.

[00:09:09] So here’s, here’s what I love about what we just heard together.

[00:09:14] All right.

[00:09:15] Yeah.

[00:09:16] We, and that was not prepared for just to keep it, everything above board.

[00:09:20] We didn’t talk about this.

[00:09:22] This is, this is actually me putting Brian to the test a little bit.

[00:09:25] Um, the, the, you pivoted this, this, uh, the story that you

[00:09:32] clearly have prepared, right?

[00:09:35] The story was prepared, but you didn’t know.

[00:09:37] I was going to ask you about that.

[00:09:38] Nope.

[00:09:38] Pivoted from start with human to tell me about a time that you took a

[00:09:46] personalized approach to performance.

[00:09:49] Right.

[00:09:50] And, and that kind of, that’s what we’re talking about when we say snap

[00:09:54] two is you have this story that you have, you know, very good detail on.

[00:09:59] It shows a lot of different important values that you hold a lot of, uh,

[00:10:05] important kind of outcomes that a company would care about in a, in

[00:10:09] a single succinct story, but it didn’t have to be only this thing about

[00:10:15] starting with human, you don’t have something on your side that is

[00:10:19] labeled start with human, right?

[00:10:21] It’s you’re adjusting, uh, and you’re translating between these things.

[00:10:26] And so it takes a little bit of practice.

[00:10:28] And I think that’s kind of a, an underpinning of what we’re talking

[00:10:30] about here, um, is that your, your interview process and multiple

[00:10:35] interviews, hopefully that you’re going to go through, uh, their practice,

[00:10:41] their, their, their opportunities for you to, and you can do this with the values.

[00:10:46] Like you’re saying, do it with the values on the page of the company that

[00:10:49] you’re getting ready to interview at.

[00:10:51] Look at a value, look at your stories and say, this one kind of fits that one.

[00:10:55] This one fits that one.

[00:10:57] Yeah.

[00:10:58] Would you agree with that kind of approach?

[00:10:59] Yeah.

[00:11:00] Yeah.

[00:11:00] And you know, that’s sort of, that’s why code coverage comes to mind for me, right?

[00:11:06] It’s like, well, what stories can cover these, these values that these companies

[00:11:12] have and they’re not, they’re not that different, right?

[00:11:16] Companies care about teamwork.

[00:11:17] They care about excellence.

[00:11:19] They care about integrity.

[00:11:20] They care about visibility.

[00:11:22] You know, if you think about what a reasonable company would want to see

[00:11:27] in the behaviors that its employees demonstrate, you’re going to get something

[00:11:32] like 80 or 90% coverage, so that’s not a bad place to be.

[00:11:37] What do you think about potentially even referencing the values if they

[00:11:43] don’t ask you about the values, having those available and saying, Hey, this

[00:11:47] kind of reminds me of the value of focus wisely.

[00:11:52] Here’s a story that kind of matches that.

[00:11:54] Does that feel to on the nose?

[00:11:56] How does that feel?

[00:11:57] Just, you know, first hearing it.

[00:12:00] Yeah.

[00:12:00] I like to coach my clients to mention it, but not to be so overt about it.

[00:12:04] Yeah.

[00:12:05] Right.

[00:12:06] So, and so there’s a little bit of subtlety here, you know, if, uh, so at

[00:12:11] Zillow, they have a, they used to have a core value called turn on the lights.

[00:12:14] You know, Godzilla was born out of this day idea of giving information to

[00:12:18] people that didn’t have it before.

[00:12:19] Like how much your neighbor’s house is worth and, uh, and being able to see

[00:12:24] that amongst the really broad neighborhoods and that, that empowers you

[00:12:28] to make a better decision, whether you’re buying or selling whatever.

[00:12:32] And so they, they, they used to probably still do have a question about, tell

[00:12:37] me about a time when you discovered an issue and, uh, but it wasn’t like, uh,

[00:12:42] necessarily a great thing.

[00:12:44] Like you, you noticed a big mistake that you made.

[00:12:47] Like, and it was going to impact the timeline for a project.

[00:12:50] Like, what did you do?

[00:12:51] And they’re looking to see if you will tell a story about when you turned on

[00:12:54] the lights, either for something good or more importantly, when something wasn’t

[00:12:58] good or where you’re too afraid to share those details.

[00:13:03] Yeah.

[00:13:04] Um, so in a case like that, um, you can imagine that, uh, in it, I wouldn’t say,

[00:13:11] well, since one of your core values is turn on the lights, and you’re asking me

[00:13:17] a question that sounds like it’s like, you’re looking to evaluate whether I have

[00:13:21] a story that aligns with the company value.

[00:13:24] That’s pretty like.

[00:13:25] Bull in a China shop.

[00:13:26] Like we don’t need to do that.

[00:13:27] Right.

[00:13:28] Right.

[00:13:28] Yeah.

[00:13:29] That that’s doesn’t maybe increase your chances of getting the offer.

[00:13:32] It just kind of makes you come across as a little junior.

[00:13:35] So, you know, more senior people are also have more mature communication styles,

[00:13:40] but I would reference turn on the lights.

[00:13:43] I’d say, yeah, you know, now that I think about it, I do have a turn on the light

[00:13:47] story and that’s all I would say.

[00:13:51] And then I would go tell my story, but just mentioning those four words so that

[00:13:55] they know that I know, uh, and that my story is very clearly connected to turn

[00:14:02] on the lights, like you could argue that my, the HR story I just told you about

[00:14:07] Steve, you could argue that’s turning on the lights too.

[00:14:09] I got someone else to turn on the lights about a real problem that was standing

[00:14:13] in the way of their performance that they hadn’t shared before.

[00:14:17] That may even be considered that maybe they didn’t feel comfortable until you

[00:14:21] actually prompted them to tell.

[00:14:23] Yeah.

[00:14:25] Yeah.

[00:14:25] And in fact, for a while I didn’t get that answer.

[00:14:28] Yeah.

[00:14:28] I had to ask that person four or five times to, in order for them to finally

[00:14:31] open up about it, because not everybody, not every leader that we know would

[00:14:39] necessarily respond the way I did, right?

[00:14:41] That’s just the truth.

[00:14:42] So, uh,

[00:14:44] and here’s, here’s an interesting thing.

[00:14:45] I’ll, I’ll, I’ll kind of show how this framework can, is, is flexible.

[00:14:50] Okay.

[00:14:51] Yeah.

[00:14:52] The second value, we, the first value start with human.

[00:14:54] You answered that one.

[00:14:55] The second value is find a way.

[00:14:57] Now here’s the interesting thing.

[00:14:58] That story can also be a find a way.

[00:15:02] Yep.

[00:15:03] Because you’re, you’re looking at this situation and one path could have been

[00:15:09] okay, we’re not going to deal with this.

[00:15:11] We’re just going to put this person on an improvement plan.

[00:15:13] You know, we’re going to make life difficult until they quit.

[00:15:16] Terrible, terrible management, uh, tactic, but certainly one that people use.

[00:15:21] Or we’re going to find a way we’re going to make this work.

[00:15:24] So, and again, um, it’s not because you picked a broad story.

[00:15:30] It’s that it, you’re looking at different aspects or different kind

[00:15:34] of facets of the same story, right?

[00:15:39] Does, does that track?

[00:15:41] Yeah, it does.

[00:15:42] You know, when you say find a way, most people interpret that as, uh, like

[00:15:47] if they’re an engineer, they think of it as like, find a way

[00:15:49] through a technical problem, right?

[00:15:50] Like that’s how most people perceive that.

[00:15:52] Um, but you’re right.

[00:15:54] Uh, find a way would work with leadership too, but the story that comes to mind

[00:15:58] for find a way, which is actually kind of funny, uh, when it was at Zillow, we

[00:16:04] were tasked with, there’s a lot, one of the use cases we support is like mom and

[00:16:07] pops that own like one rental, right?

[00:16:10] So not like big property management companies with 10,000 units, but Bob

[00:16:16] works in tech and he has a rental and he wants to list that rental on Zillow.com

[00:16:20] is Zillow.com has rentals.

[00:16:22] And so, but the, the wizard to go through like that, uh, apartment owner, rental

[00:16:28] owner needs to go through the landlord.

[00:16:30] It has a place where you have to add an address, not a surprise, but it doesn’t

[00:16:34] real time validate whether that address is legitimate.

[00:16:37] It actually does that later.

[00:16:39] Now you already know where this is going because you’ve been around the block.

[00:16:42] So if they make a typo and you get all the way through this process, there was

[00:16:48] like a two or a three hour delay before we would send you a notification that

[00:16:52] like, Hey, you typed in the address wrong.

[00:16:54] But lots of attrition, I bet.

[00:16:55] Right.

[00:16:56] Yeah.

[00:16:56] Not only that, but when you only own one unit, that’s not your job.

[00:17:00] Like you have other jobs, like you work it like in tech, right?

[00:17:05] You know, if you don’t capture them at that moment or soon after, uh, it’s a

[00:17:11] really bad experience because this person doesn’t have all day to go do this.

[00:17:15] They’re doing other things.

[00:17:18] And so I asked, I was the TPM for this project.

[00:17:20] And I asked my engineers, what could we do here?

[00:17:24] Why is it taking three hours?

[00:17:26] Right.

[00:17:27] And it turns out, and this is going to make you, I hope you have a bucket nearby

[00:17:29] because you might want to tell you this story, but so the reason it was three

[00:17:34] hours long is because, um, they were batching things together.

[00:17:37] You’re like, okay, makes sense.

[00:17:39] And they were batching things together and they were screen scraping.

[00:17:42] And you’re like, Oh my God, how could you do both of those at the same time?

[00:17:45] This sounds so terrible.

[00:17:47] And so, uh, and then they told me it was going to take six months to solve this

[00:17:53] problem and I’m looking at the solution and I’m going, yeah, I guess I understand

[00:17:58] why it will take that long.

[00:17:59] Maybe there was some buffer there, but we couldn’t afford six months.

[00:18:02] So I had to find a way.

[00:18:03] And, and I dug deeper into why there was this delay.

[00:18:08] Why were these batch processes around?

[00:18:12] And, uh, and nobody knew, uh, it was a SQL job.

[00:18:16] That’s all we, so I went to go talk with ops and I said, can you look into this

[00:18:21] job and they, and they said, yeah, I said, what about it?

[00:18:25] It’s been running successfully for a long time.

[00:18:26] I was like, okay, well, that’s good.

[00:18:28] Uh, like how long does it take to run?

[00:18:31] And they’re like, on average, or like the longest it’s ever run.

[00:18:34] And they said, I’d say on average, you’re like nine minutes.

[00:18:37] I was like, wait, what?

[00:18:40] And they said, yeah, it runs about nine minutes and it’s

[00:18:42] scheduled to run every three hours.

[00:18:44] Why do you want it to run more often?

[00:18:47] And I was like, yeah, like how, how often would you permit us to run that?

[00:18:53] They’re like, well, let me go look at three months worth of.

[00:18:56] Like statistics here and how long it’s ever taken to run.

[00:19:00] Right.

[00:19:00] Like that seems reasonable.

[00:19:02] What’s P 95 look like here?

[00:19:04] And they said, the most it’s ever taken to run is like 15 minutes.

[00:19:07] Uh, is every 20 minutes.

[00:19:09] Okay.

[00:19:10] I was like, yeah, that’ll do.

[00:19:12] And so we had an, we had an, okay.

[00:19:14] R, uh, you know, like, and for those who don’t know it stands

[00:19:17] for objective and key results.

[00:19:18] And we had a KR key results for that quarter to reduce their turnaround

[00:19:22] time it took to notify people that their address was invalid.

[00:19:27] And this was one component of that.

[00:19:29] So with zero lines of code, right.

[00:19:35] Because the ops team just reconfigured a job to run more often.

[00:19:39] Yep.

[00:19:39] Our turnaround time goes from three hours to 20 minutes.

[00:19:43] Right.

[00:19:44] With a conversation, just one with a conversation.

[00:19:47] Right.

[00:19:48] And you better believe as a PM, like I’m not going to go after that six month

[00:19:53] user store anymore.

[00:19:54] I’m, I’m like, dude, we got like 80% of what we wanted.

[00:19:58] We’re moving on infinite ROI.

[00:20:02] Yeah.

[00:20:02] So I wasn’t able to deliver the sub-second validation that was the original

[00:20:07] request, but to go from like 180 minutes to 20 minutes, like there is a chance

[00:20:14] that if they started this wizard, because the wizard takes maybe five or 10

[00:20:18] minutes to go through anyway, that I will still be able to capture them before

[00:20:22] they go off and do something else.

[00:20:25] And so for our perspective, it wasn’t like we like knocked it out of the park,

[00:20:29] but man, to spend no engineering effort and to get 80% of the way, get it 80%

[00:20:34] smaller, well, not even 80%, eight times smaller is, is, is, is that’s how I

[00:20:41] found a way, right?

[00:20:42] So like, like I said, I’m doing this live, so I would practice this and it

[00:20:46] would be much shorter, but when you hear that story, like, what do you think

[00:20:53] about the person that’s telling the story?

[00:20:56] I think first, the way that you wove in, like the subtle, like we were talking

[00:21:01] about, it’s not on the nose for the value, right?

[00:21:05] You quickly kind of, uh, you wove that in, in a way that felt authentic and

[00:21:10] true to what the value is actually representing.

[00:21:14] So that’s one, one piece of it.

[00:21:16] Uh, when I hear it, I think, okay, this is a person who, um,

[00:21:23] again, the OKR orientation, the outcome orientation, you know, you’re, you’re

[00:21:30] not jumping to code, you’re not jumping to, uh, you know, try to make your

[00:21:35] developers do, you know, go and go and try to code a new thing to solve the

[00:21:42] problem, you’re not one, uh, solution, one type of solution minded, instead

[00:21:47] you’re focusing on the variety of ways.

[00:21:49] Uh, you know, looking at what is the actual root of the problem and we can

[00:21:54] attack the root of the problem with, again, like, uh, Pareto principle 80

[00:22:00] 20 kind of thing, right?

[00:22:01] So you, uh, you, you accomplish a ginormous lift, uh, recognizing that,

[00:22:10] well, there still is room for improvement, but, uh, product has chosen

[00:22:15] not to pursue it, which is the prerogative.

[00:22:18] And it tells me a little bit about kind of like the power structure that you

[00:22:21] worked in, in the past as well.

[00:22:23] So that kind of gives me some meat on the bone to discuss like, well, you

[00:22:27] know, at our company, maybe product holds a little bit of a different role than

[00:22:31] what you worked in there or whatever.

[00:22:33] Uh, so you’re giving some kind of more than just saying, here’s what I value.

[00:22:39] You’re also saying, here’s how I have worked before.

[00:22:42] Uh, so there’s a lot that comes with this, and this is why I think stories

[00:22:46] are so valuable, uh, because they communicate so much, right?

[00:22:51] This is, this is the key, um, to a great interview is, is really just

[00:22:57] nailing these stories, I think.

[00:22:59] Yeah.

[00:23:00] Stories move the world, right?

[00:23:01] I mean, people write $50 million checks to startup founders based on stories.

[00:23:07] Yep.

[00:23:08] There’s data in there too, right?

[00:23:09] But even if you have the data, if the story is not compelling, like stories

[00:23:13] move people, the data still has to be stitched together, right?

[00:23:17] It still has to tell a narrative of why now and why this, why me, right?

[00:23:25] Uh, why would you give me money to go do this rather than going

[00:23:28] and doing it yourself?

[00:23:30] Yeah.

[00:23:31] So we have, we’ve gone through two of these.

[00:23:33] Uh, do you have time to go through the other two?

[00:23:36] Sure.

[00:23:37] Excellent.

[00:23:38] Uh, so, so we’ve, we’ve gone through, start with human.

[00:23:40] We’ve gone through, find a way.

[00:23:42] Uh, hang on airplane.

[00:23:46] Okay.

[00:23:47] They moved, uh, we’ve gone through, start with human.

[00:23:50] We’ve gone through, find a way.

[00:23:52] Now we’re going to go through, uh, the next one, which is focus wisely.

[00:23:56] And to give a little bit of color, I’ll read a little bit from, again, this is

[00:24:00] on the Calendly, uh, careers page.

[00:24:02] It says, we recognize that all things do not matter equally.

[00:24:05] We are highly analytical in our approach, digging deep to

[00:24:07] discover the top priorities.

[00:24:09] Bootstrap mentality keeps our focus on what is most important.

[00:24:13] We think lean act resourcefully and refuse to compromise on quality.

[00:24:16] So, uh, tell me, tell me about a time, uh, when you had to, uh, choose

[00:24:23] between two really good options.

[00:24:27] Yeah.

[00:24:29] So I’m definitely the kind of person that loves to think about global

[00:24:35] maximum, you know, and I think there’s a lot of leaders that think about

[00:24:38] maximizing their team’s ability to get something done, but there comes a

[00:24:42] time when you look sideways at a sister team and you look at what they’re

[00:24:47] trying to accomplish and you compare it to what your team’s trying to do.

[00:24:50] And if you were the director of the VP and that other team was struggling,

[00:24:56] you would offer some of your team’s resources to help them get things over

[00:24:59] the line, right?

[00:25:00] Cause like, it’s just how the way things play out, right?

[00:25:03] Sometimes we have the huge impactful project in Q3 and then our sister team

[00:25:08] has this huge impactful project in Q4.

[00:25:11] So I remember a time when, uh, my sister team was struggling.

[00:25:16] So I was in a growth org.

[00:25:17] Um, you know, I worked for this engagement team and this other, uh, there

[00:25:22] was another team that was a sister team of mine and they had this huge project.

[00:25:26] And I remember looking at what it was, we were going to deliver and talking

[00:25:29] with my PM about what was left in the quarter.

[00:25:32] We have already planned the quarter out.

[00:25:33] We had our stories lined up.

[00:25:36] And I just remember looking at the stories and being like, I just

[00:25:39] don’t feel like this is, I don’t feel responsible using my resources on the

[00:25:45] things inside my little ring fenced, like, you know, backyard pasture, when

[00:25:51] I see my neighbor and what they’re trying to accomplish and what our

[00:25:54] resources could do for them.

[00:25:56] And so focusing wisely for me in this case was talking to that other engineering

[00:26:04] manager and their PM.

[00:26:05] So we had what’s called a two unto, you know, so we brought, you know, uh, the

[00:26:08] PMs and the engineers together, uh, for sister teams.

[00:26:12] And, and I said, you know, a resounding success for my stories that I’m working

[00:26:18] on are not going to deliver a 10th of the impact if I lend you some of my

[00:26:23] resources to go after this, this big swing you guys are taking.

[00:26:27] And so I want to talk about a proposal we could make to leadership to cut some

[00:26:33] of the scope that we were going to deliver this quarter in favor of lending

[00:26:39] more engineering horsepower to your team.

[00:26:41] Because as it turns out, uh, these two teams were once a single team and they

[00:26:45] had recently split when I joined.

[00:26:47] And so most of the people on both teams had the same domain knowledge.

[00:26:51] So there’s not really a lot of ramp up time.

[00:26:53] You know, they could really kind of pivot pretty quickly, much more

[00:26:57] quickly than other teams could.

[00:26:59] And RPM was kind of a little frustrated about it, you know, which makes sense.

[00:27:03] They said they were going to deliver this.

[00:27:05] And I said, but can you look at me and tell me that if we deliver this at a

[00:27:09] resounding success, that, that our impact will be higher than if we just

[00:27:14] helped this other team and they couldn’t really say it, they were like, no, you’re

[00:27:17] right.

[00:27:18] And so we went to leadership and we said, Hey, um, we want to lend some nonzero

[00:27:25] amount of resources to this team.

[00:27:26] And we have a proposal for how many people that is, but we want to explain

[00:27:30] why, and then we want to get your blessing on this idea.

[00:27:34] And then we want to talk about the minutia of like how much, right?

[00:27:38] Cause there’s an if we should do this.

[00:27:41] And then there’s a, okay, well, how many resources should go over there?

[00:27:44] And that worked really well.

[00:27:47] Uh, and it, not only did it give my team an opportunity to work with people they

[00:27:53] missed working with because the team had split, but it also gave them an

[00:27:58] opportunity on their own reviews that year to write about something that they

[00:28:03] were a part of that was 10 times larger than if they had delivered things on our

[00:28:07] backlog.

[00:28:09] Right.

[00:28:10] And what does that do to their resume and their review and their ability to grow as

[00:28:15] engineers?

[00:28:16] And also what does it do when I can model as a leader, this behavior that

[00:28:22] I shouldn’t just care about what’s on my roadmap.

[00:28:25] I should have this idea of global maxima, just local maxima, right?

[00:28:30] So, uh, not all environments will support that, but that’s environments that I

[00:28:35] look for when I’m interviewing.

[00:28:37] And so I would have kind of weave that into the interview and say, so is that

[00:28:40] type of an, you know, is that type of, uh, behavior something that is, would be

[00:28:45] encouraged at a company like this?

[00:28:47] Like, yeah, the answer is no, then it might not be.

[00:28:50] No, then it might not be a good place for me to take an offer.

[00:28:54] Right.

[00:28:54] And that’s, and I think that’s an important note here is that you’re not, again,

[00:28:59] going back to what you said earlier, I think this is so critical.

[00:29:02] This is not a test.

[00:29:04] You’re not trying to, this is not an essay, right?

[00:29:06] Like, um, you’re not trying to score certain points.

[00:29:10] You are legitimately answering a question, right?

[00:29:15] You’re answering a question in a way that shows, uh, kind of, uh, thinking

[00:29:23] like a spectrum analyzer kind of way of thinking about this is like, where do

[00:29:27] you live on this spectrum for focus wisely?

[00:29:31] Well, I live in this area where I think about global maxima.

[00:29:35] Is that something that makes sense?

[00:29:37] Or, you know, the, the alternative to that somewhere else on the spectrum,

[00:29:40] it’s not necessarily positive or negative.

[00:29:42] It’s more just, you know, how do you operate, right?

[00:29:45] What are your ways of thinking about focus?

[00:29:48] Uh, maybe you focus hardcore and you, um, you know, this is, this is an alternative

[00:29:53] version, uh, you focus very much.

[00:29:55] So you protect your team from outside invaders and it’s not a global maxima.

[00:30:00] It’s, Hey, we have these things to accomplish with our team.

[00:30:04] And maybe that works in particular environments or something.

[00:30:07] I don’t know.

[00:30:08] Um, as a, as a kind of a, again, an illustration here, because we’re

[00:30:13] kind of doing a mock interview.

[00:30:15] I just realized that we didn’t really, uh, preface that I’m going to kind of respond

[00:30:19] as the interviewer might about that specific story you told to see, you know,

[00:30:24] so we can kind of explain, like.

[00:30:26] When you’re prepping these stories, don’t just prep the story.

[00:30:29] And then if you get asked a question about it, you fall apart, right?

[00:30:32] It there, there’s some contextual information.

[00:30:35] So I’m going to ask you a question about that story.

[00:30:38] Um, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen a similar kind of approach where, uh, you know,

[00:30:44] one team can say, Oh, Hey, I see team a is struggling.

[00:30:48] So team B, uh, I lead team B.

[00:30:50] I’m going to give you a couple of my developers for a few months.

[00:30:53] I’ve seen that fail in particularly strange ways.

[00:30:58] Uh, one way that it fails is, uh, if you’re shoveling resources around

[00:31:05] constantly, so there’s not really a sense of continuity for the team.

[00:31:10] And then the second way that I’ve seen this fail is if the other team feels

[00:31:16] threatened by the need for those resources, they feel that their opportunity

[00:31:23] to show that they can succeed has somehow been diminished, that they need

[00:31:29] someone to come help them along.

[00:31:31] So I’m curious, you know, how did you, uh, did you think about those kinds

[00:31:38] of risks when you, when you made this offer and then how did you mitigate those risks?

[00:31:42] Yeah.

[00:31:43] So since that original team, so context here, when I joined this team split,

[00:31:48] this big team split into two small teams.

[00:31:50] So when this event happened, it had not been too long after that.

[00:31:55] So there’s still a strong sense of camaraderie between these two teams.

[00:31:59] In fact, the best way to describe the environment is that they miss working

[00:32:03] with those people that they used to work.

[00:32:05] And so in that sense, there’s an advantage here because this is an

[00:32:09] opportunity to give them something that’s hard to give them after a split,

[00:32:13] which is to like a get the band back together, right?

[00:32:17] Yeah.

[00:32:18] And go work on this thing.

[00:32:20] And, uh, and because they’d worked together for a while and the

[00:32:24] charter basically got split, they already felt ownership for that larger

[00:32:28] charter and we’re getting used to not caring about the whole thing.

[00:32:33] And so there’s this real psychological ownership that existed on that team,

[00:32:37] even before the split.

[00:32:39] And so this opportunity to help the coworkers that they enjoyed working

[00:32:43] with was something that they were looking forward to.

[00:32:47] So that’s one thing to, uh, you know, if we think about what the cellular

[00:32:53] process of mitosis, right?

[00:32:55] Like a cell kind of starts out kind of like a circle and then gets a little

[00:33:00] stretchy, you know, and then the space between them gets a little thinner and

[00:33:04] then boink, you know, they kind of become two cells from, and so that process

[00:33:09] was happening organizationally here.

[00:33:12] So I don’t feel like it was chaos to help them, for them to help their prior

[00:33:18] coworkers get something really important over the finish line.

[00:33:23] And then secondly, in terms of, did that other team feel threatened by that?

[00:33:27] It’s like, not really, you know, this is not some stranger team.

[00:33:31] This is people they’d worked with up until four to eight weeks ago.

[00:33:35] And so they missed working with these people.

[00:33:37] They wanted to work with them.

[00:33:40] And then on top of that, you know, being a growth org, uh, I don’t know, you

[00:33:44] know, in an interview, I wouldn’t be able to assume that the interviewer knows a

[00:33:47] lot about growth orgs in general, but a lot of growth organizations work in

[00:33:51] what’s called an away team capacity, which is to say they work a lot on

[00:33:55] code bases they don’t own.

[00:33:58] And so a growth team kind of goes around and looks at what other teams haven’t

[00:34:03] prioritized for the quarter because of other resources and anything right

[00:34:08] below the cut line, we might volunteer to do work in that code base that belongs

[00:34:13] to another team, we have a good relationship with them and we’ve set up

[00:34:16] some contracts about what’s expected, uh, support ability, things like that.

[00:34:21] And so this idea of helping another team is also sort of embedded into the

[00:34:26] cultural DNA of a growth organization.

[00:34:29] So in that way, the worry about it feeling threatened, it’s like, well, no,

[00:34:33] that other team is actually doing the same thing we’re doing.

[00:34:36] They are volunteering their resources to other orgs, um, in order to work on

[00:34:40] things they don’t have capacity for.

[00:34:43] So since we’re in the process of offering our resources to other teams, they’re a

[00:34:49] lot less likely to feel threatened when they are experiencing the other side of it.

[00:34:54] Yeah.

[00:34:54] It sounds like, it sounds like there’s like a, uh, this is a practice, um,

[00:35:00] like a supported practice in the org.

[00:35:03] And so it’s not an unusual or unexpected thing, uh, for, for that to happen.

[00:35:09] It just so happens that you had the opportunity to, to tap into that, um,

[00:35:16] established way of doing things in order to optimize for the global maximum.

[00:35:22] Yeah, for sure.

[00:35:23] And, and, you know, I’ve been in experiences where that didn’t happen.

[00:35:28] You know, the, the inverse of this for me is, uh, I can’t share the details,

[00:35:33] uh, uh, of the metrics themselves, but when I was once working on a team that

[00:35:38] was in charge of ensuring people buy more crypto, they’ve already bought once.

[00:35:43] We just want to make them make them buy more often.

[00:35:45] And, uh, and then I remembered looking at a startling statistic of an upstream team.

[00:35:51] Okay.

[00:35:52] So in order to, uh, buy crypto, you have to have a payment method, uh, spoiler

[00:35:56] alert, you have to have a way to means to buy things when you want to buy them.

[00:36:00] So, but in crypto, you can’t use a credit card.

[00:36:03] Uh, it’s not allowed.

[00:36:05] So you have to be willing to connect basically your checking

[00:36:08] account to an app to buy crypto.

[00:36:11] Not everybody wants to do that, right?

[00:36:14] Yeah, sure.

[00:36:15] Because if a hack happens and suddenly some, you know, like the, like people

[00:36:19] just go immediately into nightmare scenarios.

[00:36:22] Uh,

[00:36:23] I would think that crypto is, is not the first, like the trust and crypto

[00:36:27] are not the first two things.

[00:36:28] That’s the first word that comes to mind when we, when we think about crypto,

[00:36:31] especially if you, even if you know more about it, the idea of undoing a

[00:36:35] transaction is not really possible.

[00:36:37] Yeah.

[00:36:38] Like not the way ledgers work.

[00:36:39] Right.

[00:36:39] So oops, extra zero too bad.

[00:36:42] Yeah.

[00:36:43] Or oops, send it to, uh, uh, X zero, zero, zero is an address.

[00:36:46] And I just burned something, right?

[00:36:48] Rather than transferring it.

[00:36:49] It just doesn’t exist anymore.

[00:36:50] So, uh, and I remember seeing this really startling statistic, uh, of an upstream

[00:36:57] team about how, what percent of the time when someone tries to add a payment

[00:37:02] method, have they been successful one week later and there’s a number that I

[00:37:07] thought like a percentage in my head that I had, and when I heard what the real

[00:37:10] number was, it was off by a factor of 10, meaning it was 10 times lower than

[00:37:14] I thought it would be.

[00:37:16] And I was like, wait a second.

[00:37:19] In my mind, I’m like, you’re telling me there are millions of people stuck

[00:37:24] behind this ad payment method.

[00:37:26] Damn.

[00:37:29] That want to give us money and haven’t been able to set up their payment method

[00:37:35] yet, and my team is working on all these tiny little features to try and get

[00:37:39] people to buy a little bit more crypto.

[00:37:42] When, if we went and helped that other team with that problem, there would be

[00:37:47] several orders of magnitude, larger of an increase, because if you’ve got, if

[00:37:52] you’ve got, if you’ve got a million people outside your restaurant that want to walk

[00:37:55] in, what do you do?

[00:37:57] You want to make, you make your restaurant bigger, right?

[00:38:00] Or you make the doors wider.

[00:38:02] And I remember thinking, wow, I really, uh, my number one priority now is to

[00:38:09] widen that funnel.

[00:38:11] Like, right.

[00:38:12] If this was an hourglass of sorts, like, how do I make that choke point?

[00:38:16] How do I widen that choke point?

[00:38:18] Because just doing that would be so much more impactful than working

[00:38:23] on these features I have.

[00:38:25] Yeah.

[00:38:25] But that requires being really creative and trying to convince people in other

[00:38:28] orgs to let you work on their code base.

[00:38:30] And not everybody’s comfortable with that.

[00:38:31] So.

[00:38:32] Right.

[00:38:33] Yeah.

[00:38:34] It reminds me of something we were talking about earlier, and I think it

[00:38:37] applies to, um, the, the theory of constraints and really just thinking

[00:38:43] about system, system, uh, variables and where is the bottleneck we’re talking

[00:38:47] about earlier about the, uh, the effectiveness or lack thereof of focusing

[00:38:52] on the technical aspects as not the bottleneck for most, for most of these

[00:38:57] roles, uh, in the same way we can talk about this global maxima idea, uh, of,

[00:39:04] of recognizing where the bottleneck is, uh, for the organization rather than

[00:39:09] bottlenecking at some sub part, right?

[00:39:12] It doesn’t matter how fast your team is running.

[00:39:15] The org can still fail and just so happens your team is a part of it.

[00:39:19] But, um, yeah, now we’re kind of piercing the veil of our, uh, of our

[00:39:23] mock interview a little bit, um, but this is, uh, so, so again, you’ve, you’ve

[00:39:29] shown like, you have such a, um, a good, uh, uh, level or a high level of

[00:39:38] awareness about what these stories mean.

[00:39:40] And contextually, you didn’t memorize a script, I guess is what I’m trying to

[00:39:45] get out.

[00:39:45] Um, you have certain points that you want to hit in the beat of the story, but

[00:39:51] it’s not like you’re reading a script out.

[00:39:52] And then when somebody asks you a question to dig deeper on a particular

[00:39:55] aspect that you fall apart, you’re able to talk about it because you understand

[00:40:00] the story, not because you’ve memorized key points or, or talking points, uh,

[00:40:06] without the context.

[00:40:08] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:40:09] And I think one thing that’s really important to know, like, and you and I

[00:40:13] know this as interviewers, Jonathan, but to share with the audience, it is 90%

[00:40:18] more likely that you will talk too long than you will talk not enough.

[00:40:22] Yeah, right.

[00:40:23] So this, so this is something you told me that actually was, was good reminder

[00:40:29] and something that I had not really thought about in an interview and something

[00:40:33] that, so yeah, go ahead.

[00:40:34] Sorry.

[00:40:35] Yeah.

[00:40:35] So there is no real downside to providing a concise verbal answer and then inviting

[00:40:43] more discussion because it feels more like a conversation rather than a

[00:40:48] soliloquy, right?

[00:40:50] And so, but you and I have both, I’m sure written feedback like, wow, I asked a

[00:40:55] simple question and they went on for 15 minutes and, and in a way that’s factually

[00:41:00] true, but there are not that many interviewers that will interrupt you to

[00:41:05] make sure that we set aside enough time to get through everything we should get

[00:41:10] through.

[00:41:11] So there are people out there that if you talk too long, they won’t stop you.

[00:41:14] Right.

[00:41:15] Yeah.

[00:41:16] So you want to eliminate that risk and tactically the way to do that is to have

[00:41:20] a concise answer and then not to say, would you like to go deeper, but just

[00:41:25] assume they want to, where would you like to go deeper, you know, or where would

[00:41:30] you like to, you know, what details would you like to know?

[00:41:33] And that making your responses more concise means you can’t get too far away

[00:41:39] from what the interviewer wants to hear.

[00:41:41] As long as you’re asking these check-in questions, you go and you’ll never get

[00:41:45] penalized for a concise answer with a check-in question.

[00:41:52] And because this goes back to, yeah, but I was just going to say it goes back to

[00:41:56] the signal discussion, right?

[00:41:58] Because do you have the signal you need or do we need to go deeper?

[00:42:01] Right.

[00:42:02] And, and our default is likely to keep providing signal and keep providing

[00:42:07] signal like, like we’re a hose that they turned on, right?

[00:42:11] Uh, and, and, and we’ll just wait for them to move it along.

[00:42:14] But actually what we should be doing is we understand if you walk into an

[00:42:19] interview and you recognize, okay, this person has, let’s say, you know, 10

[00:42:23] things that they need signal on.

[00:42:27] And in order for us to get through all 10 of them, we might need

[00:42:31] every minute of this interview.

[00:42:33] You want to get to all 10 of those.

[00:42:36] You want the signal to be there because if you only get through, let’s say a

[00:42:40] third and, uh, make no mistake about it.

[00:42:44] Some things you’re going to be weaker on than you are on other things.

[00:42:47] Let’s imagine that the first third that you go through, you’re weaker on.

[00:42:50] Then you would have been the second and third thirds, you know, the

[00:42:55] latter part of the interview.

[00:42:58] Then you’ve lost the opportunity to show your strengths, right?

[00:43:02] So you’re not able to get to the important stuff.

[00:43:05] And now in the debrief, when, when they’re looking at you versus

[00:43:09] another candidate that maybe has mediocre performance, but they

[00:43:13] got to all of the questions, they have signal across everything.

[00:43:18] They’re likely to pick the other candidate to move forward.

[00:43:21] Is that, does that square?

[00:43:23] Does that seem correct to you?

[00:43:24] Yeah.

[00:43:25] I mean, do you want to work with the person that rambles on?

[00:43:28] Of course not.

[00:43:29] Like in standup, when standup is supposed to be like seven minutes

[00:43:33] and this person takes seven minutes themselves, right?

[00:43:36] Yeah, exactly.

[00:43:37] Like, remember we want to demonstrate behaviors that make it that sort of

[00:43:41] accomplished that answer this competence question, but that also

[00:43:44] passed this sort of coworker test, right?

[00:43:46] Do I want to work with this person?

[00:43:49] And that is often harder to describe an interview feedback, but I know you felt

[00:43:55] it, like some of these interviews we take, we’re like, man, I wish I had an opening.

[00:44:00] I’m going to write this person’s name on a post-it note somewhere.

[00:44:03] And if I moved to another company and we get an opening, I’m, I’m finding

[00:44:06] calling them and saying, dude, you need to come here because you’re amazing.

[00:44:13] Because interestingly, I would say I’ve even had interviewers that

[00:44:17] I would put in that category.

[00:44:19] Uh, but that’s it.

[00:44:20] That’s a different discussion.

[00:44:21] No.

[00:44:21] Yeah.

[00:44:22] Like I’ve done it the same way.

[00:44:23] I gave a really good interview experience to a few people at Coinbase and, uh, they

[00:44:28] off, they ended up not getting the offer.

[00:44:30] Um, but they worked, they reached out to me later cause they wanted to work

[00:44:33] with me in a different capacity.

[00:44:35] So it happens for sure.

[00:44:36] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:44:39] We’ll be right back with a continuation of my interview with Brian.

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[00:46:07] That’s G E T unblocked.com.

[00:46:32] This episode is probably going to be cut into two parts and then we’ll do another

[00:46:37] interview because what we really wanted to get into is this idea of, of starting out.

[00:46:44] What is the first 30 or 60 or 90 days, you know, like the, the infamous first 90 days

[00:46:53] book that’s sitting on my desk right now.

[00:46:55] Literally I’m looking at it and I’m looking at it and I’m looking at it and I’m

[00:46:58] really want to dig into that stuff with you in the next interview probably.

[00:47:03] And we’ll cut this one into two parts, but let’s, let’s get into this last, this

[00:47:07] last value and see how this, you know, what, what kind of story you could match to

[00:47:14] this particular value strive for excellence, a little bit of context.

[00:47:19] We are self-starters who crave empowerment, actively pursue opportunities for

[00:47:23] impact, and we’re going to get into that in the next interview, but we’re going to

[00:47:27] pursue opportunities for impact, take initiative, et cetera.

[00:47:30] This is the one that you kind of already mentioned.

[00:47:33] Uh, you’re looking for excellence, right?

[00:47:35] Yeah.

[00:47:36] So tell me about a time that this might be the question.

[00:47:39] Tell me about a time when, uh, you really needed to, uh, go one step further than

[00:47:49] maybe what the base level expectation or what the specs said to go.

[00:47:53] Yeah.

[00:47:54] So I’m the kind of person who runs every role that I have

[00:48:02] in a very people forward manner.

[00:48:04] So when I joined Zillow, I joined as a technical PM, uh, on the CICD team.

[00:48:10] So for those that aren’t familiar, it’s like continuous integration, continuous

[00:48:13] development, building deployment team, basically.

[00:48:16] So a lot of tech companies have a team, uh, chartered with owning the pipeline

[00:48:22] so that all the other teams can push their code, right.

[00:48:26] You can push it to test environments, share test environments.

[00:48:28] They have this, the idea of staging or production, um, productions, usually

[00:48:32] handled by ops, uh, depending on the culture of the company.

[00:48:36] So I joined this company as a TPM.

[00:48:39] And one of the first things any decent PM does is, especially if they own a

[00:48:43] platform team is go talk to people.

[00:48:45] You’re going to introduce yourself and ask them, Hey, I’m new here.

[00:48:50] Uh, what do you like about what we offer as a team and what like makes your

[00:48:55] blood boil in terms of pain points, you know, and being a new guy, you can rail

[00:48:59] on me as hard as you want, right?

[00:49:01] I have no skin in this game.

[00:49:02] I didn’t make these features.

[00:49:04] Um, you know, I didn’t write these specs and I got a very vivid, consistent

[00:49:09] picture that went something like what you offer is so awful that I am investing

[00:49:17] money out of my own budget to buy an alternative, even though yours is free.

[00:49:23] I was like, wow.

[00:49:24] Okay.

[00:49:25] Uh, so tell me more about that.

[00:49:28] And it turned out that we had built a system and tried to support it for a long

[00:49:32] time without doing a lot of, without addressing technical debt and you know,

[00:49:36] there’s side effects to that.

[00:49:38] We, we were using Jenkins and, uh, there was a highly variable amount of time

[00:49:42] between when you committed and when it deploy started.

[00:49:45] Well, if you know, CICD there, the C in there stands for continuous, which is

[00:49:50] to say that it shouldn’t be very long between a commit and when it deploy

[00:49:54] starts in your pipeline and, uh, our dashboards had told us that, you know,

[00:50:00] these delays were something like five minutes to 45 minutes, um, 45 minutes

[00:50:06] is a long time to wait for a CICD pipeline.

[00:50:09] Uh, it basically was not meeting what I considered an

[00:50:14] acceptable bar, like these people don’t consider this.

[00:50:17] Not only is it long, but it’s inconsistently long.

[00:50:21] And in some way the inconsistency is worse than the duration.

[00:50:24] It always took 20 minutes.

[00:50:26] An engineer could go read a PR, like go give some feedback, right?

[00:50:30] Go open a design doc, go to a standup, do something, but when it’s inconsistent

[00:50:35] and highly variable and it could be long, it’s like insult to injury.

[00:50:40] So the first thing I did is I partnered with, uh, some of the more

[00:50:45] technical people on my team, my principal engineers, I had two.

[00:50:48] And we talked about what are we going to do here to raise the bar on excellence?

[00:50:54] Um, and it took a while, but we refactored, we significantly refactored

[00:51:00] what it is our customers were exposed to.

[00:51:03] They were actually exposed to how we were storing our data in YAML files,

[00:51:06] which was kind of terrible because we couldn’t make a data change without

[00:51:09] them having to change the way they did things.

[00:51:12] So we had to create a bunch of wrappers.

[00:51:14] And once we’d done that, uh, and refactored everything behind the scenes,

[00:51:19] uh, we got our P nine D delay from commit to deploy start down to under three

[00:51:25] minutes, uh, and while supporting a 10 X increase in deployed volume.

[00:51:32] So 10 times as many deploy requests coming through the pipeline.

[00:51:36] And instead of up to 45 minutes being, uh, P 90 being something like 15

[00:51:42] times faster under 10 times the load.

[00:51:46] So, you know, I don’t think nobody told me and sat me down.

[00:51:51] My boss didn’t say, you need to go make these happen.

[00:51:55] But when we started thinking about what’s the right thing to do to encourage

[00:51:58] people to submit smaller PRS, it is certainly make, make the right thing.

[00:52:04] The cheap thing.

[00:52:06] Yes.

[00:52:06] And so our solution with this highly variable and very lengthy delay was

[00:52:12] encouraging people to create larger PRS because they didn’t want to have to wait.

[00:52:17] So it’s like, well, that’s working against the spirit that

[00:52:21] we’re trying to achieve here.

[00:52:23] Right.

[00:52:23] So what would, what would a delighted customer see in terms of a measurable,

[00:52:31] uh, success criteria around stability, you know, performance and friction.

[00:52:37] And so once I did these interviews, you know, our new mission became, you know,

[00:52:42] we provide stable, fast, low friction developer experiences for all

[00:52:47] engineering teams at Zillow and all of those adjectives had metrics.

[00:52:51] And when we met those metrics, we raised the bar and, uh, no one told us to, but

[00:52:56] it was the right thing to do.

[00:52:58] So, uh, there’s what we need to do to be acceptable.

[00:53:02] And then there’s what we should offer, especially.

[00:53:06] And in our case, we just saw our team as the pit crew, right.

[00:53:09] For the race cars and these engineering teams are race cars.

[00:53:13] And when they pit and they need to submit a deploy, the longer it takes, like the

[00:53:18] more our competitors are catching up to us.

[00:53:20] So once we instilled that kind of culture, then what we went after was a

[00:53:25] lot higher than we were expecting to.

[00:53:28] So that tells me, uh, as your interviewer, that tells me one, you understand, uh,

[00:53:36] excellence, um, in the way that I probably was asking about this idea that

[00:53:42] there’s some quality that is not necessarily explicitly defined.

[00:53:48] You don’t have to have everything, you know, handed to you in order to

[00:53:52] make a judgment call, right?

[00:53:54] There’s an interesting wrinkle in this, and I’m curious what your thoughts are.

[00:53:58] This idea that there are bars that we set, uh, that you have some intuition

[00:54:07] that 45 minutes is too long.

[00:54:09] Three minutes is much better and probably acceptable.

[00:54:13] We’re going to continue raising a bar, but you know, that idea, you know,

[00:54:19] of there being some, um, art to that, uh, I’m curious, you know, where would

[00:54:28] that line be?

[00:54:29] How do you, how do you define what if it was 20 minutes or what if it was 15?

[00:54:35] You know, where do you, um, you know, how do you, how do you develop that intuition?

[00:54:39] It might be a question I would ask as, as an interviewer here.

[00:54:43] Yeah.

[00:54:43] So I had never worked in a bar before, but I had never worked in a bar before.

[00:54:49] I’d never worked in a CICD team before I joined that team.

[00:54:52] So I didn’t know what was reasonable when I started either.

[00:54:56] Uh, but when I went and met representatives from probably like 25 to 30 of the 35

[00:55:03] engineering teams at the company, you know, a pattern emerges and, and the

[00:55:07] types of questions we ask are, well, what sucks about what we offer and what, what

[00:55:14] would it look like for it to be a great experience for you?

[00:55:18] No, and I think you’re probably familiar, Jonathan, like the law of five, right?

[00:55:21] There’s this idea that if you take five data points, the odds that the median is

[00:55:26] somewhere between the min and the max of those five data points is something like

[00:55:30] 95%, I can’t remember what the exact terminology is, but in a situation like

[00:55:36] this, when you ask like, what is a reasonable commit to deploy start delay,

[00:55:41] you’re going to get a range of numbers.

[00:55:43] Uh, and the reasonable one is probably somewhere in between that range.

[00:55:49] And then when you go back and you talk with the team and you say, okay, well,

[00:55:51] what can we accomplish?

[00:55:54] And then, and then we say, well, this is what we could do quickly.

[00:55:57] And then you ask, well, like, what, what would it take to, for you to be

[00:56:01] proud of what we’ve done here?

[00:56:03] Like not that just, we got the work done, but like, what’s the bar that’s

[00:56:06] exciting for you to go after that makes you want to put that impact statement on

[00:56:11] your resume, like when you move on to another job where you feel like you can

[00:56:15] kind of boast about how amazing we made this because I think a lot of people

[00:56:20] settle for, I’m going to insult people in an entire state when I say this, but

[00:56:25] like, I don’t have like a lot of interest in going to New Jersey.

[00:56:29] So like, if I have to do a lot of work to win a trip to New Jersey, um, I’m not

[00:56:34] going to work hard for it.

[00:56:35] Um, I’m sure people could say that about a lot of other things, but if you tell

[00:56:39] me that I could win a week long catamaran trip in the Mediterranean, I

[00:56:44] will probably run through a few brick walls to make that happen.

[00:56:47] Right.

[00:56:47] And so there’s this idea that, and yes, there is a bit of judgment and data

[00:56:53] that it needs to be compelling, but also feasible and exciting.

[00:56:58] It needs to be something that outsizes our resources, but not our intellect.

[00:57:06] Right.

[00:57:07] This is a Simon Sinek quote, right?

[00:57:08] Like if you, if a leader can give somebody problems, a team that outsizes

[00:57:12] their resources, but not their intellect, then people will do everything they

[00:57:15] can to go after that problem.

[00:57:17] You have to give them something exciting to achieve.

[00:57:20] And sometimes that thing is harder to achieve, but we’re more excited to achieve it.

[00:57:27] And it gives, I think so.

[00:57:29] Yeah.

[00:57:29] I think, uh, you know, part of, part of the question is, uh, you know, how do you,

[00:57:35] how do you pick?

[00:57:36] And then the other, the other part of the question is kind of like, how do you,

[00:57:39] how do you choose a threshold?

[00:57:40] But I don’t think that is necessarily the insightful one.

[00:57:45] I think to your point, there’s the threshold is what, what is exciting?

[00:57:51] Like what, there is a problem here.

[00:57:53] Let’s set a threshold that gets us to a place where we collectively are, are

[00:57:59] happy or excited about the accomplishment that we’ve made, which may be going from

[00:58:04] three hours to 30 minutes, right?

[00:58:08] If you had a three hour CI CD process, cutting that down to 30 minutes is a

[00:58:12] massive improvement where 30 minutes may be again, intuitively bad at another place.

[00:58:18] There’s a lot of subjective kind of experience based things, uh, to, to deal

[00:58:24] with in this kind of situation.

[00:58:26] But, um, I think your, your heuristics are good on their own.

[00:58:31] Uh, the idea that, you know, you’re, you’re not necessarily, um, you’re not

[00:58:38] necessarily beholden to a specific number at every place.

[00:58:40] In other words, you go to another job, you encounter a similar problem.

[00:58:44] Three minutes is not necessarily going to be your new standard that

[00:58:46] everybody has to meet from now on.

[00:58:48] Correct.

[00:58:48] Yeah.

[00:58:49] There’s a crawl, walk, run approach here.

[00:58:50] Right.

[00:58:51] So there’s a, like, how far away from running are we?

[00:58:54] And do we, can we make the investment is running necessary, right?

[00:59:00] Right.

[00:59:00] I don’t need to run in my kitchen.

[00:59:01] My kitchen is not that big.

[00:59:04] Walking in my kitchen is sufficient, like, in fact, it might be quite

[00:59:07] dangerous to run in my kitchen, depending on what I’m holding in my hand.

[00:59:10] Right.

[00:59:11] So I may not even want that, but, you know, what I experienced in that

[00:59:17] environment was a, people don’t really trust us to build the right thing

[00:59:22] because what we’re offering is so far away from their expectations.

[00:59:26] Okay.

[00:59:27] So what is it?

[00:59:28] What are their expectations?

[00:59:30] Right.

[00:59:31] And what can we do to quickly make small improvements and in parallel, set up

[00:59:38] things to make a larger improvement so that we can earn back the trust for them

[00:59:42] to share feedback with us that they weren’t even, they wouldn’t even trust

[00:59:46] us with at the beginning, you know?

[00:59:48] Yeah.

[00:59:48] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:59:49] And how do we build those relationships and then show them that we are

[00:59:52] like a partner in them, right?

[00:59:55] Right.

[00:59:56] Like, and this is where this idea of using a pit crew analogy was very

[01:00:00] compelling, that it’s like, you don’t have to be the race car driver to

[01:00:03] contribute to these teams, but if you have a bad pit crew, like you can lose races.

[01:00:09] Right.

[01:00:10] I wanted, I wanted our team to feel that sense of like, this pit crew is really

[01:00:15] about like, how quickly can we get these teams back out on the track because the

[01:00:18] other teams are not pitting, like red is not pitting as often as we are.

[01:00:23] If our system is slower than our experimentation, feedback loop is

[01:00:27] slower, and at that feedback loop is slower, we are learning more slowly

[01:00:30] what works compared to our competitors.

[01:00:33] So what can we do to excite people about working on shared library dependencies,

[01:00:40] which is not the sexiest topic for a lot of people, even if you are an engineer.

[01:00:45] So that’s how, that’s how we found a way to make the work meaningful,

[01:00:50] like to give people a sense of purpose.

[01:00:52] Yeah.

[01:00:53] Yeah.

[01:00:53] There’s the, as a manager, I often think about resume driven development, right?

[01:00:58] It’s this idea that like, what is something that we could say, this is bad

[01:01:02] enough that we could put it on our resume if we improve it to this point.

[01:01:08] And I know that, of course, that’s not the only determining factor,

[01:01:11] but it’s a good heuristic, right?

[01:01:12] It’s would I be proud enough of, of this work to talk about it in an interview

[01:01:18] setting, if not, then why not?

[01:01:22] Like what’s, that’s not the, again, not the only thing you would, you

[01:01:26] would want to ask about, but in, in a question like this, the excellence

[01:01:29] question, absolutely, absolutely.

[01:01:32] That would be the kind of thing that you would want to focus on as, you know,

[01:01:36] it’s something that would, that would land on your resume, as a

[01:01:40] way of talking about excellence.

[01:01:43] So again, I guess kind of zooming out of this, of this mock interview.

[01:01:49] For a second and reiterating the importance of these, of the story driven

[01:01:54] approach and practicing these stories, practicing, understanding the

[01:01:59] context for your own stories, you’d be surprised the number of people that

[01:02:05] I’ve encountered in interviewing where they would tell a story, but then if

[01:02:10] you ask them a question or a follow-up, it was almost like talking to two

[01:02:14] different people, so that’s why I wanted to kind of go into those, those

[01:02:18] follow-up questions with you.

[01:02:19] Uh, Brian, I’m curious, um, before we, we close out, uh, this, this

[01:02:25] part of the interview, what is one thing?

[01:02:28] And let’s, let’s talk about, okay, you’ve, you’ve gone over the hurdle.

[01:02:32] And I know we, we didn’t cover resumes or anything like that yet.

[01:02:35] We can talk about that stuff in the next, next part of this, but let’s

[01:02:38] imagine that somebody has, has gone through this process.

[01:02:41] They’ve gone through, you know, they’ve used some of these tactics.

[01:02:43] We talked about, they’ve gotten an offer.

[01:02:46] They liked the offer.

[01:02:47] We’re making a bunch of assumptions here, right?

[01:02:49] Uh, fast forwarding, but we’re getting close to day one of this job.

[01:02:54] Is there one piece of advice for somebody who’s launching into a new role?

[01:03:00] One piece of advice that you would give them, uh, to, to start out well.

[01:03:07] Yeah.

[01:03:08] You know, when we join as an engineer in a new company, we tend to think

[01:03:18] from a scarcity mindset, right?

[01:03:20] We say, how long is it going to take me to get up to speed?

[01:03:24] I need to onboard.

[01:03:25] I need to ramp.

[01:03:26] How quickly can I ramp?

[01:03:27] Like there’s this sense that you’re, there’s not a lot you can offer because

[01:03:31] you believe that the only thing you can offer is to push a PR, right?

[01:03:37] Yep.

[01:03:38] Uh, and there’s so much more that you can offer, uh, that is not pushing a

[01:03:44] PR that you could do in your first week.

[01:03:46] Uh, so I want to make some assumptions since you made some already.

[01:03:50] So, yeah, of course to do so.

[01:03:52] Sure.

[01:03:53] So let’s say you’re coming in at more of a senior role.

[01:03:55] So you’re not, you know, you know, and by senior, I mean, I’m expected to

[01:04:00] amplify the impact of the people around me.

[01:04:03] I’m expected to mentor and coach more junior people.

[01:04:06] Uh, the most valuable thing I can do every minute of the day is probably

[01:04:11] not always writing code as a senior.

[01:04:14] There’s other things.

[01:04:16] That are sometimes more valuable, like convincing, um, an art director to

[01:04:20] not re-render art, that’s not necessary.

[01:04:22] And, uh, and a lot of those things you can observe a lot in your first couple

[01:04:29] weeks and compare it to what you expected to see, right?

[01:04:34] Like if you think about, let’s just take a simple, like three-legged stool

[01:04:38] approach, like people product process, you join a new team, if you’re a senior,

[01:04:42] you have a sense of what a senior should know at this company or what a staff

[01:04:47] engineer does, or what a college hires capability is, and you should just

[01:04:51] listen, right, and ask questions and observe a lot and document what you’re

[01:04:57] seeing.

[01:04:58] Now this may be a little bit more lab coat, right?

[01:05:00] You know, observe what you’re seeing.

[01:05:02] And I don’t know if we ever talked about this onboarding exercise.

[01:05:07] I think we might do that in our next session, but this idea of just writing

[01:05:11] down observations, good observations, things that are working well, things

[01:05:14] that aren’t working well, things that are confusing to you, and then just

[01:05:18] gathering them up and then talking with your manager about them in your first

[01:05:22] 30 days, you know, you have your next one-on-one, you’re like, I have this

[01:05:25] list, I want you to look at it, uh, before we meet, and then I want to talk about

[01:05:29] them and that in your observations and sharing what you think is doing great

[01:05:36] and what is not doing great, the signal you get back from your manager will help

[01:05:41] calibrate you to the, like, what the expectations are in this team.

[01:05:46] And, um, I think as a leader, like we’ve never talked about this before, but I

[01:05:51] think you’d probably agree that 90% or more of performance issues come from a

[01:05:56] lack of crystal clear alignment on expectations between direct and their

[01:06:01] manager, right?

[01:06:02] Yeah, if not more.

[01:06:04] If not more.

[01:06:05] And so in a way, just like we use this sort of check-in question in an

[01:06:09] interview, which is kind of like Marco Polo, right?

[01:06:11] We say Marco, and then if we realize the interviewer’s way on the other side of

[01:06:14] the pool, we’re like, oh, we got to get closer.

[01:06:17] We don’t want that distance to be too far.

[01:06:19] You don’t want the distance to be too far when you join a new company there.

[01:06:23] So you want to share what you’re observing, like as a Marco, and then

[01:06:28] listen to what your boss says as the Polo, because you’re calibrating

[01:06:33] yourself on what your leader’s expectations are of what you’re going to do.

[01:06:37] You know what?

[01:06:38] Yeah.

[01:06:39] I’ve seen senior engineers that write half the code for a team.

[01:06:42] And I’ve seen engine senior engineers that write, you know, a 10th of the code

[01:06:47] for a team, even on the same team size, right?

[01:06:49] Because what they were expected to do was just different.

[01:06:54] One of those teams where he didn’t write a lot of code, it was like, uh, he had

[01:06:58] to help a sister team as the architect because they didn’t have any seniors.

[01:07:02] And so he had to build a system from scratch.

[01:07:05] Uh, but that was a lot of training that other team on how to be self-sufficient.

[01:07:10] Well, it’s not like writing a lot of code, right?

[01:07:12] That’s sitting down and talking about sound principles, first design, how

[01:07:17] to analyze the system, all that other stuff.

[01:07:20] So there’s one piece of feedback.

[01:07:21] I would say, don’t assume you can’t contribute, but the way you contribute

[01:07:27] might be to have conversations on your observations and then calibrate to make

[01:07:33] sure that the distance between you and your boss on what you expect success

[01:07:38] looks like as small as possible.

[01:07:41] Yeah.

[01:07:41] I’ll, uh, reference the first 90 days here for a second.

[01:07:44] I’m curious what your thoughts are on this.

[01:07:46] Cause I think it’s, it kind of, uh, echoes what you’re saying.

[01:07:50] Um, but it has, has this straight, this kind of odd.

[01:07:54] And for some people, I think even off putting way of putting, of, of

[01:07:58] explaining this or articulating it, they say to negotiate success, uh, or I

[01:08:06] guess he, Michael Watkins, who wrote the book, um, he refers to it as negotiating

[01:08:11] success.

[01:08:12] So the idea being that you meet with your boss and you talk about, okay, what

[01:08:15] does success look like and perhaps adjust those expectations on both sides.

[01:08:21] So you get a little bit of a change in, let’s say your boss thinks that

[01:08:25] success is, you know, you bringing that, uh, CI CD, CD time down to under one

[01:08:31] minute, uh, we might want to negotiate that, uh, up a little bit or, uh, getting,

[01:08:36] well, like, like you said, alignment maybe is a better, I think a more

[01:08:40] palatable way of thinking about is how can you negotiate success?

[01:08:44] Success is, uh, maybe, uh, defined outside of the negotiation table.

[01:08:49] But I think, uh, negotiating what your expectations are.

[01:08:55] That does track for me.

[01:08:56] What, what do you think about the language that he uses in the book for that?

[01:09:00] Yeah.

[01:09:00] So I’m a big fan of the first 90 days.

[01:09:02] Like, you know, I am, but, um, with some caveats, right?

[01:09:06] Yeah.

[01:09:06] With some caveats.

[01:09:07] Uh, I think the first third of the book is really good, you know, in a way that

[01:09:12] it helps to identify what scenario like is, are you in startup or, you know,

[01:09:19] are you in this, whatever, you know, it’s the stars, uh, is the acronym

[01:09:22] they use in the book, but, uh, and I think that’s helpful because there’s

[01:09:28] some ramifications about what you should index on that doesn’t require a

[01:09:33] lot of data for you to collect.

[01:09:36] Right.

[01:09:36] I took a picture of that page in the book and I sent it to my boss and my

[01:09:40] skip level and I say, we’re in one, we’re in, we’re in a right.

[01:09:45] Yeah.

[01:09:45] I wanted to hear from both of them, both my, my senior manager, my director

[01:09:49] that they gave me the same answer.

[01:09:50] In fact, it was very important that I heard the same answer.

[01:09:53] So I wanted to make sure, uh, they had alignment, right?

[01:09:56] Yes.

[01:09:57] Yeah.

[01:09:58] And when I did, it told me a lot about what to go after.

[01:10:01] Um, but I did have to negotiate success like, uh, uh, 10 days, 14 days, 14 days

[01:10:08] into my, that job, my boss came to me and said, I want to give you

[01:10:14] seven more direct reports at the time.

[01:10:17] So they wanted to go from six to 13.

[01:10:20] Uh, and I had to negotiate success.

[01:10:24] Now, maybe I didn’t do a good job.

[01:10:25] I’ll tell you what I did.

[01:10:26] You can tell me.

[01:10:27] So, uh, I mean, I got laid off, but I wanted to, so I’m not sure what that means.

[01:10:32] So I asked my boss, I said, how important it is to you that I have a successful

[01:10:38] first six months or first 12 months of this company, like, and I don’t mean

[01:10:43] like that you care about me and like, how important is it to your career?

[01:10:47] Like as a manager that the managers underneath you are successful.

[01:10:52] Um, and he says, it’s very important.

[01:10:55] I was like, okay.

[01:10:56] And I said, uh, if we have a scale rating of one to five for employee performance

[01:11:03] here, and I don’t remember if we did, but let’s just pretend we did.

[01:11:05] I said, if you give me these people, what do you think the impact is to my

[01:11:10] performance rating, like just as a baseline, he’s like, what do you mean?

[01:11:14] I was like, well, imagine an AB test where you didn’t give me this team and

[01:11:18] what, and what kind of performance ceiling I have, and you give me this team.

[01:11:21] He’s like, yeah, you’re probably going to take at least a one

[01:11:23] point hit on your performance.

[01:11:25] Um, it’s like, so if I could get a four without this new team at best case

[01:11:30] scenario, then the best case scenario I could get, if you give me, if you double

[01:11:34] my team sizes, a three, and he’s like, yeah, that sounds about right.

[01:11:38] I was like, do you want the ceiling of my success to be a three in the

[01:11:43] first 12 months of me working at this company?

[01:11:46] And he said, no.

[01:11:50] And I said, and in that case, what I hear you saying is that we

[01:11:54] shouldn’t give me these people.

[01:11:57] And he said, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying.

[01:12:01] I was like, okay.

[01:12:02] Like I’m open to expanding my span of control, but I don’t know if like in

[01:12:08] the first two weeks of this job is the right time to accept this.

[01:12:12] What do you think?

[01:12:13] What do you think?

[01:12:14] You know, and I sort of had to use his own logic against him.

[01:12:21] And I’m really glad I didn’t, but, um, I probably could have shown a more impact

[01:12:24] if I did, but I don’t think I would have been successful at all, just allowed

[01:12:28] them to give me that and not negotiate.

[01:12:30] Yeah.

[01:12:30] I think it’s a valid response, right?

[01:12:33] I think it’s, I think you’re correct about what you’re saying.

[01:12:36] I imagine the feeling for your boss was like, Oh, like a little deflated that

[01:12:44] the, this didn’t pan out the way that he was most, most managers I’ve met myself

[01:12:49] included are hoping often hoping that I ask somebody to do something like that.

[01:12:56] And they step up to the challenge and somehow some way that I don’t necessarily

[01:13:02] have direct impact over or control over, they hit a four with those seven extra

[01:13:07] people, right?

[01:13:09] Like that’s, that’s the, that’s the hope.

[01:13:12] And, and of course that doesn’t make sense.

[01:13:14] And you kind of showed him that that doesn’t make sense.

[01:13:17] Uh, so in that regard, I think it, I think that worked great, right?

[01:13:20] Like you came out of it without being overloaded.

[01:13:23] Um, he came out of it, having made the argument for you to not have the

[01:13:28] reports, uh, when he had walked in asking you to have the reports.

[01:13:33] And I think, yeah, I mean, I, many people might say, Oh, that’s an, that’s an

[01:13:38] opportunity, but I think you actually showed your manager.

[01:13:43] My goal is not just to chase opportunity for the sake of opportunity in that

[01:13:47] situation, uh, but instead to say, no, I want to actually meet a level of

[01:13:53] excellence, going back to our earlier conversation that’s acceptable.

[01:13:57] That’s, that’s where we set the bar.

[01:13:59] So if I’m not going to be able to do that with these people, do you still

[01:14:04] want me to move forward with that?

[01:14:06] Yeah.

[01:14:07] Yeah.

[01:14:07] And I did, I probably lose out on career velocity.

[01:14:10] Absolutely.

[01:14:10] You know, I’m sure like, and I’d taken on 13 direct reports.

[01:14:14] Maybe I would have got promoted to senior manager.

[01:14:17] Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten laid off.

[01:14:19] Uh, but you know, I’m being a thousand years old now in tech terms.

[01:14:28] I’m very clear what it is I want.

[01:14:30] Right.

[01:14:30] And the type of environment I got to thrive in and, uh, and to, and

[01:14:37] to just say, yes, boss, and to accept those people, a lot of people would

[01:14:41] make a different decision there, but, um, it’s not what I was looking for.

[01:14:46] I didn’t want to look back and say, I wish I said no, and things would have

[01:14:50] been better because it would sacrifice my ability to lead people in a way that

[01:14:57] I feel like philosophically is the way I want to lead people.

[01:15:00] Like I’m a very people forward leader.

[01:15:02] Anyone who’s worked with me will tell you this and that has implications.

[01:15:07] Uh, you know, we went through an exercise to identify your strengths.

[01:15:11] I’ve done that with every direct report I’ve ever had.

[01:15:13] Uh, and, and to have that kind of insight into every direct report and

[01:15:19] then to be able to look at the team structure of who’s good at what.

[01:15:22] You know, if we look for the strengths that overlap, what is the most

[01:15:27] overlapping strength on our team that starts to suggest the type of culture

[01:15:33] or team norms that we want to enforce.

[01:15:36] Yep.

[01:15:37] Um, and so I want to be able to devote enough time to my individuals.

[01:15:42] And I didn’t feel like having 13 direct reports is going to let me be able to

[01:15:45] lead the way that I felt was most important to lead the way I wanted to lead.

[01:15:51] And that was the conscious choice on my part, but, um, yeah, people, other

[01:15:56] people would make a different decision.

[01:15:58] And that doesn’t mean that my decision is wrong.

[01:16:01] It just was wrong for me.

[01:16:03] Right.

[01:16:04] Well, and I think, uh, I think that, well, this started out as a question

[01:16:12] about, uh, the first, the, the first, like initial, uh, I guess,

[01:16:18] like first week on the job, but, uh, I think your point about negotiating

[01:16:25] success in this particular manner, uh, you have an opportunity in that moment

[01:16:33] to kind of set the tone and expectation.

[01:16:35] I, there was a manager I worked with one time and, uh, this particular, the

[01:16:42] company I was, I worked with, uh, at the time was mostly remote, um, they had

[01:16:50] kind of a central group of people who worked, uh, in the, in mountain mountain

[01:16:56] time, uh, and this particular person worked Eastern time and periodically

[01:17:04] the company would ask people to travel, uh, for, for like summits or her, you

[01:17:10] know, all hands kind of stuff.

[01:17:12] Okay.

[01:17:13] This person doesn’t like traveling for work.

[01:17:16] And so right up front, they kind of negotiated this position of, I

[01:17:23] don’t really do that.

[01:17:24] I don’t really travel now, uh, hear me clearly.

[01:17:28] I don’t necessarily think this is like a good negotiating position to take per

[01:17:32] se, uh, if your company’s asking you to travel and that was part of the

[01:17:36] expectations when you were hired.

[01:17:37] And it was probably a tough sell, but this person was able to successfully

[01:17:42] do that so that now, uh, when it’s time to travel for most people, this person

[01:17:49] just doesn’t have to do it.

[01:17:51] Um, now to your point, like when you’re negotiating, that’s not a, let’s

[01:17:57] see everything that I can get.

[01:17:59] There’s a two-sided part of that conversation.

[01:18:01] You are also giving something up potentially, right?

[01:18:05] Yeah, there’s a trade-off.

[01:18:07] Yeah, absolutely.

[01:18:08] Okay, Brian, I think we could talk for another three hours and we wouldn’t get

[01:18:11] through everything that we have that we could talk about here.

[01:18:14] Um, I, I’d like to kind of get a final, uh, I’m going to ask you one of my questions

[01:18:20] that I, that I ask everyone that comes on the show and then I’ll ask you the

[01:18:23] other one, uh, on the next episode.

[01:18:26] The first one is what do you wish more people would ask you about?

[01:18:31] Uh, what do I wish more people would ask me about?

[01:18:34] Um, I think, well, the first question that comes to mind is why did you make this

[01:18:45] transition, like, cause for the people that don’t know, like, um, I pretty much

[01:18:49] made a conscious chan transition to go from full-time work, earning a lot of

[01:18:54] money, like a lot of money and fintech to, to earning like 84% of the money.

[01:19:02] To, to earning like 84% less.

[01:19:05] Like I took an 84% pay cut to do what I do now.

[01:19:09] Um, and I think I would love for everybody to ask me, why did you take that pay cut?

[01:19:18] Um, and how did you, how did you convince yourself that, uh, your happiness, your

[01:19:25] fulfillment was worth that much?

[01:19:28] Because I think for 20 years of my career, I would never have thought that my

[01:19:32] fulfillment or my happiness was worth a pay cut of that magnitude.

[01:19:39] This is a lot.

[01:19:40] I mean, I mean, just to be transparent, like we’re talking about it, like a half

[01:19:44] a million dollars a year pay cut, like not trivial amounts of money.

[01:19:50] And so I wish everyone I spoke to would ask me that so I could just share

[01:19:57] my story and provide maybe some, some feedback about what I thought about my

[01:20:02] career five years ago, what I think about my career three years ago and what I

[01:20:07] think about my career today.

[01:20:08] Cause those three answers are so different and I would love to share that

[01:20:11] with other people so they could find their own version of what a rich life is

[01:20:14] for them, uh, which is not always financial.

[01:20:20] I would say rarely, uh, is financial the only part or the only component of that.

[01:20:26] Yeah, for sure.

[01:20:27] That’s a very long answer to a very short question.

[01:20:31] Well, I, I, I would say, um, given the number of answers that have gone longer,

[01:20:36] I would put, I would put this in the shorter, uh, the shorter column of all

[01:20:40] the, all the inches that I’ve gotten to that question.

[01:20:43] Yeah.

[01:20:44] Brian, thank you so much for your time.

[01:20:46] I look forward to our next discussion and of course, to our

[01:20:49] sessions upcoming as well.

[01:20:51] Um, if people are convinced, uh, if, if, if we have convinced them that coaching

[01:20:57] is worth their time, worth their, uh, effort, worth their money, um, where,

[01:21:02] where, where would you send them?

[01:21:05] Yeah.

[01:21:05] So if they’re interested and they want to talk with me specifically, the best

[01:21:10] way is just to go look me up, uh, on LinkedIn, Brian Pulliam, uh, Brian K

[01:21:14] Pulliam is my URL handle on LinkedIn.

[01:21:17] Uh, or they just go to refactor coaching.com.

[01:21:19] That’s my website.

[01:21:20] It’s a really crappy landing page as most engineers would make.

[01:21:23] I’m not a designer.

[01:21:25] Uh, but if you’re curious about career coaching in general and how

[01:21:29] you might find a better one, um, we can talk a little bit about resources

[01:21:32] in the next episode, point them at, but the TLDR is don’t settle for a coach

[01:21:38] that isn’t a good fit for you because there’s a lot of options out there

[01:21:42] and they all offer something different.

[01:21:44] And so making sure you interview a few before you decide, I think

[01:21:49] would be a good decision.

[01:21:51] You know, I, what I offer is different than what other people offer.

[01:21:55] And, um, and I don’t hide that.

[01:21:57] So if you’re interested in coaching in general, get clear about what it is

[01:22:01] you want so that you can go determine whether these people are a good fit for

[01:22:05] you.

[01:22:06] And if people are interested in talking with me in particular, can you just go

[01:22:09] to refactor coaching.com or, um, look me up.

[01:22:12] Oh, and I’m not the Brian Pulliam from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is

[01:22:17] a convicted double member.

[01:22:18] That’s a different person.

[01:22:20] Okay.

[01:22:22] Good to know.

[01:22:22] Uh, I don’t think he’s going to be on LinkedIn.

[01:22:24] If I had to guess, I will, yeah, I will also say, uh, that I have done exactly

[01:22:31] what you’re saying.

[01:22:32] I’ve, I’ve worked with multiple coaches, uh, and, and you’re, you’re exactly

[01:22:36] right that finding the right coach to help with the things that you care

[01:22:41] about, um, and with the kind of like awareness, uh, working with you, Brian

[01:22:48] has been the first time that I’ve worked with a coach that has the technical

[01:22:51] experience to speak the language that I speak.

[01:22:55] And that’s, that was one of the critical factors for me.

[01:22:58] People who are listening to us right now, you may have other critical factors,

[01:23:01] right?

[01:23:01] You may have like cultural factors that you care about, uh, like a location.

[01:23:05] Um, you know, they, they need to have lived in, in the Bay area because a big

[01:23:09] part of your career is based in that or something like that.

[01:23:11] I don’t know.

[01:23:12] Um, those, those are the kinds of things to think about when you’re talking to

[01:23:16] your coach.

[01:23:16] This is, uh, totally, um, I guess like within your realm of decision-making,

[01:23:24] uh, nobody is pushing you to work with a particular coach.

[01:23:28] It is entirely for your benefit.

[01:23:31] So be picky, right?

[01:23:32] Like, I think that’s, that’s the key factor with, with picking a coach.

[01:23:37] Um, I was just very fortunate to, uh, to come across Brian.

[01:23:42] Um, and if you, if you have similar tastes and considerations that I have,

[01:23:47] Brian may work well for you.

[01:23:49] And, uh, dare I say he may not, he may not be the right fit.

[01:23:54] Um,

[01:23:54] yeah, the people, the people that get success with me, cause like a lot of

[01:23:57] people ask me that question, people who are willing to experiment to try

[01:24:02] different things, to achieve their goals.

[01:24:04] I think that’s a really core critical thing.

[01:24:06] You know, I’ve been brought up making billionaires richer on AB testing.

[01:24:11] So I believe in AB testing and the scientific method should be applied to

[01:24:15] our own careers and, uh, someone who wants somebody with a couple of decades

[01:24:20] of tech experience and 17 years of coaching, um, and someone who’s been in

[01:24:25] tech, like the people who are looking for that, like those are the people that

[01:24:29] tend, uh, that tend to work really well with a coach like me, but other people

[01:24:34] want something else, so that that’s sort of the profile of the people who tend

[01:24:39] to be a good fit for me.

[01:24:41] Yep.

[01:24:41] That makes sense.

[01:24:43] Brian.

[01:24:43] Thank you so much for your time today.

[01:24:45] Yeah.

[01:24:46] Pleasure being on here looking forward to the next one.

[01:24:52] And thank you for listening to today’s episode of developer T my

[01:24:56] interview with Brian Pulliam.

[01:24:58] Again, if you have not, uh, set up an intro call with Brian, I highly suggest

[01:25:03] that you do if you are looking for a coach to help you either in the interviewing

[01:25:09] process, or maybe you’re just looking to improve, uh, your chances at a promo

[01:25:15] and your current role, whatever your reason is for wanting a coach, Brian

[01:25:20] may be the right choice for you.

[01:25:22] Uh, Brian is offering 10% off for folks who book three or more sessions.

[01:25:28] You can get an intro call with him at refactorcoaching.com.

[01:25:32] Thank you again to today’s sponsor.

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[01:25:53] If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and whatever

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[01:25:58] And until next time, enjoy your team.

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