the path to principal w/ rich rader

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me, old-fashioned email, social media at T D S N T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Chris, it's great to see you buddy. Give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Yeah, so my name is Retrader. I'm a principal engineer at Evacore and it's kind of a funny thing.

I'm here to talk about what I do. I remember you actually, Taylor placed me at Evacore and I think I applied as a senior and they came back and said, we're going to actually, we want to offer you the principal develop position. I was like, okay, that's just a different word for senior. What does that mean? And, you know, kind of coming in and doing, you know, what I do, kind of seeing stuff and trying to fix it. I mean, this is what every good developer wants to do, you just help make their organization better. And we've kind of, you know, I've kind of found, and I think the industry kind of found that there's this step beyond senior developer that is still individual contributor.

And in principle, developer in a lot of ways still is that path forward that people are kind of coming up with. It's really a director level of responsibility, but I'm still on a team. I'm still coding every day. I am obviously involved with a lot more than just the day to day coding, but I'm kind of the extraordinarily trusted boots on the ground. And that's kind of where the superpower of a principal kind of comes from. Were you familiar? And again, it's great to see Chris for us. Great to see you Justin and then Chris. It's great to see you all this morning. And were you aware of this principle type role pre-evacore?

No, I wasn't actually. I think that it definitely was one that Signa who owns Evacore was very, very passionate about. They have a very large program that they've had for like eight some odd years that will curate their developers, will assign a mentor, will build up their organization. Because they've got within Sigma, over 100 principal developers. So it's how you grow that organization. They have an entire program with dozens and dozens of people that get people into this role. In a way, I was kind of grandfathered in when I came in. I still go through that to help out, help explain and grow. But it is one of those things where it was a surprise to me.

And I had a very pleasant surprise because it was, you know, kind of, you know, led to me not only optimize my team, but optimize organization, just improve anything I found and just make that job expectation. And that's been very rewarding. Why do you think companies should, and again, if you all have questions about the principal role or anything like that, please throw it up in the chat and we'll definitely get to it. Rich, would you say, Why would you say companies should implement a principal engineer role? Like a principal engineer track, because I'm curious, because I think right now, I think there's like your junior mid-senior and then we're just going to put you in management, right?

Like there's no thought around people who want to stay hands on the keys. And so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on why companies should really consider this method. Yeah, it's a very, I'll say, strategic type of decision to say, we're not going to have this person who's a senior, typically we're like architects or manager. Those two roles are still very much needed. We still have those roles at Eide before. There's a lot more managers and architects than there are principals. The main thought is that when it comes down to roles, responsibilities, who I have to make happy. Right now, within our organization, managers and architects don't necessarily have a customer that they're making happy in interacting with day to day.

So that pulse on the system went down and our customer is not happy. You know, the customer goes and talks to me about that. I have a direct like incentive to make sure my systems are never down. So that my customer who I am directly speaking to every single day is still happy. I still have that like feedback loop of I want a team, I want to make the people, you know, the nurses who are trying to help people out at Ewa core, those people, you know, need to be happy and there's a direct link to that. But I could also take all the expertise of, you know, the the architecture and manager, you know, responsibilities have had at previous companies and, you know, basically translate or almost do the cross communication between when our management launches this program, this is how the people who are implementing features hear that.

And that gives people, you know, you know, my managers can bounce off their ideas off me. I can tell them exactly how it's going to be digested, how it's going to be implemented by a customer. I can improve the day to day for developer on my own team and then broadcast throughout the entire organization, at Evacor. So you're working closely with the client, the end users, and you're kind of like, you're almost like a technical analyst, almost, too. Right, yeah. Yeah. You're having to deal with end users, take the requirements, communicate it upwards, like listen, like in tech talk, this is what we got to do.

I mean, so you're definitely bridging the gap on both ends between management and end users. Yeah. And so we also take, like our customer comes to us and say, hey, we'd like to improve this. Well, I'm sitting there hearing all these things and going, okay, now I'm building up, here's a multi-year strategic vision for a program where we can leverage this and save millions of dollars by improving this particular process. We're a bit call center at EPCOR. So writing software to enhance the call center functionality is a big win, but the right way is to do it and how to leverage it and balance all those things.

It's definitely bridging the gap, but also knowing that we are definitely overall responsible for not only making our customer happy but improving the technology. So it's kind of balancing, it's kind of a weird one. I'm balancing improving the technology and improving the product at the same time. And that's a fun one to be a part of in the middle of. Yeah, absolutely. So John comes in and asks, and then Christina, it's great to see you, girl. John comes in and goes, how often are these titles interchanged? Because I'm curious too, at least in your experience, could senior lead be the same as staff principal? If so, how can we tell when we're applying?

Oh yeah, that's a great one. Staff and principal are definitely interchangeable. I think when they have the principal program at Signa, they hand you a book about staff engineers. That's the kind of say, here's roughly the blueprint. So it is definitely an interchangeable title. Senior and lead, really those are, it's somewhat funny. IT in general are awful when it comes to job descriptions and everybody thinks they know what a senior is or a lead or an architect or a manager and it's all over the place. I could tell you that at the companies I've been at, senior and lead have not been the same, but I have no doubt that other companies, senior and lead are the same.

How to tell when they're apart really comes down to, you almost have to ask what are the responsibilities? A lead typically might own a bit more responsibility, be accountable for a bit more than just a senior. You'll typically have a lead on a team, but that's just my experience. I could tell you that I probably point to dozens of places where multiple leads are on a team. It's just, you kind of have to... You really have to ask some questions. You got to ask some questions. So, and Rich, you and I were chatting off air and I was like, man, I just feel like I have a core.

Like, even when you and I worked together to place you there a few years back, it's also crazy how fast time flies. But I also feel like you guys do a pretty good job of incentivizing engineers to stay, to incentivize them from multiple different levels. We're talking about the career pass up to senior principal. Can you talk about me with some other things that Evercore does that really keeps and retains their talent? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things. There's a big, just known culture of growth. Our pillars in our community, for example, it is my job to basically tie what we say our community pillars are, our cultural pillars, to what they really are and call out when that is not the case.

Because our leadership goes, hey, we want to be a dynamic learning organization. Well, when we aren't, it's my job to kind of step in and say, hey, we're not growing people enough. We're not building people up enough. People are working overtime or people are burnt out. I think my favorite example of the types of things that Evercore does in particular, we had a very large program launch. Probably about a year after I started, where we basically flipped it at the switch for 10, 15, 30 times as much traffic. And that huge amount of changes. We typically don't like large, big projects, but health insurance, their contracts ends, they need to write a new contract for multiple years.

You kind of work within the boundaries of some of those contracts being laid out. So we turned on a huge switch and that resulted in people working after hours. But that did not result in people working overtime. There's a very big difference between someone needing just to be there just in case someone had an issue. We're a very large 15 team organization at some point. There's hundreds of microservices in our system. If there's a hiccup and someone just missed it, or there's a question or concern, we had someone there. But we spent a tremendous amount of effort in, let's set up a schedule where we know that these people are going to be available to answer questions.

That's certainly a job. And you might be responsible for answering a question between say 2 PM and 8 PM. But that's your day. And that's it. You're not expected to work over because we had a huge gigantic program launch. It was, the expectation was that, hey, we're gonna be all hands on deck on this, but doesn't mean that you're losing time from your family. I love that. And then not long after that, we had the award ceremony. we had a Dundee situation going on where people voted for, you know, all kinds of fun stuff as a way to celebrate all the hard work. You know, we had an award ceremony.

It was almost like a graduation. I think I came away with four awards. I get to add on and get the little thing. I got printed out and stuck on my wall somewhere. You know, they're fun. And you're just, you know, digging in, growing people. We, probably about every month or so, We'll hold a five or six hour workshop where we're gonna teach and train and grow people. The most recent one we did was just a bit ago, I dressed up as Godzilla to make it entertaining. And we just talked about micro UIs, how we build them, how we deploy them, our strategy, we're opinionated about that.

So we worked on just building up that skill set across the organization. And we asked people, what do you want to learn? and then we tailor what we teach them and how we grow them based off what they want to learn. Do you try to implement the stuff in your teaching in production? Like, is that something that Evacorra tries to do? Like, if you guys are trying to learn a new technology for something and you guys are teaching it in these classrooms, is it a pretty good chance that you will try to tinker with it and like within Evacorra in the tech stack? Oh, absolutely.

Typically, if we're teaching something it's already in production for some team. We are a 15 team organization. And each team, we follow a stream ownership. That means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But in our space, a stream ownership is you're responsible for helping facts come into the system. For example, in my system. If facts is in all technology, we're acquired by the government except facts. It's fun stuff. But you receive a facts. You need to do something with it, get into the system. For example, my team in particular in the company owns that slice. So we get to basically experiment and try to find the best things for that area.

And we've implemented, we've moved a lot of stuff from the on-premise servers to the cloud and done a lot of neat stuff. But I think pretty much everything that we've done, we have the workshop on micro-uIs. We are now teaching a program. We have dozens of micro-uIs. It is the main pattern. We're very successful with that at Evercore, but it is a thing. We're kind of elevating everybody else up. And so it seems you to try all kinds of stuff. I mean, there are boundaries within reason. We're probably not going to go off and run Python, just probably not. But you could if you really needed to for a particular problem.

And so it's tristuff. Let's figure out what works best. And then if something works out for you, teach everybody else. We have a weekly session where we have a dev community of practice. For an hour, we sit down and talk about what worked best this week for a team, or what thing they found. And they can teach and brag and lift and do all the things that make for a healthy organization. And those people are typically rewarded for it. If you find something that's going to help out the organization and teach it, then you're typically rewarded for the teaching, not so much the iterating. So it helps drive that innovation plus teaching.

It lifts us all forward. And we've rewritten our stack entirely in the past two years based off of that type of system. Really? Yes. That's awesome. That's awesome. So I'm curious, right? So how do the conversations go? So let's say like, you know, I'm a senior engineer at the Nebuchar, right? And I'm curious to go into management. I'm curious to, you know, potentially become, you know, be like rich and become a principal engineer, right? So it's like what conversations are had in the organizational level to really prep people. Cause I think, you know, talking to guys and gals like yourself on the show, I always ask the question, how, how did you know when you want to go in a leadership or how did you know when you want to stay in IC, right?

Are there conversations being had at Evercore before that jump happens? Oh, absolutely. That is an extremely, say, curated and thought-out process. Okay. I think, you know, it's my perspective that, you know, being an individual contributor, being a manager, being an architect, all those jobs are a lot more similar than they are different for the vast, probably like 85, 90% of the job, you know. At least my perspective on management and architecture. I'm a principal, but I don't necessarily have authority to make someone do something a certain way. I'm expected to build influence with that person, which is the same exact mindset we have for architects, for example, which is the same exact mindset we have for our managers.

Plus, remind us a little bit, because if you kind of, for example, break the idea of extreme ownership if you make someone do something that they would. What is extreme ownership? I'm just curious because I'm a recruiter and I don't know anything. That's fair. Well, there is a book about it that everyone in IT is apparently reading. People have a lot of different interpretations of it. I will sum it up and say that it's really trying to set up a system where there's There's nothing in between you and a happy customer. You being a developer. Interesting. And, you know, because at that point, you know, extreme ownership is you see something that your customer might not like, you fix it.

It might not be like yours, but you take ownership of, you know, your customer's experience. And, you know, that's a very IT-centric, you know, version of that because we typically will support our customers. It's just shifting the mindset of someone else screwed up or that's someone else's problem You know at the end of the day your customers still seeing a problem. Yeah You know let's fix it and let's let's move forward with it And so supporting that system of you know people have every opportunity every ability you know whatever it takes to make your customer happy do that and You know that that means a lot and you know But the idea is that if you're on an agile team and you're communicating with the same Language with your management saying you know hey, I did this to make my customer happy You know, so it's not always the right decision But if you're doing it for the right reason typically you're always in the right and then That's that's fascinating.

I've never heard of that, but thank you for educating. I want to go to a few comments here. Stephen. It's great to see you Raymond, it's great to see you too. Samantha Riley, what's going on. Erica going back flexible schedule. I thought that was fascinating by the way about how you had people work hours, different hours, but not work overtime, which I think is great. Christina coming here and affirming more with rich is saying the time and roles of this project clearly to find the finding nature of the project was celebrated. That's the way to do it. Absolutely. Cody, What's up? It's great to see you.

And Chris goes, is that space ghost art? It is. I love it. I love it. I love it. Game recognizes games. So rich, as we're obviously kind of in the tail end of this conversation and time flies when we're having fun. Like always, um, I do want to go back to the conversations being had because we got, I got to, I interrupted you about extreme ownership. What, what are the conversations like to groom these people to go into the next step in their career to ever core? Yeah. Well, so we have, you know, a really tremendous management organization here, where you'll have one of ones every week, every other week.

You'll have the typical stuff. You'll have what you expect your managers to kind of do for you, especially at EPCOR, our dev managers don't have customers in the same regard. So their only responsibility is to grow people, retain people, And there, I'll say, in a lot of ways, their success is based off of their people growing. So the incentive is already there. We have a fair bit. I meet once a week with my manager Andy. We talk about the next steps for me, how to grow. The mentorship program itself is a gigantic mentorship program. But if we have a, I just had a mentee go from advisor to senior advisor.

It's kind of like low level senior to high level senior. And that was identified as something that could possibly be a thing that could happen. We managed to found someone who was lifting themselves up. And so they reached out to me, they found a dedicated mentee, mentor for that person, who was me. I coached that person on different things. That was a year long kind of investment in helping this person grow, you know translate, understand the things that Because jumping to a senior or anything is always a weird thing because it's different Sure, and it's hard to quantify how it's different and you know, we have You know, we're kind of famous for our junior community.

We meet Weekly and have a you know our junior community practice where she's poor at all our people And really, our managers are setting pretty transparent goals for a person to meet in terms of, this is the expectation for this level. I know this because I helped curate them because that's part of my job responsibilities, to help make sure that we have a right balance of people. So I will say that it helps to have people just dedicated to growing talent in the organization. I think we had dozens of people just a couple of months ago get promotions. That's awesome. The amount of growth that they've had over the past couple of years.

So I guess in summary, so what I'm hearing is there's a few things that will do really well for retention. Obviously the first off, you have a management track and an individual contributor track, so that's the first thing. thing is is y'all do like basic classroom sessions where y'all basically tinker you allow a few hours in a day you educate etc. You then have a mentor mentorship mentor mentee program within evacore and is it like structured and you get paired up with somebody based off of like what they want to do and how it aligns to kind of what you do. Yep. Okay. So that's awesome.

So that's three things. Am I missing anything else? I'm kind of maybe some key differentiators with Evercore. Kind of what y'all are doing. I think one of the biggest things that I see is, you know, more than anything retention, we drive our culture to be, you know, a very scientific, almost thought process. It's all we very much say your culture for us is what we reward, tolerate, and don't tolerate. So, little things, very little things. If someone works over, we don't reward them for working over. We apologize that they had to work over. We reward teaching. We don't necessarily reward people trying new things. So, trying new things in a vacuum doesn't necessarily give you the same level of incentive.

There are very little things It's that drive our culture to be a place where it's very inclusive, very welcoming, and you'll meet probably once a month, talk only about our culture for an hour. And it is just a company-wide, let's come in here and talk about this and figure out, you'll get on the same page, you'll get on the same terms. And I found that culture and people knowing was expected of them and what it takes to be successful is just that warm blanket that people know that they're going to do the job right. They know what's expected. As they write a line of code, they know what expected.

And are you guys, are you all primarily remote still? Are you all back in the office? I've never been in the office. So I hear it's nice. We're all we're all pretty much remote so you can build good culture remotely Absolutely, it's it's different It is different You know, but I you know It's not it's not say hard. It's not impossible. It's just you got to change your mindset How do you get people to where they're comfortable to turn on their webcam? You know, how do you get folks to where they're? comfortable just having a conversation, you know, in a room. How do you still include everybody when you're all disconnected?

It's not, maybe I've just been a nerd and I've had friends who I've never met ever for years. Rich, you a nerd? Get out of town. But it is one of those things, virtual happy hours, you know, having a game session. My team loves to play GeoGuesser as a group. We love it. We all, I don't know if you ever played Geogueser, they plop you down in somewhere in the world with Google Maps and you have to guess where you are. I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do mine. And so, for example, it's a great thing. If you have a very diverse team, you're better at that than others.

So there's lots of opportunities to build up that culture. It just takes some creativity. I love that, I love that. All right, man. So any last bits of words of wisdom that you wanna share to the individual for watching? If not, no worries, you already dropped some heat. But I don't know if you wanted to leave the guests with any last little words of wisdom. Well, I'll say one of my mentors, he famously said that the grass is greener where you water it. And I think that's become kind of my motto. And I'll say, if you wanna work in a place that you like, you gotta make the place where you work, a place you like.

And so that's my advice to anybody. I love that, I love that so much. All right, y'all, well thanks again, thanks again for tuning in this morning to Guys House of 2.0. We appreciate it a lot. And again, I saw all y'all this morning, so thank you so much for hanging out. Rich, thank you so much. Stay on real quick as we wrap up here. But y'all have a great one. Tuesday, tomorrow morning, I'm hanging out with a recruiter from Stripe. So it's gonna be a great conversation around how to get into Stripe and just what this individual looks for on the other side. I'm trying to pull in more recruiters internally at companies because they're a little bit different than me and the agency side.

So I'm trying to get a better view, a more holistic view, a more fair view because it's not always just the agency that's important. The corporate recruiters obviously have a lot on their play as well. So tomorrow morning, 9th or AM Central, JD Alex from Stripe. So I'll see you all tomorrow morning. Thank you so much. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Cause you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store.

I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.