jem young, engineering manager at netflix and the state of tech

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[Music] all righty what's going on everybody good morning good morning I mean no one's here yet I mean it's morning here barely morning it's 11. so so this is this is the special edition special edition of uh um uh guidance counselor 2.0 um when whenever I have a West Coast whenever I have a West Coast guest like Jem we gotta go 11. we got to go 11.

Seven's a little too early actually I caught up uh do you know Nas actually caught up with nas uh last week and and uh she actually did the early time she did the early time so bless her bless her heart she got up at 7am to do this thing but uh Jam has kids so we needed to uh we need to do a little a little later in the day so Jen thanks for joining me and I appreciate it yeah thanks for having me uh as always and yes kids got to get to school yeah so we gotta do a little bit later absolutely absolutely

so those you tune in again this is lunchtime Edition guidance counselor 2.0 or basically bring on really cool guests um uh in the Tech Community to talk about all things State attack today we're going to talk about the state of Technology um really the ecosystem of of where we're at right now listen I was gonna be honest and Jim's going to talk about it like it's [ __ ] nuts right now I mean it just is excuse my language but you know it's just crazy right now so we're going to talk about it we're going to talk about leadership principles and and hiring and scaling

teams um because Jim's really good at that um and but if you are tuned in say hey we'd love to hear from you um would would uh love to know what you're tuning in from um tell me tell me what tell me what you're eating for lunch right because technically it's 11 um you know and I'm always interested what people eat for lunch one thing I realized at the start of covert is I could eat chicken salad sandwiches for like months on end and not be tired of it Jim do you have any like bunch of things that you could just eat day in day

out by chance oh for sure peanut but ter and jelly man peanut butter jelly jelly yeah you do have kids I can say that much right now you do have kids oh he my oldest doesn't like peanut butter and jelly we're like are you serious dude he doesn't like chicken nuggets doesn't like peanut butter and jelly he doesn't like hamburgers and I'm like do you know what I ate as a kid none of this stuff I eat like cottage cheese and a tortilla like and you're getting like Gourmet yeah organic nuggets I mean like no yeah gems gem shop in an air one uh yeah

and feeding the arrow on groceries and the kids like no past too bougie thanks Jim um so uh yeah we have people tune in again say hey love to hear from you again this is a networking platform right I talk about this um what I realize is is I would love a platform like this if I was on the job search where I can just show up in my underwear hang out comment like engage with people um listen there are people that I've known that have gotten jobs from this show I I have people that have gotten job or uh Mentor mentees from this show

and I've had a bunch of people message me and said they've made a lot of great friends so um please comment even if you're watching this in the future please comment because people still check this and still network with each other after the show is done so please comment please be engaged we'd love to hear from you and listen this is a q a because I bring on a lot of people who know what they're talking about at least I think they know who they're talking about what they're talking about and so uh and this is the one time where you can ask an engineering

manager from Netflix something and you not get billed for it so uh so so so definitely ask questions we would love to answer them um but uh before we dive in I definitely want to give shouts to people tune in um Crystal it's great to hear from you Allison I love it from Michigan uh bison burger man that sounds great I want a burger right now Chris in Central Illinois I love it Christoph er hey from Florida peanut butter and jelly sandwich always okay here's the question Jim here's a big question crunchy or smooth crunchy obviously you gotta have the texture otherwise it's like uh

see mine's like a Vibe thing I'm always I'm I'm team crunchy but I think like sometimes man I just don't want to chew for like 60 more times than I have to so it just I don't know it just depends how tired my jaw is Mark it's great to see you Alice great to see you Victor Daniel we got the crew here today Christina Scott um it's great to see y'all from Africa I love it we're International this morning uh St Louis Jason I'm going to be in St Louis I just got accepted into Dev up in August so I'll be up in St Louis

so meet upcoming uh in the St Louis area would love to hang um Christina it's great to see you Joseph it's been a minute man I hope you're doing well um let's see here team crunchy I love it team crunchy all right already got it Scott it's great to see you as well from Massachusetts all right enough let me run my mouth Jim let's give the people what they want who are you what do you do and we'll go from there yeah thanks for having me on Taylor uh my name is Jim young I'm an engineering manager at Netflix for the web platform team a

bit of Netflix seven years so you know I've been around a while seeing some changes and I've seen changes in Netflix seeing changes in texting changes in Silicon Valley um yeah in my my free time like I have a podcast too called front and happy hour with Ryan frequent frequent guests thank you um I'm an instructor on front end Masters I just wrapped up full stack for front end version three hey what what is front end Masters man because I've been meaning to ask you that just in general yeah it's a learning platform for front Engineers what I what I love about Friday Masters it's

it's super curated so um you know the the CEO Mark he he knows the instructors and everybody that comes on there actually has a real world experience no offens e to YouTube no offense to other other platforms come out their own shade but uh sometimes people get on get on and start teaching and they don't they've never worked in a professional environment they've never existed is this is this the right website tridentmasters.com yes okay cool I hope so you never know when you type a random I know me too I just typed in front of that if you have a message real quick uh but

I'm a big fan of the platform big fan of the instructors uh probably a lot of people on there you've heard of before so cool anyways yeah I I I do love teaching when I get the chance it's I I always feel if you know we're in our privilege uh our position in Tech it's our job to give back in some way I'm not a good writer I I just it takes me so I texted him the other day my brother was like Jesus you are awful at writing yeah some people can just do it they just like more props get a doc and yeah

I wish I wish yep yep but I Like You Back by teaching and giving talks things like that I love that I love that all right so jam so let's go dive into this we got a few more comments look at this peanut butter jelly and banana all right listen now we're getting a little wild that wasn't the question Greg crunchy or smooth that wasn't the question fritzin's great to see you front end Masters is awesome front end love it JC love to see you man uh from St Louis another St Louis I love it Eric that's great to see you all right so Jim

uh shit's a little bananas speaking of bananas it's bananas right now and Tech Market um what are your thoughts man I mean let's just let's just chop it up here I mean there's no right or wrong answers obviously preferably hot takes um but what do you what what are your thoughts just everything going on right now yeah uh I mean it's nothing but hot takes we don't we don't rehearse any questions ahead of time no we don't none I mean this is Jim hopped on five minutes before we went live unfortunately no gym so it's fine but just in case pe ople think this is

like a rehearse thing yeah uh yeah it's kind of wild you know the with the you know larger macroeconomic environments uh unfortunately we grew up in Tech since 2008 the the big crash then um we grew up getting used to free money essentially where you know interest rates were zero percent and so so a lot of tech is built around this concept of we'll we'll just get more VC funding we don't have to be profitable we don't have to even have a plan to turn profit right uh we'll just get more VC funding and we grow grow grow as big as possible uh sure there's

so many good examples of this looking back and I think in another couple years we'll we'll look back at Tech and be like really that's what happened um one of my favorite examples I think is Wag the Dog walking startup got half a billion dollars in funding and you're like okay that seems a little strange like how big is the dog walking startup gonna grow to get a half a billion dollars but no no shade on them just like that's just that was the state of tech like a couple years ago where you know everybody's getting money for everything now there's better place to put

your money so we're being a little we're being more rigorous now in in Silicon Valley and Tech in general where we're not doing unbounded salaries we're not doing infinite hiring and we are being a little more ruthless with how we spend our money because we don't know what's coming down the road we don't know how how deep this uh recession is going to go so yeah unfortunately that that has resulted in a lot of layoffs and we can get into that my take on those two but yeah absolutely it's Sam Sam comes in I used to walk dogs for wag that's funny yeah let's talk

about layoffs man I mean you know you know I um it's been hard it's been hard to see my friends bounce and and um and you know I've I've had to deal with it a little bit on my end to be totally Frank with you and so let's talk about it I mean what's going on it's tough and I I wil l be I'll try to be objective here but you know we all know somebody who's affected or knows somebody who knows somebody um so it's tough and so I try not to give too many hot takes on that area because it could just easily

be you could be me that's just how it is that I mean my wife was like are you sure you're all right and I was like I mean I think I am and I think that's a scary thing it's it's not a lot of the layouts we're seeing is not necessarily due to Performance the companies will say there's some arbitrary Benchmark or something but a lot of it's just random like you happen to be working in an area that the company doesn't feel like isn't they're investing anymore or they feel like that was more speculative and it's not that's not your business value it's not

your fault no it's absolutely not your fault uh I look at uh Microsoft with hololens remember that the cool AR they were developing laid off though that whole team just decided to drop it one day and that that's just how it is these days it's just I don't know uh have you ever heard the term decimation where that where that comes from no so it's not a pleasant term but it essentially means one in every 10 people and just that's what it means that's that's it and that's kind of how it is these days with state of tech it's just like it doesn't matter who

you are how good you are how long you've been at the company it's just it could be you could be about one in ten and yeah that's that's a state attack it's not a great place to be these days unfortunately what I mean talk about so I've been kind of curious so actually I tweeted this this morning um and I'll say it's kind of tee up the conversation here I said right now if if you have been sitting in the shadows waiting to get directions if you haven't really been involved in slack conversations if you've kind of just been eating snacks in the corner and

doing just the bare minimum I would say right now is the time to change all of that I would say rig ht now is you need to be front and center you need to be upwards communicating with your manager what can I do hey I'm sitting around because I'm sure you're having these conversations Jim I know I'm having we getting these upper leadership meetings they're like all right who needs to go we what about this person what about this person what about this person and then we have to go through as managers going well this person does this and this person does this how can

people I'm not say being layoff proof because that's impossible but what it what are your tips for people right now who are scared and and and who can maybe better themselves within the within the company it's a it's a good time to show out and show up uh your all your tips there as always Taylor are right on the money like people should know your name uh at a company I I think it's a good sign managers should know your name other other managers VPS should say like oh I've heard of that person and again none of these are going to save you from a

layoff necessarily managers most of the time have no no say in layoffs that's usually made by managers or managers above them but if it did come down to that and you're you're looking at a team of people and you're saying like I gotta cut one I gotta cut X percentage who am I gonna who am I going to put on that list right you're always going to say like oh the person who who delivers the most the person who shows up a lot the person who contributes that's the one you want to keep on your team obviously and that's always the case and I I'm

not saying change your personality or anything like that we all have our different ways of yeah I'm not saying not be you yeah and don't just you know jump into documents and make comments just for the sake of visibility like find find the thing you're good at whether it's a lot of code reviews or maybe writing documents or pulling together teams or brainstorming things like that but Now's the Time I think when we're all getting a little bit more scrutiny in Tech about like hey what do you do exactly and then you gotta justify how it is today yeah like listen anybody on this call

right now if somebody comes to ask you what do you do you need to be able to say exactly what you do without a doubt yeah and and and have artifacts to point to like I did this project I look at this document that I that I wrote look at this uh look at this team I pulled together for to solve this problem look at the money I saved this company yeah and that's that's you know we're all just tiny belts these days I know I know um and uh I have so many questions I want to ask you so let's talk let's talk upper

leadership right now upper leadership seems to be getting cut a lot you know I I think I think companies at least what I've seen companies want the contributors they don't want to have all of these like middle managers what's your advice to kind of these middle managers right now I mean that that are still holding on that are still scared because I I I've been thinking about that a lot too and so it's just a coincidence you and I were talking today so I'm interested to hear your thoughts I mean I'm a middle manager same as the same as you same same all right so

who knows what if my advice is accurate or not but right uh I I think one of them is it's again like what do you do at the company what what's the value that you provide I do think and this is definitely a hot take that it look it often looks like there's a lot of layers of management and people are like why do we need five directors five senior managers between me and the the team itself like the VPS start to look at that and that's fine it's fine to be rigorous and look at the span of control of a manager if you're a

manager of three people I don't know that that's you know if I'm a VP I'm looking at that and saying like yeah it's the best best movie maybe it is maybe you're super technical you're in the code with with people um but if you're not you h ave to look at it as critically as as uh like a VP would so my advice is again show up send out people should always know your name in a company that's a good sign in a good way not in a oh failure oh well and I think the normal person Jim could be like well this is dumb

I shouldn't have to defend myself and listen I agree with you but the times are changing I think that's a song um and and I just think that's where we're at right now like even me like I've I mean there's been conversations about my content right and it's like low like we're we're supporting your content what's going on right and I've had a meeting with my leadership and we kind of put a dollar amount right it's been close to three hundred thousand dollars worth of sales that's come through my content in just eight weeks alone right so we kind of put numbers around that and

it's like that's the that's the type of intentionality right my leadership team supports everything I do and I'm so blessed for that but we're still having that conversation even when I have an incredibly supportive leadership team Taylor I love you said put numbers to it and that's that's great advice like have concrete measurements of what you do whether it's money whether it's people that you hired um projects accomplished okrs checked off Etc but you got to have hard metrics now because that's what people are going off um you know maybe two three years ago is enough to be like oh my team has these great

ideas and we're gonna we're gonna brainstorm make these Greenfield projects Etc and companies are like sure you know go nuts we have the time now that that error is over and now you have to say here's the value I provide to the business for the numbers backing that up and here's all the metrics that we track and we look at that we are improving over time and that we're going after this year yep I love that uh there's a few comments I've come and I want to get to and definitely hear your thoughts Jim um here's the big one seems like big Tech hired too

many people during the pandemic now they're on course correcting there's a lot of restriction going on what are your thoughts on this man I mean you're you're big Tech obviously um you know you know was there an overhiring did the business match it what are your thoughts here yes and no so this is a common a common misconception yes Netflix is uh Silicon Valley but we of all the companies we get lumped in with we have probably the smallest engineering team we have you know two three thousand Engineers which sounds like a lot but you know not comparatively to meta who has meta Google any

of any of the companies yeah um so we that Netflix did a little bit differently we don't tend to like hire in big batches like that but yeah a lot of tech companies did hire during the pandemic and what happened was 2020 we're all sitting at home we're all ordering more doordash we're all ordering more stuff on Amazon we're all trying to get our Home Gyms together we're all you know just becoming uh digital natives a bit more and companies and leaders looked at that and said well this is New Normal once people get used to ordering food and that's delivered and having their toilet

paper dropped off of their door and like all these things that became you know the digital world that blew up in 2020 they said that's their normal so they all hired up every single company scaled up massively from 2020 to 2021.

and that's where things went off the rails because 2021 at the end of it you know we started seeing a bit of correction and then 2022 we saw more correction and uh so the question by uh lavonda there is yeah big Tech did hire too many people and they hired people with that with no intent of the business value they were going to deliver it was just some VP somewhere is like hey what about the metaverse and someone said yeah that's cool so let's hire 100 people to work on this project because we have essentially free infinite money and then that that pool is go

ne so now big Tech's like okay let's be a little bit more rigorous in in what we're doing here so yeah I think and Gemma Mitch has your thoughts um I think in this you know let's talk about svb real quick right I think there's just a lot of group think and panic in the market and I think you know um one of my favorite podcasts shout out to group chat um is who I listen to there are three guys out in La um very networked into the tech and finance Community you know and they said it best they go like does anybody think these

days they were like literally like like and listen I'm not really big on the government stuff like I'm very uneducated so I'm just gonna say that now but they were even like why isn't the like FDIC aware that this could happen is anybody talking to anybody like and I feel like that kind of happened with tech too it's like hey the metaverse and and there's nobody going well do we need to have that right like I feel like everyone's like yeah yeah that sounds great everyone do it and there's just no critical thinking thinking there's no critical thinking happening right now and well until now

because we have to yeah that so so part of it is this kind of new era of Silicon Valley where we're at today which is things are getting tighter belts are tightening we there's not infinite money for just random ideas which kind of sucks in a way because you know that's how Innovation happens just like these random moments of creation and that's how we get a lot of the technology we enjoy today now we have to be we have to be more ruthless and say what's the value here to the company it's not just because it's cool uh or this will be a thing in

10 years so let's get in now we have to say what's this going to provide to us in the next two three years four or five years so there's no more of that kind of speculative thinking but there's also this conflict where we all yearn for like the Halcyon Days of innovation and you know you can join a startup and become a bi llionaire because you got in at the ground floor of a really good idea of like the Google or meta and all that but those days are gone and yeah but we're all everybody still yearns for them in a way of like let's

just go back to building being creative let's get rid of the middle management let's get rid of all that but that's just not the state of business anymore we heck is a business just like oil or Finance or anything else and it it's sad to say but like that's just the error we live in now yeah 100 100 um let's see here definitely some comments around freelancing and Contracting um you know to be honest Allison and Jeff um I want to bring on somebody who's really good with pricing when it comes to freelancing in Tech um because I want to be able to give that

back to you all so um I'll keep an eye on that um let's see here I love this Java comes in keep that Dev journal with big wins and contributions because it's hard to remember so I interviewed somebody I don't know who it was but they said what they do is they spend five minutes every week 10 minutes every two weeks and then 30 minutes every month documenting successes just in a journal yeah fantastic advice and that that's for anybody whether you're like I'm secure in my job my brother you're like I'm not getting laid off but yeah yeah I do the same thing I

have a doc it's open right now it's called management oh do you really yeah and I just like what are some of the challenges I've had to work through because in the in the in the moment I'm like oh of course I'll remember this in a year but a year later you know it's like being a parent there's always a new crisis and you've forgotten the last one um so yeah just you take two minutes and be like today I work through this or this week I work through that's it it's a challenger had a difficult conversation and here's what I've learned then you recap

that so when you do need to find a new role you're ready you you have your resume it makes it resume writing easier but you have your you're like hey hey man what have you been up to and you're like well here's my responsibilities here's what I did here's some challenges and that's what hiring managers want to hear that's what everybody wants to hear is like who you are yeah you can code that's great lots of people can code but like what did you do like what did you what was um definitely a lot of people commenting on you know keeping track of stuff for

sure uh Sam Sam from Brooklyn Sam and I are gonna link up whenever I do a Brooklyn Meetup um question for later with the market being saturated with experienced Engineers do you do you find that companies are looking for juniors if so what qualities do you look for when you're hiring more Junior positions Jim what are your thoughts on this and and um you know I'm really curious on on your end I I have seen an increase in juniors and it's oh you have that's why oh yeah that's I have okay that's why we're we we aren't in an unprecedented territory in Tech like I

think people think it's one way but uh it's something we've never experienced before which is uh you know past 10 years Tech salaries exploded you know the I know plenty of people that make way more than doctors way more in finance people and that's that was super common and still is however in this new world maybe we want some Junior talent because if senior Engineers are commanding you know 400 500 300 whatever their their commanding in Silicon Valley maybe we should look towards Junior talent and start developing that a little bit kind of like um kind of like baseball or football or something like that

yeah you go on higher than the next star right and pay them that money but really what you need right now in the business is like maybe we should grow some homegrown talents yeah and they're they're a little bit cheaper they they're not as experienced you have to you definitely have to hand hold a lot more but right maybe that's the era we're in right now where we w ant to build up this new base of talents and kind of develop them in-house well I was I was Gem and I were chit chatting right before we went live and Jim was like you know I

see you doing the hockey stuff and and I want to give this example of kind of what we did right so my brother and I my brother is in Tech he's a product owner I think he'd be a hell of a recruiter um but but what my brother and I did is we created a feeder program for a year and a half so our team plays in the upper division but we had a lower division team and allowed the upper team members to play down to work on things because if you're not playing at if you're not playing at super high level you can work

on things and kind of Master some things but what it allowed us to do is it allowed us to bring in a bunch of randos who we didn't know and 90 of those randos were pretty bad but the 10 we found are now playing in the upper team with us and we're killing everybody and not literally but but literally what what that's allowed us to do is and I apply that with business right my latest conference talk a Manifesto and hiring that I gave at that conference and I'll be giving um and um at that conference keynote in Wisconsin in July is basically you have

to have some sort of feeder program if you have no feeder program it's just like any successful sports teams baseball soccer football football is college but now I got the XFL but like there you have to have the feeder programs to be successful long term yeah and I think we're learning that because you know yeah 2020 oh we only need senior Engineers what are they building uh yeah basically that's all 2021s give me your best seniors and it's like yeah and again we can't blame we can't blame the industry because when you have unlimited money and you have unlimited budgets of course you're going to

hire the absolute best you can but now we're looking at the things we're building and saying do we need a senior engineer to build this or can we do with the two Junior Engineers yeah and that's that's like the mindset shift we're going through right now um it is a tricky space to stand out I think as a junior engineer because you are competing against paying Engineers mid-level developers who are pretty good at what they do but what I look for in junior talent and has has never changed it's always that that passion and I don't mean like working 80 hours a week um I'm

always I'm online available all the time like that's not what I mean when a passion that means like hey you know I I was digging through the code I'm still new here and I noticed this problem so I pulled this thread a little bit I noticed our documentation is like way out of date so I went in and go ahead and updated that for the next people and like that's the sort of behavior you want like that that leader behavior and you can see that really really early with even Junior people that's how you stand out it's like I'm a leader I'm a go-getter I'm

gonna go do these things I'm gonna make your life because you're a junior you can be a leader like absolutely I firmly believe that I firmly believe that all right we got to get to these there's so much time but I have a hard cut because my wife's got to go and I gotta go on baby Duty and Jim totally understands that um oh Lord Scott that's a great let's real quick we're gonna do rap fire in this new world where there's even more competition for software it's hard for a junior to uh to break and have metrics that provide context what verifiable metrics do

you want to see in a junior dev's portfolio what are ways we can provide that production level data this is a great question on our own way that will wow future employers gem go oh man uh no no offense Junior Engineers you're probably not going to have metrics that are useful to me uh because like you you you might make an impact here and there but like metrics I'm not really looking at that that's probably a mistake I see on people's resume which is like I d id XX and X it's helpful but tell me what you led tell me tell me like hey I

had this idea and I wasn't seeing enough to execute it but like I brainstormed and I pulled the people together and we helped deliver this tell me about the projects that you you drove tell me about the impact you had on the company is that if that's metric space and you have hard metrics that's fine but what I want to see is like that passion that drive that you know I'm hungry and I want to I want to make the business better no matter where I am and I want to make everybody around me better and like that's a story you should be telling I

love that real quick from lavonda always be interviewing yeah you have to right now uh I'm gonna be honest with you I I think you just you have to keep your head on a swivel right now um I think you just got to be aware for sure uh uh Lord have mercy so many questions gem man every time you come on dude it's it's just it's so many questions uh uh see here Sam comes in again random question what are your thoughts about the Advent of AI Jim joked about this backstage um how it may disrupt the market for front-end devs in the future should

we be scared joking kind of thoughts uh you can't fight the future but let's face it a lot of what we do is uh boilerplate and that's what AI can help solve is like that boilerplate that's always been the case you know as multi increases we don't have to do the menial jobs or the the jobs that don't take a lot of brain power anymore I'd say that's what AI can help what AI can't help with is the actual hard problems the the nuances of business the nuances of a code base things like that so I wouldn't be worried but I'd say it's a good

time to start looking at how AI can improve your your current role like maybe writing a dock for you or something like that writing out some boilerplate template there you go sweet Jim thank you my friend that was awesome I appreciate you obviously I could talk for you for hours uh y'all for r eal go ahead and connect with Jim on LinkedIn on Twitter um his Twitter is and his LinkedIn is him holding a cat that's shooting out lasers so you cannot miss it it's the best profile pick on the internet I truly think that um Jen thank you so much my friends thanks for

having me on Taylor all right we'll see y'all tomorrow at unicorn finders 9 30 in the morning peace see