ai, coffee, and leveling up your career w/robin gupta, vp of eng

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Robin look good to people what they want man. Who are you? Where are you located and what time is it right now? We'll go from there Yeah, 100% first of all. Thank you. Thank you so much to Taylor and the fam over here for having me I'm talking live and in person from Bangalore India. It's 9 p.m. I see post dinner Coffee time If I had coffee Robin at 9 p.m. I would I would never go to sleep Yeah, see that's the idea. Have coffee, catch up with Taylor, spread some vibes and then we'll be just go and sleep. Yeah, now that you've uncored the world.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. So Rob, what do you do, ma'am? Oh, yeah. So apart from being a coffee nerd, I'm also a co-ordener and currently at work, I had the engineering vertical at Pro bar. We are a premier sales host, the start automation product company. Okay, that's the company part. But what I do is three things, technology, super passionate, super focused on AI and how we can implement it in our products. Second, people, that's like I think my thing for many, many years now, coaching, mentoring, and helping people grow. And third is process. So fine tuning the process here, a little bit there, can extract some more mojo out of our teams.

So that is what I do in the next channel. I love that. I love that. And Maria, I want to celebrate you, except that a part-time remote evening teaching job coding bootcamp. No side classes. I love it. I love teaching. Most of all, I love that Marie. Congratulations. So Robin, let's go ahead and dive in, man. Lots to talk about today. One of the things, you know, we talked about backstage, but for those of you watching now in the future and you don't kind of know this setup, I don't do set questions, right? I don't send any of my audience questions. We don't have 12 questions where to answer them.

This is totally off the cuff, right? So I get backstage with my guests and I go, what do you pass by right now? So, so Robin of course brought up what everybody's passion right now AI so Robin if you want to start diving in man like I guess what are you looking at what are you tinkering with how are you using it and we just go from there yeah 100% and interestingly before this session I was thinking about this that see this question will come up or might come up as Taylor said nothing is scripted it's all improved to you yeah so there are these two things happening in the AI and interestingly Open AI has turned this whole world into like a hackathon everybody's just like hacking at it.

How do we make sense out of it? How do we get profit out of it? So I see these like three camps of people, right? I don't know about you guys. I'll ask Taylor for sure, which camp is Ian. So one camp is the Procorders. Yeah, let's get on to the Python things. Yeah, I see your comments about the AI overlords. I'll come to that in a minute. The one is Procorders Camp, Python and Langchain and Langsmith or you know open your APIs and fine tuning and what not. Second is the low coders camp prompt engineering or can we build custom GPTs and third is naysayers yeah yeah we don't believe in all this.

It's not gonna touch me and this other person. So that is how I see the world. I'm super passionate I think I'm in mostly in the first and second category. Some pessimistic Saturday is where it doesn't work I'm in a third category. Yeah, this is not gonna work for me forever. Sure But you cannot be a bystander is the idea What how I mean what are you using in your workflow because I here's deal so so Ganyo We did a we did a virtual meetup last week with one of my buddies Lee Harrington It was a very very like 101 chat around prompt engineering How do you make it work especially within your codebase yada yada?

What are you doing right now? How are you experimenting with AI? Do you have it in your workflows? I'm just curious if you want to dive in how you're using it right now. John, 100%. Okay, so we'll talk about AdWords and Outside Duper. Right? So, okay, Offwork is how I think of a technology. You know, go on to Google collab, write a few lines of Python code. It's very friendly folks who are Python-y stars. Shout out to them. But even if you're not a coder, that's fine. There are many templates and notebooks and frameworks available, so you can try that out. If you're not a coder, even that's perfectly fine.

It's as simple as firing up THAD Jupyty. Then then tinkering with the questions that you asked. And earlier this year, I gave a talk on prompt engineering. And okay, very simply, it's like talking to your eight-year-old daughter. Interestingly, I have an eight-and-a-half-year-old daughter. And you have to specifically tell her, build a house which would have one window and one roof and black smoke coming out. The door should be red, the house should be white, the roof should be blue. It will make the house. Just like my daughter will make a very beautiful house. So you have to follow the same principle. Just make it almost specific, not very specific, a little bit specific.

And then you can enhance. You can ask things like, okay, be creative. Don't make the cloud maybe make a mountain or something. or maybe a unique corner of the house and you can do that. Right? So, okay, back to the main thread. Pro coders do that. Low coders do prompt engineering fine tuning. You can build your custom GPTs. That is what I tried and it definitely worked pretty fine. So that is what I did outside work and then at work, what we are doing is it is we are trying out GitHub co-pilot as part of our dev teams. We've got some very good results 40 to 50% increment in developer experience, I wouldn't say velocity or acceleration.

Sure. But people are 50% happier for sure, right? Because you can write those small snippets. So what is GitHub Copile for the ones watching this that may not have tinkered with it yet? Like, what is it? Also, just so I can learn too. I kind of know what it is, but not really. Yeah, no problem. See, basically, when you write code, right, in any ID integrated development environment, you can fire up your ID and write a small statement, Print Hello World, right? If you do print and you press tab, it can show you Hello World or some options. GitHub CoPilot takes it a step further.

You can write a comment, write the program for a calculator using Python. It will start writing that out. So GitHub CoPilot is the user representation for a large language model, which has been trained on a lot of code. And then you can press tab tab, accept those changes, and then very quickly build out programs. So what are your thoughts on this, Robin Barrett comes in and Barrett was a former guest. I love co-pout, but sometimes it tries to be a little too helpful. Kyle, like an eight-year-old daughter, let's be a harvestist. Yeah, right. Let me, daddy, let me make coffee for you. No, no, no.

I think I'll do the coffee. You just stand there and help me with the cookie. Definitely bad. That is the case. Seven out of ten times, I'm happy with what it does. And I'm like, yeah, it's cute. Sure. But three out of ten times, I'm like, really angry. Yeah, don't write it, just stop. Don't don't give me any suggestions. You don't know what APIs I have. You don't have the context. So just it's fine. So I haven't asked this with anybody, especially engineering leaders yet. You're the first one. Are you constantly trying to evaluate how to implement AI within your engineering organization right now? Because you said you told me backstage 40 people?

Yeah, exactly. That you're managing right now? Yeah, it's a lot. So are you, is it always on your mind, like how, how can we implement these tools to, to make either developer experience and or velocity better? Yeah, definitely. So these two questions, not just to one, not just developer experience. And how can we use this to make our folks happier? There's one question. The other is how can we incorporate these technologies into a core product to make our end users happier. So that is what we are also working within Pro-R labs, which is the Innovation Center at Pro-R. We're in the experiment with these things.

large language models, open source, close source, APIs and custom development to understand how best can we use this, not just for us, but for our end users as well. Constantly, definitely. Yeah, that makes sense. What would you say to Ryan right here, because Ryan comes in and goes, I've tried Copilot with work. I'm sure other people feel this way too. I haven't found it useful yet, but I can see where it can be used. What would you say to Ryan and the individuals who may be tinkering with stuff like this and maybe having this issue? Yeah, see, it's just like charge-up-t. Obviously, chargeability cannot make the whole thing.

But think of it as an extension of the auto-complete on your phone. So what we have found out is that scripting languages, like type, sphere, pro-java script, or maybe Python, not procedural languages like Java. On the scripting languages, about five, seven lines of code is our mental model, that do something, ask, co-pilot something, which makes it five to seven lines of code. That's about it. If it is too big, it like kind of, you know, goes into other directions where we don't want it to go. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love that. I want to talk as or just as we wrap up here, any other thoughts on AI, because I want to kind of move in to obviously mentor menteeship, what we talked about some leadership stuff, anything else with AI.

Again, I know this could be its own top and we get super grainy. But I want to see if there's anything else. Any other words of wisdom that you would give for maybe some one on one type stuff. Yeah, definitely. See, first thing is, so don't be a ness here. Try it out. It's a tool, right? And I see there's a tool from the future. So whether you are a pro-coder or a low-coder or no-coder, it's perfectly fine. This is the time to learn and not be anxious about it. Learn these new tools and technologies and see how best they can help you back in your career.

Maybe at work or even outside work. Awesome. I love that. Let me ask you this. Rob and coffee real quick. You and I bonded over coffee. How do you like your coffee? What do you get? Do you have a favorite coffee shop where you live? Just want to touch on coffee real, real fast. Yeah, 100%. So I've been like that kind of a person who got his own coffee and roasted it at house. And then actually got sold it over. He's at your house. Yeah. Exactly 45 minutes later, my family was like, something is burning in the kitchen. Like, yeah, no, no, I'm just experimenting with stuff.

Yeah. So I'm that kind of a person, but those coffee roasting days are over. I get my coffee from third wave coffee in India. The name is very interesting because the coffee industry has had like three waves. So the first wave was all about, you know, pre-built coffee or, you know, next cafe kind of things. You can just get the powder put in the water. You are in World War II. You don't have time to brew coffee, right? The bullet's fine. The second wave was like where Starbucks came. So there was industrialization, right? Or many coffee chains sprung up across the world. But these are chains like McDonald's and they treat coffee like burger, not good.

Now we are in this like third wave of coffee. Wherein' you know you have these bespoke barista shops. And you know, some shops they only do like arabicars and some do robusta, some do like blends or very specific holiday things. So we are in this wave, I'm super excited to be part of this like third wave of coffee. I love it. And that is how this chain in India started. Third way of coffee. And they're about a very small size or small batches roasting from their own farm to the coffee. Okay. So it's super fresh, super zingy. What's your favorite coffee style or coffee that you get?

Are you just like, cause I'm like an ice coffee black, that's it. What's your go-to coffee drink? Yeah, I think I was that person, black coffee. Also, I'm very fat like you can't see below a certain line, but secrets. I'm a little bit fatter. So from there, I've now come to realize that it depends on the mood and the day. If Bangalore is a little too cold, you know, it's a cabbage, you know, if it's a little too hot, it's a cold brew from over the night. And if I'm feeling lazy and fat at the same time, but there's more pressure, maybe go to a cafe or do a nitro brew or something.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Marie comes in here goes, any going back to Copile real quick, any tips online how to use Copile, I guess kind of what you told Ryan too, but I haven't used it much, but I'm interested. Yeah, 100%. See, okay. So this is a mental model I use and I alluded to earlier. It's like think of it as talking to a seven or eight year, not 10 year old kid, not two year old, 728 is the sweet spot, right? And then when you talk to that personality, first think about what you want to build. So come from the outside, that today we'll be building a house.

In web terms, it will be more like today we'll be building a landing page for a website. So that should be like a header. This is what we'll do. This is our intention, right? And if you don't have access to a copilot, it's fine. You can go to chat, GPD and try the same things. Or cloud or whatever your jam is, right? It's the same thing. First, the high level outline and then the next the low level lines, the landing page will have a header image or a hero image. It will have a sign up button which will take in emails. It will also have four links about privacy policy, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then you can do the same thing on Copilot. It will actually generate those codes for you. You can mention the languages. But long story short, summarizing all that, go with the high level intent. of it as talking to a seven or eight year old. And then in your comments, mention these components that you want to build out, you should be fine. I really love, I really love, I can tell you're an engineering leader because you're you're you're explaining things really well. But talking about how AI is a seven eight year old child, I think is brilliant because because I think I think I think people think it's gonna, I think people think AI is like a full on adult.

Right. No, not like and that's not the case. And so I really love that you have to you have to still tell AI step by step like if you have a child. It just kind of does that work. Exactly. Elliott comes in here. I love using AI. I'm fortunate to be where I'm in a team that's encouraged to leverage it for innovation in many areas of my company's public and internal facing products. There's a million places to innovate, but in general, what innovations are bringing business value in the work that you're doing with AI? Wow. Tough questions and slightly secret. We are from Labs, but still, here's a sneak peek.

So basically, if you look at AI in general, right? Whenever we say I am assuming large language models, there are like a ton of other AI things which can happen, machine learning, neural networks, NLP, blah, blah, blah. Another day, another topic. Today, it's all about genetic AI. But we have found to be very useful is also writing on the way of chat GPT that one the reason why open AI build chat GPT is because it's conversational. It can craft answers and then it's all text based. So we are trying something similar. And again, these are experiments that we are doing. The other thing is now that people have used the chat GPT interface, right?

Generally, our user behavior is started getting attuned to that. Sure. You're fine chatting with bots now. Right. Suddenly, one year back, maybe not. Today, definitely, a lot of folks in tech are fine chatting with stuff. Right? So that is how any time would answer your question. Think about text. Think about the chatting interface. Think about question answers and see how can that bring value for your product or for your cooperation? I love that. I love that. I want to get into, you know, one thing you talk about is your career in engineering leadership and how you've brought people up through the career. One thing you mentioned that I'm really passionate about is the mentor-mentee relationship.

I think it's very nuanced. I think it could be an amazing level upper for your career. Can you talk about maybe your history with mentor menteeship, maybe how you've implemented your organization and maybe just some other thoughts around it? Yeah, 100%. See, okay. And again, I generally resort to similar mental models whenever I go through this. And for Star Wars fans, there's like Master Yoda. And then there's like the whole thing. I love it. So I think of myself some days, not every day as Master Yoda, but also not like that cryptic. Right. There's no point in being cryptic. If I tell Taylor, be smart or be not, I'll kill her like, dude like this chat jiffy out there and Robert is telling me be smart Robby now what does it mean?

Right so as you said it has to be super nuanced but that relationship would be there and what I found through my career is that one you can be a mentor and the mentee at the same time I'm a mentor for some people plus I'm a mentee for some people as well yeah so that is super important also what I found is both at work and off work. This mental mental relationship has kept me going for many years as a regional leader. Some people get burnt out with just people management and all. I personally see it as tending to a garden. Like you have to water the plants and wait for the fruits to come.

Pray to God that the rain happens in the right quantity and suddenly that product doesn't pressurize the engine in too much. So those planning needs to happen. but also off work you need to cut off some time. Generally my time is Friday evenings after office to mentor some of the people in my circle. But also at the same time go on to platforms. Like I was mentioning to Taylor before the call. There are platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter or ADPList or Plato HQ. I just go to Twitter and put a calendar link that hey you can block time with me over here. Long story short, I think it helps grow people, but it also helps me grow so far.

I don't think I would be here Without the blessing of all those people I had a hundred I'd say same. Let me ask you this. Do you have? Do you have a formalized mentor mentee relationship kind of program within your engineering group? Yeah, that is something which you are starting Yeah, exactly Yeah, are there any parameters that you're putting in place anything you want to share just maybe for some other engineering leaders And I'll tell you this I have a lot of engineering leaders watch this show they don't comment in the comments, but they're in my DMs. So yeah. So so what would you tell those engineering leaders who watch this on maybe some parameters you're putting in place for your mentor mentee program?

Yeah, definitely. See, first of all, like try to pass the wide net because even if you want to be mental, the mentees might be a little bit sharp, which is fine. And I people don't realize the value in that relationship. And they're like, Oh, will I be like this? Like another one on one. Oh my God. I'm already sweating. So you have to be very open and transparent with the people. And then to your point, rather than going to like very technical parameters, just start simple. So one of the programs that we are starting is the speaker Academy at Fova. We are helping budding speakers or folks who really want to be on the stage and speak, get up and get that mentorship.

Yeah. So it's very simple. Nothing engineering, nothing technical. We won't, you know, terrify you with Python or large language models. We start with simple things. Sure. but yeah, we'll definitely go to the more complicated things in life. Are you, what do you think a good cadence is for mentee, mental relationship within an organization? Like what are you encouraging? Is it once a week, once a month? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it should be once in two weeks to get started with. Okay. That is not too frequent and not interfering with your work, but it's also not like too relaxed. Yeah. Yeah.

But then as you build that relationship, you can ask that question up front. Like let's say I'm your mentee and you can ask me, okay, all in half your quiddies will be catch up. But I'm like, Sunday is I have to go pick up my daughter and that thing happens and then the releases are there. We should do once a month and we should then do once a month. Right. So I think it depends a lot on where that cooperation is at. If it's, is it a large organization or a small organization? Plus where that person is at? Are they going through? I don't know very tough phase in their life where they actually appreciate once a week.

Or are they just relaxed? They just joined the corporation. So it's fine to catch up once in two weeks because your release is going on. I love that. I love that. Marie comes in here, goes same. Can't shout out my engineering mentors enough. They know things I don't and then I get smarter. Love that. And then there it comes in here. I love the mentor. I think it's more far more fulfilling. Yeah. And I think, man, like I just, you know, if we talk about employee retention, right? And I was really big on employee. Like I get, I don't know about you. I have kind of themes and topics that I get really passionate about through the course of a year.

Well, during 2021, 2022, everybody was getting picked off for jobs. I was really big on talking about employee retention. And I think one of the biggest things from employee retention that you can do is actually have a really good sophisticated mentor mentee program within your organization because there is such a passion. Barrett, Marie, a lot of other engineering leaders that I know that aren't necessarily in leadership positions, but they just love mentoring, right? There's a passion for teaching. And I think if you can empower your senior leaders with mentor mentee opportunities, I think that's one of the many things many ways to keep your talent attached within your organization.

Exactly. This is so coincidental. I don't know. This is Fates plan or this happened. Today I was eating this book. It's called Ask a Developer. It's by the founder of Twilio. And he mentioned this like very profound thing that don't, you know, if you start treating your developers or engineers, as code monkeys, they might as well become monkeys and jump from branch to branch. The minute you get them a seat at the table and you help them grow and have these mentor mentee kind of engagements, one, it's not costly. You just need like a Zoom call or 30 minutes once and we cover it with that cadence.

It also makes that person very empowered, right? And then it's good for both employee retention, but also employee growth at the same time. These are the future leaders that we're looking at. I love that. I love that. Alec comes in here and goes, our company does the same with Public Speaking Academy, helping people at least stop saying, um, and yeah, love that. It's big. I think another thing too. So I also, Robin, I want to give you a shout out. So we talked about this backstage about kind of stepping into this new opportunity, kind of this unknown opportunity. I do want you to brag on yourself a little bit and highlight this.

And also too, like, I think, and even with me, right, I was at one company for 12 years. Wow. 12 years. That's really isn't taking as long. Yeah, it's a long time. The fear of the unknown is terrifying. You recently went into something that was very unknown. Can you just give words of encouragement to people who may be embarking on the unknown and kind of your robin's thoughts on that? Yeah, 100%. Okay, so first the data and then the philosophy. I love it. I love it. You're such an engineering leader, it's ridiculous. So actually I joined Pro-VAR as the AVP for Innovation. Now see, this title is very problematic, right?

So is the AVP, so you are in leadership position, but it's also for innovation. So innovation is like a very loaded word. It is not like AVP for engineering, and there are no books to like, become the AVP for Innovation. There are books to be for a VP for Engineering. So I had to really kick start the innovation at crowbar or at my current organization to be very frank on on camera and on record. I haven't run innovation departments as such in the past. So also I was jumping in from a large organization to a smaller one. So this is like not just jumping into the pool, but with a pool full of sharks and you don't even know is it whatever fire.

So complicated as well, but I think I find some happiness in crisis similar to Elon. And the idea was okay, Pincher knows, jump in the pool, we'll figure out how to swim. And when I jumped in, I actually like this book, it's called the Nike Day Plan. So for the first 90 days, I just had virtual coffees with a lot of people within the corporation understood the pain points of the product of the people process and tech. And that is how kick started this whole thing with one event, the Hackathon. So we had a Hackathon at my cooperation. We came up with some nifty ideas and we did like these two things.

We not only benefited the engineering folks or folks around the cooperation made them empowered. We also got some very nice ideas or prototypes to be incorporated in our product. And that's how the whole journey started. So those are the data points. Now the philosophy. See, I think in this vulnerable and uncertain tenure of our lives in our tech career, I think right now with open AI and oh my god, the tech is just being appended like anything. Plus, the global macroeconomics and there is literally like two wars. Like, we started with one war, but there are like two wars, I call AI the third war, so there are three things happening, right?

It cannot be more uncertain, I think. whatever years of my life I've never seen such uncertainty. But that can do two things. It can either fight in you or it can empower you and you can find these opportunities. So you have to really treat this chaos as a ladder, climb it, jump into it and just start building. If you're an engineer, build, if you're not an engineer, it's okay, learn and build. So that's the philosophy. Jump into it and make it work. I love that. I love that. And let's see here. Yeah, Marie comes in here. I was going to say that mentoring mentee is free with the results or priceless.

I love that. Jan, it comes in. One of the key things I'm looking for in my next role at the company has a structured mentorship learning instructor. So engineering leaders, you heard it first, implement it. I think it could be a huge, huge activity that secret sauce. Yeah, definitely. All right, man, we're going to wrap up here. It was a pleasure. Last four questions again. Tom, Tom, we're having fun with friends. So first question is, What do you, if money was the same, if money was the same, what would you do for your job outside of tech? Yeah, 100, okay. I was gonna say 100 things, but I'll just cut it to one thing.

I would rather go into teaching. That is how I started my career. I loved it, I used to teach electrical engineering. Also, I just love writing, so I've been teaching and writing go hand in hand. So if the money was the same, yeah. like a university college level or like a younger age group. I'm kind of curious. I think I would do university or college. Younger folks would be naughty. I'm getting old as you can see. I don't know all the memes and they would just like send me something I wouldn't know. He goes I don't know all the memes. I love the transparency Robin.

I can also tell you're a dad too. I do. All right. Next question is, you know, what do you do outside of work for fun? Okay. Yeah, this is going to sound super nerdy. So these days I'm into large language models and stuff. So I think with things here and there, I make things. But I'm tired. So I try to make custom GPTs with HoFone. I'm not tired. I just fire a Python and Google collab and see how I can do that thing with an open source language model. I love it. And then it kind of goes my next question. I know we talked about AI.

I'm kind of curious if you have any other thing maybe didn't share. Is there any tools, technologies, frameworks that maybe you and your team are experiment? It doesn't have to be AI. It could just be traditional software engineering. Is there anything that your team is messing with right now that you're excited about? Yeah, 100%. So AI was one thing. But the other thing you're super passionate about is the cloud platform. So interestingly, what we have seen is that everybody's thinking that DevOps and cloud are done. It's not so. have found working with large organizations is that a lot of large organizations, BFSI, banking financial services in Chardonncy, and governments and so on, so for health care, blah, blah, I can go on and hunt.

Sure. Not many people have moved into a much short state of cloud. So that is something which we are super passionate about. That is what we are also tinkering with at office and I'm tinkering with personally. So yeah, because I'm seeing stuff like clouds dead, everyone's back on prem, you know, all this stuff and I'm like, I've even seen some stuff about monolith versus microservices. So we are back to the mid 2000s at this point, I feel like. But no, that's really good to know. And I think that's awesome. So last question here, Robin. So it shows called Guidance Council 2.0 because we had Guidance Councils at middle school high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have them.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Robin? I think I would just go back in time first Mac myself in the face. And then we very open that building on tech, learning new things is great. But don't forget two things in the process. One is like really work on the fundamentals, like the core computer science. Focus on it. Come on, go through the books. Do the mathematics. And second is do not forget brand building. I think in this connected world, as you mentioned initially, brand or individual brands are super important. It will not only help that individual grow, but also help them grow as a leader and then attract talent and power and smarts in the world.

I love that, I love that, that's awesome, that's awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. I hope y'all have a great rest of your Monday, Robin. I hope you sleep well, you're gonna go off to bed now. And so I hope you get a good night's sleep. But for those of you who are watching still, thank you so much for hanging out with us today for guidance comes 2.0 tomorrow. We have my guy Joe Pravet on the show. Joe was laid off twice in one year. He is a senior engineer. He just got a job and he recently did a fantastic job documenting his job search on Twitter.

So we're gonna bring him on, talk about all the things that he learned most recently going through his job shirts as a senior engineer. So, Robin, thank you my friend for hanging out. I appreciate it. Stay on real quick backstage. I can say bye to you. Everyone else, thank you all so much. Appreciate you. We'll see y'all tomorrow morning. Peace. Bye-bye. Hey, you did it. you listen 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 finish 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 at Tdaston on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.