making yourself invaluable w/ annyce davis vp of eng at meetup

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All right, so Anise, give the people they want a little bit about you. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Okay, so hi, I'm Anise Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup. I lovingly joke that I do everything. But I really specialize in just like helping teams, deliver software. Personally, I'm really attached to mobile development, specifically Android. So yeah, that's me. I love that. I love that. So, and how long have you been a VP of engineering at meetup.com? So I've been a VP for two years now. Okay. And I've been here at meetup for four years. Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome.

Fantastic. So we had lots of dive in today. Again, I don't have set questions, right? I know I say this a lot. I literally, Anisha just hopped on a call with me. First time we've ever met 10 minutes ago, and I was like, we want to talk about she goes, ah, so we have a good conversation. She gave me some great topics. I'm really excited to talk about Brooklyn, what's going on, Michael, and Maria's good to see you, Natalie. It's great to see you all this morning. We got some stragglers this morning. All right, so the first thing I really want to dig into first before y'all get bored of us and move on is making yourself invaluable to your organization.

Anise brought this up, herself unprompted. I think this is incredibly important. Anise, I went through an interview. I went through my job search. My first time on the job search ever. Like I landed a job out of college for 12 years and then I recently left. So yeah, it was kind of crazy. And so the place where I'm at now, like I really realized that like I had to dig in of what I was able to bring to the table. And so, and Lisa, I wanna dive in with that. What are your initial thoughts and then we'll obviously kind of get dive deeper about making yourself invaluable to your organization?

Yeah, what I guess what I feel happens for engineers is they really focus on the what and the how of what they do. For example, I help people review their resumes and they'll say like I Locked this new app. It used Kotlin multi-platform Well, what do you do? There's a lot of people I can do that same exact thing but the the piece that's missing is the impact Yes, what was the business impact of the fact that you did that and so that is how you can really sell yourself and and stand out from all the other candidates when they're just giving you 30 seconds to look at your resume.

They need to say the impact. Like for example, like you would say, oh, this opened up a million dollar business line for my company. That's incredible. Right. Right? That's incredible, especially during a time where it's all about like call savings in the bottom line and making shareholders more money. Yeah. You're a person that can help make more money. Okay, yeah, we want you here. Right. So I think that's the key. Why do you think people struggle? I have my thoughts, but I'm gonna say, why do you think people struggle with that? Because very few people do that, in my opinion. Yeah. I think it's a few things.

So first I'll say it's something psychological. And I think people view it's like immoral to talk about money. Yeah, I grew up Southern Baptist. You didn't do that. You didn't do that. You had smack on the head. Don't talk about money. I really feel like people are just nervous to say, like, OK, I did something to make money. We all want to feel like we're doing good. We're contributing to the greater good. We're doing meaningful work. And that's awesome. But ultimately, people don't pay you because they really want to have a new technology for their product. They pay you because you can help them make even more money.

That's what it is. So first I think it's just very much a psychological thing where we hesitate to connect our work with direct revenue. Yep, absolutely. I do, Marie kind of brings up too. The struggle can be that engineers brains are always so into code and the technical details to us. That's the job. So it's hard to translate that from a business people for a lot of us smiley face. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think too, I mean, I think a lot of people don't have access to this information I feel like too. Do you agree like or not? What's up kids? I feel like both companies that have been at, they will at least share high level, you know, business takeaways.

At least like this month, we would get a positive or negative or good stuff. We got this much revenue, even if it's like, maybe on a monthly or quarterly basis. We're sharing some metrics with you. If you work for a public company, that stuff's online. So there's, I don't think there's really an excuse to say, like I have no idea whatsoever what money my company is making. And then let's say you absolutely have no clue. Then you can just guess, because we're engineers, right? So you say, on average, everyone on my team that say makes a hundred thousand. Just do simple easy math. There's just three people of my team.

That means that we'd have to at least be making this much money for our work to be all over the board. Like, you know, you can try to guess it. Other things are like more specific. Like let's say I was working on an application, a native app, because that's what I'm most familiar with. And I helps boost the ratings from like 4.3 to 4.5. That's incredible, especially for an app. So then I might say like, I helped lead a 75% increase in app store ratings. It's like, ooh, that's incredible. Like that's a great number to throw out there and say that you were able to do.

Right. So even if it's like not direct revenue, there's some metric that you should be moving. Yeah. And, and, and I'll, um, and also to like pretty, pretty underrated thing to figure out, just ask, Hey, Dev, like, I need, it's like, if I worked on a Unai report to you and we did something, I'd be like, hey, how, how much do you think to smooth the needle? And you could probably tell me. Yes. Right. Just ask. Yeah. Yeah. Because also too, I'd be curious. I saw, again, not a developer here. But like if I was a developer, I would be asking like, hey, what, what are we doing?

And how's it move the needle? Pretty much any time. I mean, that's just the way I would work. Like, hey, I'd be on a project. How's this move the needle? And I'd like take notes. Okay. All right. And then like, when you write your resume, you have all those notes available. And it's so important. because like let's look at the flip side. If you're working on a project and you're not moving the needle, you know that's a, you may wanna try to switch teams or. Talk about that, talk about that first. Right? Cause I know, I'm sure you know a lot of people who work on projects that aren't, critical public facing.

How do you try to position yourself within the organization? Because I've been asked this question to tell me, How do you jockey to get on another project? Yes. So what I recommend to people is become that person. Every company has that, I'll say that guy. So it's like, who's that guy that knows about AWS? That guy who does the iOS app, there's always like that guy. You wanna become that person. So whatever it is so that the higher up business people know your name and they can associate you with a particular subject, you become the SME, then that is the best thing for you. That's probably even more important than being the best engineer in that particular category.

You want to be known as that person who they can go to and get answers to the questions and answers that they can actually understand. Sure. Yeah. What do you mean to actually understand? I'm back that first. Yeah. You emphasize that pretty good. Yes. Because I, you'll always know that person when you ask them a question, you need to sit down and have your cup of coffee because it's going to be a long one. And you're like, so. And then this technology originated from struts, actions, black and air. Man, all I was trying to find out is the app reactor now. You know, like, and they kind of go on and on.

Yeah. And so I feel like for business people, they're coming to you. They have so many other things that they're trying to do. Yeah. They need the specific answer to the question that's being asked. Is this app react? Yes or no kind of answers? And then if they need follow-up, then you can provide it. Or they need the answer now and you're like, well, technically, I'd have to guess. Yeah. And I'm going to just guess. I have to go dig in the code. No, guess. Say, my best guess is blank. But if you can give me to the end of the day, I can provide a more accurate response to you.

Mm hmm. You're the perfect. That's the best way to communicate with people who are so busy in context switching constantly. And then in their eyes, now you're a winner. It's like, great, I can go to this person and get my question answered. A hundred percent. I think this also goes to writing resumes because I'm sure you view a lot of resumes yourself. Yep. I think there's a lot of people have problems with putting things in plain English. Yes. And that to me, for me, that's actually one of my strengths, like is taking, like hiring problems because the organization I work with helps with hiring. And he's if you need developers, let me know.

But basically at the end of the day, like I was having Drix my CEO the other night and he's like, man, you just like break things down so well. What I've realized is that like, that's actually been the reason why I can get into certain rooms that I probably wouldn't be allowed to be in because I can literally talk about things in the simplest terms and I attribute that to my mother because me and my brother's a great product person too, same reason. Because we've had to explain things to my mother and sometimes she doesn't understand things that well. But it's a superpower. Being able to break down complicated things is such a way that anyone can understand it.

It's really a superpower. Yep, absolutely. Emmet comes in here speaking of being invaluable. Found out, I'm saving my CEO and lead engineer at least 20 hours plus combined. Is that a week Emmet, I'm assuming, a week, a month? Again, right? You got to finish that out Emmet. Finish that out. Finish that out. That's great. We're almost done in a week, a month, but regardless of the time. But that's perfect. So like you were just like piggybacking on that. If you were to put that on his resume, saving them 20 hours per week. Okay. Good. Yeah. Even better. What do you think is their salaries? Yeah.

Okay. And now you say, I am saving the business, whatever their salaries 20 hours per week by my whatever you implement it. That's incredible. Like that is so valuable. So once again, time your work to money. Is this. That's it. Again, it's also goes for running resume. Marie comes in guessing it's tough for engineers. We need to get that mindset because code is so precise. We don't guess we validate. Accenture said becomes harder, harder, the more technical. Yeah. No, until I get buried out here. Sound like a cobalt developer. or the wise old guru must demonstrate their wisdom by sharing an unimportant answer to them.

Before times, yeah, before times of COBOL. Which by the way, shout out IBM. I don't, who's ever running y'all's content from a TikTok perspective is great. They've had two TikToks that have made me cackle. Oh. So anyways. Okay. So let's talk about kind of going in a little bit to I.C. versus management. I think, you know, there's something that you've done, something I get tons of questions about, had a lot of engineering leaders on the show talk about this. When did you make the decision to go into management? Because I think I feel like there's a fork in the road. Yes. And you kind of have to decide.

So let's answer that. I have a few more questions. What's the answer to that one first? I'll say the decision was kind of made for me. Oh, OK. Well, there you go. I'll do it. Like when I joined Meetup, I joined as a senior engineering manager, but there was so much flexibility to what that meant. And as an EM, there's people who are more technical. There's obviously three things that I think about engineering management, people process product. And some people tend to lean more towards the people process side. I tend to be more of a product person, so to have like a product mindset. And then also just really enjoying the business of software development and programming and coding.

So I've been to Over-index my time there. And I guess sometimes when you're good at things, then that's the thing you get more of. Girl preach. Whether you're like, that's the thing I love or not. You know what I mean? Oh, oh, she is really good at getting teams to deliver software. Well, we're management. Exactly. Do you miss it? Do you miss being our team? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's okay, I feel like. I feel like some people are like, you got to be going home, I'm management. That's all you can, you know? No, I keep my technical skills relatively strong because I never know when I'm kind of done and I want to go back to being an individual contributor.

So that's something that I'm completely open to. Okay, so I'm doing this management thing now. It doesn't mean I have to do it forever. There's still like law. That shall not go back to individual contributor. So I tend to stay in a physical room. Right. Well, and also, so let's talk about maybe taking a step back. Cause I think a lot of people, I'm an engineering leader. I only want to be an engineering leader. If I go back to IC, it's a step back. As a VP of engineering, do you see that in someone's resume or not? No, here's a prime example. We have one of our iOS engineers was a CTO at his previous company, right?

So he was doing iOS development, but also operating as a CTO. Right. But then he decided, you know what? I prefer to do more individual contributor work. I value my schedule more. I like having the flexibility that comes with being an IC. When you're in management, it's meetings. It's constant context switching. You're not getting in your flow state. You don't get two hours of coding time. It's like, hair on fire, this thing's wrong, this thing's wrong. Someone's mad, someone's mad at someone else. And then, you know, I'm mad at somebody else, to be honest. Right. Okay, so here we go. And I think that there's value to being self-aware And saying like, you know what, for this phase of my life, maybe this is better for me, maybe being.

And I see it's better for me than being in management and then vice versa. I mean, for me, you could say I took a step back. This is the first time in six years I haven't led a team. I was leading a team of 12 recruiters during my last time at Vaco and now I'm by myself. And for me, like I understand how it can stress people out. Right? I understand. But also to like a lot of the things I say on the show is my own medicine. Like I use the show as my own therapy session to you all to be totally frank. For me, I've realized that in my career there's only so much money you can make.

Yes. And there's only so many titles you can have. Yep. Yep. So once you've maxed out on both, what are you gonna do? I mean, it's also like what I try to tell people is that, okay, you make more money, and then the government takes more money. Girl. It's, it's, congratulations. Every Monday we're talking about taxes, not just when we're not going down. You make more money, the government takes more money. Yeah, more problem. It's like, what was wrong? What was wrong wrong? You know, it just, Oh, it was not wrong. Eventually, just try to spend less and live your best life. Yeah, it's something I haven't talked a lot about, savings during this time because I don't think we're out of it yet.

So for those of you who have bad savings accountability like I do start saving. Also use the app co-pilot. That's what I'm using. It's not sponsored. But it's great. Barrett comes in here, former guest of the show. I love both. Being an IC is great. Being a manager is great. It's all about the culture of the company and your part in it. Yeah, totally, totally agree with that. Anise, I'm kind of curious. This kind of goes into other things you do. How do you stay current on things? Where do you go? What do you read? Because I think there's again the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the I don't the word I'm looking for escaping me the people who watch the show are a variety of places in their careers, right junior all the way to where you're at and leadership.

I'm sure a lot of the years of having a show they've talked about where they go and sharpen their skills I am curious with you. Where do go who you listen to what do you read yes okay great questions so what I do is I subscribe to several newsletters so I subscribe to it the Android weekly newsletter okay I subscribe to morning brew great also subscribe to like the IT brew So it's like more the more technical version of it same same I subscribe to like a Kotlin newsletter GraphQL an Architecture newsletter as well and then like an engineering leadership one. Okay. All right. Hold on hold on real quick first off That's a lot second off.

How do you so do you I'm kind of curious because I've been thinking about this Do you set time out to give your brain a break and actually read that stuff during the day? So when the newsletter comes in, I'm kind of like an inbox zero person. So when the newsletter comes in, I go through, I scan everything and I'm like, hmm, this will be relevant for me. Or like, oh, this sounds pretty interesting. And then I just like quickly open up the links of the things that I want to read and then pin them on my browser and then boom, archive the email. Okay.

So then kind of like throughout the week, there might be like a short video that I can watch from a newsletter or an article where I'm like, oh, that's right. I wanted to read that article about cost optimizations for whatever. And then I'll go through and read it. Morning brew is really, you know, it's fun. It's a fun review. So it's kind of like, all right, let me just find out what what happened in the world yesterday or whatever. So I also think that's important just to know what the heck is going on. Yeah, in the world, because I'm not a person that watches news.

So that helps me at least know what's going on because so much affects you. We're so connected as humans that something in one part of the world, I'm reading about it on the brew and like two days later, they're somehow impacting me. So it's like just looking sure you're aware of what's going on. I feel is very useful. And then I read a lot of books. actually around like just talking to people, human psychology, like I'm reading this one. Say less, ask more, change the way you lead forever. I have another one about difficult conversations. I need that. Stop marriage for a lot of me that.

I read that and then I get more into like product marketing. So this is the other book that's kind of like on my desk for now, a million dollar offers. Just to, that's something that is like my, my, where I'm leaking is like product marketing because I have such an engineering brain. Sure. Like we want to sell something, tell them what it does. You can make friends with this, click this button. Use our product. Thanks. We'll leave you by you. Make friends. Yeah. It's like, okay, no one's ever going to buy that. Words are hard. I just like pushing push. I try to push myself to learn more about the things where I'm weak in and then by subscribing to these various newsletters, I can establish things for myself.

Like I'll say, oh, it looks like this thing is trending more. Let me investigate it because I don't have time to investigate every single thing that comes across my screen. Yeah, 100%. I'm answering Marie's question or I'm bringing it up because I always love like hacking or hacking your day or whatever, you know what I'm saying? What do you use to get to inbox zero? Like I'm a good person. It's gonna make me sound like so extra, but here's what I do. Save place, save place. So I have so many filters on my emails. So that for the most part, they're not even making it to my inbox.

It's just all folders. It's just like folders, or they're going away. for example, if someone accepts my meeting, I honestly don't need an email about it, and I don't really need to know. I only need to know if someone declines a meeting. So I'm like, okay, filter for all email accepts, just archive them and like don't even show them to me, because I don't care, right? And then I have a lot of the shortcuts. So I've added a lot of the shortcuts like from Gmail so that I can send an email and archive it at the same time, or I can quickly archive emails. I just push the E button.

So I'm just going through my emails like, okay, archive, archive, archive. I just don't like having that mental overload of like, I have 10,000 emails in my inbox. It's like, no, I take it in, I figure I would need to go with this email and then move. I'm gonna try to click blue now. That's one way to do it. Yeah, I'm trying to, so we use, so I'm the last company we're Outlook, and this time we're Gmail, and for me, I basically, to me, my workflow, not that y'all ask, is like, basically, any email I have in my inbox is a task. Do the task.

But then if I have another task that has to be created, I use Google tasks, and so I have to keep it in my calendar inbox, or I'm gonna forget it. So that's just what I do. Alright, as we wrap up here, I want to get to one more question or two. Let's talk about your LinkedIn learning and some of the courses you put out. Definitely want to give you a shout out. So yeah, talk about what you've done, maybe some things on the horizon, all that stuff. Yeah, sure. So I teach courses for LinkedIn learning. I think it's really important to have multiple revenue streams.

So that's one way that I do it. And I have a bunch of courses around Android development, technical communication. And one of my most recent courses is the introduction to software development. And the way I like to think of it is I have a friend, they come over and go, so you're a programmer, huh? What's that about? Like, and then this is the course for them. Like they're just living beside me. And I'm like, well, since you asked. And that was a really fun course to create because you're trying to describe software development to someone that doesn't know the lingo. And it was hilarious that there's so much lingo.

Just lingo on top, lingo on top of lingo. Um, and tried to explain it in a way that someone that's not that's not in the club. Can I? Again, there we go. We're going back to dumbing things down. Yeah. We've kind of gone the full circle here. Yep. That's so true. I love that. Um, all right. So last I have four questions as we wrap up with any guest. Okay. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, Laney's on your, like without any prep. First question, if money was the same, what would you do for your career outside of tech? I'd be a teacher. What age group range type?

I'd probably teach middle school. Any sort of specific subject? Yes, computer science, because I did that for one year and it was It was amazing, but I was like poor for that whole year. So if money was the same. Yes, money was the same again. I would do that. Why middle school? I'm curious. I think that it's such an awkward time of life. Can't defer. For humans, it was definitely for me. I got picked on like crazy. I was bullied so much. It's like terrible. Same. I even like stopped playing my instrument because they were bullying me so much. But anyway, that's another story for another day.

Oh, no, no, no. What instrument? I used to play French horn. Banders, look at us. That's what I'm talking about. I was a drummer. So I feel like having a supportive teacher, kind of like no experience. They can be there for you, can advocate for you, will really just make the world of difference for people, for people that are becoming adults and grown up humans. So that's what I would do. Edgar, middle school is fun. school teacher here. I love it. I love it. Yes, yeah, for real. Barrett love teaching. Yay. I just doesn't pay enough. I know. I know. Yeah, Barrett Barrett's a huge, huge mentor.

Marie clarinet. Look at us. I love it. Second question. What do you do outside of work for fun that brings you joy? And I love walking. I do a lot of just like walking in nature. I like poetry, so I'll watch poetry, read poetry, write poetry. I'm more introverted, so I kind of like these sort of solitary calming activities. I literally say them. Look at that. Barrett's a saxophone. I love it. I love it. Next question. What tools, technologies, trends, frameworks, just anything you're reading that you're kind to keep it an eye on right now. That's good. I would say I'm really keeping an eye on AI and where it goes.

And like, as far as security is concerned, I feel interesting. I'm just really much like jumping on AI, try to use AI everywhere. Then with these like large language models, like, Okay, is there gonna come a time where they're like, clapping around? What day are you giving it? Yes, yeah. So that's something I'm kind of keeping my eye on to just see, like is the government gonna put something in place? Like our company is gonna start saying like, no, you can't use this, you can't use that. That's something I'm keeping my eye on. I love that, I love that. Last question as we wrap up here and again, y'all, thank you again for tuning in today, all the comments around all of our band nerds here, which I love, Banners, Unites.

We had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have guidance counselors. That's why the show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Anise? Best advice is, you're already good enough and everyone is just making it up as they go. I love that. I love that advice so much. I love that. Thank you again for hanging out with us today. Again, go check out Render ATL June 12th through 14th. Anish will be there if you liked what you heard today. I know I did. Hopefully you go see her talk, which has no idea what she's talking on yet, but that's okay, because I wouldn't either.

So Anish, how can people find you if they wanna reach out and have maybe another question? Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can prime me on LinkedIn, Anish Davis. Still on X and also massive. you can find me there from Girl Tips. Awesome, I love it. Well, y'all have a great one, and he's down a quick second. So, how do you offer her? Y'all have a great rest of your morning. We'll see y'all tomorrow. Bye. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because 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 at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.