advancing your career from senior to leadership w/ principal engineer, stephen shary

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[Music] good morning no one's here yet good morning uh Stephen do you have do you have snow up in Cincy right now uh I'm in Columbus we've got about Columbus that's right yeah yeah Columbus yeah Columbus yeah we got four or five inches it's been brutally cold I think for everybody on the oh it's been awful it's been so I have bad circulation in my feet and toes it's been it's been pretty brutal for the fanges and metatarsals lately oh yeah yeah I love to uh I like I work remote and so I do a lot of walking especially on meetings okay and uh so

I walk like five or six miles a day I need to get better at that you we talked about that we we talked about that at momentum talk about I think that's I need to get out more I get no steps so yeah I I mean I think I I think I do like 14 15,000 a day um are you serious yeah yeah so um so it's like you know now this week it was like nine degrees out so that was kind of rough um so I had like two pairs of socks two pairs of gloves long underware you know I had a a face

mask the ball of clava ski goggles you know two hats on but you know I was able to do like five miles and crunch through it that's crazy and you're just do one-on ones with people sometimes I do a lot of like there are calls where we like review stuff and I just say to them like can you send me all the documents ahead of time so I can go through them and come prepared to the meeting that's hilarious um and they're like they're like yeah we can we can totally do that and then my boss was like Hey if you're like he was like

I remember early on he was like hey what what should I think about you going on walks while you're in the meeting and my response to him was I'm the only person that's not on my laptop doing work I'm the only person that's actually listening to what everybody has to say I don't I don't have anything else to do that's interesting that's I feel like all right hold on real quick pause on that every good morning there's people tuning in good morning happy Frid Tay once we get past Wednesday Stephen we get to Thursday and then Frid T just let you know that you can

use that in your meetings today when you walk um it's good to see y'all again say hey we love to hear from you um again T it's good to see you uh uh Jason it's great to see you I I literally just saw you on another meeting before this Mark it's good to see you um again three days in a row I love it JC it's wonderful to see you as well y'all continue to say hey um the reason why I tell people that again this is a networking platform what I realized when I started this show almost five years ago in March five years

ago um is I wanted this to be a place for you to tune in 30 minutes today learn a little bit of information apply in your job search and your career and network with people on the chat um so if you don't comment like no one knows you're watching I think that's like kind of like the the thing that no one talks about I think networking obviously and we and and if you've watched any of my lives this week it's been heavy heavy Community Based stuff we're GNA talk about we're back in the career side of things with Stephen but one of the things is

is excuse me is networking has changed and everyone's online and so the way to engage with folks online is like you got to comment you got to engage you got you just can't sit there you just can't watch right so please say hey we love to hear from you um also true the reason why I have amazing guest so I want you to connect with them please connect with Stephen afterwards tell him he said hey uh tell him that you came via um obviously guidance cser 2.0 because a lot of y'all send DMS and then no one knows where like you're coming from so please

thr that in DMS um also too want to give a shout out to uh aight um listen I'm an aight hero my guy Jason Tor is in the chat's an aight hero we're gonna do more stuff with aight the future great great little product so um if you are looking to start up something qui ckly um check out app right it's a great little tool um let's see here Ricardo it's good to see you Gerard it's great to see you as well and hea my co-worker it's good to see you as well this morning uh and thank you Tork and Jordan it's good to see

you yes finally I like Fridays I feel like more people show up on Fridays because they're not like cramming down meetings um all right Stephen let's go well first off let's get to people who who you are what do you do and talk about your time at Kroger because that was like really cool uh yeah so my name's uh Stephen Sherry I'm principal software engineer um I'm at a company called ACV auctions um I started in series C and we're now post IPO we're a public company so I got to was engineer number 16 we're at over I'm we about 350 360 now in terms

of developers um my job before that um I worked for a National Grocery chain called Kruger um they have like 16 different brands they tried to purchase I think a 17th recently that didn't work out so well um and I was one of the lead engineers on the e-commerce stuff like the order online uh Digital Coupons uh digital Pharmacy um I helped grow a lot of that I I think I was engineer number four in that department and um so I've done a lot of things around how many people did you help hire out there so when I was at Kroger for about two and

a half years I did every single phone screen for that and so we hired uh I think like over 30 UND people so I I did hundreds of interviews I would say thousands it might be I don't know yeah I can I can safely say hundreds of interviews the funny thing is is that I would meet people and they'd be like oh hey how are you doing and I'd be like I have no idea who you are they remember you from like the Kroger interview well no they this is when I was at Kroger oh gotcha and they were like don't you remember me you

interviewed me and I and it was a phone screen I'm like I don't I'm sorry I do I do like 16 a week like you know so three day basically three day yeah that's crazy that's crazy Jaylen it's good to see you this morning um and and and so I met I met Stephen at momentum developer conferences past year up in Cincinnati Stephen had a Stephen and I had a great chat he came to my talk um gave me some critiques he's the reason why I now do I I started doing slides by the way I did slides uh I did slides in somewhere and

oh I did slides this past time to commit your code in Dallas and I thought and I did it because of you so there you go oh thanks um so Stephen lot to talk about today uh if you did not so Stephen and I went live a few months ago check that out I believe it's on my YouTube but it's incredible talk about interviewing we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna have a little bit of a different talk today talking about basically advancing your career going from senior kind of IC level to leadership I know that's a big jump Stephen's got some talks about that and

kind of we're going to work in kind of good Tech culture as well so Stephen it's always kind of awkward to kind of kick off this thing because there's so much to talk about but do you let's just dive in thoughts on advancing things people should be aware of going from IC to to kind of that senior leadership role yeah um so I've given several talks on this at different conferences and one of the things for folks to know is is that it's very easy the software development industry doesn't have a lot of standardization we don't have um we don't put emphasis on certifications um

in the software engineer ing World certifications are almost like an anti pattern a little bit like we used to kind of joke around with this guy that had become a Java certified developer you know um I used to recruit those back in the day um but the the issue that you run into is that a good software engineer can move from out of college to senior engineer in like a three-year period it's not unheard of for me to see someone with a resume and they're three years in to their career and now they're a senior engineer and then the thought is well I've got 27

to 33 more years to go what do or maybe 40 years talked about this all the time yeah what do I do right like what do I do and um you know it's it's really difficult and and I think in the past um I would say like probably five to seven years the thing that I've seen is we're starting to see these leadership technical tracks start to pop up in different places um and one of the things that you can do is you can look at uh levels.fyi um is a great website um to kind of look at what these different technical career ladders are

um I highly recommend that you look at it um and one of the things that you'll notice is is that if you it allows you to compare different companies at different levels and they're all made up they're all completely different a't that crazy and you know someone will be a staff engineer someone's a senior Advanced engineer another person is a architect another person is just a engineer seven right and uh there's re there's fellow there's uh Advanced senior architect principal senior principal Advanced senior like fellow fellow event Bright's got a fellow fellow yeah right fellow yeah and so one of the things to realize is

that the industry is trying to start to build these career Ladders because a lot of times it was I become a senior engineer what do I do five years in you're like I like to write code but the only way for it to advance my career is to become a manager right and what I've typically seen is is that when you become a manager you stop writing code and I don't think that there are really great managers out there and I really happy when I have a good manager that I work for but I do think that as a separate set of skills and not

everybody that likes to write code and be a software engineer wants to become a manager 100% And I personally have been offered management positions before and I've turned them all down and so at my company um I am the I'm at the highest technical ladder and so I report to the CTO and um we can kind of get into that kind of stuff but things are changing and now there's this concept of technical leadership but not management like we're starting to diverge that and uh total total plug this is not I I don't I don't know this guy but there's this great book called staff

engineer by Will Larson okay and he it's called leadership beyond the management track and it's specifically forof Ware Engineers if you find yourself as a senior engineer that's been in that role for several years and you're like what do I do next he wrote his book is really fantastic and talks about these different what he calls archetypes which is like hey hether there are these different patterns of leadership that he's observed and he has interviewed dozens of people at at large companies to kind of understand what that is that's awesome so yeah CU like I saw that kind of the during covid right you'd have

like zero to three years in your senior you know and I I've said a long time like there's only so much money outside of fang that you can get there's only so much titles you can get so like if if somebody but but what if somebody's watching this now or in the future and they're like well yeah Stephen that's great but like all the companies I'm interviewing for do not value like kind of that individual contributor leadership track yeah and and I think you know that's that's one of the things that I've brought up you know that that I've seen is is that there are

some companies like if you go work for a mom and pop car wash company and they need to have credit card processing for you know people swipe and they choose which car wash they don't they wouldn't need someone like they don't need a principal engineer that's like I'm going to manage how systems work work in multiple regions and have zero downtime failover if we have major issues and I need to be able to but then you think about like um I think about like the Mike Tyso n fight on Netflix right right they had what did they have they had 60 million streaming streaming people

right so they went from a small amount up to 60 million very very quickly and that is an extremely difficult and engineering problem yeah those are fascinating to me like as a non as a nerd non- Tech Guy like myself I'm like oh that's interesting yeah and and it's kind of like there are you don't you don't at a certain point like if you were a building architect you would want to move Beyond sheds and gazebos and you want to get to skyscrapers well they're not building skyscrapers in the middle of a cornfield they're building a lot of sheds right and so I see you're

saying I see you're saying yeah yeah some sometimes you got to move to these companies that are solving bigger problems yeah right now the interesting thing is is that some people are like well there's probably only five companies there's like what Google and Oracle and you know Facebook and meta and you know Amazon and those are the only big companies out there like my my company does busino business uh use car auto auctions and you know think oh that's tiny like no we facilitate millions of live auctions with live bidding happening all the time yeah yeah and it is it is a very difficult technical

problem to solve and to keep running right and like I have to deal with real time you know we we do like real-time streaming of live auctions physical auctions that you can bid on and things like that and so we deal with a lot of that kind of stuff and those are not simple and easy problems so um yeah so there are some companies where you will hit that that that technical ceiling well this is interesting because I and I do want to get to kind of like Steven's top three items for people moving so give me we'll get there in a second but I

think like what's fascinating I see some Nashville folks in here Garrett um I believe there's like one or two other people from Nashville in here I think like that's why I think it's like the Nashville market like there's not a lot of like really good Engineers like there's like there's like there's good Engineers for sure but I think the scale at which the Nashville businesses are trying to to solve is not to that level they in my opinion it's l shed and gazebos right okay if we're talking about and so that's why I'm like don't get so like you may have to look elsewhere right

I don't think sometimes if you're in a smaller City there are some cool startups are doing some pretty high scale High availability blah BL things in Nashville but as a whole we are a healthc care market right and Healthcare Tech from what I've heard from a lot of people and that's why when covid hit Nashville got all the top Engineers left kind of because all these other companies with bigger problems came in and got them right so just kind of a tip always be looking to kind of level up and I think the the pro the solving of those problems I think is huge kind

of like what you just said yeah I you know one thing I always tell people is in January refresh your resume yes every no matter what always refresh your resume right um and I think that you know yeah there are great companies to kind of understand how to professionally do your job like being a software engineer and then there are these opportunities where you can move to a company where you can see that growth yeah you know you can say like okay what is okay like what does that look like um sometimes like I've talked to companies in Columbus and I realize there's not a

lot of future growth you or there's no future growth for me to move to this company you know kind of thing um salary salary you know stock and benefits and all that stuff seems to be a an indicator as well because a lot of people think like oh really good money and software engineering that can only come from like the Fang level companies and there are a number of non- fang companies that I know of that pay at these you know uh senior plus like staff staff plus principal senior principal fellow type situations where they're paying good money there's not a lot of those roles

because they don't need 300 principal Engineers you know what they're doing um but but they you know they do get you know really well compensated for what they do yeah absolutely um so so what are some maybe like give me three things people should consider people should be mindful of making that jump from from senior to to leadership uh or not can you of give me kind of some some you know Stevens three things to consider yeah so um it I I will say when you move like beyond the senior engineering level there's it's kind of like you stop working with like hand rails so

to speak okay you start like climbing up in the mountain and you used to have handrails on both sides you'd be like hey I have these tickets of work that I have to do and I am really good I can grind these tickets out really fast I can fix this bug fix this bug add this feature add this button you know new screen do this like I'm really really like there is nothing better like like no one can beat me at that like just grinding these tickets and that's really good like that is a solid engineer that can come in and just do this and

what I find is is you get to a point where you're like I could do any ticket right I could fix anything right and then then I say okay let's build something new yeah and they're like okay and like what's the ticket for that and I'm like build something brand new and we need to do this like like when I was at when I was at Kroger it was like all right we need to build a website where you can find any grocery item in the grocery store and add it to your cart and it tells you if it's in stock and it tells you

what the price is and we need to know if there are coupons and all this stuff and they were like like and that's where people are like I don't even know how to wrap my head around a problem that big and that's where you start getting into th is idea of like okay well you need to be able to start taking on bigger and bigger problems that take some thought additionally what I tell people is you know as you move into these leadership roles no longer do I want you to write good code and good tests and things like that can you write what I

would call the reference implementation so if you were getting into a new technology like JavaScript and you wanted to do we're we're dealing with this at our current company and we're we're setting up new backend JavaScript apps I'm like what is what is the correct way to start one you know like what is what is it to write the code that is the perfect example if this is how it should start this is how I should build my endpoints this is how I should talk to a database this how to talk to a queue that kind of thing how do I deploy this so that

I know how it's running and that it's managing its memory and its CPU correctly and then they're like oh and writing the reference implementation where it's like you could post this on the internet and be like this is how you should write this type of application huh you know that's where it's like oh um yeah I don't know and that's where you know you see people are like oh when I want to write a book or do a tutorial I need to understand all the edge cases of things because I can't just say hey I think if you just drop in you know uh turn

on this experimental feature then everything should work you have to understand why these things do that and that's where that that's so it's wider scope of things but also like you can dive really deep in and be like I can answer every question I know exactly the right way to do this I love that and that's so good and I think too I think just a lot of times like you know I think people rush and and I'm saying in my career too right and I've kind of morphed into that right I've morphed into like I was the guy I was the recruiter I was

good on the job Awards I was good at calling out calls doing the metrics doing the thing and then now with like this team I'm at with torque it's like I'm having to figure out how to like cook the ocean right I mean it's like it's like you're trying to figure out these large lower problems so I would encourage a lot of you like if you feel like you know you just have to have time in the seat and I think that's like highly under like no one talks about thatmore like I want to race to get to senior and it's like yeah yeah but

it's it's yeah but it's better if you can actually learn what's going on and for me I wouldn't be where I'm at like it like Taylor 10 years ago or five years ago is nowhere where I'm at now it's just because I have time in the seat so yeah I I I mean so I have Engineers that are the senior level they want to become like a technical leader so we have we have six different levels L1 through six and I'll have an L3 which is our senior engineer and they'll say I want to become an L4 and I'll say okay and we'll talk with

their manager and they'll be like all right you're going to take over this application and you're going to be the person in charge of it and we plan on making these these changes to this existing thing and you need to keep it up and running and you need to get these features added on time and it needs to not look like a Frankenstein that you've just sewed on arms all over the place at the end that engineer for sure right it needs to look like a coherent thing like there needs to be rhy and reason to this and you know people will be like oh

well this is a really good project and we're like yeah welcome to working at with other people's code yeah you know and it's like you need to do this for at least 12 months right to kind of show this and I usually what I usually recommend to our managers is I say don't give that new person who's learning the application that represents 95% of our Revenue don't don't do that yeah yeah give them the application that represents like 2% of Revenue so if they really struggle with this like it's not going to show up in our earnings reports exactly right and and really the technical

leaders that are really good those people are gifted the 95% revenue and what I what I have at my company is I have probably three or four Engineers that own these massive pillars of revenue for our company and they accept nothing less than a really good job on their stuff and they will go and other Engineers that are working on the project they be like we they'll rally troops we need to fix this we need to improve this this has to be this good and you learn you learn a ton of stuff right like oh I'm not going to choose all the big shiny new

fancy Technologies because right they no one knows how they work and when they break I don't know how to fix them right right and I I realized that like the business wants me to get 50 things done next week but if I push 50 things into the app I'll be up every night on call trying to fix this stuff right yeah you know and so I do a lot of mentoring with our technical our technical leaders showing them like hey you should not sacrifice stability and good quality for just releasing this stuff as fast as possible so you've you've interviewed a lot of people you've

been in leadership role you're giving some just amazing amazing kind of stuff right now in the chat you know definitely has has been enjoying it what would you say are some biggest weaknesses of people that are that like that you that you see with blinders that you could share where people can maybe check themselves on this on this video yeah so one question I'll ask in an interview to kind of understand is I'll say I'll say oh I see that you have some leadership like you've LED some teams and stuff like that and I was like if I threw you on a new team what

are some best practices that you would want your team to do to ensure success and stability of the product that you're doing and I don't know if I could answer that appropriately your questions are so go od they're so good it it's yeah it's a hard question that doesn't have a right answer I know and and some people are like documentation everything has to be written down everything has to be written down I'm like I'm just a VI guy yeah and some people are like I I want to have good communication with my Engineers like I want and some people are like I want to

set my be coding best practices into this other people like automated testing and other people are like I really want to get in with the business and understand what they're doing and I there's no I mean depending on the culture of the company some companies are like yeah we document like crazy like if you go work for like a DOD contractor they're going to be like documentation documentation documentation that's huge you go work for a startup and they're like uh you just gotta get us enough Revenue that we're going to make it through the next year you know so they're like I don't really care

about anything else you know but we we just got to grow our Revenue so that like we can make it to the next round of funding so the answer changes depending on the company that you're going into and I think you should always be honest about what you know and what you feel confident like I know that this works and I've done this in the past so that is the that is the kind of thing that I think about is like what what does work and if you haven't been a leader but you've been on a team where you enjoyed what you were doing it's

good to reflect and kind of meditate and think what was good about like why did things go well what were we doing that made it work well you know and sometimes you're like hey you have to have you can't just have a bunch of mid-level Engineers running around all making different decisions I want to go this way I want to go that way I want to go this way I go that way it was like hey we had a really strong technical leader who just really guided us and gave us aot lot of Direction and that made us succe ssful what are what are some

what are some other maybe one or two other areas that as we kind of wrap up here and time flies so fast on this call um what are maybe just some other tips encouragement uh for folks on the chat um or who are listenting in the future just about how to level up their career with maybe some some of the blind spots other people have that you've seen um you know one of the things that I think about is um it's really easy for folks to be um into disagreement like I think there's a wrong idea I don't think we should do this right yes

and one of the first good things about being a leader is being like I'm gonna tow the line like if my boss comes down and says we are going to make this change and and we'll have a discussion about why we're doing it and all these other things you know he came he came to me last year and said we need to save money we need to save money on our costs we need to do this okay you know all right well I'm that's going to be my job you know and I think like being a good leader is first being a person that's like

when a decision is made I will get behind it yeah and if you're constantly like well I still think this is the wrong decision you know that's fine but just be like put that to the side I think this is the wrong decision but I'm now going to hear learn I'm going to learn yeah and and if this is the wrong decision I'm going to fully understand why it was yeah and and maybe you're like well everything has pros and cons to it and sometimes the cons are like well we won't be able to scale to a million customers well we only have 10 right

now like like right you know I always joke with people they're like what happens when we get to a million I'm like well it's someone else's problem because I've been retired from our stock like that's not my problem that's someone else's problem to deal with and so I would say follow after that and the next thing I would just say is like being a positive encouraging person is not the standard that I see in the office workplace and so a lot of times what I try and do is set a culture of just being positive like being a leader and saying hey I think you

did a great job with that hey you like and it's just on stuff like a really difficult bug that you're like I didn't know how we were gonna do that I thought what you came up with was great like hey that meeting that was the best standup we've had in months and I'm so glad we did that I hope you continue to do that yes and it's just it's just like encouraging people and what I found is that like when I encourage and say positive things to people they're like oh I want to hear more about what you have to say and when people want

hear want to hear more about what you have to say they're putting you in the position of wanting to hear your advice and you're moving up you know and those kind of things so I love that that's so good um so a as we wrap up I do I do want to go back to this phone walking thing that you're you you got going on I think it's fascinating so okay so you're out here taking so do you like go outside and walk yeah yeah all the time and you're just on like actual meetings with leadership just walking yeah yeah like I I I've I've

had meetings with our CEO and our coo and CTO and do you find yourself I think it's an interesting thing about being what you said when we started about not being distracted people thought you were distracted or something yeah what' you say so so I I'll just give a background like I like to walk during meetings when I can yeah some people like what the heck are they talking about yeah yeah so so something like this I'm not obviously I'm not walking um because I'm on video you should have just for the heck of it uh it doesn't work I tried it one time it

was a total disaster um but I'll do video off and at this point I walk so much that my co-workers know that I'm walking and I I do encourage them to walk as well because they're like H I'm trapped inside I'm lik e yeah I got get better my counselor about it yesterday I gotta I gotta get outside more and they were like where do I go I was like who cares just walk down the street adult you can go where you want I was like just walk up and down the street 10 times like who cares right and so like I personally like I've

got a one-hour meeting Loop that I can do I've got a two-hour meeting Loop I've got a two and a half hour meeting Loop that and I I've got multiple different loops through our neighborhoods and stuff like that I walk to parks and different things like that while I'm on a call and the thing that I brought up earlier was at first people were like oh what do I think about you walking like you know are you being distracted you're not like zeroed in and I'm like no I'm actually more zeroed in than anybody because I'm not working on my laptop I think that's an

interesting thing yeah you guys how many times have you been in a call where they're like I'll be like they're like all right uh so Taylor uh what what do you think think about this you know blah blah blah and first thing is I'm sorry could you repeat that question right which means I'm sorry I was yeah and now I'm here to answer your question right I never do that ever you know and so like I've got I've got a meeting at one o'clock today and I'll probably go walk during lunch and at my one o'clock meeting and clock in four four to five miles

today and it's great you you feel good at the of it um I will say work up to it because if I I one time walked 10 miles in a day and I got to my desk at like 3 p.m.

and I was absolutely exhausted and I couldn't do anything else for rest of the day and I was like okay that's that's way too many miles for me but um it's a great way like it it helps your mental state it helps you physically you know it just clears a lot of things and I do a lot of one-on ones like that I do a lot of other things if people need to present stuff like if they're going to be going through stuff on e of the things I just do is I say hey could you send that to me before the meeting I'd like

to review it so that I know what you're talking about when you're going to go through it which holy cow like Amazon goes a little a little in the extreme where every meeting has to have a meeting summary you know goals document that they make but just asking people to be like hey can you provide slides if you're doing this it just lets you go there and be familiar with the content so you're not learning it for the first time and so you have time to kind of like think about it and come up with good questions and feedback and things like that I think

that's I think that's fascinating I think it's fascinating I think there's a whole another chat about that about not everything needs to be a video even I've started to consider you know should I start really getting out there it's been so cold I haven't gotten out of the house which is I think hurt my mental capacity a little bit but I think once it gets a little bit warmer I think I'm gonna think I'm G take some more calls there's no bad weather there's only bad clothing that's like a Swedish that's a Nordic saying that is a Nordic saying okay that's fair that's you like

my dad right there he's like my dad like I I have full rain gear I I go out and pouring rain do you really oh yeah just dancing in the rain seems out here dancing in the rain I love it no I got an umbrella I got you know I got like a raincoat on and things like that I got my airpods on I'm on a zoom call and I'm just out there walking and I got to tell you like you know people are like oh I love to turn on you know the sound of rain in the background so I can like calm down

and rest I'm like yeah I do that but it's real yeah yeah you just go out you just do it I love it I love it um well y'all thanks again for hanging out with us this morning obviously Stephen we wrap up with a few quick rapid fire questions first off um uh if if I told you you could not do anyt hing in Tech tomorrow but you could get paid the same if not more to pursue one of your favorite hobbies what would it what would it be uh probably farming and robots doing my farming nice so like you would develop the robots in

with the far any type of farming because farming is kind of like a kind of like AI there L involved uh yeah yeah not not me not Mega crop like monocrop so I do stuff like uh like like local backyard gardening nice yeah maybe on an acre or two so I do some stuff with robotic gardening do do do you have a garden right now or no yeah you yeah I think it's like 75 feet by 80 feet nice man that's awesome um when it comes to a Content recommendation it could be maybe something you watch on Netflix and or technical content AKA framework tooling

something other you're messing with right now got any thoughts uh I mean I love I I do a lot of walking so I do audiobooks a lot yeah so uh I you haven't heard I like to do a lot of walking uh yeah so I listen to a lot of audiobooks as well um and then I also find myself doing chores while I listen to audiobooks which is fantastic because it's like doing something useful and you're like listening to stuff in terms of content um I don't listen to that much stuff I've used I've started to use the Google LM notebook thing a little bit

where I will punch in scientific papers so I've been doing I'm more on the large language model uh software engineering side right now yeah and everything's so brand new that it's like I just get piles of scientific research papers to read because it's just not on on the internet and there's this LM notebook thing that Google has where they'll turn scientific paper into a podcast that you can listen to you can turn podcast you can turn your meeting podcast yeah awesome so um yeah and then I have a private podcast at my company uh where I do training yes we talked about that that's awesome

I think that's so cool I think I think I think that's a great idea I think every company I th ink a company should have a podcast literally just for updates instead of sending emails I would just have a podcast for updates and if you want toist to it great if you don't you don't I think it's great yeah that's what we do on the technical side listen to it at work or in the shower or great yeah just listen to the latest release in the shower I love it yeah um uh so we're coming up on Valentine's Day um is um uh what's your

favorite like candy like what's kind of like your favorite Valentine's Day candy you're not a big candy guy I'm not a candy guy at all I'm a pie guy I'm a fruit okay all right like a fruit dessert kind of guy like cherry pie sour cherry pie strawberry rhubarb oh my gosh rubar is good I I my wife loves Cherry hate Cherry I think it's gross um all right last last question Stephen Show's called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counsels in middle school high school and college but now as adults we don't have them if you could go back and tell young Stephen

one piece of advice what would it be uh I I think you asked me this last I had no idea what you said though so we're gonna ask I said quit your job more often uh oh is that what you said oh I love that we'll do we'll roll that again unless you want to give a new one uh yeah that that would be uh quit your job more often because I think people are too afraid to move from one job to another because the interview experience is so traumatic and hard you know like I I totally feel that you know when I've done that

in the past um I I think the other thing is is that um if you feel uncomfortable or you feel like imposter like I don't know how to do this those feelings are not negative feelings that you should View you as bad those are actually opportunities where you're learning and growing and so that feeling of uncomfortableness should be viewed as like I'm I'm growing like I'm learning how to do weightlifting recently from a couple my friends I'm back in CrossFit too myself and when you start weightlifting it is just painful you're so sore and you and you you think like soreness is bad like I

should not feel sore and so I would definitely say like you know lean into that like ask people like Hey how do you feel when you do this and some people feel confident all the time when they shouldn't but a lot of people are like yeah I tried to do this and I was successful yeah and absolutely yes on the quit your job bigest how jumps yep I love that I love that great perspective cool well yall go connect with Stephen I'll tag him after we get off this but uh again Stephen thank you my friends stay on so I can say bye to you

backstage but y'all have a great one have a great weekend and we'll be back next week on Monday um I'm going live with my friend Tessa Cel former devell at Snapchat now doing her own thing it's going to be a great conversation youall