Changes in engineering management craft, career growth and all hands demos for inspiration and context w/ Lindsey Simon #252

We're doing a special in-episode feature on the future of AI-powered incident management with our friends and sponsor X Matters. People as a primary integration layer is really fragile. With multiple people and all of that coordination, you become slower to find the root cause. The slower you find the root cause, you then don't know what action you need to take to resolve it. Getting to that fast is the goal.

Later in the episode, Mike Bennett, who leads the engineering team at X Matters, shares why human-driven coordination creates outage risk and how AI-powered orchestration can dramatically accelerate your path from event to resolution. When you join a company to increase the output and impact of a group of people.

to show up and claim that you think you can do that. It's a pretty bold claim. I think the best strategy, and and this isn't new, is to really try to understand the company you're going into and what you think they should do differently.

You know, you might go and say, I'm a really good manager. You need a really good manager. I'll figure out the company later. I don't think that's gonna cut it anymore. And so I think in this process of, hey, you're gonna go and try it on for size, show, do your homework. Go in wanting the job. Practice for yourself what that means. You're a manager, you're also a salesperson, you're also a product manager, you're also a customer support engineer, you're also an IC.

Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the engineering leadership community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC. And I'm Patrick Gallagher. and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits, and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Live from the Vercell recording studio, Lindsay Simon, VP of Engineering at Vercell, joins us to talk about the evolution of management.

Craft and career growth strategies. We dissect the practice of live all hands demos as a tool for context, accountability, and inspiration, plus Lindsay's vote with your wallet framework for career strategy. We also get into how a customer support engineer pushing code to his open source Project while on a quest to debug inspired him to apply to Vercel. And why the most effective VPs right now are building hobby projects. to maintain AI competency and empathy for non-technical users.

Let me introduce you to Lindsay. Lindsay Simon is VP of Engineering at Vercell. Making the web better has been his lifelong career ambition. Prior to Versell, Lindsay spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch App Engine as an original core team member and worked as a tech lead on the Google Translate and Web Performance teams.

Lindsey's lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, and his creative hobbies beyond coding include writing music and hunting for wild mushrooms. Enjoy our conversation with Lindsay Simon. Thanks for inviting me to the Vercell headquarters. It's really exciting to be here. Yeah. How's your day going? It's uh Tuesday. Yeah. There's a lot of energy in here.

It's we had our all we had our company all hands this morning and so you know if you came in and noticed a pack of people in the kitchen, they were all in there listening and uh I did. I I opened up the door and I was like just blown away by the energy.

So we're gonna kinda talk about like a lot of a lot of different things and how it's shifting in this era. Can we start with all hands and like how it's evolved a little bit? Because I'd like to get a sense of like how how has that evolved because I think that is such a missed opportunity for people to create a powerful moment.

for their teams or their companies is to use that in a really intentional way. So yeah, tell me more about how it's evolved. It's certainly become more organized in the sense that we do think about making it more intentional because it's six hundred plus people.

spending their time in an hour. It's a it's an expensive meeting in that sense. You know, we do the prep for it. When I joined All hands was there there was some degree of prep, but it was much more of what we do now on Fridays at eight AM, which was we called demo days, meaning that All Hands was a show and tell of what you were building, pitching.

why you were building it back to the rest of the team. And so it kept everybody in context around what was going on. You know, you could infer like how well the people building it, understood the mission or or or you know, were changing the mission. Um and they were sharing their thoughts about that in real time. And so it was really inspiring. And you would, you know, get to see their craft work. Uh you know, and you would what people could do week over week.

to rebuild parts of the system or build new parts of the system was super impressive. That context piece and that ability for people to get a sense of how things are evolving real time is one of the hardest challenges of You know, this premise of like being in the AI era, the environment that people are in is that things are accelerating. What you can build is moving faster. I find myself oftentimes I'm definitely like, Wow, things are moving so fast like and I missed something.

And so to me I can see like I can see that demo day as such an important way for people to gain the right operating information in their heads to then go and do more things or to challenge what they thought is possible. Like did you find that really helpful for teams in terms of like decision making and changing workflows and some of those elements.

Yeah. I mean the the thing that helped me the most and I think was different about Vercel is it was very visual. I think a lot of times these meetings are, you know, yapping, right? Or hey, I'm gonna show you my document. I'm gonna share my document on the screen. This is the thing I'm doing. And it wasn't that. It was never meant to be and you know, nobody shares video. Um, it's live, it's real, it may not work, but it's the current state.

Um and I think when you start showing artifacts of things that were, even a week ago, you you're now getting into a world where, oh, okay, you produced this video of a feature or a thing you're doing, like, you know, you you gussied it up.

Right. And now it's actually dated. Like the thing you shot the video of a week ago isn't hot anymore. You've been working on it since then. Like what did you do differently? And so I think that that contributing to that real time sense is showing the real time like the real thing right now, not

the thing it was a couple days ago or the thing you've packaged together. It's like, okay, you can ask questions and somebody can be like, oh, oh yeah. Well we didn't build that part. Well, okay. I noticed. You know, it it it's like there's an accountability about what's actually real right now. It was pretty fresh for me and I loved it.

Accountability for what's real. I I like that concept. So how do you prep for for like a day like today? Like what do you do to help really anchor it on on it being real, on it being like visual and to create that sense of that sense of progress? Yeah, so you mean like if I'm presenting? Um like or even like contributing to the audience. Yeah. I mean honestly not

as much as you'd think. I try y usually, for me personally as a developer, I try to get the thing to work really well and feel comfortable, but it's not rehearsed. Um, I have a narrative in my head and it either goes that way or it goes some other way. Uh, and I try to make it real. But I I think there's something about

sharing the novelty for yourself and other people. It isn't if it's not new to you at all, then it's not new to anyone else either. And you get to experience the joy of victory or the agony of defeat in in together. And that's kind of okay. I there's something like so fun'cause I you know, a couple of events in the Bay Area, like there's there's like this big culture on live demoing right now. And like it being such a such a mark of street cred. And I think that is is so true is like in the live

sharing with people your energy or excitement around a particular thing and then to bring everybody into the thought process behind it. It's like like potential and like the implications of it. Like it's really fun to kind of be a part of that. I think that really maximizes the like live time that you have with people is in sharing the energy or enthusiasm or the promise of the I think we we consume a lot of pre crafted media and there's something about the raw

You know, the stakes are high. Yeah. In the sense that, you know, you don't really know how it's gonna shake out. If the stakes aren't high because it's just gonna work and it's gonna be fair to middle and I mean It's still good. You can learn things from that. But I think we all kind of revel in the back and forth of, well, then this may not work. Um and and I think that goes back like the history for me of getting into programming was going and doing meetups.

I mean there used to be a thing we called it bar camp. Uh, in Austin where I was growing up as a programmer. we would rent venues.

out during the day'cause they didn't do anything during the day. You know, they were stalking beer and, you know, it smelled terrible. But they had a stage. They had, you know, room. They had a space. It was like a a big enough space to accommodate forty people. And, you know, we could bring a whiteboard or something and people could bring computers and You know you could have this live unscripted meetup, barcade.

Uh, and um that was that was really exciting for me. I would go to those with the idea that I was gonna try to show a really cool demo that would excite other people and see some that would excite me too. That was pretty addictive. Yeah. Live demo culture is I I feel like a good pulse for how we know San Francisco is back. It's true. I mean there are so much so many more events right now on a given week. We have an intern program and one of the things I

you know, excited about them coming to San Francisco for is that you know in addition to events that we might be a part of or you're doing'cause it's very active now, there's so many. I mean you're you're gr if you're in San Francisco right now and you want to go network and and meet people. It's a very welcoming culture for that.

We're taking a quick break for a special feature on the future of AI-powered incident management with our friends and sponsor, X-Matters. Mike Bennett, who leads the engineering team at X-Matters, shares why human-driven coordination creates outage risk.

and how AI powered orchestration can dramatically accelerate your path from event to resolution. We're the ones that are correlating the alerts across the platforms. We're the ones that have to remember that a similar issue happened six months ago and This is what we did about it. We're the ones that have to figure out this is a symptom in service A, but it has a dependency in service B that we need to know

what that dependency is and how that could impact this thing. We decide on who is going to be page based on some informal knowledge. It's it's not scalable. I mean it th all of that works in a in a very small scale environment, but as as systems grow, as teams grow, people as a primary integration layer is really fragile.

So the outage risk is with with multiple people and all of that coordination, uh you become slower to find the root cause. The slower you find the root cause, you then don't know what action you need to take. to resolve it. The risk there is not knowing immediately what the problem is, so you don't know what the route for that mitigation is. With all of the information that is out there, getting to that fast is the key

goal and is the key problem when you've when you're relying on people to do it. When a signal comes into X Matters, the first thing that you can do is based off of that signal, you can then make a call out to the right people.

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It's linked to the ticket that generated the incident. And from there we can determine, okay, well I've seen I've seen this before because my incident suggestions is saying this looks similar to this incident you had last week. We've got built-in automations that can do stuff. So within an instant you might have an automation that says automatically restart pods or automatically rollback services. Like I mentioned before, we can also do that as part of a response.

to the signal that comes out to say, okay, this has happened, do a rollback and I can just Touch my phone and go back to bed without even getting out of bed. All of the automation, the flexibility of the tool and all the the things that you can build in along with the data that you've got with the service catalogue, with your on call, with your who's on duties and get you to get the right people at the right time on the call if you need to get to a point where you're in a conference.

X Matters automates the entire incident lifecycle, taking you from initial event to final resolution. To see how their purpose-built AI slashes your resolution times and gives your team the context to stop disruptions before they start, head to xmatters.com. That's xmatt e-r-s.com.

Um, but this was kind of fun because you know, you and I spent some time at a dinner together a few weeks ago and this career growth conversation came up because you were reflecting on meeting Jerry Lee, founder of ELC, while you were at Salesforce and sort of discussing what to do next. Tell us about that story in that moment. Yeah. I w I was trying to crystallize for myself.

you know, how to think about what I wanted to do, you know, going forward. I could tell that the company that I had been with with QIP and acquired by Salesforce was instead of targeting productivity at a very broad scale, was trying to target, well, how do we make things that people that you know are using Salesforce more productive within that ecosystem?

And I didn't have any experience in that ecosystem. I was learning and it was interesting to me. But I also didn't I d I felt like I w didn't have the intuition that I wished I had to have instinct for things in there. And and some of that was just my own background. Like I didn't have experience

selling directly. Um, I didn't have experience of, you know, being a forward deployed salesperson at that time. So, you know, I didn't know how to think about the interconnec you know, what sucked about those tools or what would be great. And so when I was Talking to Jerry, I was sort of reflecting like there were a lot of interesting companies and people building interesting technology. And I, you know, I was trying to figure out well, what

What what makes sense? You know, I had gone to Quip uh with the intention of perhaps you know spending more time as a manager. I'd been a tech lead before that and I was a tech lead when I started, but the thing was okay, I I was gonna try to give up using code as my only lever uh within the company. It's not the only lever, but it was the one that I could fall back on. Yeah. It could produce a lot of impact through code. And so I was going to try to not do that or do it different.

And so, you know, talking to Jerry, it was really fun back and forth because I had a feeling he was talking to a lot of startups and a lot of other people at other companies and had a really broad view. So I wanted to prick his brain about, you know, what he saw, you know, for people who felt like they were, you know, feeding their ambitions correctly or or, you know, struggling or, you know, where they were feeling stagnant. And one of the things I left that

kind of conversation with him and a few other people was I wanted to go somewhere where I was voting with my wallet. Meaning they had some degree of product market fit in the world and I was part of that. And it was kind of a liberating way of approaching what usually was the job search, you know, because it's like, okay, well, would I use this? Okay, that gets you excited about the mission is very different from, am I using it right now? And I have no idea if this company has job.

You know, imagine you're sitting there looking through your subscriptions and thinking, okay, this is the sum total of all the places you could work. It's it's not that many, but it's enough. And I know I wondered if that would work for me. And I had already, I think I had just started and met Gashermo and explored Zeit and I was pretty convinced that was gonna be what I wanted to do.

Like I was a paying customer. I didn't know anybody at the company. Uh I knew who some of the people were, but I was so fascinated and excited about what they were building. And in fact, before I went to Quip, I did my interviews for Quip and for Segment, which was another company I was excited about, using Next.js.

Like, you know, usually interviews have a building part. And so I used Next.js to build my interviews. And that was kind of a a a a signal and sort of meant like, okay, this is this makes a lot of sense. It felt intuitive. There's there's a lot to get into there and I really like this idea of

thinking about where you wanted to go next. And there was this level of, you know, your instinct and intuition were sort of being drawn or in different areas as sort of like your strength. So I kind of see perceive that as like a way of analyzing your strengths or the unique experiences that you have that you can sort of double down on in your next opportunity. And you you really be able to use that as a way to impact.

A feature organization. And then the other was like I love taking stock of like what are the things that you use in love as almost like a discovery point. Because you're right. Like I can think of like five specific things that I use that I'm like, oh, I would be an evangelist.

For this, like in a heartbeat. Well, it makes sense. And when I met Sheryl, I was like, we talk sometimes about career growth. Like I obviously gave up on that idea a long time ago, I guess, because my conversation was not about looking at my path.

from you know job role to role. I mean I was just like I just want to work at the company. I actually don't care what job I'll be the janitor, you know, whatever. I didn't care. In fact, I was talking about being an advocate and and doing DevRel or something like that. Because I was so excited about what the company was building that I felt like I could talk about it in a way that would share my infectious energy with other people.

Now I didn't have experience doing developer relations, you know, concretely. Like it wasn't a job title on my resume. And I think as punishment for that, Kashermo may give me a job title I'd also never had on my resume, which was product manager.

Um, so I actually started as a product manager and it wasn't like we discussed that and I agreed to it. It was I had already agreed I was gonna come work here and you know figured all that out. And then a week before I started, Goshowa, you know, sort of dropped the bomb on me, I was gonna do product. And in the end it was really great because it was the, you know, code shouldn't be your primary lever as a manager, theoretically.

And so I was gonna continue that, but also I was gonna be talking to customers. You know, it has a lot of elements of developer relations because our customers are developers. So it really you really satisfied a lot of that itch for me. And it was a great experience. I think the the other part of your story I think is really interesting about this is also

There's a lot of noise when it comes to finding opportunities. And I think that your story with how you got involved with the first cell, I think is really fun in terms of like how you identified it and then how you started to you when you sent everybody a message being like, hey, this is really cool. How do I get involved?

And so I wanted you to I was wondering if you could tell us the story of like how you first got involved with Purcell and like what was like the early interactions like. Because a lot of like I'm trying to think of right now is like how do people get attention in a noisy market is sort of the overarching goal.

But I think the way that you initiated your conversation with Versell is really interesting. So we brings it to that. It's luck. But I mean in this sense, so what it actually started with customer success. So this point zeit the company Had published you know, there was next JS. And then there was infrastructure and and services to, you know, be able to take your next JS app and put it on the web. And

there was a change to that infrastructure called now v2. Um so if you remember there was a now CLI, which was amazing. You could buy a domain and create a project with one CLI command. It's kind of a you know, start your company in one C L I command moment. And I thought that was really powerful'cause buying domains was Historically uh you know, go to some nasty website

click around, suffer through the ten pages of upsells. This is just like a command line and you just had your domain. It was and it was connected. It was on the web already. So it felt amazing. And I had filed a ticket because my open source hobby project, which was actually about collecting rainfall data for figuring out whether you should go hunt mushrooms. Because I hunt culinary mushrooms all over the coast. And so I was like, Oh is it?

Did it rain in Point Reyes in the last two weeks? I mean it may not have rained in San Francisco, but it might have rained in Point Reyes. So, you know, you had temperature, yeah, at least you read it. Is this still available? Is this still forecast is no longer available because weather underground canned their API? Oh but it would get weather data from people that just created those weather stations all up and down the coast.

So it was a it was an amazing thing. Um my wife started hunting morel mushrooms in the Northwest and so like we just started getting into tuning into the seasons that that's available and timing and stuff. So

No, it's all and you gotta have it all right. You have to have elevation. You have to have you know, and the truth is you can figure this out on social media pretty easily'cause people love to post their stuff. But I wanted to do it through heuristics and science and I thought that's a fun programming project. Yeah. And it was. But

But for some reason when now V two came out and I was convinced I wanted to use that because, you know, I wanted to use the new thing. And and you know, I wasn't I wasn't programming that much. I was in my day job I was like, okay, I noticed my build failed because I just, you know, made an edit that morning or something. And so I wrote in and uh

I didn't expect I would actually hear back. I was a paying pro customer because I had bought that So that my mentor who also worked on this project with me. could also go through the experience of seeing what modern deployment on this new system uh looked like'cause I was excited about it. And he never actually deployed anything, but I had bought two seats. So at the time he had to be a pro customer to have collaboration.

So I wrote in and I went about my day and I didn't expect anything. And then I got an email from GitHub that somebody was pushing a change up. up to my open source project and I was excited about that. So I looked at it after work and it wasn't a person writing, you know, working on Sporecast, unsurprisingly. It was a Vercell customer support engineer pushing to a branch.

To trigger the build system to try to help figure out why it wasn't working. And, you know, they didn't email me, they didn't send me a ticket number, they didn't do any of that. But I just saw that this person, Paolo Dimitri, who was a C S engineer at Versal Isaiah. uh was writing code to interact with me.

And real, you know, I don't know if he was relying on the systems to notify me or just didn't think about it, but I thought that was incredible. If that's what this company did to support developers, like that looked like the future of what developer relations should be. You know, it was kind of code first. It was tech first. It wasn't email cons and a system. And so I was excited. I just wrote into jobs at zeit.co and said, hey.

Here's my resume. I promise I'm not a suit because I had a I had a fancy title, right? I'm the EPU of Engineering. And I didn't want them to think. that I was looking for that. I just wanted to work at the company. And then I ended up coming and meeting Gashermo and

too tall Nate, you know, one of the other engineers and Kevin Van Gundy, like some of the people just really early on and I you know I knew it. I knew the moment I walked up the stairs above Tomazzo's Pizza in North Beach into a tiny little start-up office that I was back. That was the f I I've done this before. I love going to companies where that's kinda you know, it's it's a and it's a department with cords on the floor and, you know, one little conference room and people just hacking.

The story's incredible because I think it's so indicative of culture. when you're working with like a particular person and the way it kind of occurs to me is like impact versus process. Like the like the person was like, we're going to fig do whatever we need to do to figure out what their problem is. Regardless of like a customer service ticket or just putting Lindsay in line. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. Do you feel like that? has continued in different ways.

As this is growing. I mean we have a we we have a values uh system for Versal that we you know share with people who join the company and and one of the values is to dig deep. Talk about dig deep. I mean Paulo went and dug into my project, like I can't believe that means he cloned it locally. He noodled on it. I mean what a what a flex.

I mean, you know, like for somebody who in my mind at Google or at big companies, you know, customer success I never interacted with customer success as an engineer. And meanwhile, I'm having this amazing interaction with somebody who, you know, is an engineer by every definition and trying to help me. And it felt amazing. And I want I want other developers to have that experience. I want that to be their experience of using this platform.

So that's still true. Um and and I think that, you know, if you fast forward into what we do now, one of the things that I've worked on here was to change the experience of getting support to incorporate AI. Um, it's quite good. You know, n something now, nine out of ten things you would ask normally have filled out a ticket for, we can help you without you having to fill out a ticket and wait for a response.

So is great at giving you the information you need. And so nobody wants to fill out a web form, let alone wait six hours for a response. If you can get on your way and empowered and and personalized information back. For your account, this is the error. Here's what we think you should do to fix it. Like that's amazing. And and these systems are quite good at it. So we now spend our time making the system feel more self-healing than we do making you wait for us to to heal it for you.

I I really like this concept of make the system feel self healing. Okay. I feel like it's a really powerful product principle to design your system around. Totally. I mean it is the one. It it's It's what got me into this space. I when I worked at Google, the first big team I was on was called App Engine and the whole premise of App Engine was that it would be an auto scaling system.

I had spent years learning how to scale VMs and shard databases, things that I did not have any interest in. Like I wasn't interested in that part. I was a builder, but I had to do this because otherwise it wasn't fact. And if it's not fast, it has a it's a terrible experience. And I care a lot about the experience. So I had to learn how to make it fast. But then the principle of App Engine was you would have a directory and a project and Google would take care of the rest.

Like that's very powerful. Verzell has the same ambition. It's that okay, if Something happens now. We have like build observability and an agent that tells you what it thinks you need to do based on the logs, based on the data. You have the option to let it just do it. Uh, you can intervene and do things yourself. It's it's really empowering. So Vercel obviously caught your attention with Paolo, uh really demonstrating some of the best qualities and characteristics of great support.

So you're kind of at a phase where you're like you knew you wanted to do something different and you were starting to pay attention to what that might be. How would you Recommend somebody at that same phase take the next step? Like what would you have them pay attention to? What should they be reflecting on when they're thinking about a next career step? You know, what what I tell people generally is like, you know, you have a few angles to consider in this. There are the people.

There's the mission of the company. And then undeniably, there's probably this part of your own sense of your career story. And you're going to weigh them differently in the process. Like sometimes you can go all in on all I ca you know, all I care about is the mission. I don't care if I do it for free. I can I can do that right now in my life. You know

You may not be in a situation where you can do that. So you're gonna make trade-offs across these dimensions. And what I've usually advise people to do is make it real. Go start interviewing, talking to people. Um, challenge yourself. You don't you don't have to accept.

you know, every opportunity that comes your way, but you should feel the urgency of what it would mean to consider doing that. Because if you spend if you're just doing that in your own head, it's not very real. Once you start interacting with other people and other organizations. Your own expansion of what's possible really does it.

And you know, it can't just be you reading about things that you have to go meet people and talk. At least that w that's what worked for me. But it wasn't like the first time I did that. It was immediately obvious what I should do next. You know, I had probably interviewed at six different companies just to go through the process over seven months just to try to, you know, suss it out for myself.

To segue into management culture and how it's shifting, I guess maybe the first question is bold strategies for an engineering manager to get notice. in the interview process. And I'm thinking about like Paolo and like locally cloning your project and then digging into it and that being something that really stands out to you. And I'm like, what are bold strategies that managers can do that can have them stand out in the process beyond

submitting an application. And I maybe that that's kind of teeing up like how management culture is shifting and what people are being assessed on where that assessment is sort of shifting or where impact looks like shifting. Yeah. I mean I think that When you join a company to increase the output and impact of a group of people.

to show up and claim that you think you can do that. It's a pretty bold claim, especially if you don't know those people yet and et cetera. So I think the best strategy, and and this isn't new, is to really try to understand the company you're going into and what you think they should do differently.

Now obviously it's somewhat naive. You don't know that much about the company and and any company you go to knows that. They know you don't know the inside baseball. But when you have conviction about something that you think they should do, immediately you kind of bond.

Right. You bond over the mission of the company. And, you know, I think traditionally, you know, I d I don't know that this was always the case, but I I can think of counterexamples too. But like, you know, you might go say, I'm a really good manager. You need a really good manager. I'll figure out the company later. I don't think that's gonna cut it anymore. And so I think in this process of, hey, you're gonna go and try it on for size. Show do your homework.

Go in wanting the job. Practice for yourself what that means. You're a manager, you're also a salesperson, you're also a product manager. You're also a customer support engineer. You're also an IC. You know, you have to know all of those things. And so when you go to a company and you're

you have the privilege of talking to them about joining their mission, you should know what you're talking about at some level. Now, you know, again, that depth is something, but you can't go in and be like, oh, I'm trying to learn more about your company here live. You know, do your homework. You know, we uh even at Google they used to ask candidates in the interview process, like, hey, go to the homepage of Google. You know, wh how should we make it better? And sometimes

candidates would say, Oh, it it's perfect now. You know, they're sort of afraid of breaking the glass of the person on the other side. That's the wrong answer. You know, if it's perfect now, we could all just retire and go home. And it's not. Yeah. You know, it's of course it's not. Um you know, you should be able to go to the homepage of Google right now and tear it to shreds.

I love this idea of creating a point of view. Like when you're when you're going into a company and interviewing with them is like if you do the prep work ahead of time and develop a recommendation, a strategy, an approach, or just a point of view on product direction, even management approach to help execute.

X team that you're interviewing for achieve different results, like for me that's like such a more productive exercise than how do I change the phrasing on my cover letter to match whatever values that they're looking for?

Which feels also like you're sending that into a void. But I think like to me it feels more controlla also to develop a point of view. Yeah. And I mean the other side of that is obviously like be resourceful. You know, you can you can send in your resume on the web form and sometimes that works. But go grind. Go find people you know that know somebody that knows somebody at that company. Work your way in, be resourceful.

And again, that assumes you've targeted some companies you want to go after. You can do both. You know, you can get pulled into ones you know less about and see what that experience is like and go after some of them. You do want to go after the ones you really want after you've practiced.

Like everything in the world, practice makes perfect. And so if you go do your first interview with a company you're dying to work at and you haven't been interviewing and practicing, you may just knock it out of the park, but you probably won't. So it's no longer enough to just

Be a good manager and figure out the company later. So I I like that trend in terms of framing people. So when you're thinking about how management and engineering leadership and like the culture of that is shifting, like what are some other observations or trends that you're seeing?

Maybe maybe not for sell, but maybe broadly more in the industry. Like are there certain things that you're seeing shift or certain things becoming greater priorities for managers to do in terms of like their impact and how they operate? The nice thing about AI in a sense is, you know, we go to go back to your point around code isn't your only lever. As a manager, you know, just people managing it isn't a thing anymore. You know, are you you an engineer first and a manager second?

Both, you know, how do you balance these things? I think that you can't really understand how to help people if you don't live in their shoes. And so, you know, you've got to do IC work on the team. You've got to do customer success work on the team. You've got to do product management on the team. And ultimately your job is to enable them to focus more in one of these capacities.

Um so that's that's important too. But it doesn't mean you don't try to live in their shoes and experience what they're experiencing. If you don't go through the experience of trying to land code, how do you have empathy when somebody's like the build system take

Eight minutes, I'm dying here. Like, you know, you're like, oh, okay, well, I mean, for me it was twenty twenty minutes back in my days, it's eight minutes now. You know, you can't have that attitude. It should be zero point one seconds. So how what does it feel like when it's eight minutes now? It feels too slow. And you have to feel it. to be able to share that experience. So I think being able to share experience with your team is key. You know, knowing

what's going on in people's life. You know, a lot of the principles of of being a good manager still apply. Uh it's not like it's totally changed, but I think it's easier to stay connected now into what the day to day life and and work is like because it's changed so much. And so you have a responsibility to learn yourself now what that means. I mean, a manager without AI competency today is a very risky world to live in.

I think my my next question is sort of like what maybe like patterns of behavior look like for somebody to help kind of build out that shift. in maybe default behavior. So maybe they're somebody who's been, you know, an engineering leader, default people manager. And for me, I'm like, I definitely like there's a a lot of like kind of human behavior friction to sort of change your style of work and your patterns and like what kind of the default things you do are.

What types of things can help somebody shift into getting deeper as an IC, diving into some of these different tools, doing more PM work or doing more customer success work? Cause I I also really love this idea of like you need to feel all of these other dynamics to be effective at then enabling other people. And you've kind of said that a couple different times, the different things that you've you've talked about it, but like that feeling in terms of product taste, that feeling in terms of

How do you enable customer success to be more effective with your your customers? But also then like your product manager and developing product taste, like a Feeling the problems that you're working with is such an important thing for your intuition and productivity. So how can somebody sort of shift in? Like what are what are some of maybe the behaviors that you're seeing or patterns of work that drive that?

Yeah, I mean the nice part about again the learning phase is go build something. You know, and the word engineer, the idea that we build things as a, you know, job, it's privilege. for sure. And, you know, just ask yourself, like, what's the last thing you built for fun or for, you know, a use purpose that has a stakeholder that's not necessarily a technologist? Um I think that people who do consulting in any capacity gain an empathy that people've never done it just don't understand.

Um, when you are beholden to someone who doesn't care how you did the thing, they might appreciate it, but that isn't really what they care about. They care about, you know, how well it works for them or saves them time. Um, you know, you're building a system to improve some productivity thing. Well, it either does or it doesn't.

Um and you're gonna get very raw feedback from somebody who doesn't care how the sauce is made. A and cooking's a good analogy too, you know. You could use all the best equipment in the world and produce something that doesn't taste good and who cares? You've gotta have checks and balances out there. And so I usually tell people build something for your parents or

For your, you know, your community where somebody will give you honest raw feedback. And that will force you to go back to trying to learn how to build this thing to be useful. Yeah and you can start from scratch. Right now. And it's then it shouldn't be that scary. There's a lot of gr the tooling is so much better now. It's so easy to get a web page on Vercel through, you know, V Zero to getting something live that then, you know, has a Git repository. Like these things are n the

seemed like, you know, I need to be in a terminal on a command line, on a Linux machine, you know, using GNU systems, like it no nobody's thinking about that anymore. I interview a lot of people who don't, you know, know that history now when they're using these tools and I think that's okay. You know, you can learn that, but also your job is to build upon the shoulders of the things that have come before you and so.

Do you think you'd be able to revive SporeCast pretty rapid? Well, like would you reimagine SporeCast using moderate like modern tools? Um probably not. Uh I have other means that work better for me, it's just friends. Yeah.

And and you know, I I think social networks are better for that. But I still use I still have hobby projects that I build and work on every week uh relentlessly. The same one that I demoed to Gashermo before I joined this company, I still work on every week and I use every week.

So, you know, that's it's kind of personal software. You can use it too, but you might not write music. And so, you know, having chords and lyrics and the ability to look things up, it may not be interesting to you. So it's fine. But I lo I love working on it. It gives me a chance to play with my own expectations for how the software should work and I depend on it.

I'd be curious to get your perspective of like what great management looks like at Brussel. And then maybe some of the previous like normal patterns of management that are maybe less relevant now and comparing and contrasting where you're seeing great shift to and then what are some things maybe that are becoming less impactful as a manager?

Well I'm gonna turn it on his head. I actually think It's the same principle as was true before as is today. Great people doing great work have conviction. They know how to unblock other people and themselves. You know, that's part of it too, is you have to know how to unblock yourself. And then you learn figure out how to unblock other people to make them feel empowered and have agency. And sometimes that's sharing context.

Sometimes that's sharing things you've learned in your own experience, and sometimes it's sharing technical wisdom. Uh it it needs to be kind of all of those things. So I think. great leaders are it's the same principles. The the tools are different and probably it has more to do with who who your audience is. But

Look, we're a developer tools company here. And so you need to be a developer to know how to build there. And so helping your developers build for developers is really fun. It takes great communication skills. Fan you know, you need to be fantastic at getting your point across concisely and definitively.

I think the way that you frame like those high-level categories is really powerful because it's like being a great manager hasn't shifted. It's just like the tools that are changing are. And so you have to become familiar with those and like personal projects and experimentation there is going to help you drive and get that context.

And then that's also gonna then in the context of these new tools and how it's impacting products, workflows, you have just a much better sense of how then you can unblock people'cause the the specific tactics to unblock are changing. Yeah. So if you can get a sense of that, that's gonna help you then do the thing that isn't changing, which is unblock people, be effective and help provide that context and and wisdom.

And I mean talking to customers remains like, you know, the magic of figuring out how to do that is understanding how to go from scratch with somebody's problem. It it is in a way going back to like sort of the service uh industry mentality. It's like if somebody's coming to you with a problem, they're on fire. Your job is to figure out how to put that fire out.

Um and you don't have you don't know everything about what's going on in their situation. So you you're really flying blind and trying to be effective. And and the best people are are they're exceptional at best.

This you and I were kind of talking about this idea of like co learning with your team as like a really important principle right now.

And the r the reason why I think I wanted to kind of bring this up is we we we did a hackathon at our conference. Oh, um and for a lot of engineering leaders, it was actually it was like their first time using some of these tools and V0 was one was one of the ones that we recommended. Like use this, play around. One of the things that was interesting was people sort of mentioned

previously like a sense of imposter syndrome or like a fear of looking bad if they were doing these tools and like failing and not an expert at them immediately. And so I think that for like a lot of managers who maybe like are hesitant to kind of jump into that, like that's a very real fear.

Um, one of the ideas you and I were kind of talking about was, you know, learning the craft alongside your team as a way to like both bond people, but then also to sort of create a a system of of learning. But like for some people, there's like this internal fear of like if

I'm not perceived as the expert, like I'm not gonna have credibility or like people won't then list me. So I don't I don't know if I have like a question, maybe just like a reflection. Fear is the mind killer. Yeah. I mean that's the that's the thing. Fear is the mind killer. And if you're afraid of looking or or being perceived a certain way, it will dog you forever. Yeah. That's the thing to get over. Be vulnerable. Um, I I find that goes a long way too. And also

Helping be a manager and a leader and you know acknowledging what you don't know. It feels vulnerable, but also it's just honesty. And what you're trying to really assess with the people around you is trust. And if you're dishonest, like you're not gonna build trust. And so if you're straightforward about the things you don't know and you don't try to dance around that. Uh you will you will build trust with the people around you.

And you know, the alternative to that is you will erode it and it's very, very difficult to reattain. So, you know, showing what you don't know to other people is is a perfectly good way to build trust. And the alternative is waiting until you're an expert. You're not gonna likely become it.

I wanna jump in a little bit into interviewing and some of the w because I know that you and Versailles vulnerable mode. Vulnerable mode, it's yeah my gosh, yeah. Vulnerable power the inherent power dynamic of somebody assessing you for fit. is uh anxiety inducing, to say the least. But I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about interviewing and Versalho has done a lot in terms of experimentation and thinking critically about how how that

shifting. So part of it is I want to spend some time just hearing what you're learning, what you've been experimenting with, some of the insights or trends or observations that you've seen with interviewing. Both maybe from like a hiring for side, but then also from a candidate side going through the interview process. We can kind of tackle that a few different ways. But

Yeah, I mean I think there have been a few pretty monumental shifts in what this looks like in my time in the industry in any case. I mean, my first interviews were steak dinner with the CEO in Austin. Like that was kind of the final bomb. Uh whereas, you know, my final boss interviews in Silicon Valley were, you know, systems design and algorithms and big O notation, you know, math.

So it was very different, uh different experience. And then I think another shift was when you started seeing more remote interviewing, you know, not a phone screen, but something where, you know, you were actually coding more and it felt live.

people are doing fully remote and some people are doing, you know, in person experiences. So you get a lot of different fidelity around somebody in terms of assessing their capabilities and fit. And certainly AI has changed That's probably the biggest shift is you know now, you know, the thing where you would remotely ask somebody to write code is incredibly subt.

Uh our tooling is, you know, you have adjacent minds sitting on your desk alongside this thing that's connected to a video. You know, you don't know what's in their head or what they're reading off a screen. Also, you want to assess their abilities with those tools. So I think knowing how well somebody works with AI tools,'cause you know, you're not starting day one without those things.

But it was it's not so dissimilar when people like Oh, I'm interviewing them. They're gonna look up the answer on Stack Over for In some ways it's not that different. So I think for gaining experience through the process of interviewing other people, the only way to do that by doing it. And in a position in a company, you should try to figure out how to get that experience.

Um and if you're on the other side of that, again, going through go through the experience. You know, don't don't put, you know, your golden company as your first interview. Go through the process. Get get familiar with it. Because there's probably a mean to every company interviewing at the present time around how they operate.

Some people will let you use AI, some people won't. Some people absolutely need to see you use AI. Um, you know, what company do you want to work for? There's a lot of principles back to I I think I always go back to some of Joel Spolsky's blog posts of the old days, like, okay, are they gonna give me the best

tech money can buy. You know, so you should get in your interview process, if you don't have access to the best tech money can buy to demonstrate your abilities, do you want to work at that company? So I think you got you have to think about a lot of these things in the process. You know, what matches what you're looking for.

r related trends there I think are knowing how to learn during the process. You you might get to some point and then now the interviewer's going to tell you something. You know, can you listen? Do you pay attention there? Can you repeat back what they're saying? Some of this is like comprehension under stress. That's pretty relevant to most work environments, depending on the nature of the company.

Are there certain patterns of interviews that are that are shifting that you're starting to see? So you were kind of mentioning There is this thing where people want to see how you operate without AI tools and how they operate with AI tools. Are there certain ways that those sort of assessments are looking or shifting or how does Vercel sort of approach those Yeah. I mean, one of the one of the things we're doing now is people come and spend a day just working.

Um we'll probably s and in some ways we might see more of that. Because it's just so hard to tell what is and what isn't you over a screen anymore. Um, and so I think we'll probably see more of that.

the proof of work or like the demonstration of your abilities I think is such an effective it's like Farn Anthroit from Shopify, he like was our fifth person on the podcast ever and like I still think about his principles on hiring because his thing was like there is no better way to demonstrate experience than experience. And to and to show that.

And so it is interesting to think about like the dynamics of that right now is that if you can do something live with somebody and co create with them or co learn with them, you understand how they operate and how they behave and like what that looks like. And I think that probably does And how they communicate, whether whether you wanna

sit next to them every day. Are there any experiments or things that you're you're seeing how interviews may shift in the future or patterns maybe that may change? Like I said, I think the working and, you know, come spend a day or a week working live with a company is probably gonna become more normal. I think it was always the case for smaller companies to do this.

You go back to like Eli Gill's book on you know building startups and like that was a just a requirement. You spent a lot of time, you hired slowly, you really were careful about this. You would definitely want to spend time working with someone before. What why is day one day one? Yeah. Um, you know, and I and so I think that we'll see more of that probably scaled up to even larger companies.

See in saying that like also makes you think like then having a point of view and doing all the work ahead of them is such an important then prerequisite for that then conversation because if you've developed a point of view or maybe a sense of where the product is, like then you can sort of Build that, communicate all of that research ahead of time with the people you're building with and probably set you for more success. Well, and also I mean the I the

Um mistake not to mention a trend that we had. COVID really sent everyone into full remote work. And you know, certainly San Francisco right now is very much an in real life experience of working. Th there are remote companies here, it's to some extent, but they are not the norm.

And I think the the capital is investing in people working in person and iterating together and sweating the details together, feeling the pain together, feeling the joys together. Um and that's just a fundamental human organization that's worked for a long time and I think it's bad.

We've got some rapid fire questions, right? Okay, let's go. Okay. What are you reading or listening to right now? Well, I was listening to an interview with Eileen Goo this morning, uh,'cause she's very popular, th this sort of take on how you think before you talk. It's very relevant for this podcast. I mean I thought it was very, you know, eloquent. I'm gonna look that up. Um what was it, yeah, Eileen? Olympian, yeah.

That's great. Friend and Ike shared it. Uh you know the creator of JavaScript. So I immediately shared it back with my daughter. That's great. Number two, what is a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you? the principles of reusable, composable, lightweight things to make Systems. Building upon, you know, tools that don't do too many things, but you can build upon them. It's so fundamental.

Um, and I think especially with, you know, our ability to think less about uh how the code is composed for human readability, you know, that used to be a really big deal. Human readability was a fundamental part of assessing code. I think we'll, you know, now obviously the

It's a lot less relevant. But figuring out whether it works well and how well those systems compose themselves and how adjustable they are, how tunable they are, how error free they are, those things will, you know, they'll come back. And so that Unix philosophy is pretty key to that.

What is a trend you're seeing or following that's interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet? Well, I I don't know if I'm I'm the trend maker considering I'm taking whetstone knife sharpening classes in my free time when I'm not programming. So, you know, I I I'm learning what those are from our interns. It's probably the right answer.

Well that's the idea of like, you know, encouraging people to talk to your interns for like what's new. Like what's emerging. That's right. Last question. Is there a quote or a mantra you live by or a quote that's resonating with you right now? Yeah. And the the one that comes back to me is is the you know, the the cheesiest one. It's so good. You know, don't look back because you're not going that way. It can be hard

To think about your decisions in the context of you know how you're feeling. And you can you can get stuck thinking about that. And it's it's just not a good way to. How that resonates with me as you're sharing that is, you know, right now things are moving fast and there's sort of like a discomfort with that. And I think a lot of people that like the dinner that we did a few weeks ago kind of talk about that discomfort.

And so for me I find a lot of, I guess, comfort in thinking about like don't look back or think about all of the ways that, you know, maybe you were comfortable are shifting, but think and look forward and think about how you're growing and and kind of sitting with that discomfort. Yeah, what do you want to explore?

Yeah. Um, you know. And and and it is obviously yeah, the pithy form it is not don't care about history. But I think it's, you know, don't get stuck on m oh, you know, human readability. It's it's still important to you know, get over it. It's not.

Um and it doesn't mean that it's uh it's irrelevant. Lindsay, thanks for inviting me. Yeah. To hang out. Thanks for coming. And thanks for an incredible conversation reflecting on career and how management and things are shifting. Um it's been a lot of fun. So thank you. Wow, it's my pleasure. If you're listening to this and you're wondering, how can I connect with other engineering leaders in my city? Pull up your phone right now and go to elc.community, click our

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