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**Phillip Carter:** Awesome. Sounds good. I'd be happy to do it. |
**Justin Garisson:** And in the pre-show we did determine that being a PM doesn't mean you work at night... It's something else beyond that... But tell us a little about your background. How did you end up as a principal PM at Honeycomb? And what software are you responsible for? |
**Phillip Carter:** \[07:52\] Yeah, so I started my career working at Microsoft outside of college, and I joined the .NET team. And that was pretty fortuitous, because this was around 2015, when we had the very first, very crappy preview of cross-platform .NET that we were building, which at the time was called .NET Co... |
**Justin Garisson:** Is it not called .NET Core anymore? |
**Phillip Carter:** No, no, it's just called .NET. And there's huge, huge branding things... The Windows thing was called .NET or The .NET Framework, and they're like "Okay, we still have to keep calling it the .NET Framework." There's actually some legalities associated with that. But at the same time, it's like very ... |
So I worked on our languages, specifically on the F\# language and the C\# compiler quite a bit, and then IDE tooling in Visual Studio. And also our family of like Visual Studio Code, and like there were other cross-platform language server type stuff. Keep in mind also, when the concept of a language server was still ... |
**Autumn Nash:** At this point were you an engineer, or were you a PM? |
**Phillip Carter:** I was a PM. But PM was kind of weird in that group. We wrote a lot of code, we did a lot of prototypes... It was not uncommon for PMs to actually just implement entire features, or do the initial architecture for something, because we needed someone to not be tied to the current shipping schedule, a... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's the kind of PM I'm trying to work my way into. |
**Phillip Carter:** Yeah, it's fun. |
**Justin Garisson:** Someone that's outside the sprint cadence. You're like "Now I can do whatever I want." |
**Autumn Nash:** I was like "Can I contribute upstream?" And they're like "If you want." And I was like... |
**Justin Garisson:** That's when the night job kicks in. |
**Phillip Carter:** I do really recommend it. I mean, I think, as an aside, in terms of like product work, there's a lot of literature about how to be a good PM, and how to do good product work and stuff like that... And I think a lot of it ends up getting over-indexed on, and a lot more time gets spent on things like ... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's why I feel like I want to stay as technical as possible, and using the products that I'm a PM for, because I don't want to lose the empathy for developers. |
**Justin Garisson:** Intuition is way better than data. If you're like data-driven, you're like "No, no, I know how this should work, because I do it." It's so much more powerful than saying "Here's why, and I will show you why." |
**Autumn Nash:** \[12:03\] I'm not gonna lie, but I'm so excited to write code for fun and for an experiment, and not in production... |
**Phillip Carter:** Nice. |
**Autumn Nash:** Like... I'm back! |
**Justin Garisson:** Not being on call is a magical experience. Phillip, so out of college, doing this PM -- PM work is usually like more of a leadership type role for like a pretty big sort of migration progress... Again, legacy makes money. Now you're like "Oh, that legacy thing makes a ton of money, and we need to m... |
**Phillip Carter:** It is. And one of the places where I think Microsoft - or at least certainly Microsoft in the era that I was there - is really a great place for growing PMs, because they do throw you into the deep end. But then they also treat you like someone who is capable of swimming in the deep end. So occasion... |
And since I've switched over to Honeycomb and into the startup world, there's this meme about people in big tech can't work in startups, because they're too used to like too much structure and too much stuff around them, and yadda, yadda, yadda. And I'm like, no, we were like feral children left to just try to make the... |
**Justin Garisson:** The small-scale impact is amazing. This is my first startup too, and coming from Amazon, where it felt like the PM group was also thrown into the deep end... But at some point, Amazon was kind of like putting their foot on your head, and you're kind of like "Wait a minute, I'm trying to swim here. ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm really excited to be working as a PM for Linux at Microsoft, in the insecurity realm, because it's so new to Microsoft that it's got that startup vibe, which was very much Keyspaces at Amazon. You get to do all the things and try all the things, but under the shell of corporate America. |
**Justin Garisson:** Yeah. I mean, security is really new for Microsoft. |
**Autumn Nash:** I knew you were going to throw shade at me. Why are you like this? Also, I've decided Phillip is our people, because did you see him give his whole background with just a little bit of honesty and truth and shade, but then also like we're right here...? |
**Justin Garisson:** You can have a good experience and have some shade. It's fine. |
**Phillip Carter:** You can, absolutely. |
**Autumn Nash:** But it's being honest, and people being able to trust your opinion. |
**Justin Garisson:** And your experience is your experience, and no one can take that away. |
**Autumn Nash:** It is. But when people aren't honest and they'll just say all the good things, and they'll just like blow smoke up at you, you won't trust them and their opinion on anything technical. That's how you lose all your credibility. |
**Break**: \[15:16\] |
**Justin Garisson:** Alright, Phillip, here's one honest thing that I have wanted to know for a very long time. |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh, no... |
**Justin Garisson:** There was a .NET fork called Mono. It was its own open source thing. How was that treated inside of Microsoft, being on this .NET team that was trying to get there, and they were going from the other side, like "We made this .NET native thing on Linux"? Was that like "Don't ever talk about it?" Was... |
**Phillip Carter:** Surprisingly, pretty well. So at the time, Miguel - he's now a good friend; shout-out to Miguel. You should talk to him sometime. He's amazing. He was the lead of the Mono project, he founded it when it started, and then helped create Xamarin with Nat, who has since became CEO of GitHub, and all tha... |
Obviously, lots of similarities. There's elements of systems programming going on here, where there's good code written in both places... But very often, when you would try to host a monoservice somewhere, it would just fall over, and you'd be like "Oh, is this a joke?' It's like "No, it's not, actually. It was just ma... |
\[20:04\] But on the Xamarin client side, we're like "Okay, this is just a fundamentally different runtime, and actually even different set of libraries." And then we worked with them to start unifying some of the library layer. Because there's just all the different utilities in the .NET standard library that - it rea... |
**Justin Garisson:** Do you know if other languages do that? Is that something that's common? |
**Phillip Carter:** I know that in Java they do that, because they have many different runtimes for different purposes. However, you do need to -- the burden is on the developer to deploy the appropriate runtime for their thing. Whereas in .NET, we architected it. So it's just one thing that you deploy to whatever devi... |
**Autumn Nash:** It also has to do with a lot of the garbage collectors. There's different garbage collectors, and you need to tune them in different manners, depending on what you're doing. So it's possible, but it's not as easy. You need to know what you're doing, or you need someone to know what they're doing, or to... |
**Phillip Carter:** Oh, yeah. Java - it's an impressive engineering system that they have, that they've built with just all these really smart people there. And obviously, the language side is also evolving, with all these great features and stuff... But to your point, Java's low-key really good with perf. And I think ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Well, not just that, but \[unintelligible 00:22:56.26\] in just a lot of the things that are coming out, that are... Usually, as it gets older, people are just maintaining it. But the things that have moved forward in the last couple of years in Java are really impressive to be at this stage in technol... |
**Justin Garisson:** I remember at Amazon, because the problem with Java is no one ever upgrades their Java. It's just like "Oh, well, the perf problems of 2005..." |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh, don't... You're gonna give me PTSD. Stop. |
**Justin Garisson:** ...because people are still running it from 2005. Like "I'm still on Java 9", or something like that. But I remember at Amazon they had this whole like shim layer that they built in. And I'm pretty sure there was a blog post about this, where they were like "Well, we're not going to rewrite all our... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[24:07\] The performance literally paid for like millions of dollars. |
**Justin Garisson:** All the engineering time, plus more. Yeah. It was crazy. Just like "We just put a shim. We didn't rewrite the code. We recompiled it, put the shim..." |
**Autumn Nash:** During the pandemic, when they were firing other people, our department kept growing, because that's how much money optimized-- It got to the point where they wanted to rewrite everything in Rust, but Java got so much faster that they could prioritize what they wanted to write in Rust. And Amazon does ... |
**Justin Garisson:** So... Fast-forward a little bit here. Let's get out of the .NET era, and -- at Honeycomb... |
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