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• Mistakes to avoid in code reviews, such as leaving too many comments and only reviewing the diff |
• Sean Goedecke's concerns about writing blog posts that might influence his superiors or colleagues at GitHub |
• The responsibility that comes with having a widely-read blog and influencing industry-wide opinions |
• Sean's experience of working at a high level and the potential pressure of being a thought leader |
• Sean's draft on the importance of getting the main thing right, and how being a "grinder" doesn't necessarily mean success |
• Jerod Santo's response to Sean's concerns, emphasizing that companies value employees working in the right direction, even if it's not a lot of hours |
• The importance of being on the right path and doing the right thing in software development, and how it's easy to move in the wrong direction |
• Leverage and its potential for massive gains or losses |
• The importance of making genuinely useful contributions |
• The concept of scale and how it can amplify the impact of small changes |
• The example of the TikTok intern who saved the company $300,000 by rewriting a small part of their service |
• The high stakes of making technical decisions in high-growth companies like Copilot |
• The potential consequences of making mistakes in high-stakes environments |
• The importance of understanding the audience and tone when writing about technical topics |
• The challenge of writing about blogging and getting attention on platforms like Hacker News |
• Balancing the need to attract a large audience with the desire to engage with high-quality readers who provide meaningful feedback |
• The tension between using clickbait titles and language to attract a broad audience versus alienating high-quality readers who are turned off by it |
• The value of having a niche audience that is engaged and provides thoughtful feedback, as exemplified by the Changelog's audience |
• The challenges of dealing with negative feedback and criticism, particularly on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit |
• The importance of authenticity and vulnerability in online writing and sharing, including the value of being transparent about one's personal and professional background. |
• Wrap-up of the show |
• Sean Goedecke's gratitude for readers |
• Commitment to continue writing as long as people read |
• Ending of the show |
**Jerod Santo:** Today we're joined by Sean Goedecke, who is over there in Melbourne, Australia, and has been blogging like a fiend, like a prolific fiend... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Non-stop. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and I've just been like slurping up his blog posts and putting them in Changelog ews. Sean, welcome. |
**Sean Goedecke:** Hey. Great to be here. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, because you are where you are, and we are where we are, we'll definitely be dealing with a little bit of lag and latency, so hang with us, everyone... I'm sure it'll get smoothed out in post, but if Adam is telling stories over the top of Sean's answers, that's why. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Blame me. Blame me. |
**Jerod Santo:** No, I'm blaming the ocean and the speed of light. I'm not blaming you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's get a key and open that room, okay? |
**Jerod Santo:** There we go. I actually went back, Sean, and checked... In the last 50 issues or so I think I've included posts by you in Changelog News, one, two, three, four, five different posts of yours, in like the last... That's probably a year. At this point I should just put a redirect into your blog, you know... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not quite sure myself. So I didn't write for the longest time. I didn't write for the first eight years of my career. And then all of a sudden, in the last two years, I find myself having a lot of things to say. I think it's kind of self-reinforcing, in a way. It's e... |
It all kicked off for me with a post I wrote about how to ship projects, maybe a year ago. And I wrote that out of frustration with people I'd worked with in the past, and people I'd seen work, engineers who were treating the shipping part as like an afterthought, and they sort of felt if they wrote all the code and th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I do find that having something to say is obviously the barrier to entry, right? I mean, you have to have something to say, to say something, right? That's pretty clear for everybody. But then there's also the exercise and the discipline to just show up and do. You mentioned in the pre-call that you... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, sure. So I don't see myself as a particularly disciplined guy. Like, I don't have the kind of three blog posts a week, rain or shine, got to hit my deadlines, got to do the thing every day. I don't have that at all. What I do have, I think, is a pretty good sense of how I like to work, and I'm ... |
Some of my drafts, I think, will never see the light of day. They're just kind of like breeding grounds for kind of other interesting ideas. And often, it's like -- you say that having ideas is the barrier... Well, I think people have more ideas than they imagine. Every time you get annoyed at like a coworker or annoye... |
The reason when I wrote about 95% of projects failing I think is a good example of that... Where I read a bunch of tweets saying "Oh, 95% of AI projects fail at large enterprise companies. This proves that AI is in a bubble." Well, no, it doesn't. You have to go look at the base rate of how many complicated enterprise ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:22\] Yeah... Well, let me clarify, just in case that was a little off in what I said. I can't rewind and determine exactly what I said, but... Having something to say is different than having ideas. I think that you can have ideas, but I think having something to say is like being down the road... |
**Sean Goedecke:** I appreciate that, firstly. Thank you for saying that. And yeah, I do agree with you, I think, and it ties into how I didn't write much of anything at all for the first seven, eight years of my career. And I think partly that's because - yeah, maybe I didn't have anything to say. And I'm still 10 yea... |
I mean, I have a hundred times where I've written "Engineers should be more mindful of how the organization functions, and they should see their role as more than technical." I've made that point in a hundred different ways, and I'll continue to make that point. I guess that's part of what I've got to say. Maybe if you... |
**Jerod Santo:** And it's well said, because we do - I'm saying 'we', but I do sometimes discount, or do not want to repeat the same thing over and over again, because you think "Well, I've already said that. It's not interesting anymore." You want something fresh... It's not a fresh take, it's the same old take. But n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** And that's really how you get a message out. I mean, there's a reason why I call it beating the drum, is you're just -- it's the same beat every single time. It's just like, people aren't listening. Different people, different mind spaces... They're not ready to hear it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Time, even. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...or they didn't notice... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Time changes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Time changes... And eventually, the message gets out. You can't actually say something just once, in the world that we live in, unless you already have a gigantic microphone, or it's very bombastic, and have it resonate. Like, you do have to actually say the same things in different ways, to reach diff... |
What are some of the other things you've been saying over and over again? So I liked that one: "An engineer must be aware of the politics or the..." |
**Sean Goedecke:** \[12:10\] Yeah, it's broader than the technical engineers ought to be aware of the politics of the organization. And broader than that, one thing I've said over and over that I think is a bit more controversial is that senior engineers specifically ought to be heavily involved in the politics of thei... |
And part of that, which again is a point I've made over and over, that a lot of people don't like hearing, is that you want to be confident in the workplace as a senior engineer. You want to be more confident than you feel internally. A huge part of the job is being more confident than you feel internally. If you're in... |
Anybody who has to make a difficult decision is going to be kind of dealing with their own uncertainties about it... And if you're in the best place to make that decision, it's your responsibility to deal with your own uncertainties, and not simply to be a technical kind of "Well, it could go either way. There's lots o... |
**Jerod Santo:** So to those who might say "I get it, Sean, I'm supposed to be more confident in my position... But I'm not." How did you and when did you acquire and accrue the confidence necessary to be confident? |
**Sean Goedecke:** I don't know if I have good advice on that front. I think I'm naturally very confident in my own ideas... So I wouldn't like to tell people steps that they could take to do that when I didn't follow any steps myself. That's just kind of a fortunate a fortunate way in which my personality fits, I thin... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Sean Goedecke:** But in general, I haven't always been confident about tech, specifically; a lot of it was just time, and years working in the same industry, solving similar problems, seeing the same things crop up... Particularly if you're fairly new to the industry and you're not confident, I wouldn't worry about i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Confidence as well, because you kind of have to get on the road a bit, and you kind of have to make mistakes... And when you're new, you're like "Oh, the last thing I want to do is make a mistake, because I might get fired, or I might be seen as less valuable", or "I really am not an engineer.... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think there's a sense in which in tech it's almost easy to gain confidence quickly, if you're working as a software engineer... And that's because codebases are so complicated, and are so different, and contain so much accidental detail that if you're even a fairly ju... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:21\] So let's zoom in on that post about company politics, since that's kind of the topic that we're on right here. You have the confidence, you've gotten to become senior enough that you know that you have good things to say, and good direction with regard to where the company should go, how the ... |
**Sean Goedecke:** Yeah, sure. And I want to preface this by saying that my experience has been with large orgs, whether it's 10, or 20, or 30 engineering teams... So the advice I give is probably not as relevant to smaller companies or startups. But certainly in large orgs, kind of paradoxically, the process of influe... |
I'm a staff engineer at GitHub, I'm not going to be able to point GitHub the company in a different direction, and certainly not going to be able to point Microsoft the company in a different direction. Very, very few people are in a position to do that. But what you can do is you can influence your local politics. And... |
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