4 Years In Big Tech After Startups - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

and pull up the chat as well should be live on Instagram looks like linkedin's going too great cool stuff all right folks well I think we're good to go I am going to put the link to my newsletter which is generally what I talk about on these Monday night streams so that'll be in the chat if you can do me a favor as you're joining so I know the chat is working because I basically never trust it at this point if you're able to leave me a note in the chat so I can see it coming through say hello because I'm happy to see all of you these uh conversations are meant to be conversations it's not just a recorded YouTube video so I'm more than happy to be taking questions as I go that's actually my preference so uh I am watching on Instagram I'm watching on Tik Tok uh people wave awesome from twitch hello hey in facted FPS it's good to see you back um hello Giovani on Instagram I appreciate you being here thanks for letting me know the chat's working again if you're on other channels come say hi uh like I said it's hard to trust I've seen it a couple times now where someone's like hey you know you didn't respond to my message and I'm like oh crap I never saw it coming through so Giovani yes you are from Instagram and I do appreciate you being here so that's awesome uh cool I think all the chat is working for now but by all means um if I'm going through the topics today if you were trying to ask me a question I couldn't see it I didn't get to it uh shoot me a message in my DMs I'm happy to try and respond to get stuff answered for you so I'd much rather um you know like I say on all these streams I want to make time to answer stuff you want to talk about and if that means derailing from the the current point of discussion just that's cool just say say what you got to say in the chat we'll jump over to it so um the topic for this discussion today at least is a guiding guiding principle is going to be uh my my previous newsletter which last week was celebrating four years at Microsoft for me so I wanted to be able to talk through this because it's a good opportunity for me to reflect because most of my career is not at Microsoft uh most of my career is in fact from startups which is cool it's a it's a very different different space to be in and I thank you I appreciate that um I it's a different it's a different space right so I know that uh folks that often tune into these um not everyone right but I think there's a lot of folks that join in to to check out and see what it's like being in software engineering you're either uh perhaps aspiring to be a software engineer or a junior software engineer and kind of want to see how things are or you know if you are a junior software engineer you're trying out some space maybe you're at a startup maybe you're in big Tech and you got in and you're just curious what it's like to be in these other environments so I want to make sure that I can take this opportunity and this conversation to share my different perspectives uh kind of going through both uh but like I said more more experience bias for being in startups and more recency bias of course for being in big Tech here at Microsoft so that's going to be the framing for today and I will remind folks again because I see more people joining the stream please do ask questions about anything that you're interested in uh if there's time at the end of this generally I jump over to Reddit and pick a couple of uh couple of topics from experience devs to like that subreddit to kind of talk through and offer some perspective on it um so I'm going to try to go all the way for the the full two hours here um I started CrossFit with my wife and she goes very very early in the morning so if I go if I basically get to sleep at 11:00 and then I get my 6 hours of uh sleep for for bright and early at CrossFit in the morning uh which I I think I've completed all the way through three workouts now um I've been bodybuilding for like 20 years and I made it three minutes into my first crossfit workout and almost blacked out so cardio is apparently not my my strong suit but that's okay because today we're talking about big Tech and startups so with that said um yeah great thanks D Thompson Dev just Googled who is the coolest Dev on the internet it brought me to your stream well I appreciate that um I'll I'll try to keep uh live up to that name but yeah let's let's dive into things so again uh I hope it's still in the chat but my my newsletter is there and I'm going to kind of go through the content just because that's how it's organized but um I wanted to start off by by giving a little bit of history for for myself right because like I said I'm at Microsoft now but that's not where I spent the majority of my career and for me uh I went to I went to University so I kind of took that like air quotes like traditional software engineering path um College University kind of thing um for me and I like offering this context too because I don't say that because I like I'm trying to sound like elitist or something because that's the only way to do it hello Maria good to see you I haven't chatted with you in a while so awesome to see you here um for me University and software engineering this was an important combination because in Canada and there are other places in the world but in Canada and especially in Ontario there is a governing body for engineering and that means that if you want to be a professional software engineer or a professional engineer of any kind you do need to go to an accredited school you need to pass an Ethics exam and and you need to have I think it's 2 years of experience under another professional engineer and then you do all of this and then you're paying dues every year like literally you're paying money to keep your professional engineering designation so for me to become like this is this was my goal right I want to be a professional engineer which is uh like being classified as a lawyer or a doctor in this case an engineer it's a professional designation in Ontario and other places in the world too but that's why I went for I went for computer engineering so accredited program and that was kind of how I started things off but the reason I'm bringing this up is because my program I was very fortunate that I had what's called a co-op program and in a couple more interviews that I've done recently that internships and Co-op has has come up uh a little bit more which is cool because I've almost like I've almost forgotten that this is something to be talking about with aspiring software Engineers um if you have the opportunity to go do an internship 100% I recommend doing this uh so much um I know for for myself at the University of waterl this is one of the benefits of of universities and colleges and I'm not saying boot camps don't have this some absolutely will but some schools are literally set up with internship programs and Cooperative programs so at the University of water they had these relationships with companies companies would register to be on their portals right they register to be on their portal so that students can go apply for jobs and then that way it makes your job search a little bit easier but other you know boot camps or other colleges University might just have relationships with uh more local companies or big companies uh that are nearby and that way you can kind of get like funneled in for um internships and things like that so internships were sort of like the number one thing that made me stay in school I feel like I probably would have been like uh I don't really know if I'm I'm if I'm cut out for this but then I would go for an internship and I'd be like oh man I love software like I love programming this is definitely the spot so um I can't recommend them enough GM Von on Instagram says what was the most difference changing from startup uh Universe to Big Tech I'm going to get to this in just a moment I'm just doing my Preamble but that's going to be the biggest Focus uh for this convers so giovan I will absolutely get to that uh and I'm not sure I pronounced your name on Instagram pan oo good to see you hello this is me waving um so I had this opportunity to do internships I actually had six internships which was two full years of work experience so um so Kelsey ocean uh how about apprenticeships yes this might look different uh depending on you know your setup whether it's how how it's done through school or what different uh companies are offering you my point is that any opportunity you can to try and secure some type of uh call it like it's generally like a shorter term guided work experience with a company if you're a boot camp student if you're a college or university student whatever any opportunity like that I highly recommend going after and if it's not something that's just offered at school for you or your boot camp or whatever please do try and seek these things out because the opportunities do exist and just like if you're applying for jobs looking for full-time you should be trying to seek these things out because they're such amazing experiences uh infected FPS is saying I wish i' had done more internships while I was in school I was mostly not confident in my skills at the time yep so I never did any until my senior year so for me it was a forcing function in school we so I can appreciate that infected FPS because when I started University because it was a co-op program literally the first couple of weeks of being in University like we're kind of you move away from home for me this is the first time doing anything like this I've always been at home and you join this school everyone's new you're total stranger to everyone a completely different place trying to go to classes and then they go by the way start preparing your resume because you're applying for jobs next week and you're like what the hell do you mean what do you mean apply for jobs like I never worked I don't know how to program at a company like it's it's nuts right but the whole point was that they they kind of forced you into this and they gave you a lot of support to do it so some schools are like that um like I said very fortunate to be have gone to the University of water but there are other places like this as well please do seek these things out apprenticeship co-op programs internships anything like that highly recommend so for me at my internships I focused a lot at small companies and startups and the I've talked about this before in newsletters and in streams but for me one of the big goals of that was at the smaller organizations I felt like I'd have an opportunity to have like more impact relative to the company um I can remember early on in my internships being like I don't I'm not interested in the big companies I don't know what it was I had uh you know classmates a lot of them were like applying for apple and stuff in the first couple years and I was like I don't know why people are doing this like it doesn't appeal to me but to each their own I'm sure they got paid very well doing those internships so that's great for them but um I just kind of went the opposite direction I wanted to work at these smaller companies and personally I'm so glad that I did because at the smaller companies it turns out that I got the experience I wanted I was able to have you know I'm going to call it like big impact I don't know relative to the company maybe they were like whatever he's just a kid kind of thing but I felt like my work was being seen I felt like like it was being impactful That's What mattered to me so I thought that was really cool um this led me to when I graduated um I remember being like you know like i' had the startup experience for throughout my five years of University and doing these six internships I'm like I like that that's a good feeling for me and the place that I started working at fulltime it's a it's kind of ironic because I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn now and it's kind of full circle thing for me I literally was going through my spam folder in Gmail and I've told this story before I've told it to um the individual that I'm about to talk about and I was going through my spam folder and I had a LinkedIn message and it was basically LinkedIn email then I had the you know the Gmail kind of uh notification for it in my spam and I was reading this and it was about asking me to come in for a job interview and I remember being like hold on like I know it's in my spam folder but this was written by a person like it wasn't just automated it wasn't a copy paste thing like someone took the time to read my profile and they were interested in interviewing me so I was like okay um and at the time I was pursuing a couple things I was planning on going back to one of my uh previous internships uh I had an opportunity that I was uh recently talking about I think I think this was to go work at wish I think I was trying to wait for a conversation around that I was also considering maybe doing my MBA um but I remember being like I have a couple things lined up and I was it just felt like I have nothing to lose like why not go do this interview and it changed my life um I went for the interview it was for a digital forensics company uh they were profitable with no investors and I was like okay like that's a good sign cuz I think traditionally startups are high-risk because you're like hey is the company going to exist in a week a month from now like what does that look like not having investors was very cool and being profitable already um and it was in watero which is where I had spent my entire University life so um I decided to go pursue that and for me I spent the next eight years of my life there and I had uh a lot of impact at a small company that grew to uh hundreds of people which is really cool we became International uh we essentially were the underdog and digital forensics and there were a couple of like incumbents that essentially had like a monopoly and just over time kind of kind of took that over from them which is super cool so it was a really awesome experience um but I've also mentioned this before I I started managing teams there a few months into to working as a software engineer so uh bit of a unique experience but I I loved being at a startup it was awesome so the the reason I'm telling this before I kind of get into the rest of like the big Tech versus startup thing because that's the whole point of this conversation is that I want to give you the context and the background so that you can understand where some of my biases and perspective come from I think it's it's almost like unfair to to start just talking about these things and comparing them without giving you that context because you'll be like well dude I don't agree with that or that's not how I see it that's not what I heard totally everyone's going to have a different experience I'm not trying to say otherwise but for me the other thing that I want to kind of focus on here is a couple things right so one that I did uh start off being an engineering manager very early on in my sort of full-time professional career so had that going for me but I was also writing code every day with my teams so that meant that I was in the code also managing teams the teams that I manag were responsible for a majority of my time at this forensic company for rapidly prototyping things starting off new products and things like that so over those eight years I was building a lot of the sort of beginnings of code bases right I would prototype things with my teams we would get them kicked off and then if they had some you know had some Roots we go cool we'd spin up some more teams put people on them and we'd kind of move around but I'm telling you this because the interesting thing that happened if you kind of think through this experience is like I was around long enough at this company that all of the new stuff we were building in the beginning that was the Legacy code by the end of my eight-year time there like in the last couple of years I spent a large majority of my time going around to different teams kind of like acting almost like a consultant about some of the Legacy code being like hey we tried building things this way or people would say hey like we're thinking about going in this direction like what do you think so even though I was no longer building in those areas I had a lot of context and a lot of sort of the initial history there um and depending on you know who you are and what what companies you're working at you might be on teams where you've worked with people like this kind of refer to them like historians right it sounds kind of funny but they kind of have a lot of the context just from being around the code for so long it's not the best spot to be in people might say oh that's great job security but like it's not what you want for teams so I was doing my best just to try and share as much information as I possibly could um because the what's the the analogy or the go-to is usually something about a bus coming by and taking someone out but try to frame that a different way and say hey if this person won the lottery and they didn't have to work anymore what would happen right you want to make sure that you can kind of share the knowledge make sure there's no single points of failure so I was trying to do my best to do that but that means my entire professional work experience up to this point before going to Big Tech startups having a ton of domain knowledge in an area having a ton of like the codebase knowledge and then both um hands-on experience and uh managing teams okay so that's kind of the the preface for all of this now we switch so I go to Microsoft I have not when I start at Microsoft I have not been building any of the original products at Microsoft some of the code base that I was working in was roughly as old as some of the people that were hired onto my team there's a lot of old code in the places where working in it's just the reality of it so lots of Legacy code stuff that I and I don't have my hands in it as a manager at Microsoft I am not coding at work I code every single day outside of work but I don't code at work it's not part of my role not that they wouldn't allow me it's just like not an expectation and I have a lot of other things that I'm doing so I don't code at work the reason that I want to bring that up is because that means that I'm not going to have the same experience in the code base not like the intimate knowledge of the code base and different products and services I'm just not going to have it I'm going to have to approach things in a very different way to understand them I'm going to have to rely on my team the experts in the team to sort of Teach Me Over time how these things work really listen to them to understand where sort of the dragons in the code are and like the different his historical elements to that um yeah Dan that's right code is old as the people on the team it's uh it's true um it's it's pretty fascinating to think about but um yeah the the again the point here is just like this looked very different for me I liked to when I reflect on like my time managing at a startup and kind of coming into to Microsoft I would say like and I wrote this in my newsl to right like I feel like one of my I'm going to call it like a superpower so some of the things that I relied on as being a successful engineering manager I relied on the fact that I had handson intimate knowledge of the code base that my team is working in when I joined Microsoft it was kind of like almost like Kryptonite right like I don't have that super anymore so uh when we talk about things like impostor syndrome that was huge for me because I'm suddenly going wait I don't know this code I can't e like as easily relate to conversations with people on my team because I don't know the code um and that's not an expectation of me right but that's something that I just relied on and I had that experience from before so that was hard okay so where are we going with all this the other thing that I'll mention related to not having experience in the code thank you Mr shadowman I appreciate that um the other thing that I want to mention is that I don't have the domain knowledge because that's important too when I started off in digital forensics I knew absolutely nothing about digital forensics zero I can remember starting my first day and kind of sitting down with the CTO there was a couple of us and he was asking us some some questions about frenic and we're like dude no like don't know um but that's fine like we were there to learn and and he taught us and you know over 8 years I have two patents that are related to digital forensics two more that are pending and I feel like they should have been granted by now maybe I should follow up on that but you know I I got to learn the domain when I was hired on at Microsoft I was working for the deployment team in substrate and for context Microsoft 365 is sort of the area of Microsoft but substrate is this platform that all of The Office 365 services are built on top of so I got to manage teams related to deployment for substrate I had never done and they knew this when they hired me for the record it's not like I'm like I snuck through or something but I had never done uh planetary scale uh distributed deployments ever not a thing but I spent the next three and a half years doing that and then recently so at the beginning of this year I switched over to the routing plane team and again they hired me into that team not having any experience with DOs protection firewalls routing none of that but those are some of my core responsibilities now so again just sharing this because these are these are shifts in my expectations my experience as I go through all this okay but that's kind of the the Preamble I know that was long-winded I'm pretty good at rambling and going on tangents but I think all of that is important information to kind of understand the next parts of this and I was pretty brief I think in my newsletter explaining some of these things like that come up but I think that's just because like I don't know I could probably ramble about it more but to write it I'm like I don't want to put people to sleep so I'll put you to sleep on this stream I'm just kidding but the the next part I want to talk about is pace so pace is going to be the first sort of comparison that I want to talk about so back to one of the questions that was on Instagram is from Giovani said what was the most uh difference changing from the startup Universe to uh to Big Tech and one of them is Pace I think this is an important one to talk through and the framing is like when I was at a startup it was like non-stop go time all of the time uh super fast turnaround time it was and I I should add like I never felt forced into this so I don't like talking about this and I don't want the perception to be oh that must have sucked like I can't believe people made you do that sounds like a terrible Place uh for me quite the opposite maybe there were some people that felt pressured into this at different points it's not for me to to speak on their behalf but I love to work I absolutely loved spending my time working I'm not saying that like to to brag I just feel very fortunate that like I had a place like I love the work we were doing and I love the people I work with right so okay I'm glad Maria I don't trying not to put people to sleep but um that's the goal right please stay awake the for me it was very awesome that I had this opportunity to to basically work as hard as I want and and feel like I'm being being valued for doing it but it meant that we were at least the people I was working with and the situations I was putting myself in we were working a lot we were working rapidly on things so if we had issues like we'd be staying up fixing bugs trying to ship things um it was like that like typical startup life right like we' stay up super late fixing bugs sometimes sleep under our desk just because we're like we got to fix the stuff in the morning there's no point driving home now we'd hang out after work and stuff we were just always always together but always moving forward trying to solve things as fast as possible and when I say fast as possible I don't want people to have the impression that like that meant oh it doesn't matter how buggy it is or anything else because this is an important part about digital forensics you can't mess anything up in digital forensics if you mess anything up the whole case that an examiner is going through in court that data can get tossed out toast doesn't get used and if you think about the situations that we're trying to help with um we're talking for for murder trials uh terrorism we're talking about for unfortunately for uh child sexual abuse cases things like that so these are incredibly important so when I say moving fast I mean truly delivering value as rapidly as possible possible it does not mean building crappy software it does not mean shipping bugs if we were going to have bugs right like we would compromise on things like I'm going to say like usability and what I mean by that is like as long as people could get their job done and it's not going to be error prone or have false information great does that mean we could make it faster later sure sure could we make it more intuitive later sure but the reason that this was super important and I don't think that some people realize this depending on the companies um yes this is being streamed on Twitch by the way if you do sorry this is a question in the chat if you want you can find me I I believe my twitch handle is Dev leader CA um so you can check me out but this is being streamed on Twitch and by the way it is recorded So if you need to to jump at any point um this will be recorded as well so there you go hopefully that helps we were ship we the thing that I think people Miss is that we need to be shipping value fast to keep the company alive it's it's like it's that simple I don't think that people realize that depending on where they're working um if you're like hey I work at a company and like I don't want to say it's comfy I don't mean to to say that everyone else just must be comfy but you you don't feel like the company is going to go away if like if you're a week late on something like for us it was really like we're trying to keep the company alive and we're trying to like we're trying to win in the space I feel like the people that I was around we wanted to be successful at what we were doing and that meant getting value to customers as rapidly as we could because we know the impact of that and it meant that like every step we're taking we were getting this feedback from our customer base that like you guys are doing awesome like this is this is what we need in digital forensic so I feel like it was very easy for us to be to be motivated to keep that fast pace up now as the company grew like did that slow down yeah there were aspects of it slowing down when I started there was eight people at that company roughly and by the time I left there was like mid2 200 U 250 to 300 kind of range so it grew did it slow down sure there were aspects hey ex coding good to see you um there were parts of it that slowed down for sure but that's it's almost like a bit of a side effect when when businesses start getting very large more teams more people but I I can say that I felt like in the areas I was working in it was always trying to keep that culture of that fast pace so I wanted to call that part out from the startup side very fast pace now when we go to Microsoft by the way this isn't a criticism I'm doing trying to do like a just a general comparison here if I say that it's slower Pace my intention is not to say it's because it's bad because I think that's not fair um it's just different so Microsoft is a ridiculously big company and even the space I work in is a part of Microsoft and it's ridiculously big so when we talk about the pace of things it's going to be slower I'm sure there are parts of Microsoft that feel very rapid right I and and particular when I talk about the startup parts to I did a lot of prototyping I kind of mentioned that but prototyping almost by definition is going to feel more rapid in Microsoft I don't do anything like that so we have existing platforms we have for and I and I only have worked on platform teams um and infected FPS about the corporate red tape kind of so I'll touch on that a little bit too but when you work on platform teams and you have like hundreds of services that are using your infrastructure like sure you want to go fast for them like you want to make sure that they're getting everything they need like you know good response time and everything but like for deployment for example what you don't do cuz I think we saw an example of this uh a few weeks back not not because of Microsoft and I don't mean to like to point to the company that did it but it sounds like someone deployed some changes across the entire world pretty rapidly and there was a problem right so like in deployment we would make sure that we are on purpose going slower we're on purpose having a managed deployment platform that can guide other teams through this process to make make sure that they catch issues so it's almost kind of like built into some of the stuff we're doing that it will go slower so this is part of it now the other thing that I think is important this is kind of to infect at FPS this point we talk about corporate red tape one thing that I kind of want to put into perspective is like there are tons of teams tons of teams in the space that I'm in trying to make forward progress with goals that are aligned to the business so we will have the this information provided to us from leadership and there conversations around that and all of these teams are going to have their version of how these goals need to be accomplished so like that's going to mean that they're going to start coming up with things they need solutions for these things and suddenly we're going to have to start having dependencies on each other but when you think about how many teams there are and the opportunity for dependencies to come up you suddenly are in this position where like things start to be a little bit coupled in terms of delivery so you're going to have these conversations about okay well when are you going to get this done what's your dependency and these things just take time to discuss they start to slow things down the time Horizons that we're planning for are longer um I'm trying to think at the forensic company like we did two we Sprints but like we weren't we weren't planning for like months like I think the only time that would really happen for us is if we were like hey we have a big conference we want to make a splash but like it was kind of aspirational and then we would work towards that but at Microsoft it's like no we're planning for you know longer periods of time so very different that way but just as a result the pace is a lot slower so I think for me I should okay 's another part to it and I because I want to talk about this from like a a software engineer perspective I I'm kind of talking about it a little bit from my management perspective but obviously more more I'm assuming more software Engineers listening than than folks managing but um I think something that's important to consider too is like the size of the code base the number of products and services that are using shared libraries and things like that you could imagine that your build times and your test Suites and stuff running they're probably going to take a little bit longer than you'd have at a startup with a smaller code base fewer things going on so you have you have these different overheads right even if it's for the same types of things they just might be they might feel exaggerated so Pace I think is a huge one when I reflect on this kind of thing I think I I think I thrive in like more fast-paced and when I say that again I'm trying to I'm kind of thinking about this a little bit for the first time I think I thrive in an environment like that because I think that it puts constraints on me that I have to get things done in some in some boundary right like it's not hey we got to get this thing done in the next six months it's like this needs a solution by the time people leave the office today it needs a solution by the time the weekend comes like we we need like the constraint of time is is there whereas with some of these other bigger situations it's like things can slip because other people are slipping like the timelines are always kind of moving out a little bit as we go as much as we don't want them to it's kind of a inevitable thing so I think I thrive in environments where that's um where there's sort of this constraint around that so I think that's something I do miss about like startups um I don't think that that is impossible to have at a at a big tech company I think that's entirely possible I think it's more of how your team culture is and uh your larger organizations culture is right so you might be working in an area working on products where you do have that kind of like rapid turnaround and it kind of feels like a little startup within a larger company that's totally possible I've heard about this from other people I haven't had that experience at Microsoft or anywhere else but I've heard that's possible so that's kind of my framing for Pace sort of the comparison that I want to give you on that front I'm just checking if there's anything else no nothing else from my newsletter that I wanted to mention there um okay if you have questions about pace and sort of comparing uh big Tech and startups please feel free to add that in the chat um there's a lot more people on now than when I started so if uh something I mentioned at the beginning is if you have questions about literally anything related to sof sofware engineering please just ask them in the chat um I I make YouTube videos and if I just wanted to pre-record something and not engage with people I would go do that instead but I want these live streams to be uh interactive and I would much rather answer your questions so just a heads up please do ask away I am watching chat as I blab on here so next part that I'm going to talk through is impact so like I said if you have anything that you wanted to bring up just put it in the chat and I'll I'll stop talking and and go over to that impact is an interesting one because I think that you can frame this in different ways and it's going to have different meaning to different people so when I think about impact I I see it uh as sort of two major things and I Tred to describe it I didn't have a good way to do this I thought maybe it uh it stood out when I wrote it but I don't know if it's going to resonate with people and awesome um someone from e ethopia that's so cool to see from Facebook so thanks for joining uh I appreciate you being here I think this is awesome that we can have this type of technology that enables us to connect so again if you have any questions please just ask this is great the impact conversation I was trying to describe like a rectangle and kind of laughed at myself because when I was writing this I was like dude you're going to use a stupid geometry uh analogy to try and talk about impact but seemed to to click for me so the geometry analogy here is going to be about um sort of like when we say impact like how meaningful that is and meaningful is very subjective because when I say meaningful I mean meaningful for you like do you resonate with this thing does it align with your values do you personally see this is something that you're like wow I'm passionate about this like there's meaning behind it but that's very subjective and for you to decide so not for me to say but for you and the one that I like to talk about that I mention in my my newsletter and I've already said it on this stream but the digital forensics company something that was like pardon me uh something that was really impactful for me was because there was so much meaning in the in the forensic work the fact that we could help save children from from predators like I I personally and this again it's subjective I cannot think of anything that resonates as more impactful for me that just that's my my my stance on it I can't think of anything to be able to help save kids so when we talk about like this rectangle framing that I want to show is like if we have two axes my one a my one axis is very tall because it's so impactful now the other part is kind of like the the volume right so in our case yes we could have more volume of impact the more sales we're making the more people that are using our software the more that we can go help other people because we're helping law enforcement we're helping uh government agencies we're helping people do the investigations to help solve these crimes so the more people we can get this to the more volume of impact there is so I see it like a rectangle it's like the area of a rectangle and one axis is the volume of the the impact and the other axis is the the meaning to you um I will I will talk about the tech in just a sec because I think that's a really good question I love talking about this um so I will I will give you a good good I'll give you an answer that I feel like is uh going to share my perspective on it on the other side when we talk about impact um I'm going to talk about what I do at Microsoft so this is again it's I'm not knocking what we do I think it's I think it's very impactful but the meaning behind that like when I talk about the deployment team the meaningfulness behind that does not resonate with me the same way that kids does it's just the reality I don't I'm not as passionate about that as I was for helping save kids I would argue the same thing when I work on the routing team this is it's not a bad thing to say this I'm just being you know honest about my reflection I don't have the same passion for a routing plane that I do for saving kids just that's just how my values align but I talked about these two axes right the area of the rectangle the volume of impact that we have at Microsoft at least on the teams that I've been working in is ridiculously big when we talk about the routing plane so I don't manage the whole thing uh there's a a partner group engineering manager that's sort of my manager who has ownership over the whole space but the I I own parts of this those are my responsibilities to manage like in our group we manage like we route trillions of requests per day across the planet right for for tons of users for tons of companies like it's insane the volume is just insane I don't even know what a trillion looks like I can't I can't imagine a trillion of anything it's such a huge number and that's every day so the volume is the other element here so yes I do think that the meaning there is meaning there being able to help make sure that we can keep all of these things accessible for individuals with low latency making sure that we can protect our services from attackers and things like that yes there is meaning but the volume is just very different in some of these big tech companies okay couple questions in the chat how to push business people to reduce Tech debt I prefer we should fix something that's broken I prefer we should fix something that's not broken but things must be serviceable too as in long run it's going to impact the business workflow okay and Giovani I just saw your question come in on Instagram so I will come to that after uh I read uh one of the other comments here so because I realize the chat's not shared across these platforms it's a bit of a mess okay so to rem's question here about tech debt um the way that I like framing this is that I feel like the conversation yeah should shouldn't okay I I figured that was the case uh I prefer we shouldn't fix something that's not broken so yes I would agree and like stereotypically what I've seen happen and I like I said I was an engineering manager developing software at the same time I literally had to live both sides of this exact conversation for eight years which is why I like to talk about it and at a startup okay so when we talk about this type of thing I feel like stereotypically people that love being in code over index on code needing to be like more clean architected better and it's not wrong for them to say like hey this could be better yet hey we should invest time into this they're going to have a perspective about what that code looks like how easy it is to work in how testable it is how brittle it is they will have an understanding of all these things and valid right I not trying to dismiss the fact that someone will look at code and say hey we can do this better so I think that's important but I think what breaks down is uh two things one is communication communication sort of at the root of everything and I feel like it's the cause of every problem is bad communication at some point but communication and alignment of values SL priorities so what does that mean when we talk about communicating these things and um and even remes in the way that you've asked this question how to push business people to reduce Tech debt right this tells me that what it sounds like is that the engineering team is trying to say to individuals who are the product owners hey this Tech debt is something we need to go address and the product owners are going I think we need to go deliver features I'm making assumptions here but I think that's probably what's happening so if that's the case even the way that this question's been framed is like how do we convince them that's a communication thing and I think traditionally what happens is that developers programmers they they get frustrated because they go they just won't listen they won't schedule the tech debt they don't think it's important we know it's important this is going to be a disaster if we don't address it but what's actually happening is like I said two things it's not being communicated clearly and what I mean by that is not to say that you're not trying or that people aren't having conversations maybe they're not but even if you are it's not being communicated effectively how do we communicate effectively well we need to understand the audience that we're speaking to so for example if you were trying to convince and I don't know if Maria is still on uh the the call here uh Maria I know from LinkedIn we've done uh we've done a live stream and a recorded podcast together which I thought was awesome um Maria is very big on communication like this is a huge part of software devel she's a coach uh for for language and communication as well but being able to communicate clearly is critical and when we talk about clear communication this is understanding the audience that you want to deliver the message to it's going to sound kind of funny when I say this but when you're talking about tech debt and the importance of it you are trying to sell this idea to someone else and how do we sell things to other people I realize this is a weird way to put it so I apologize if it doesn't totally resonate with you but to sell things to other people we need to talk about it in a way that they are going to Value it and I'm going to say that again we need to talk about it in a way that they will value it not in a way that you value it maybe you align on the same things and that's totally cool that's great but they need to understand the value of it and that means that it's not a matter of you repeating things in a way that you go this code sucks this code is brittle um this pattern isn't good we don't have tests in this space they don't care and people don't like to hear this party either your customers don't care they don't they don't know what tests you have they don't know what language it's written in they don't know when the last commit was they don't know any of that what they do know are these other things that you should be caring about and communicating the side effects of these things when you have a brittle code base you're making changes you're breaking stuff you're either shipping bugs or you can't ship anything because you're constantly fixing bugs right so these are things that your product owner is going to care about they will care about if you're explaining to them it's going to slow us down to the point and you have like tangible examples we cannot deliver things for the business because of this for example we have this feature coming up okay this is in part of the code base we're know we're going to have to go extend this add this feature if you're able to point to and say this part of the code base has no tests on it we can't add the test because we have to go spend some time refactoring or rewriting things like we we've seen in the past you know three or four examples of us touching areas of code like this uh our estimates were way off we spent way more time fixing bugs or we had bad um feedback from customers with breakages this is one of those opportunities we don't want to repeat that and finding examples I'm I'm kind of obviously this is a very quick example as I go through it but you want to be able to highlight these types of things and make it something that the product owners can understand they do not care about the same things you might as a developer but ultimately the other thing I mentioned was values ultimately your teams should be aligning on the value which is important the more that you and your team can discuss things like what you value together the weight of those values jokes on on Tik Tok jokes on them I don't care at all y yeah I guess so um the more that you can align on the values of these things the easier these conversations can become so communication is required from both sides I'm not just saying hey programmers hey developers you suck at this it's all on you it is absolutely from the other side as well people need to find a way to meet in the middle but I'm just trying to articulate to you that your product owners do not care about oh there's no Tas they care about the side effect of their being no test and that needs to be explained in a way that they can understand so I hope that kind of helps um I realize it's kind of generic advice but it's without really specific examples to walk through and me knowing your Team Dynamics it's really difficult to to get into the weeds of it yeah and then sorry I'm reading comment on Instagram uh people hate being sold stuff but they love being able to relate and solve a problem that is dear to them yes yep so again you're finding ways where people go oh like okay that makes sense I can see why but trying to convince like a a a product owner that's not in the code and writing software all the time is uh going to be tricky if you're just saying hey we want to make it clean um so again that helps uh and Maria's here so I can't agree more on the importance of communication skills thanks for sticking around Maria and it's vital to take into account what others care about their goals then it's easier to negotiate I think great example I think negotiate is a better word than to sell um it's kind of a con I'm trying to say like convincing other people but I think even um I think Maria has a good point like negotiate is a very good word to use here because I think that does a better job illustrating that it is a a balance and you're meeting in the middle bloody poach on Tik Tok says I only care about Dev experience well I think Dev experience is important but what's important for a company to stay alive is shipping value to customers um and in order to keep doing that yes you will need to have a good Dev experience or else your developers will stop shipping value to customers so it is a balance infected fps to your point in fast-paced Dev uh vers in a larger Corp uh definitely happens but it starts fast and slows down the closer you get to production at least the company I work for yep so these things like the the pacing and stuff will change um Giovani had a a question on Instagram how do you feel to be part of a giant company I think when you were in startups you had more power of decision uh weren't you so let me know if I'm wrong please sure so yeah um I definitely I had a lot of autonomy where I used to work um because I was there since basically right at the beginning um I had a lot of influence I had a lot of uh sort of experience to back those things up so I felt like um given that experience I could talk about things in a way where people would say oh okay like great you have an opinion and then I could back it up and say and here's why and here's a bunch of evidence and people would I'm going to use the word respect or respect that like they would say okay like that makes sense that we can relate we can rationalize that so I feel like I had a lot of autonomy I had a lot of influence um kind of interesting like at that company I I've talked about this before like job levels didn't they weren't really a thing they kind of were like we basically had just recently introduced like a senior developer position but there was nothing above that at the time I think they have staff Engineers there now I don't know all the the details since I've left um but for me uh as a technical manager they technically now pun intended they didn't have any career progression beyond that so I had peers that were being uh and people sounds kind of funny people that I hired to be my peers were being promoted into director positions because they were engineering managers that were not technical engineering managers they created a tier above that to be directors um I believe if I would have stuck around there I would have been at Direct level at this point um I don't want to say VP necessarily but this would have been something that I would have been pushing for and I would have been there since the beginning driving this type of impact at a at a broad level I know they brought in Executives and they've done they've done a great job like they've been very successful I didn't mention this at least in this conversation that company ipoed after I left and then they got bought back to private for $2 billion they were successful and they are successful to this day so um yeah Giovani to your point I had a lot of influence and that's something for me I think that was very motivating to be able to be there was a lot of like trust that was given to me from my leadership I feel like I have a lot of trust from my current leadership but the um the scope of uh of influence I can have I don't feel like is the same I can have influence across the entire company where I worked before and I don't mean that in like a malicious way like I'm going to control it but like I feel like if someone said hey we got to solve this problem we got to work on this challenge here's a new space that I would have trust given to me for my leadership and I would have autonomy to go basically be resourceful and go solve any problem within the company I don't have that where I work now so that's definitely something that's missing something I kind of miss um but like I said I given my situation with my current manager and everything I feel like there there is a lot of trust there is a lot of autonomy it's just not the same scale if I can put it that way uh so yeah I think hopefully that answers your question Giovani Dan um oh so let me go back um so Nota Nota an what company did you work in and what was your salary I'm not going to disclose my salary uh where I used to work um because I don't think that's totally relevant um but uh and sorry I don't I don't mean to say that your question is not a fair one to ask I don't I don't think that me providing that number to you is going to to help in any way that I can I can see so I'm I'm going to Omit that part uh I worked at a company called magnet forensics when I started there it was called Jad software the Founder's name was Jad uh good name for a software company after yourself and then as it was growing he him and his business partner so founder and then the CTO they both renamed it to magnet forensics so you can Google magnet forensics um that's where I kind of have the overwhelming majority of my work experiences from magnet forensics um Dan how do you visualize a trillion plus request at your current role at what point is it prohibitive um a really good question uh it's challenging because you need to the systems that we use to go aggregate data like that you're certainly not looking at individual points so it's not like you go plot a scatter plot graph and it's here's a trillion points on it like absolutely nothing like that but we have to you like we have to bucket things we have to use uh time ranges that are acceptable so um if you were for example if you were like hey I just need to go aggregate data across all trillion of requests in 24 hours it's like it's not going to work so we have to filter things down so for example when we're working with our firewall policies and we want to know how effective they are and that type of thing we will filter data in a way that gets us a reasonable data set so um I would say trying to even visualize a trillion request that that's already prohibitive um so uh ideally when we talk about that kind of thing it's more about the the different situations that we're we're looking at so if we're trying to look at effectiveness of certain things uh we're trying to look at different traffic patterns we we scope things into a way that makes it more manageable because even as an example even with a trillion requests what types of patterns would one hope to see just by having all one trillion like we need a little bit more to start going on right so oh there's a trillion requests per day and we are looking at a a Dos attack okay well what are some characteristics about the Dos attack we've seen okay like let's look at those or we have a service that's inaccessible or something okay there's a trillion requests per day but we're only talking about the service that's inaccessible how can we start scoping that down and make sense of it so it's just about focusing that data um bloody pouch you have autonomy at startus because no one else is going to do it I think so yeah I I I can't tell if I sense like a little bit of sarcasm or not but like yeah I think this is true um and I think that it takes a particular type of attitude and um so sort of like proactiveness to to kind of dive into that if that makes sense like if if you had a team of people working at a startup and no one was proactively trying to solve challenges I think you'd be in a bad spot real fast there's a bunch of questions this is super cool I'm going to jump across platforms and I apologize because I realize people can't see the chat across Tik Tok and Instagram so I got to go between them um on Instagram do you believe that at some point an I has to become people manager to grow absolutely not I will explain this AKA what does senior principal software architect do next okay so at some level I would say and we even see this at Microsoft for the the highlevel individual contributor positions even those ones end up getting some type of direct reports um but I almost think that that ends up happening because you have people that are so technical that their leadership needs to also be so technical to be effective sounds kind of weird but traditionally I absolutely do not think nor encourage that individual contributors become managers I think it's an anti- pattern and the reason I say that is because engineering managers this is my opinion from my experience engineering managers are a people first role software engineering involves people absolutely both involve technology both involve people but in my opinion to be a successful engineering manager you are putting people first if you do not enjoy working with people problems as a priority you will not enjoy being an engineering manager it's going to feel like a ton of friction and and quite honestly I feel like individuals that are not aligned with that that get promoted from an IC into an engineering manager position they sometimes struggle because one none of us get Management training I don't know why that's a thing that's just just left out um which sucks because like we're going to be the people that are managing the individuals and trying to help them level up in their careers but no one's even taught us how to manage kind of weird um but I think that individuals that are strong ic's that are used to feeling sort of valued uh externally but also from like um how they feel accomplished from their individual contributions it feels very challenging to go it's not about me it's not about what I deliver it's about me leveling up the team and helping everyone deliver better as a whole so um I I don't think let me back up I don't think that for a company to force Engineers to become people managers is a good pattern I think having the opportunity to especially once you start getting up higher and higher to kind of say like hey you're having so much influence over these groups of people does it make sense that you have a couple of ic's that are like if you're like a distinguished engineer at Microsoft that's extremely high level maybe you'll have a couple of principal Engineers or some Architects reporting to you because those types of people are also going to want to have a manager that's like extremely technical like that that kind of thing comes up but uh I hope that kind of answers uh my perspective on it um okay uh from Facebook what's your advice for remote developers and how to cope with constantly changing Dev ecosystem good question um I think for uh remote developers one of the best things you can do this is kind of a general thing is um and it's it shouldn't be all on you but you should be proactive about this do try to stay engaged do be asking questions um try not to like that sense where you're like man I feel isolated like the team's not around me maybe they're all in the office and you're not maybe everyone's remote try not to let that feeling of isolation win and I don't want that to sound cheesy but I I kind of like I mean it like instead of being like hey I'm stuck on this this task tried some things out or right I need some clarity but like I don't want to bother other people other people are busy I don't want to bother them like don't give into these thoughts like imagine that you were sitting there with your team and you could turn to Jim or Susan or whoever and say like hey got this question could you help me for a sec you know you look over at them and they're chatting with someone else you say hey by the way like you got a second could you help me with this like having if you kind of picture that you're working with your team like that and not being hesitant to reach out for help or reaching out to to work with other people I think that you can go a very long way working remote some of the biggest struggles I see with remote work end up being that like we are isolated but then people people don't use the tools to try and un unisol themselves they kind of just stay that way and and and feel almost trapped like they're isolated so I do encourage engineering managers leaders and and entire teams to to try and promote that closeness right uh Bas base paint I'll come back to that point just after because I was reading the question off of Instagram and I want to clarify that if it was confusing so um for Facebook um on the I hope that kind of helps for the remote developer part like basically find ways to be engaged and try to promote that culture within the team how to cope with constantly changing Dev ecosystems this is challenging because I don't have a lot of experience with that to offer advice but I would say um couple things is one try to develop a team culture where the the dev ecosystem to set that up at least should be very low effort so if it isn't make it better for the next person document it automate it whatever you have to do um and for yourself if you're constantly going through this type of thing try to look at kind of like even with programming languages and and and Frameworks like try to look at the common things that you can abstract from it I'm going to jump down to Bas paints uh question on Twitch just because I I I don't want to go too far away from this other question so I'm not following the uh the last train of thought what's the difference between distinguished individual with five people reporting them and a manager difference is that the size of the team and the specialization strictly um in general I'm still not a fan of it like still not a fan but you might find that in these types of situations the specialization and the narrow Focus that you might have to have on some of these individuals for for management like they don't want a lot of handson um they don't need a lot of Hands-On they don't want a lot of Hands-On and they want more of their conversations to be about very technical things that might work okay I still don't love it so I don't recommend it but if an option and it happens to kind of fit some business needs that might be valuable so uh Bas pain I hope that helps clarify it's not the way that I would recommend it um I do see that kind of thing happen and I think that it can be successful based on those constraints uh back up to Dan's question uh or or comment so digital forensics but a balance of what's uh acceptable Fidelity loss yeah um not trying to be funny but it's not app insights no so we don't we don't use app insights this is more um like I would say app insights is probably like for apps um on the platform side of things like we talking about like tons of services across you know like thousands and thousands of machines across the planet so not quite the same so it's a lot more sort of like a big data problem at that scale uh rsh we as devs have such situations where a client demands specific Tech stack for their products and sometimes it brings on extra layer of learning curve and increases deliver every time uh is it okay is it okay to be client choices I think this depends on what you're building honestly um if you were building stuff like if I back up and you ask me this question in general I would say if you have a situation where your customer is telling you the solution I think that's backwards is it is a general sense I'm not when I speak in generalizations I want to be very clear that there's absolutely always outliers to any type of sweeping generalization I will be the first to admit it which is why I'm emphasizing this in general I would say if a customer comes to you and they say this is the solution what's missing from that statement is this is the challenge we're facing that we need help with so if they give you this is the challenge we're facing and here's a solution I think the engineering part is supposed to be here is a solution that we recommend for solving your problem when you are presented a solution generally I think that it's like you're not doing the engineering work as much to deliver on that maybe there's other constraints and it's about making it a reality so of course it's a generalization for me to say no I don't agree with that um there might be situations where depending if you're Consulting and you have a customer that needs some type of platform that needs a specific technology I could see that coming up for sure um but if someone came to me and just making this up and they were like hey we need you to do this Consulting work we need um we need an application that's going to I'm just going to pick something D an e-commerce site and it must be built with an asp.net core backend you have to use a Microsoft SQL server and you need to have it um in I don't know uh you need like this front end for it uh like it needs to be a react front end and has to I would start to kind of question that like why and if they could if there's a reason for it like oh because we're we're reselling this and to other developers to go build on top of and like those are the developers that we need to hire for like sure I don't know but I would much rather be in a situation where the customers are telling us challenges and we are solving the the challenges they have and making the technical decisions for that so that's my my general framing for that Maria says when my client transitioned from Tech lead into management he told me he was surprised by the amount of meetings and the absolute necessity for excellent communication skills he was even laughing that he got into Tech because he thought it would just be him and his computer and zero interactions with people and now it's about 95% interaction with people 100% um literally recorded a podcast this morning with um someone that I I really look up to and Admire from back home in the Kitchener waterl area uh successful entrepreneur um and his business now this podcast will probably be out in two weeks time uh his business now is called chocolate soup super cool name and they focus on sort of like employee uh recognition opportuni so when we were chatting in the podcast it sounds kind of funny to say this but I I kept saying like it's about like working in teams of software Engineers we still need to treat people like people and it seems like it should be so easy but sometimes it feels like apparently it's work because otherwise like why wouldn't it be easy why doesn't it feel like we're working with our friends at work right like why does it feel like as a manager like it's extra effort to try and acknowledge people and to say good work on this and to you to to recognize them and appreciate them like it it shouldn't feel like that so um it was a really interesting conversation and a good reminder to uh to Maria's Point like there's a lot of people interactions I I've said this before and I will keep saying it but I feel like the biggest challenges in software engineering are not technical challenges Engineers are super smart people we will solve technical problems we don't seem to be so great at people challenges we Str strg a lot with that uh LinkedIn user uh kind of weird sorry the name's not coming through so I can't see what your name is I apologize um I thought right now for about 95% of developers Works remotely I don't know what the stats are and remote development um I'm sure it's been shifting dramatically kind of both ways over the last few years I don't have stats though I would wager a large majority of Developers are working remotely there has been a big return to office movement uh some have given up on that others are still pushing for it so I I do suspect a lot of uh remote work though uh one last question can remote devs aspire to be managers or better to stick to the IC um I don't think that that's dependent on being remote or not personally um I'm biased because I worked in person for a long time I'm biased because I was made a manager a few months into to working at a start start up so my my experience is different so that's my bias but I'm trying to think like as a manager right now if I had individuals on my team that work remotely and they said hey Nick I'm interested in focusing more on being a manager I would try to support that however I can so okay can I find mentorship opportunities for this person like whether that's bringing on interns whether that's uh you know if they're senior Engineers principal Engineers helping them guide more Junior Engineers that kind of thing I would just be trying to build up that skill set for them and have those opportunities if I don't have that opportunity in my team for them to to be a manager I still want to scale them up and give them the opportunities it may very well mean that they have to go to apply to another team in Microsoft and go transfer to that which would suck to lose someone but like I don't think people think about it this way but especially if you're not in in a management position um I would it sounds funny I got to preface that I would much rather lose someone by helping them grow into a position they want to be in then basically keep someone have them start underperforming start wanting to leave for other reasons because I just didn't help them grow so I would much rather invest the time give them those opportunities keep them super engaged doing awesome work and then at the end of the day if I don't have that opportunity say hey look there's this other team that's nearby like I want to keep close right there's this other team like let's see if we can get you to apply for that position if they have to leave the company like that sucks for sure but they're going to leave anyway like if that's what they want to pursue and you can't give them that opportunity they're going to leave whether that's them getting disengaged and kind of falling into a spot where they're like crap I need to leave because this sucks or because you gave them all of those opportunities unfortunately didn't have a role and they have to go for right it's going to happen inevitably so I'd much rather do the positive thing build a good relationship get great work out of them and then see them succeed somewhere else so it's hard but did you jump jobs every few years absolutely not um I stayed at the same company for eight years uh opinion on using jumping to increase salary yes this is a very common thing um so it's a very common thing for people to jump uh I think the reality is that this works I I think there's just data that shows that this works if your goal is to have higher compensation jumping jobs every couple of years is a strategy for that like I just think that it is especially some larger companies have sign on bonuses and things like that and and I say that I'm trying to be like sort of unbiased in how I say that because I think it I think it is a fact I think that if you jump companies every couple of years you can work on maximizing compensation but it's a question the yeah the okay opinion on using jumping to increase salary yes does work now if you change the question you say do I recommend doing it my answer is not necessarily and I want to I want to exaggerate the example Okay so if you could jump jobs every year six months to a year let's say you're just jumping jobs because you applied for something and like all of your energy is going into like I'm going to apply for this job and kind of like level up and and get the next salary and then and next compensation band and then go to another company and and keep doing this if you could hyper optimize for this on paper you might say holy crap like my compensation's going way up but the reality is you reach a point where you've hyperfocused on this and very likely at some point you can't actually do your role effectively anymore and it's because you've trained yourself to go apply for jobs right if this is all you're doing is all of your energy goes into this again I'm taking the example to an extreme what you in a few years you reach a very high level of engineering because you've kind of found your your way through this and then what you're in your role and you're like I can't can't do my job because I don't actually have much experience I haven't been spending the time doing the important things so I think there is a middle ground and I always try to remind people like you should have an understanding of like what your value is it's going to look different for everyone some people don't want to go through the effort of applying for jobs and switching jobs and like that's totally cool some people don't want more responsibilities the more people I talk with an inter on my podcast the more that I hear that some people are like totally content at their jobs they have a good work life balance right they're they're just happy and then I've I've heard this and I never thought that I would but people were telling me and some some different cultures like people will turn down promotions they like nope I don't want the extra responsibility that's okay no thanks so you I think that there's there's a middle ground so if you're at a place and you're not feeling valued and you're feeling like your compensation is not what you deserve I think you should always be trying to work at a place that compensates you for a value that you feel like you're worth and I I I think that's kind of just the general way that I put that so I hope that that helps um some companies make it a requirement to be uh an in-person manager yeah I mean this is going to be constraints on different companies for sure could you share your experience working with developers that got time difference for about 12 hours yes so I work with uh Engineers that are in sushia China we are at exact opposite times of the world it's interesting it's super cool um I think you need a lot of really good communication you need clarity about what's going on this works super well for us with our on call rotations um it's called follow the sun right so in our daytime we can be on call solving Liv site incidents for our platform they come online we do good handoffs we can make sure that there's continuity it works really well um on the traditional work side of things I think you have a couple different approaches sorry I got to block someone from this chat what's going on man get out of here um spamming in my my twitch chat um you can have a couple of different strategies you can have dedicated projects and stuff so that you don't have coupling between the time zones because that can be challenging or you can purposefully have the coupling you split up the work but you have people work in the same project area so that they have an understanding of how things are being built you have the team's involvement and then when it comes time for supporting it you have different geographies and time zones that can support it so hope that helps it's kind of a general thing there's a lot of awesome questions in this chat I'm super excited that you guys are involved here um I see a couple questions about golden handcuffs so I'm going to talk about those and then come back so golden handcuffs um this is just an opportunity cost so it's up to you um depends what the number is what you're comfortable with uh I'mma click it don't click it do not click the link I can't delete it from the the ram chat but I block the person so don't go don't go click and sketchy things um I think you have to understand what your number is right so if you have a compensation package and you have to stick around make up an example right just to keep it easy if you get say looks awesome you get 100 Grand uh you get $400,000 and it's $100,000 a year over four years the way that I would and this is going to be different for everyone but like if you assume that the stock price isn't going to change let's say could you just assume that that feels like you're making $100,000 a year and if you are interested in that like if that is part of how you view your compensation whether that's going into your savings or however else you'd like to use that when you're applying for your next job is there a sign on bonus is there a a comp like a compensation package is going to pay you out similarly to make up for that but I feel like it's an opportunity cost so I realize that's a very like generic answer but think that you just have to kind of do that analysis for yourself because like I can't advise on that certainly I know you're not asking for that but my opinion is like if you're if you're in a situation where you have golden handcuffs for folks that aren't familiar with what that means it's kind of like um you have you have a very good offer for money but it's not realized yet you have to stick around a little bit longer right um some of the uh when I was interviewing with Amazon before Microsoft some of the compensation packages felt like they were heavily skewed to be a very golden handcuff Situation Big stock grants for signing on you would get 5% in the first year out of four I think it was four years and 5% and then 15% the second year so two years you only get 20% of your of your huge stock package and then everything was heavily loaded in the last like year three and four so it's interesting because by that logic it kind of forces you to be like I have to be here for at least three years to really realize like the benefit of this but that's just it like you have to kind of think about the time you want to stay in the company and then try to balance it out if your goal is to maximize how much you're earning that's a factor I will say because I I realize that not everyone has like this like luxury or opportunity at this point in their career some of the compensation packages and stuff you'll see online they seem kind of ridiculous like how is anyone making that kind of money and for different individuals you will have a different point of income where it's just like your needs are being met you're living comfortably you're not concerned financially you're not like paycheck to paycheck being like Oh my God how is this going to happen once you go past a certain point of that it starts being like like what do you do you need to buy a new Lamborghini every year like probably not like I'm exaggerating right but there's going to be situations where some of these comp packages are crazy but I I've I've talked about this on other podcast episodes and and live streams but um it's kind of hard to show but I have a tattoo on my arm um I can never figure out how to show this because the camera's weired there we go it's showing um it's an hourglass and it shows money falling into an empty pit and I have this tattoo on my arm as a permanent reminder that's do not just do things for the sake of money do not just work to make a number go up in a bank account because it's not fulfilling and you will die someday because we all do and you will say great I maximized a number like high great high score and then you're dead so I think it's important to try to get what you're valued at so that you can live comfortably so you can be happy to try and move some of those stressors that uh that finances will have on you make sure your family supported all that I think it's very important Beyond a certain point it stops having such a big impact and that will look different for everyone um uh infected FPS I'll be biased the people that jump every few months to a year might be uh yeah might be the ones have to handhold on certain things might be my industry insurance though that's possible right that could be your experience for sure I think that's fair to to kind of chime in on that um I got it communication skills are vital for Success yep sell negotiate analogy offers the right insights thanks Nick and Maria awesome thanks remes I hope that really helps um base base paint I can see the parallels with contractors they get hired on to do a job hand it off meaning they never get a chance to see the long-term consequences of their choices yeah um on that note when I was doing prototyping was kind of interesting because we would build things and then hand it off but um I think that one of the things we did well was that at least you know we were around at the company for a long time we got to see these products grow up and sometimes these were products that we would own like they'd be feature areas that we would own and we would be growing them and then they would reach a point where we're like okay like we can let our baby go and then the whole team like would kind of form around it and like that worked well for us because it wasn't just to hey build it and forget it drop it like you don't care about it your job's done but I can I can definitely see situations where that would be the case uh burand from from Facebook morning sir modular monolithic versus micr service architecture yeah uh yeah modular monolith is uh definitely the the phrase of the last couple years I guess um I'm guilty I I I use this and I say it a lot too um yeah I think people for a while over indexed on microservices because it sort of is like the epitome of uh decoupling things and making things modular and everyone's excited about that but I think the reality is that like an overwhelming majority of software that gets built just absolutely does not need it it looks amazing on paper because you talk about these decoupling aspects and the things are modular and it's all it all looks good but we don't talk about the complexity and the overhead of that so as a small if you're a single developer small group of developers you will be paying an enormous overhead for trying to manage those things when you don't yet have that problem so personally in all of my projects outside of work I build modular monoliths you can call them by any name you want but it's a it's a monolith I just happen to write modular code everything I write is basically plugins so it's like as modular as it gets um and I over index on that so like you know I'll put my hand up and be the first person to say like it's not it's not right to make everything a plugin I just love doing it so suei um please don't sue me but I I like I like building monoliths and because I write software in a modular way if I found that I had to go scale out something to be its own service my effort to go refactor that out extract it like a new entry point service would be would be lightweight it would be low effort and I could do it um like losing a ton of stock okay so back to to Dan here so like losing a ton of stock that wouldn't get if you switch Yeah should should you try to compensate for that loss and push for a larger signing bonus I would for sure um why not um I absolutely would I'm I'm not in that position but I would absolutely do the negotiation uh try to like the thing is if you're in a position where you're this is back to the golden handcuff conversation sorry for jumping around a little bit there a lot of good questions and comments so on the golden handcuff comment if you are like oh crap if I leave now I'm losing 200k over the next two years right it's $200,000 gone I'm just making numbers up you might say okay look if I sign on at this other company it's going to refresh some of these pieces maybe it's not going to get me to like where I wanted to be um okay can I go negotiate and ask for a larger signing bonus or higher stock Grant that's going to push me there get me close maybe surpass great if it surpasses right but I think it's important to do that if you truly feel that you're being properly valued I think I don't know kind of like an ethical thing I guess um but you might find oh look okay in the scheme of things maybe it's a little bit short over a couple of years or something and you're like but I this job I'm much more aligned with or or I've shifted my compensation just to give you an example maybe I'm losing 200k in stock grants over two years and that's being made up for in a cash signing bonus and my salaries higher so suddenly you start to feel like you're maybe you're losing a little bit overall but you've now balanced out your compensation to feel like it's it's more sustainable just to give you an example so I think these are things that you have to decide for yourself it's just an opportunity cost thing and I would absolutely say negotiate um okay sketch links yeah please don't click those or they turn into microliths yes uh what's your take on net Aspire where would someone use it is it practical or boil the ocean type of thing that is potentially overhyped um so I'm I've talked about this before I'm building a a platform called uh brand ghost and Dan I've actually talked to you about this um because we chat on Twitter we we're Twitter buds um but yeah I'm building a platform called brand ghost and we didn't start off using Aspire but one of the engineers on the team was like Hey like we're pretty early like we should we should hop on the Aspire train and I I think I missed the initial value prop because we were already set up in Azure like with some of our services and things like that and I was like I don't really get it but we got this really cool dashboard and I was like hell yeah like dashboard's really cool I can see what's up really like that um so that's goodness but I missed the part and this came after we were trying some things out and he was like oh go run this command locally and I realized what was happening it was looking at the code that was written in the Aspire program and standing up these Azure resources and I went you mean we didn't have to go configure any of that stuff it would have just done it for us and he was like yeah man and it wasn't obvious to me because I'm looking at the code and I'm like okay I see this is a program that will go run and we're currently using it that way so it makes sense with it's the kind of kicking off a couple services for us when we when we deploy okay makes sense cool setting up environment variables cool whatever but I didn't realize that there's this and I don't know how to explain how it actually works yet it kind of feels like it's using reflection or something to analyze the code and then it was just honestly like building up Azure resources just by examining things and I went holy crap I just didn't realize we didn't have to go stand up any of it we run a script locally and it would have gone and done it all so um I think that there's a ton of potential there um the example that I want to give you is kind of like when people talk about Blazer so I've heard people saying like hey like Blazer seem stupid because it's never going to beat JavaScript and then I go I don't hey man like I don't think anyone said that that was the goal like I think you kind of invented this competition that no one's in like Blazer helps people like me net and C developers they just want to keep coding in net and C sweet now I could be more productive it doesn't mean that it's taking away from your JavaScript land or your typescript or your react or anything else it just helps me and I feel like Aspire similar like I I am terrible at working at pipeline type things I'm terrible working with Amo files I feel like every time I touch one I have to go spend a month like getting into the zone and then finally I'm like I get it and then I move away from it and forget all of it so I'm hoping Aspire is something that works well for people like me I don't want to have to think about this stuff I'd love to write C code and just not have to I feel like I I use use the phrase like I'm tinkering I don't like to Tinker with the ammo files and configurations and stuff it just feels like I'm getting nowhere fast so I think um Aspire has a ton of potential I am currently not leveraging all of the potential that I think is there uh as a manager how do you approach training team members who lack essential skills for a task do you prefer one-on-one coaching or providing resource for self-guided learning this is situational one of the things that was taught to me very early on as a manager um I talked about this on the podcast I recorded today with the uh with the person that I was introduced by this is a wordy way to say it the HR leader that started me off introduced me to the person that I was interviewing so it was all very relevant the very first thing that she taught me was situational leadership and she said Nick um you're going to be working with people who don't think the same way as you so when you're trying to navigate problems trying to motivate them trying to engage them you you can't just think how does Nick like this because that's what I should do you have to understand the individual not only that if you have multiple individuals on your team they may be all very different so you can't use a cookie cutter and say great it worked with Tim now Bob and Sally like I'm just going to apply the same thing it's always going to be situational and I've taken this my entire career try to embody situational leadership and I think Bas paint your question here here for approaching team members who lack essential skills for things um um I do think that you need to be situational so there are going to be things where uh I might be able to coach someone on something um I've spent a lot of my career trying to coach people that uh this is by the way if you're if you follow the content I put out online because I know some people are dropping in some people we engage a bunch on LinkedIn or Twitter a lot of my content I try to gear towards people that are getting into software engineering because I've spent a lot of my career doing that already whether that's helping people transition from say like a testing role into being a developer or anything else is just something that I want to try to bring down barriers so I'm happy to coach people if I have time and I can accommodate that there's other situations where I might have a more senior engineer coach or Mentor or someone um there's other situations where people approach me and say hey I'm looking for opportunities like this and I go great like I'm happy to support you but like you should be proactive looking for these resources if you're stuck let me know but sometimes depending on the individual I'm trying to get them to be proactive to demonstrate that they're serious about it because some people will make comments like oh this is what I want but then they don't put any initiative into it so as long as I can make sure they're not blocked to doing it knowing they have my support will they take any action because if they're not maybe they don't care that much so it is a situational kind of thing I hope that kind of helps times or spaces um I actually use semicolons for all of my white space instead no I'm just kidding spaces all the way um how do you manage uh oh it's called Uh brand ghost I'll just type it in the chat actually it's brand ghost that's going to um no no worries that's okay uh brand ghost yeah so how do you manage brand GH and my my full-time employment so uh how do I manage anything really uh it's some people that see me post how much content I post and stuff online uh the answer is actually brand ghost it sounds kind of funny what is a semic I only know JavaScript um I use brand ghost so that I don't have to um oh and I think it's brand ghost AI sorry I tagged the wrong account there um I don't know my own handles I use brand G to schedule all of my content so when people say hey Nick like it looks like you post so much content how does that work it's because I don't go on the social media platforms and uh post it all manually I don't schedule my content for the week I just create content and I use brand ghost to go uh basically schedule it as necessary so when you create enough content my content is recycled I'm not I'm not shying away from it my content is recycled but I am constantly making content the interesting thing is when you recycle content and your audience is growing and actually if your audience isn't even growing um I'll give you an example if I make a post on LinkedIn and it gets a thousand Impressions okay if I have 177,000 people that follow me on LinkedIn and it gets 1,000 Impressions what percentage of my audience has never seen that post ever and that's assuming that of those a thousand Impressions those aren't just my followers so social media does not blast all of your followers and force them to see your content so when we're posting things you're actually not basically letting your entire audience see it just by the way that these algorithms work so I absolutely repost content but my strategy and this is I think the two things that separating why I'm able to do this is that I post what I call Evergreen content so it's hopefully educational it doesn't have a time limit on it it's valuable today hopefully it's valuable next week next month next year last year it's just helpful content that's the goal so I will repost it and I continuously add things and what that affords me is the flexibility to do all this in the very like I've been doing this for it's almost 20 20 months straight now I have uh I've shared this before if you follow me on social media you'll see that I have a a link to a Blog article every day those blog Artic I haven't written a Blog because I've been writing brand ghost code that's where I had to make a compromise I couldn't write blogs anymore I haven't written a Blog since May or April aside from my newsletter I post a blog article every day like a link to it and it's because I'm using brand ghost and I'm just I'm sharing out my content because it's still valuable content from a few months ago till now so the type of content I create allows me to do that um now how do I go make all the YouTube videos how do I make courses how do I do all that it's just the time management uh I definitely take too much on my plate so um I'll be the first to admit that some things end up drawing uh I don't spend enough time with my my family I could be definitely spending more time with my wife uh but there are some things where I'm making hopefully shorter term tradeoffs for being able to do this kind of stuff and uh brand ghost right now is how I am trying to make sure that I don't have to spend as much time on social media um sounds funny I don't like being on social media um I don't like having to go I don't like having to go look for content to go comment on um I just like producing content I like the conversations like like I know Dan's in the chat I think he's still on here um Maria from LinkedIn like I've met tons of awesome people doing this and I love that but in order to get impressions and engagement on social media I I just don't have time to be doing that um outside of natural conversations that come up I cannot be going to I post over 12 plat forms every single day I can't be on all of those platforms trying to comment on stuff and find other people to engage with it's I'm I'm I will never be a successful like air quotes influencer I'm happy to create content but I will never be like what I call an influencer because I cannot spend that much of my time doing that so uh I hope that helps for the the Instagram comment um I'm going to jump back over to some of the other questions from the share chat here uh my name is Nick so that was disorienting uh I did I missed that that's a good uh what's a service called I search brand go and nothing comes up um not on I don't know what the not on all 12 platforms comment was for um it is I'm putting in the chat it's brand go. a maybe our um we got a to do some SEO work but this is the platform uh still being built out but I am building this with people that uh we iterate very fast so the first uh one of the first users we had sign up uh gave us some feedback all all good stuff oh my chat said it's messed up I got to reload it sorry if I lose some of the chat here I hope it connects back again what we got clothing e-commerce stores dominating branos no way we got to get rid of that um no the first day we had feedback was incredible because um someone gave us uh you know the couple bugs here and there and that's going to happen I'm not I'm it's not going to be perfect ever so I'm not trying to pretend um but we need the feedback we need people using it and we iterate this is how software is built so um he gave us I think like six bullet points like hey like couple things here there's a bug here and we fixed it all by the end of the day and this is like I was at the office I wasn't coding it during work like fixed a couple things before I went to the office came back fixed a couple things the other Engineers are in different time zones they fix some stuff we had a rate we work hard there's also ghost brands that is a marketing agency well they better buckle up because we're coming it's funny when we first came up with brand ghost I was calling it ghost brand and I was like oh man like no you got to get the name right um no but I'm excited I think um this is being built out of something that is my it's it is literally my content strategy and I'm not saying it's the best content strategy in the world but the the proof is like and I'm not this doesn't mean bragging or anything but if you want to to understand if it's effective this is the framing I would have I over the last 20 months if you look at if the my presence on different social media platforms there's people that are way more successful with more followers and stuff I'm not not this is me not trying to like brag about this over the last 20 months of me trying to figure out a way that I can balance posting content in a sustainable way that I hope is educational if you look at my social media platforms basically I started routinely posting at the start of 2020 three that was last year so about 20 months and when I started I did not have brand ghost I had to come up with this system to do this so I had to find a way that I could keep posting content and still do everything I'm doing and I had just told myself because a lot of people don't know this I've talked about this a couple times I tried doing content Creation in 2013 this is when I started my blog and I gave up right away because I could not keep up with posting things and being regular so I stopped and then after 10 years went by I went holy crap like look at all of these people who just stuck to creating content and I don't have superpowers I'm not I'm not the smartest person ever that would be nice I'm not the most charismatic I'm not the best at you YouTube videos and streaming I'm I'm not but that's fine I don't need to be cuz one thing that I do really well is repetitive stuff I'm I'm very good at doing things every single day this is why I likeed bodybuilding I will eat the same meal multiple times a day every day for years I will go to the gym and do my stuff every day for years I like routine I'm very good at routine so when it comes to posting content I have trained myself now you have a routine and I just built that up so now I have this system that I use that I've proven and I said it's time to turn this into a platform so the system that I built ad hoc is being ported over to Brand ghost this is what's been happening for the past few months and it works the system works if you are content and happy to build content the way that I do if you're trying to be viral and have viral posts like that's not what I do brand ghost would allow you to have a baseline of content and then ideally give you some time back to go try to make viral po so that's a big difference um It looks interesting is it your own company yes um so this is this is my own I do have this uh that I have some partners with on this um have you checked out stream together could be good for AMA streams L of viewer Callin oh interesting no I've not um I I haven't um I do have like a private Discord and I've talked about doing like making that something where people could uh kind of call in um I feel like I I have heard about stream together but like the name but I've never like looked into it so that might be something interesting cic CD pipeline but for Content creation kind of um it it kind of is like that um the way that I would frame this is like as a content creator the thing that I want to spend time doing is creating content if you are a small business so whether you're like a course creator um I actually have a a real estate agent that's uh that's one of the early users and he has a roofing company he is a content creator as well like he understands content creation and he uses content creation for his businesses I can tell you what he does not want to spend time doing he doesn't want to to spend time scheduling content make the meaningful content get yourself some time to focus on your business like let us go take care of making it making sure it's always scheduled you always have posts ready to go the thing that we're building after that is an aggregate crossplatform social feed so when you do need to work on your engagement commenting on stuff because that's a big part of all of these platforms a lot of people don't realize we want to make sure that we can focus your attention so you're not like oh I have to go find all the stuffff to reply to go find com uh U can't speak accounts to go comment on and engage with so it's we just my goal is as a content creator I don't want to spend time doing like the the boring stuff about content creation let me make content and then let me get the time back to do the other important stuff and then we got Justin C Dev trying to trying to break into our app over here just poking around okay don't break anything um no but seriously yeah like sign up for the the wait list um we're onboarding people um yeah happy to have the feedback and stuff so if you if you're interested in making content if you have a small business and you're like hey I need a social media presence but I don't have time to go posting stuff I want to let me frame this for you if you are a small business you have something going on you just want to have more presence okay if you made one post every day for a year sorry not every day sorry every week every week for a year you would have 52 posts created okay 52 posts if every single one of those posts was what I refer to as Evergreen which means you can go repost it later and it's still valuable it's not like a hey flash sale this Sunday only that's not very Evergreen you would have 52 posts that you could reuse and that means that your next year in business those are 52 days worth of post you never have to think about because we could just schedule those things again for you the overwhelming majority of your audience would have never seen them ever in the first place if you could change it and you could do more content sooner you could get to a point where every 60 and this we have an evergreen score in the app you could have say every 90 days people would never have seen the content you posted sorry it repeats after 90 days it's it's a it's a way more scalable way to create content it's not about trying to cheat the system and say oh look you know I don't have to I'm just going to regurgitate my content because I don't care and I'm going to fool these people like the people haven't seen your content it's just the reality it's not cheating and you can always refine it you can make it better we're going to build an analytics so you can see these kinds of results you can say hey this Poe doesn't do so well like I should change the hook I should change the language in it all these kinds of things on on Instagram 10 years went by I signed up for Twitter in 2013 or so and I have zero followers totally can relate y there we go cool uh so do you mean to reupload yes in depending on the platform it's either a repost or re-upload um so we basically have the content repository for you we haven't done uh image and video hosting so all of your images and videos need to be external links we just have to build out the Azure storage for it and then we'll host it for you as well um reminds me of how GDC Works they have a vault that has all the content and constantly rotates a subset of the data on YouTube yep uh when scheduling post to use hashtags are strictly for your followers both depends on the uh platform um so for example like threads threads you can have one hashtag kind of weird I wonder if they'll change that it's very bizarre um so threads sometimes I might not even use a hashtag uh Instagram LinkedIn Tik Tok Facebook I will use hashtags Instagram used to be a thing where you would slam as like up to 30 hashtags just because you want to get exposure I don't think things work as well that way anymore I think people have different success with hashtags um our platform does support that um I'm trying to do a better job of making hashtags feel kind of like a a first class type of thing kind of a weird thing to explain but I I want people to be able to to use hashtags in a way that if you're just posting stuff like it can pull from your comments at a hashtags but you can also override hashtags for certain posts but again like you want to be able to set this kind of stuff up and forget about it when you're ready to add more content you add it when you want to go update a post because it didn't perform as well go update it but it's all about building on what you have and not being at a point where you're just like like I don't know like having to I if I had to try and come up with a viral post every day across 12 platforms I would have given up instantly it's just not going to happen some people some people do very well with that kind of thing some people will say hey I'm getting into this they'll there's like sort of techniques you can look at for trying to make viral videos and stuff like reh hooking people's attention trying to get people to focus in the comments of your videos so people especially on Instagram you'll see like oh like here's my little reel it's very aesthetic and I'm not I'm not trying to knock people for it sorry but aesthetic real and then it's like read the description so you're kind of checking this thing out because it's very aesthetic looking at it oh I should read the description guess what when you're there reading there and you're reading the comments video is playing they're getting watch time it's serving the purpose so there are techniques and things like that people can be very successful I literally do not have time to go do that not every day it's just not something I can focus my attention on so um my platform is built in a way that is sustainable for me creating content and I think that it's applicable for many people yes um and there you go so Justin cev this is kind of the point right I could see this type of service doing well with this current wave of solar printer launch SAS AI product every 72 hours yeah these guys are coding 20 hours a day grinding out products until one hits so again right like and and we like we have an AI element in what we're doing for different aspects what I don't want to have happen because I see this as a LinkedIn Creator primarily you know when people are using AI we would like to incorporate AI to help you with idea generation to help you take content that exists rewrite it in ways that's still in your language like your tone of voice we want to be able to do that we are going to do that we plan on using AI for on boarding your existing content onto our platform so there's an AI element however the goal is not just to be like press the AI button and then you get rocket ship emojis and people saying superb or like this is amazing like it's just we don't want garbage we just want you to be able to create content more effectively and get your time back so um as Justin C devis saying like when you have these other folks that are trying to build things and focus on building focus on their business when you don't make any time for posting about what you're doing and attracting attention you're missing out so if you're interested because this is a neat social experiment follow the brand ghost accounts on social media because do you know how we're building our profile up I'll give you a hint I'm not going on to Brand ghost and posting every day surprise kind of like my own accounts I've told people this and I've told you on this stream I do not post rarely do I post to social media directly there's a couple that I do today on LinkedIn and yesterday on LinkedIn I made two posts of me holding a book different books I did this these were separate not scheduled through brand ghost but I did these as separate dedicated posts because I already have content for Forever on LinkedIn and every other platform I can just go ahead and do these other posts every like it's rare that I post directly if you see me commenting different story if I'm engaging with you in comments that's me I'm commenting but I have more time to do that because I don't have to go make and schedule post yeah and so yeah Justin C Dev no um I'm agreeing with you I think I got that so yeah I think what you said totally makes sense uh base yeah I think high quality educational content will be in high demand with more AI generated content flooding the internet yeah it's unfortunate right um it would be nice if uh if the AI content was just more beneficial but it's you can the more time you spend consuming content online and generating it you'll you'll see these patterns where it's like it just stands out where it's like it's just not it's just not there so um anyway I went off the rails a lot I didn't finish you guys distracted me I didn't I didn't finish the whole thing about the uh startups and big Tech so that's okay I have to wrap up the stream though because I have to go to CrossFit in like six hours which is rough um but folks um sorry for not wrapping up that part uh I thought the this is probably I'm going to I'm being honest here I think out of all the live streams I've done for topics like this that are very general software engineering this is hands down the best most engaged one across all the platforms there people from twitch Twitter I had people on Instagram asking questions which is great uh there was people on Tik Tok usually I'm not blasting Tik Tok usually Tik tok's terrible for any engagement I don't know why I feel like people can't hear me or something on Tik Tok I don't know um but guys this was awesome guys and gals and and everyone in between this is super cool I do appreciate the engagement um thank you all um I appreciate you being here thanks for asking questions I am not going to have my coding live stream in the morning um between like I mentioned I'm going to CrossFit in the morning but um between my my in-laws being here for a couple more days this week try to resume things next week I think will be the goal but coding live streams will come back uh this you know this particular type of session will be at the same time next week so uh I do appreciate you all being here thank you for your support thanks for folks that engage with me on the different platforms and dropped in for the live stream as well uh if you ever miss these so you're like hey I wanted to check it out but I was busy these are all recorded so you can check them out on YouTube um you can watch these on the platform that you're watching them on and if you hate the platform you're on you just happen to drop in pick a different platform because I try to be on all them so thanks folks I'm going to go to sleep and uh yeah I appreciate the time so take care I hope everyone has an awesome week and we will see you soon