happyhour-may21.mp3 Speaker1: [00:00:09] Hey, everybody coming in, if you remember, Harp is having some family time, so I'm guest hosting for him today. So we'll just wait a minute. SQL is going to show up here. Hopefully we'll get a good group together so you can actually have some discussion. I've never been the host of this meeting before either. So that's another new experience for me. Speaker2: [00:00:34] Are you feeling well prepared? Speaker1: [00:00:36] I mean, no, but I don't know. I feel as prepared as I'm going to be. And then we'll just see where of the the afternoon takes us here. Speaker2: [00:00:47] New experience is a good. Yeah. I just figured Speaker1: [00:00:52] Anybody having cool things that happened is going Speaker2: [00:00:55] On. I mean, I've got one trial in the news today. There's been a lot of talk about Barack Obama, former president President Barack Obama saying that he believes in UFOs. And I think there's also being video footage released recently by the Pentagon or some other form of government over there that previously hadn't been shown of unidentified flying. I mean, not necessarily an unidentified flying object taken from military aircraft. So interested to know if any of you guys seen that. I've heard this from stateside. Speaker1: [00:01:37] That was news to me just now. And you said it, but I don't know anybody else. Speaker3: [00:01:40] Ok, yeah. I've been following this for what has it been two years since this has been in and out of the news for about two years where the trickle released. Trump did something. I can't remember what he did. He signed some sort of order or allowed the release of some sort of documentation. And as part of that, like this whole dump of UFO videos showed up out of nowhere. And it was basically overnight that the Pentagon just went, yeah. So UFOs. Yeah, UFOs. Ever since then, it's just been getting stranger and stranger because now all of these pilots are talking about UFOs seeing them. What are they? No clue. Seen aliens. Nope. But you've seen UFOs. Yup. That's really been the official line. And I think if they actually explained it, the story would go away pretty quickly. But the fact that no one's really given it good, this is what's actually going on explanation. It's kind of hung out there where it really difficult to figure out. I mean, OK, so there's some stuff that does some incredibly interesting aerial maneuvers. And I think that's where it's interesting is what everyone's been filling in the blanks for. Speaker2: [00:02:51] And yeah, exactly. So like I come from a data analysis or Data science perspective, there's this huge gaps in the data that you want to go and fill those gaps to make a judgment and not just kind of throw a whole host of what ifs in there and see what sticks, which is, I think, what the public did, especially when they start getting excited about aliens and all this kind of stuff, then we'll see how it transpires. I did hear someone say that there may be a third release in a month or two of reports about the video evidence. It'll be interesting to see what comes. Speaker1: [00:03:26] So I'm just going to officially start here. Hi, everybody. If you remember her, she said that he was going to be out of town. He's enjoying some time with his family. And I know that I don't quite have a voice that's the embodiment of of just the way that he does. But I will be your guest host today. So if anybody has any questions or anything, feel free to drop in the chat we were just now discussing about Obama and UFOs. If anybody knows has heard about this story, then by all means, we can talk about it if you want. But otherwise, just let me know what you want to talk about and I can put it in the Q or I can also throw out a question. I've got a question of my own if anybody wants to talk about that. So just. Yeah, let me know. Speaker4: [00:04:14] So I think I missed the beginning of the conversation. What was said here about the UFO? Like, is it something I'm sorry for barging in here? Is this something that you guys really believe in or it doesn't make sense like it was? Speaker2: [00:04:28] It was my comment, says Greg. It was basically, you know, so I'm from London to the UK and there's been a reasonable amount of media coverage here that President Barack Obama has recently said he believes in UFOs, perhaps aliens. I can hear it firsthand. I've just heard it a third party. But also there's been quite a lot of video evidence released by the Pentagon in recent months of purported UFOs. So it's just the two of those things kind of coincide. And I'm interested from expected to know if this is making big media over in the US. Speaker4: [00:05:01] Yeah, the way I usually think about this is how come the videos are. It's ever so clear to us to describe the flying vehicles or even exploring something like that is true, what would be I guess, what would be the purpose, I guess? There are so many questions I don't think we can answer, but I'm just one of those skeptics to look to to see if it's true or not. But if you sure. I'm curious to know more. Just just wait to see what you guys thought about this. This is one of those that I say, OK, that means they have enough energy to travel here. If they spent that much energy to explore, are they exploring for fun or are they exploring for survival? All of these things and it's a fun subject. So thanks for bringing it up. Thanks for catching me up to speed. Speaker1: [00:05:58] All right. Well, we do have a question in the queue from James. So, James, if you want to go ahead. Sure. Hi, everyone. Speaker5: [00:06:06] Thanks for hosting us all and thanks very specifically. I mean, I saw your stuff at the D'Ascenzo conference and I've been seeing yourself a LinkedIn and it's been really helpful. But I'm new to the science field, especially boot camp. And I'm kind of wondering how how do you guys think I should be structuring my week and how you guys structure your week when you're kind of planning ahead of time? How much time do you plan for, like, planning and thinking? How much is just straight? Speaker3: [00:06:30] Let's just make some stuff work. How much is Speaker4: [00:06:33] Cooperating with other people to see Speaker5: [00:06:34] What their insights are and what what you should be planning for the future? Speaker1: [00:06:40] Russell, go for it. Speaker2: [00:06:41] It's that's almost kind of a philosophical question. How much time do you want to spend planning time to plan? I guess, you know, so I, I try to have probably in my schedule a zone of about no more than 60 percent, six things that I know what I'm doing and then leave the rest of the time to either have a focus, time or serendipitous time for things that crop up through the week and that 60 percent, that's kind of a tad bit less spent. So I don't like to rely on my schedule to fill up with too much stuff, but that's stuff that's filled up with six things. I'd like to be kind of all different types of stuff, you know, working on something that sticks or having a meeting we need to go to. But I'm fairly certain you could ask a hundred people and get 100 different answers on this. I don't think there's any one golden rule. It's probably best to try a few different systems and see what works best for you. But don't just don't match yourself and allow time to have some time to sort of focus on what's really important and don't get close to feeling burnt out. If you're feeling close to getting burnt down, scale back before you feel content, because once you get there, it's difficult to deal with Greg. And I'll tell you. Yeah. Speaker5: [00:07:57] I mean, like, it is a pretty broad question, right. And it's really a change on workflow and like industries and like what tasks are working on a specific time. So I feel like this groups probably pretty good at pretty broad questions, though. So from what I've seen and seen. So I just kind of thought Speaker4: [00:08:14] What I'd like to see what Speaker5: [00:08:15] Your thoughts are Speaker4: [00:08:16] Really. San Antonio raises hands. Antonio Yeah. Yeah, I can Speaker6: [00:08:20] I can chime in. I'm driving actually. But I actually I wanted to share that. I recently saw something and I don't know if Jeff Bezos actually bought this, but I've been trying it out. It does when he's planning for a project. If you have seventy percent of the information, then you are he kind of starts this project because he said if you wait to have a hundred percent of the information, whatever that project is, you're never going to get there. So I've actually been trying that out. And that's been kind of working because at some point I used to be like, well, I need to talk to just a couple more people and maybe we'll get all of the information and you'll never get the one hundred percent. And that kind of pulls a lot of things right now. For the past three or four weeks, I've been trying that out. If I have seventy percent of the information, which of course is an estimate, if I feel like I'm 70 percent ready, then I just go in for the project. So that's the only part that I came across. And hopefully that makes sense. Speaker4: [00:09:17] I can see that too. When I think about the projects that I'm that I'm working on. Is that in what you mean by 70 percent of the information? And the way I look at it is more like 70 percent of the information about the solution. Right. Because the problem, though, I need more than 70 percent of whether that problem is the right problem I need to work on. I need to be sure that the data that that tool is sound and that is as a source of truth for killing any false assumptions or making sure that the need there is a need to fix an issue. Once I go there, the solution that I come up with, that's where to me I look at the 70 percent. So I like to look at it in terms of options. Right. So are we making a one way door decision where once we make that decision to implement the solution? You're stuck forever with that solution and you have to eat up the cost of that implementation or that structure, and it's very expensive to come out of it. So it's always going to leave room for two door type decisions when you're implementing new solutions. So I don't know if I'm answering that question, James, but because you're you're alluding to how much effort you should spend on planning and things like that. But I'm telling you, in terms of coming in from a project management perspective, what would be the best strategy to try to go about the project and how to think long term Speaker6: [00:10:46] For it to so. Right. I also think with what you're saying, Greg, is like in terms of I would ask for Mellops or something and I would ask people, OK, is this like is this the. That has to be it. And nobody like answers unless you have a plan. So sometimes I just put think and I would put an email right away. That one is this step two is step three. Is, is this correct. And when you put something in front of them, all of a sudden everybody has an opinion. So something like, if I'm fairly certain something might work, I just put it out there and wait for the expert, because the way my role is, I'm kind of like in a strategy role where I'm trying to coordinate between different groups. But I'm not I'm not like a normal engineer expert and nowhere near that. So I would put something out there. And all of a sudden all of the email engineers, once I said something like, oh, you're wrong, we should be doing it this way. I'm like, okay, you can call me this yesterday. But now when I said you're correcting me, so I'm not sure I want you to come up with a solution. Speaker4: [00:11:42] Dustour has been an effective way to to get people to move. Is that you propose or even prevent present the options and then you let people decide, OK, which is the best. And it's always good to just propose a solution, assuming certain conditions. So it could be, I assume, based on what we agreed on, if we move forward with option A.. This is the expected output. Unless you think option B is better, you let me know what are you right. So it's always a good technique to get people to move until you you were wrong about option A preferred option C.. And here it is and things like that. So people are funny sometimes. Yes. Speaker6: [00:12:25] And you need to be comfortable with being wrong. I think that's very important. Speaker5: [00:12:28] Yeah, sure. Speaker1: [00:12:30] After you had a good comment in the chat, do you want to chime in? Speaker5: [00:12:33] Sure, yeah. It's it's like Newton's laws of energy. You need to spend some energy, get the ball moving, get the conversation going and once the conversation starts then it's not used to have people sorry I'm cooking are not easy to get it going. Speaker4: [00:12:49] I'm a teacher, so I know that if I want to start a conversation, you've Speaker5: [00:12:53] Got to get at least one kid to start talking about it. Other kids know is this top on and chime in afterwards. But if no one says anything, it's like five, 10, 15 minutes. You've got to get the, you know, something and then it seems to make sense. Speaker1: [00:13:09] Ok, that's great. Anybody else have any thoughts for James on this topic? All right. Speaker3: [00:13:14] Well, go ahead. I'll read something, because your original question was how much time should you spend on planning? How much time should you spend on working, how much? And you're just talking generally in your we kind of plan it out, how to scope it out and box time, right? Yeah, there's a little Speaker5: [00:13:32] Bit more what I was what it's like for. But I mean, everyone's comments are so great Speaker3: [00:13:36] Because what I've watched people do and I'm starting to kind of put this into a number, that 80, 20 rule, everybody likes that when you're first starting out in your career, 80 percent of your time is going to be these and twenty percent of your time is going to be this, because you have to use these really to get the experience to use this. And you want to have a point where you say, OK, five years from now, I want to be fifty fifty. And if you're not really hardcore engineering, that might be maybe a ways out. You might spend more time as an engineer or an engineer really focused on the product, the technology, building, creating, and not so much the person who's architecting, thinking, visioning, directing and so on. But you may want to be more into the strategy side. You may want to migrate more towards a leadership role. And then. So that's your OK, want to drag my fifty fifty forward. I want to be fifty fifty and about four years or five years. Or maybe you want to be fifty fifty in ten years. But you have to realize at some point your career is going to have to get to that fifty fifty point and at some point it's going to have to go 80, 20, 80. So now you are doing 20 percent this 80 percent this because there's only so many senior roles where you're doing very, very senior work with these 80 percent of the time. There's very, very small number of just high end, all technical. No, no real planning. And so that's the way I would say schedule your doing now with the understanding of this is where you are and look forward career wise and start ask. Yourself, OK? When do I want to get to 50 50? Speaker1: [00:15:10] Was that helpful, James? Good, good information. Speaker3: [00:15:13] Yeah, that's Speaker5: [00:15:15] That's great information. Speaker1: [00:15:17] Ok, well, Mark, put a question in the chat, so why don't you go for a walk? Speaker5: [00:15:23] Yeah, just to follow up on Ben's comment. I was like, what is Congress look like when you really enjoy using these empty winegrowing in your career? You have to move towards that strategic role? Or is it one of those things where like, you know, you use your hand outside of work, kind of surprise for fun to stay sharp and then like driving time value, you really have to be that strategic side. Speaker6: [00:15:48] I can try to answer that one about how it is in my company. So I work for Verizon I and the organization it's called. And what used to happen was right. You reach up to a certain point when you're a coder and basically you max out and they basically say if you want more money, more senior, all you have to go into management. And I've seen it personally where the best, best coder I have seen. He reached a certain point really quickly in his career and they say you have to go into management. But he never really wanted to do that. But he did it anyways because he wanted to obviously make more money for his family. And his work started to suffer a lot because he didn't enjoy it, wanted to be sitting by himself in the corner, just doing his work, doing his project. It was doing kind of like architecture thing. And what he ended up doing was leaving and he ended up going to Microsoft and is doing really great there as an individual contributor. And I think companies are starting to see that. And now Verizon has a thing where you could be as high up as a director, but you don't have any reports to you. I think they're calling them like that Lowe's Associate Fellowship or something like that, where you have some really good Data engineers who have been 20, 30 years in the industry really know what they're doing and talking about it. But they're in that point of their career where they don't want to manage people. So those roles are starting to open up in my company. And I've seen a few other companies as well. But there's definitely not enough of them, I think, given the five to 10 years. And you should be able to be like a coder where you are an engineer or an architect or even a data scientist and you just coding. But until now it's been it's been a little tough is based on what I've seen. And it's unfortunate. Speaker1: [00:17:37] Yeah, I'm definitely then go for it. I'm definitely here. Just I, I am interested to hear of what this sort of looks like at other people's, you know, in other people's experience, companies you work for and stuff of what it looks like when you have a person who wants to just keep doing really technical things. Yeah. What like what is their career path look like? I'm I'm interested in that. If anybody has thoughts Speaker3: [00:17:59] On that, you know, what Antonio said is what a lot of companies have is the capital director like you are equivalent to a director with no direct reports. So that's actually really, really common. And the capital director, which I don't get you can be way more valuable engineer than a lot of directors. And a lot of companies don't understand that. So you have to kind of come to the realization that there are most companies, you know, they get to the principal staff. There's a whole bunch of titles that are out there distinguished. I think that's Oracle's distinguished. And you get all these cool titles and you're basically like you're an individual contributor at the director level and then your kept your maxed. And more times than not, companies spend as much time as they can trying to get rid of you or promote you. And so it becomes increasingly miserable as your life goes on. And that's a good majority of companies on the other side. This is what ended up happening to me sort of at a midpoint in my career, is I got connected up with a guy who was just basically a visionary, like he would throw out ideas that were nuts. He was that person that would say, hey, why don't we do? And you just look at him like you're crazy. That's not. And I got hooked up with this guy and somebody funded one of his projects at the company that was working with and said, hey, who wants to work on this team? And I was like, right, that's so dumb. I'll do it. If you're going to pay for it, I'll do it. Speaker3: [00:19:28] And I spent three years working with him and we pushed out prototypes, did advanced R&D. It was the coolest development that I've ever done. And I didn't really get to advance very much career wise. But like passion, love, enjoyed when I was building. Unreal. I mean, we built some things in the particular niche that we were in that, you know, five, six years later, people were starting to come around and copy because they had made a ton of cash. They weren't huge hits. You're one year two, but you're three to five. They started making enough money that everyone started looking at them and saying, OK, we need to copy this. It was a lot of fun and that and a lot of companies find that person who is a visionary or an innovator and actually connect yourself with them and start making the stuff that everyone says you can't make because the first time you do that, it's addicting. And I got to say, for satisfaction, if you're this type person, it's it'll get that out of you, because after about three years of just building stuff that nobody really wants until later on, like two years later, three years later, it gets kind of it gets draining after a while to not get the credit until long afterwards. And then somebody else swoops in and takes credit. But it'll get that out of you. It'll get that passion kind of pushed into a good direction. So that's something to look for in your company, is if there is that sort of program, you will you'll enjoy it if that's really what you want to do. Speaker5: [00:20:54] Just a follow up question. And two is is like I see like I definitely see that component of like, ah, you get to this point in time capped at a director, but like I feel like of us are type, we're like really gunning and trying to grow consistently. And at that point like this just makes sense to be like screw the company culture time aspect and just go on your own, because then I could be ISEA for whatever company. And my my cap is just how much market capture I can get is I've seen that play a lot as well. Speaker2: [00:21:22] Yeah, I think I've seen a lot of similar things from a UK perspective as well. So the director role I'm seeing a lot of organizations are becoming more of a pay grade rather than a description of the role you want to take. So that's the thing as well. What I'm really interested in the description of using the hands, you know, especially with the way technology is coming on now. So maybe in five or 10 years time is is NLP increases and the field is advancing. Might we be in a position where we're using far less of these? I'm just talking to our machines and instructing them on that type of commands to run and scripts to implement and will actually type in far less. Is that something that we're going to have to get used to in the in the near future, do you think? Speaker5: [00:22:12] I personally, I can see a world like that, but I think at the end of the day, I think you're still an individual contributor, because even though I'm not using my hands, I'm still I'm solving puzzles. And that's that's the thing that's really addicting for me. And I don't want to solve people puzzles because those are really messy in ways I don't like. Speaker4: [00:22:31] Could you describe could you describe for me when you say using D? I just want to make sure I grasp it. Speaker5: [00:22:37] I was just copying then, so I think then can probably better describe what's that by that. Sure. Speaker4: [00:22:44] What do you mean by when we use these, these Speaker3: [00:22:46] You're building, you're making, you're making a real there's somebody else that's doing this and saying build and this is what it's going to look like. And the more senior you get, the more you're directing what these are going to do at an architectural level and an engineering level. You're very beginning. It's just you doing this and there's almost like there's a puppet master pulling your hands up and down. But as you get more and more senior, the roles that we're talking about were the distinguished staff and the you know, that director level, individual contributor. You're an architect, but your architecture is really prototyped by these right here. You're building things that are so forward and especially the hardware world. This happens a lot in the hardware world where you are legitimately hands on doing proof of concepts of stuff that hasn't been built before. And from a software development standpoint, you're building in ways that are more efficient, that take advantage of something that just came out. But yes, you're definitely using your head, but you're the one making it real because nobody else can see the connection between how it's built and your vision. Like you see it and you make it happen because you couldn't get anybody else on the same page to actually build it until you've got certain core capabilities and functionality built yourself. And then you can bring in a whole bunch of other people, go, oh, OK, so you need me to do this and this and this. And then they start seeing the vision and they understand they're able to implement once you've simplified some of the more complex problems. And so that's what I mean Speaker4: [00:24:17] By totally get it. That makes sense, I guess. I guess that makes me think about something that I've observed as a trend across industries is that typically as humans, we reward the things that come from here that transforms the way we live more than the physical work. So when I see this, I see physical. So the example that I can take is I'm pretty sure you're paying an architect more money than the person actually putting the blocks together to build the building, which is a physical work. So I think I can maybe I can use that analogy. And I'm wondering if it's also applying here to where at some point you'll find that you working more on this to build things? Well, you'll hit the plateau where you're not allowing yourself enough time to think about future. Transformation or you're not allowing yourself to think about impact on the many. This is where you get you end up getting stuck, where you have to move to a point where you become more of a future thinker, future transformer. And that's unfortunately, society rewards those folks more. So and it's OK because it's it's up to what you want to do with your career. To Vince Point, if you're somebody who feels fulfilled by using this, go for it. There's really no right or wrong is really what you want to do. And I think wherever you choose to be, you're going to have a headache anyway. Do you want to be stressed at the top by leveraging this and you're not getting results? Can you think about the first person who made a promise or self-driving vehicles that says next year will be good to go? And then government says, is that so? Is that so? So can you imagine that so or even Elon Musk that says if I return this, I'm going to get paid that amount? What if you didn't? Right. So that's a lot of stress. Do you want that stress for your life? So I think that's that's the way I see it. Speaker2: [00:26:10] So hopefully I think that is to summarize it from from yourself, Greg, and then were really positive. And from my perspective, I think I think of the hands as the tool of the mind right the way through. So from being right at the coalface, which is kind of the front line, people building something physical or cutting whatever it is, you've got that direct connection from your mind to your hands. So there's very little latency what you think you can pretty much do so long as you have the skills to do and you do move up. So so long as you've got good synergy with the team that you're working with, essentially their hands become an extension of your hands. So so long as you can keep that synergy work there and working positively, it can be a positive step so long as that's the direction in which you want to go. Speaker1: [00:26:57] So we actually have a bit of a follow up question on this for Arter. So go ahead and ask Ascoli. Speaker5: [00:27:06] Ok, thank you. So, yeah, I was just wondering all there's all these kinds of issues where how do you make sure that you give people what they want to help them strive to be better and not to worry about like what do I have to quit what I love doing and to get paid more? And if it's a company culture thing, do you guys have any ideas for how can you structure a company's culture to kind of alleviate or reduce the kind of pressure to work friction the people, how deciding do I keep doing what I'm good at and what I love, or do I take more money? Is there a way to kind of structure, to change things around to help that kind of situation? So many ideas. I can speak from my current company. We just we're a startup and we just after four years, are just implementing levels right now and kind of career tracks. It's interesting to see that being that culture being developed right now. Something interesting that my manager did was very intentional about our team was having a manager track and analytics track and then a product building track. And as you noticed, like it does cap out a director. There's no there's no reason for that. But something that's really interesting, though, that I've noticed is that the culture is that as I go up in those levels and she kind of created this rubric, she's awesome. She has a psychology background. Speaker5: [00:28:27] So she connects back to like her Data science background, which is really great rubric. I told her she's got presented at a conference for this. But the the need to go up to level is business impact. And like that, moving that needle forwards. I've talked to Greg Aben and also this overall group about like how to drive that business impact. And what I've noticed is that as I drive for the business impact, I can't just rush and build things quickly. I waste a lot of time and also requires me to get a lot of buy. In fact, finding I'm spending a lot of my time doing that before I build something. And so even though, like culture wise, I know I can grow in the company without having direct reports, I'm still being forced into this mental component. And so I don't know if that's necessarily a culture thing, but maybe is more so just a necessity as like as you have more impact that impacts to the level. And so I guess like a better question is like is to level up as business impact need it. That's an open ended question. That's more so like a crazy idea. Like, like how do we define impact for business and does growth have to be tied to like business impact itself? I know that was kind of rambling. It's like trying to give you a snapshot of like a company figuring that out right now. Speaker1: [00:29:45] Antonio, do you have thoughts? You need it yourself. Speaker6: [00:29:48] Yeah. So I was I was on a Data driven NYC. I don't know if you follow that one. And it was with the BP of EHI or something else, Facebook. And I asked that exact same question. And I think what his answer was, was, was what I agree with. And he basically said, you have to. Technical people in positions of power, basically, because if you looked in the past, if you looked at most CEOs, they had that kind of finance background. So they were always like leading people in your management here or climbing the ladder. But if you look at now, if you look at like Elon Musk, you look at the guys at Google, you look at Microsoft CEO, they were technical guys. So they already have that culture and the background. So now when they're implementing these things, they understand how important it is to be technical. So I think then the same thing that Verizon, once these technical guys start becoming like executives and they can influence how people are getting compensated, how people are getting hired, then you start seeing being technical people being more appreciated and saying, like, OK, we don't want to cap you out. We're going to we understand that, OK, you're not necessarily you're not leading people. But that doesn't mean that you don't have the same impact as somebody who's leaving plenty of people because. Right. If you're that good of an engineer or a data scientist and Vincent, this sort of more, you can be a data scientist and have a lot more impact than a director who has plenty of report because you're director would report that the media are really doing something that, you know, people are just great that work for you. So I think it's important for Data people and for technical people to become executives. And I think over time that will kind of work itself out. Speaker1: [00:31:30] Anybody else have anything they want to add to this topic? Speaker3: [00:31:33] I think what you talk about culture, you're talking about what the company values most. And if the company understands its business model, then it's got a good connection to a value stream. And engineering is part of that volume stream in one way, shape or form. And so a company that's really connected with the technology first or product first business model and understands the role of engineering in that value stream, they're going to end up rewarding their engineers because if they don't, their value stream suffers. And so when you have mature companies, they understand that from end to end. And even when you don't get a technical CEO or really technical focused people at the top, when your senior leadership is brought in on that value stream concept and they've been you know, it's been proven to them to the point where they actually believe in it, not give them lip service to it. But once they believe in it, then you start seeing salaries and compensation going up because they understand, you know, I can kneecap myself by losing one person in a lot of companies are what I said this, but most companies are three I.T. or technical contributors away from ruin. Like three people leave and you can undo two or three years worth of forward progress with three people. Speaker3: [00:32:48] I can't remember who said that. But when I look back, when the business understands that, then you start seeing engineers getting compensated for their contributions. And a company that I worked with actually had a almost like royalties. You would work on a project. It would hit it would make its quota of cash and it had to make at least what it was projected to make. And as soon as it kept over that, you started getting some of that money back and there were people making six, seven figures as software developers because they made one project that was doing nine figures a year. And everybody wanted to be on the bleeding edge projects because there were these two people who were basically lottery winners. And you start seeing really intelligent compensation packages when the business realizes how much cash can come out of, you know, a team, four or five people that can and and build a solution that they've talked the business into building in the first place. And cash shows up, truck just shows up, dumps cash off. And that's like I said, it's it's that's the culture is value focused, revenue focus, but really understanding that value stream and seeing where engineering fits in, it's. Speaker1: [00:34:06] Greg, are you going to talk about what you posted in the chart? Speaker4: [00:34:09] Yeah, this is just prioritization. B So I think anything you venture and you'll find noise coming your way and to really understand how you get rid of some of that noise, I particularly use the Eisenhower matrix. I find it super useful to kind of figure out what are the what are the quadrants I need to work on, which ones I need to clutter in. And it takes a conversation with others as well, especially the quadrant for where you need to do clutter is where you would align with your team that this is not something that moves the needle or is even necessary for for your department is not part of your goal, the department goal or something like that. And then if you're in a position of management, you can delegate some as well. Those are the urgent and important. And for me, I like to stay around project number two, because this is the. Transformational ones that will most likely move the needle on that than I like to think about, too, is if I'm working on a project today and this is more of a cultural thing, the things that I'm working on today in terms of projects or things that we talked about a year or two years ago, that we decided that this will be a piece of transformational journey for us and it will happen within the next one to three years. Speaker4: [00:35:35] So when it happens, whatever is happening today has already been planned and it's been an execution phase right now. So that's why we need to keep a rolling three year plan to continue to move towards the future. But at the same time, you have those noise coming in, those urgent things coming in that where you have to cure fires, tell somebody to do this on your behalf or even do it yourself. That removes you from Data future planning that thing. So, again, these future planning type things are the ones that may or may not open some valve for more revenue or major cost savings for the organization. So in other words, you have to be able to think in multiple timelines the now or the current processes that you're going through already working properly. Do they need any improvements in what quick actions can I take that improve these and then the one, two, five years? What are the things that we can plan on transforming, working on in terms of long term projects that can transform the department or the company to the next level? And those are the things that you can start getting alignment from the business on, because you've identified that there are blockers, there are needs, there are issues that prevent the company from moving in that direction. And you're thinking about the solutions for those within the next five years. Speaker1: [00:37:04] That's I absolutely love seeing this and I love what you're talking about. And it was really reminding me of how I used to have a boss who could not prioritize things like at all. We would have big brainstorming sessions where we would sit around and just like, OK, no bad ideas, write everything down. And then and then it would come time to be like, all right, what are the things we want to work on or do or whatever. And then he would just label everything as a one like and then we'd have like 20 items that were one. And then we'd sit there and be like, oh, we can't have everything be a one. Like we need one thing to actually be one. And so then he would start doing one A one B, but then even in one A, you would still have things like he could only narrow it down to like seven different things at minimum. And it was the most absurd thing. And I bet you can guess how much work we ever got done and how productive we ever work because we never could, like, focus and actually figure out what we were supposed to be doing anyway. Sort of. If anybody has any thoughts on this, go ahead. But I also have a question I wanted to ask about what we were talking about before. Russell, did you have something you wanted to say? Speaker2: [00:38:14] Yeah, I just had just had a quick one to come back on culture. So as Antonio was saying, if you get a technical person at the executive level, then you can have impact. And the other side of that really is if you're not an executive or C suite level, it's very, very difficult to implement any change to culture. Culture is it's almost a fallacy in some areas. It's what the company says it is in a lot of cases rather than what the company does. It's it's talk that's talk rather than walk, that's walk. There's some good dynamic companies and really to walk the walk. But often culture is what you want the company to, or it's what the company wants it to be perceived as rather than what it actually puts into practice. So unless you are those higher echelons of the corporate ladder, very, very difficult thing to have an effect on company culture. So it was that was that a bit too negative? Speaker1: [00:39:12] Oh, no, I actually really agree with you. Speaker4: [00:39:15] I do see some faces Speaker1: [00:39:17] Anyway, but I, I do have I thought that was great. I actually kind of agree with you. If anybody has any thoughts on that, feel free to jump in, Mark, like you were thinking about it. Go ahead. Speaker5: [00:39:28] I do have thoughts because it's funny because the company I work at, like our product, is specifically trying to change culture within the whole company. And what's interesting is that, like through our data, we're actually able to like a treatment effect to see like after and implement our products. At this stage. There is this change. Right. And I kind of the term, if you are interested, is called action management. That's kind of like the brand where we're trying to go around. But what's interesting is that we have these are executives who normally it's like we'll send out a survey and get a feel for everyone and then happen every six months or one year. And then we'll make this giant ACRI culture. How? Change because we read what you said, and obviously it doesn't happen. And so somebody that's really interesting is when you want when you want to change the culture for our products, instead said we use nudges where we send these bite size interventions throughout the course of six months to nudge you towards behavior. So like next time you have a meeting, you know, ask your colleagues who the three toppings you think should be prioritized and then your colleague for your your your direct reports or say, hey, think of three things that you want. You want to prioritize and talk about the meeting. So it's like this dual kind things. But the interesting note about that is that you specifically have to target managers to to make those changes. So you actually want to implement culture change. Not only do I have to say at the top, you have to be able to implement it via the managers and ensure that direct reports see that change. So just just from my current work and seeing this Data all the time, both that like Fortune 500 companies and small companies like this interesting space called action management is actually where people are. People are agreeing with what you said, like, really you can't control culture unless you're at the top and even then, like, whatever. But there are certain, like products and ways to which people are starting to ship out within a company. Speaker1: [00:41:27] That's really interesting. I feel like you, Mark, have a very specific special view on that sort of thing because of the nature of homeo and everything. I wanted to ask a question kind of going back to what we were talking about before when we were talking about using your hands and things like that. I just we were mentioning this idea of like director level and staff and stuff like that. And I suppose that I could Google this, but for interest sake, I just hear, like, the idea of a staff and earth staff engineers like a staff Data scientist. A lot. Like what? What is that? Like somebody help me understand kind of this nuance between some of these different roles of what like what staff really means versus if you are a director with no reports. Yeah. Speaker3: [00:42:14] Anybody that knows our old man does not use the mute button today. The like staff, distinguished principal. Like I said, there's a bunch of these cool titles that are out there and in half the companies, it means we had to put the golden handcuffs on this person because they're the only one who knows how this one thing is engineered and architected. And if they leave, we're over. And that's there's a there's a career path for someone who has built something so complex and so essential to a business that they cannot be fired. And you see people like this in finance everywhere where they built something back in the 90s or the 80s. And they're still there collecting a very large salary because they're the only ones who understand it. So that's sort of one path. And when you see people who have that job title, just understand that a lot of them got there because they're it. If they leave, the company sent a lot of trouble and they won't train anyone. So in some cases, it's a negative connotation. They're this cool title is. Yes, they're intelligent, great people, but they're also gatekeepers. And we'd be better off without them. We'd be better off. We kind of moved them along. The other side is really somebody who can implement something nobody else can. And there's a lot of projects that will come up where you just need one person who can just brute force, spend a week or two solving the problem and just figure it out. And that's the most effective and efficient way. And so you'll get these people who are distinguished because they can do that from a Problem-Solving standpoint. Speaker3: [00:43:50] And typically they're also really bad at teaching other people what they know. And so they've never progressed because they don't know how to teach people to do what they did. During that three year stint in my career, I knew what I needed to do, but I was a horrible teacher. They kept trying to get me to train somebody to help me, and I couldn't do it. I just I had no idea how to do it. No one had taught me how to teach a process before. All that ever taught me how to do is teach technical skills to people. And so you've got another group who are really great engineers but really horrible teachers. And so when you see these job titles, they're awesome. When you get to that level, it's amazing. And if you're a problem solver, it's fun, it's enjoyable. It's what you want to do. But it's not necessarily always a great thing. I mean, we glorify amazing engineers and I'm kind of answering it from the perspective of, well, here's the reality of what it's like to be one of these people. And you're not always you're not always in the best company. And you yourself are typically in that role because you haven't learned some lesson that would allow you to be a multiplier where your capabilities would multiply all the people that reported in to you or all the people that were mentored by you. And so that's typically why you end up in these very, very, very distinguished roles. Speaker1: [00:45:06] Would you say that companies are sometimes reluctant to give that title to people, then Speaker3: [00:45:12] It's the salary because it's I don't think people but I almost want to take a survey like what do you think the highest paid Data scientist gets? And what I tell you, the highest paid Data scientists I've ever seen. It's going to disturb you because that's what companies don't want to hand this out, because with it, you've basically recognized that the person you know, you can't get rid of this person's person is essential to your core business. And that's why you've promoted them thus far and paid them this much in bigger companies like Intel's and IBM's. These people are everywhere because they have the core knowledge that nobody else has. And so companies don't want to promote you to that level because they want to teach you how to be a multiplier rather than a silo individual contributor. Because that's where you become more valuable is when you teach more and more people how it is that you do these amazing things and you learn to teach processes. So they're they're reluctant to promote you to that level unless they actually need you, because there's some downsides to it. You can get pretty complacent in a role where you get paid that much just to know what you know now. Speaker1: [00:46:16] Ok, well, now you've got to tell us the salary. Speaker3: [00:46:18] I want to see some justice first, want to see some justice. And I'll tell you, the highest paid Data scientists I've ever seen. Speaker5: [00:46:23] I'm total compensation. Oh, go ahead. Work. As I say, is this total compensation or just base salary? No total comp. Oh, one point five million. Speaker1: [00:46:33] Seven million. Speaker3: [00:46:35] Ok, no, not ok. Speaker1: [00:46:38] Ok, ok, good. Speaker3: [00:46:40] Just over two million dollars. It was at a hedge fund, just over two million. It was nuts. Yeah. I kind of wish I didn't know. It's like wait did I go to the. What about you wrong. Speaker7: [00:46:53] Could it be that it is the domain that dictates that kind of range. I would think the range depends on the domain. They are both well Speaker3: [00:47:03] The other really high paid like over a million was in supply chain. So definitely the highest paid average was that I know hedge funds fintech, but there are some unicorns lurking around out there and I don't even know like Facebook, Google. I have no idea. There's probably some people that are stratospheric in those companies. But no, I saw one in a supply chain company. I don't know if I could see the companies, but there was one that was a manufacturing supply chain company where there was an individual over well over seven figures. Speaker1: [00:47:34] I have another question. So when it comes to this is very topic, I found that very interesting, though, but it made me think about trying to like discern the culture of a company, like through the job description and stuff. So I kind of just want to throw out the question there, like from from a job description or maybe also in an interview or something like that. What are the things that help you read between the lines to be like, oh, that's what kind of company this is like or this company, maybe, you know, maybe an easy place to start is to talk about the red flags. But I guess I also kind of am curious about, like the white flags, too, like the things that you see that you're like, oh, this is a very good company. Does anybody have any thoughts on that? Speaker7: [00:48:19] So is your question more on how do we find that? Yeah, just Speaker1: [00:48:26] Yeah. Like say that you're reading a job description. What are the red flags or the white flags that help, you know, like this is a good company, this is a bad company Speaker7: [00:48:34] In case of Data find us positions that I have seen red flag pretty much would be to us quite a wide range of skill set that you cannot literally have one person have. That's that kind of to me it says that they don't really know what they want and they're just going to dump IP versus science versus engineering, pretty much everything on you. So I stayed away from any kind of job searches, and that's what I advise other other students in my interests. Well, that's one of the big red flag for me that I commonly tell others. The when you say white flag, what do you mean? How do you define a white flag? Speaker1: [00:49:18] I guess just any way that you want. But generally, just when you're reading a job description and you go, oh, I can tell that this is a, you know, a company of a certain way and it's a really good company. They have a great culture or something like that. Speaker7: [00:49:33] So for me, I'm from from the health care domain. So whenever I see positions that say, OK, they are using cloud technology, that kind of stuff, it gives me an idea of their internal culture. Health care is a pretty niche culture. Essentially, it's not really easy for someone to adopt cloud technologies. So that gives me an idea that how open minded they are, that's my synonymous thing. So depending on which domain you are in, something like that could. Relate to what you are looking for as a white flag. Yes, that's pretty much what I wanted to say. Speaker1: [00:50:12] That's really interesting. Mark, go Speaker5: [00:50:15] Ahead. So there's like two sides. There's the technical culture and then there's like the people culture for technical culture. That's kind of like my first pass. And I always ask kind of three main questions that really gets to like, do they know what they're talking about? Will this will this be setting me up for success or failure? Sometimes the recruiter knows, sometimes they don't. But the person who can answer this is what type of Data are they working with in the tech stack they have? The second thing is how how are they using this Data today? And then the third question I asked is whether with this position, how are they trying to use this data in the future? Those three questions really is able to help me kind of sift out who knows what they're talking about versus who isn't. So, for example, I was shaking my first Data science role, this this company, which is a pretty large company, they're excited like Mark, we want you as Data engineer. And I asked us three questions. I found out they actually just wanted me to essentially merge all their Excel files into one giant file. And I actually do. I said I can not work for you. I'm sorry I had to end this interview. But other companies where they can be very specific are like, you know, this is our tech stack. This is a Data we use. You know, we're cloud based. You know, we're we're not big data. Speaker5: [00:51:32] So we're not going to be using spark or something looking like actually specifically answer that they know what they're doing. But I really like the third question of like, what do you see this role kind of transforming that process? Because it's not just like, oh, we should just hire data scientists. They're being very intentional, like why they want my role. So those are the kind of key things I look for. And then for the people side, I feel like you can't pick that out from from a job description. So I normally sort of do research. So I'll go look a blog post. I will go look up Glassdoor, which will be very extreme views if possible. I try to interview people who used to work there but are no longer there. And then like during the interview, you can ask questions of like, hey, how how does prioritization work with your company or separately, who's going to be your direct manager? You know, hey, we have to be creating competing deadlines. What's your process for choosing which is the right one? I've had managers where, like, we do them both and we just grind my current managers, like we prioritize and cut the one that's not important. So depending on which one you prefer, that can help kind of distill kind of like what that culture culture is like. So that's that's kind of strategies I currently use. Speaker1: [00:52:43] That's really great advice. Also, Mark's boss once gave me the advice that in the interview you can tell if they care about, like, how you are as a person, how you think if they conduct the interview in a way where they're trying to like, assess like. Yeah, like how you think and stuff instead of it being a pop quiz. And I really like that advice not to answer my own question, but anybody else have any, like, strategies they use when you're trying to assess how good a company is built? Speaker3: [00:53:15] And that's what I find in job descriptions, is like culture comes through and where other people have brought up. You brought up the the crazy job description. When you look at a job description and you go, OK, you're insane. And there are a lot of those job descriptions where you look at it and you go, how am I still reading this? Two pages in? There's no way this is a team, not a person or maybe a small division of an army. And so, you know, there are those obvious ones where you look at the job description, you go, you're nuts. But then there are some subtle ones, too, where they say that we want you to be a self starter, we want you to be independent, but we want you to take feedback like, OK, so you're not going to tell me what I need to know to do my job. But when I mess up, you're going to tell me, OK, I got you. That's OK. Got it. And sometimes in the job description, the manager will say the the quiet thing out loud by accident. And that's there's a whole lot of you got to read between the lines in the job description and go with those two things don't make sense. And especially when I see I.T. type responsibilities in the job, we'll start talking about monitoring environments. I'm going, OK, red flag number one monitoring environments. OK, if that's by itself, I'm alright. Managing will you want me to also. OK, so now I'm managing environments not mine but ok so I'm an I.T. admin now. Oh you want me to know Linux really really well and you want me to networking. You know there's, there's kind of these and they'll stick them in different spots like they think you're not going to notice or something. Speaker3: [00:54:48] You know, you get worn down by the size of it. But it's those types of things where if you dissect the job description, you start finding inconsistencies where you just say, what do you mean it doesn't make any sense. Like Text X, sometimes you look at a text, I can go, wait, wait, why would you put those two text X together? That doesn't make any sense. The. Tools are either redundant or they don't work well together, and you start finding out that that's a consulting house where they're just going to be feeding your products, could be from eight different domains for different clients. And you start looking for inconsistencies that indicate you're set up to fail or you're going to be given little direction in an interview. That's the gotcha questions, those questions where they're not trying to tell if you can do the job. They're trying to tell if you can do like the best data scientist on Earth job. You start getting questions where they're not assessing. Are you capable of doing this role? Well, it's more like are you capable of doing eight different versions of this role that might come up because we don't really know what we need you to do. And so it's stuff like that where you start sharing dysfunction in their interview process, and especially if you're in the interview and you get somebody asking a stupid question, we get up and that's not a no. That's an unpopular opinion. But I had somebody I was 15 years into my career, asked me for my GPA. I just got a cat, not Fed Double-Parked. How do I get out of here? You know, there's just just and in the interview, it's not going to get better. Speaker7: [00:56:18] One thing I would like to add is someone from the job description. If they mention like a vacation policy, that's a good thing to give you an idea about the culture as well. That's something I tell the students as well to look out for. I do know about the company culture just from the job description, but definitely screening that. And then when you actually interview with them, the first level, that shouldn't give you a little bit more idea if you would be a good Speaker5: [00:56:45] Fit as a trap like I did for so many years that never took a Speaker2: [00:56:52] Vacation. I think also flexible working policies or conditions also is an interesting one, particularly for the last 18 months. If they advertise a position saying flexible working, possible percent remote, is that going to be their policy in six or 12 months time when the pandemic situation is a lot more stable? Are they going to say, you know, things have changed, that you need to be located in the office, you know, 60 percent of the time, hundred percent of the time. And so that's that's a key one to check also. Speaker1: [00:57:20] Yeah, I think that's really interesting to think about what the longer term impacts of culture will be from the pandemic versus what will end up being sort of short term. Does anybody else have any thoughts on this or any last questions? Speaker4: [00:57:38] I like to ask about how do they handle mistakes like done by other people? How do they correct those? What happens when somebody tried something and then it failed? How do they learn from it and things like that? Just kind of see whether they're looking for a unicorn, like somebody who will come in and expecting to get things right at first. Try so effectively. Here we are. So with regards to that answer, it gives you a feel for the overall guess. I want to say cautious, as we've mentioned in culture in terms of how do how does this company accept people who make mistakes and how do they learn from them? Is there a framework to try to learn from these mistakes and move forward with the overall goal? And I fully agree. There are some things that you have to ask during the interview to kind of mask any potential red flags that company may have. So your questions need definitely need to be strategic to make sure that they are properly surfaced. Sometimes they might say, oh, we were to do work on this project. Simple question, as you know, is this new what is the source of this need for this project? And then you might hear things like we've been working at it for X amount of months or years. And things add up to to me, this is a red flag kind of thing. It's like, OK, how come you guys still haven't figured it out yet kind of thing? So I think that's why you seem to really think about the questions that you're about to ask so you can kind of unmask any red flags. Description of a position can give you the red flags. Then in this case, that makes your life easier. You can move on. But when you have an even if you have a killer description of a position you should have, you should ask critical questions to to really surface any potential red flags so you can make a decision. Speaker1: [00:59:37] Well, thanks for all of that advice, everybody. And if there's no other questions, I think that will just end here for the day. It was so fun hanging out, having such a small group. I think that at its peak there were only eleven people here. So, yeah, like real intimate. Just having a nice chat with friends. Thanks so much for showing up everybody. I was really nervous that I was going to sit here and just be like, Hey, hi. Hello, Vivian, how are you today, Vivian? I'm good, Vivian. How are you, Vivian and that I was going to let Harpreet down, so thank you for showing up. Thanks for talking. I really enjoyed this discussion. And I hope that you all have a good weekend. And as Harp would say, you get one life on this planet and so go live it and live your best life and do what makes you happy. Speaker4: [01:00:29] Well, Vivian, you may think you don't have the radio voice, but you did an awesome job. So thank you for all. Speaker1: [01:00:34] It was so much. See you guys later. Speaker4: [01:00:37] Thank you. Have a good one, guys.