The Wisdom Wall

“And here's a, here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly a healthy part of the job is when you're like,…”

“I think there's literally founders who think cool, but it's going to kind of Contract out the engineering or kind of bring in some, some con, you know, an upside firm to do this. This is a hugely horrible, bad idea. If you're trying to build software as to not, and I'm super biased, obviously engineering leader type…”

“I got an engineer. He's amazing. And I got a designer and he's amazing. We don't really need product people. Like who are these folks? We know what we should do here. That's also a disaster. So like, I'm just picking one of the many sort of. Initial conditions that like lead to a successful product and just even…”

“You need those Stuart Butterfields. You need those Dr. Carps and those sorts of folks, but you also need like that set of folks that are just like turning the crank, building the crank and turning the crank. These are incredibly important. By the way, not sexy work. It's not sexy work at all. It's like process stuff,…”

“There is no accounting. Because it's, the moment we do that, then the project managers show up and they say, cool, have you done your wolf time? Great. Check. Let's do that. Thanks so much. Great. Good job, everyone. Now we're operationally sound. It's the shower time. It's that time for something to be created. And…”

“the bad ones create a scenario where engineering doesn't feel like they have a vote in what gets built. And the, this 29% time that we're talking about here is one of my countermeasures to that, in that an engineering culture where they don't feel they can invent things is a super bad engineering culture.”

“Consumery software, which means you're building a software for regular humans. I would argue you have equal parts engineering, design, and product. Products there to tell the story of the customer and to, to influence, like, to think like the customer, to think simply like the customer and not be encumbered by the how…”

“every leader that you just referred to, every single one, when I'm right, and they're wrong, and I can convince them of that in whatever scenario, they understand that. They go, yeah, well, yeah, shut up. You're right. Stop. I got it. I got it.”

“I think a lot of people want to be told what to do. Oh, I just threw up in my mouth. And I don't, I bet these people don't even think that, but I think, I think it gets you started. Right? It's not, you're actually not going to do it. I'm gonna say, hey, go do this thing right now. This is how you make coffee. You…”

“I think you can learn from background. Checks, but there are people that are, they're picking the people that they're telling to you. You gotta do like unsolicited ones are actually the ones that are actually interesting because someone who hates them tells you really interesting things, both positive and negative.”

“Accountability, if you ask most people what accountability means, they say, well, it means if I don't do what I said I was going to do, I'm going to be in trouble. It's not what accountability means at all. Accountability means to give account, to give the story of why we did this thing. Account. It's literally in the…”

“You're not, you get a new role. You're not good at it for three years.”

“30% of the people always going to hate you. It doesn't matter what you say. You're always going to be pissing off like minimum of 30%, like all the time.”

“you must stay technical as an engineer. They can tell. They know when you're no longer doing that, and your credibility, it's not gone, it's just different.”

“you don't get to say that you're building a product, but actually what you're building is a company and that's an operation, whether that's the recruiting or the sales or the product process or the quality process or whatever it is. And you're building it to scale. So if you're just shooting from the hip the entire…”

“My utopia is that engineers have a good chunk of time To do what everyone promises us during week of code or these other like one week of things. Hey, I want to build something and demo the CEO. These are great things, but that's an always thing. That's all a thing that we're built into the business is that engineers…”

“That's my utopia, is that there is that thing that's 71%, that's a real business and real stuff that's really clear, and we're debating it, and we're making it better, but there's also this free time to be kind of a free electron or a wolf or something like that.”

“That is part of the culture of these companies that you're talking about is that there is that, that debate culture that the CEO, she or he has created because they, they have a vision. They want to do the thing, but they also want their, their brightest and their, their talented folks to be arguing with them.”

“People try to write it down and they say, Hey, here are values and sort of thing, but that's not what it is. It's like, it's the early ways that their founders and the company treated each other.”

“It's not enough time and you don't, you got to see someone with bullets shooting over their heads to see who they truly are. It's, it's fine. Interviews are great. You learn quite a bit, but like I've been trying for this forever. It's kind of like root out and I'm looking at all the feedback in the first round. And…”

“Sound judgment is judgment which is, maybe you won't agree with it, but it is explainable, discernible, and you understand why I'm choosing to do what I do. And the reason good sounds bad, it's like, good sounds like I'm selling you on it. Like, this is a good idea, right? No. I mean, yes, I can market things and…”

“I'm deeply afraid of becoming irrelevant and it just, it can happen in two years. You can be at that place. That's so totally not relevant anymore.”