56: Run Toward Something - Career Growth, Mentorship & Work-Life Balance with Dave Schwantes

Brittany Ellich (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host, Brittany, and this is a podcast where a group of some of my friends and I met working on a team at GitHub, realized we were all obsessed with work getting better at what we do. And we decided to start this podcast to share what we are learning. We talk about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect.

Today on Overcommitted I’m so excited because we are joined by Dave Schwantes, a senior software engineer at GitHub with a career spanning companies like Instacart and Couchsurfing International. He has been deeply involved in engineering mentorship.

treating an in-house coding bootcamp that helped non-technical employees transition into engineering roles at Instacart without quitting their jobs or paying for outside education. In addition, Dave also helps co-lead the engineering mentorship program at GitHub with me. So very excited to have him here today. He brings a rare combination of hands-on engineering experience, deep mentorship roots, and a grounded, honest perspective on what career happiness and software actually looks like.

across different life stages. And he’s also a heck of a musician and is in a ska band. Hello, Dave, welcome.

Dave (01:16) Yeah.

Hey, really cool to be here. Like, been excited to be on your podcast since I learned you had one.

Brittany Ellich (01:24) I know. Yeah, I think you actually had told me that you did a podcast previously. And that was part of what I was like, maybe I could do that at some point because we were we have been on a team together at our adjacent teams, I guess. And we were on a team together on the Web Dev Challenge. So which I’ll link for sure in the show notes. So it’s been it’s been fun. Yeah. So to kick us off.

Dave (01:41) Yeah, we’ve made some cool stuff.

Brittany Ellich (01:45) What’s one thing you’re currently building or obsessed with learning right now?

Dave (01:49) Let’s see, so I’ve been trying to play around with AI tools like every other software engineer in the world, and I have this ongoing list of project ideas. I’ve been keeping a Google doc of these things for 20 years. And I’ve been going through and trying to chip off ones that seemed a little too hard to do, or I couldn’t justify the time to do them. So I’ve been going through and just tossing them in Copilot, or tossing them in Cloud, or something like that.

So I built a messaging app for my kid. I couldn’t find any like text messaging app I liked for them and I was tired of him asking me to text his friend’s mom to hang out. So I built him and his friends a messaging app. I built a little thing that let me train a machine learning model to detect squirrels on my bird feeder and then play metal super loud to try to scare them away. That’s been really good.

built something to try to organize the songwriting for one of my bands because we just kept sending music files back and forth and text threads and I couldn’t find it. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m chipping away at a bunch of little projects that I couldn’t justify the time for before.

Brittany Ellich (02:55) That’s amazing and such a great idea to build something. As a parent, my kids are still young enough to where they’re not wanting to message other people yet. But the idea of like, I don’t know, parental controls on software out there is very intimidating to me as a software engineer, because I’m like, they’re probably not amazing. So building one yourself, that’s such a good idea. I love that. How do your neighbors feel about the squirrel?

Dave (03:03) Mm-hmm.

In the end.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (03:22) vendetta you have.

Dave (03:24) Nobody’s like asked me about it yet. But every once in a while, there’ll be like a, you know, 15 second clip of Slayer or something like that playing super loud in the backyard. The problem is the squirrels don’t actually hate death metal. They’re kind of into it. ⁓ Yeah. So now I’m on a quest to like build some like Arduino thing that’ll like jump scare them. I don’t know. It’s it’s going to be a weird obsession. So I’m deep down that rabbit hole now.

Brittany Ellich (03:38) They’re rocking out.

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta find the right

music that the squirrels really hate, I guess. They’re probably, they’ve been hanging around your house long enough that they’re like used to too much music, Awesome. Cool. So first I wanted to talk a little bit about how you got to where you are in your career and how, you know, how things sort of connected for you. So you’re at GitHub now and worked previously, I think, at Instacart.

Dave (03:53) Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (04:14) And what is the thread that connects your experience all together, do you think?

Dave (04:18) So I’ve never been really good at having like a here’s my five year plan, here’s my 10 year plan. I’ve always kind of liked checking in like, am I happy here? Am I directionally happy? More than am I, do I have a great destination? And I guess kind of looking back at a lot of the companies I worked for, I’ve tried to work for places where I like what they make or I thought I would use what they make or I could relate to what they make in some way.

I guess my first job was, I don’t know, my high school buddy of mine was working at a company and asked me to apply there. So I worked there for a while. So I guess that wasn’t too ideologically motivated other than I was in my 20s and needed a job. But like from there, I kind of felt like I at least tried to pick stuff that was on my mind. I think when I was living in California, the first like startup job I worked at was in solar energy. It was

software for solar systems. And my wife was in grad school at the time studying energy policy. So I had been talking to her about that stuff a lot. So I’m like, oh yeah, solar could be cool. And then I was into travel. So couch surfing was cool. And I was sick of going to the grocery store. So Instacart seemed cool. I write software. So here I’m at GitHub. So I like to be able to relate to what I’m doing. I have a harder time just kind of.

getting excited about a company that does something that probably helps a lot of people, but I need some of those people to be me.

Brittany Ellich (05:46) Yeah, I like that. It’s a very different experience working on a product that is where you’re like one of the number one, you know, customer archetypes for it, for sure. How did you know at each transition that it was time to move on? Was there something that, you know, and it might have been different for each one, I guess, but like, how do you make that decision?

Dave (05:53) Yeah.

Yeah.

I think in general, I try really hard not to move away from things, but move toward things. Like, you know, my last job at Instacart, like I had a lot of fun at Instacart, met a lot of cool people, learned a of cool stuff. I didn’t really want to leave anything at Instacart, but I kind of knew that there were other things out there, other software companies of that size. And I was kind of I felt like I knew how Instacart

made software and I wanted to go somewhere else and kind of see what was universal, what was unique to different companies. And so I think it was the push of seeing what else is out there. But I think that’s gonna be a different pull at different points in my life. know, earlier on I think I was more inclined to jump to see more different things, whereas now I might be more interested in trying to go deeper in what companies.

offer. I think that’s just, you know, change in attitude, change in lifestyle, that sort of thing.

Brittany Ellich (06:57) sense. And I know having worked with you and done been a part of some mentorship related presentations with you that happiness is an important factor to you doing your job and you know it’s part of the recommendations that you give other people as well. Is this something that you have come to find over time or is this something that you’ve like just like a core value you’ve had throughout your entire career or what is that?

Dave (07:08) Mm-hmm.

I think

as I was working, I noticed people that didn’t seem happy. They might have been successful. They might have been, they might even been doing things that I kind of envied or even aspired to. But they didn’t seem to really be enjoying themselves that much. And I think it kind of came down to figuring out that you have to understand what you want.

In order to kind of have that holistic happiness and recognize that that’s that’s something that’s going to change You know what’s going to make you happy? At you know 20 is going to be different at 30 40 50 whatever like you’re gonna change your perspective your life is going to be different and I think if you If you don’t think deeply about What you really want what you value and recognize that that can change you can end up?

chasing things that look good, might have their benefits, might make you money, might get you prestige, but they’re not going to be fulfilling. You can run yourself into a career that you don’t really like. And I think that’s a risk, and I think being software engineers, we have optionality, we have some choice around this stuff. So I think you do yourself a pretty big disservice to not take that frequent time to reflect like,

What do I want? What’s really motivating me? How does work fit in with everything else?

Brittany Ellich (08:39) Yeah, I like that. Especially, I think I’m at a point in my career where I’ve sort of gone through the beginning and gotten to the mid-level part where it’s just gonna be, is this just gonna be a trudge until I get close to retirement? ⁓ And starting to realize that, yeah, that happiness and those things that I wanted early on are probably different than they are now. And so that’s a, yeah, it’s very interesting to think about.

Dave (08:53) Mm-hmm.

Yeah. An engineer I

really, really respect. I really liked work at my previous company. She was phenomenal. If she had wanted, I think she could have shot up Staff, Staff Plus, all that really easily. She was definitely a career senior engineer, but kept switching teams and switching areas of the company. She’d been doing application stuff, went and did infrastructure stuff. She built up enough reputation that she was able to move laterally a lot.

And I think she’s had a career she really likes because I think she knows that she knows what direction she wants to move in. like I always thought about that a lot.

Brittany Ellich (09:41) Yeah, yeah, I like that. Has your personal definition of happiness and like what a good career is, has that changed over time? Have you seen that? Have your own goals changed?

Dave (09:50) Yeah, I think so. I think early on career, learning is incredibly important. is always important, but learning exposure to new things, even jumping around company to company was a lot more appealing. There was this idea of breadth of exposure and also the idea of, this is a good time to go super hard on stuff professionally.

And I think as I’ve gotten older, seeing how work can kind of fit into the rest of my life. think work-life balance is a little bit of an overloaded term. But, I mean, a big part of my career happiness is how my job fits in with the rest of my life, whether that’s family, friends, interests, stuff like that. And sort of recognizing that there are things right now in my life that are…

unique and if I miss them for work things I can’t get those back. And just recognizing that it’s great to love your job and to be really into your job and care about it and put a lot of yourself into it but it is an exchange. The company’s paying you money for work and it can be a really mutually beneficial exchange and something where both sides are really happy but it’s still that part of the exchange and I don’t want to

overcorrect to that at this point in my life at the, you know, at the cost of some, I don’t know, things with my kids, things where I’m keeping my own sanity, stuff like that. I think it can be really easy to let external things pull your time. know, work is a perfect example of it. We’ll ask as much from you as you’re willing to give it. And so I think for right now, my happiness is

come a lot from putting the appropriate boundaries on different things. So it all fits together in a way that creates a happiness for me. And that’s going to be different for different people. Different people are going to decide, hey, I want to go super hard on work right now. I want to go super deep into this stuff. And that’s great. But it has to be a conscious choice. And I think for me, I’ve tried really hard to make those conscious choices. And to your point, it has evolved.

I think it was, it was like a Paul Graham tweet or something that like struck me. It was just, he said, I realized I’ve become more, or I’ve become less ambitious since I’ve had kids. And that was kind of like a shocking thing. I’m like, huh, there is a little bit of that, but that’s a narrow quote, right? It’s not that you’ve become less ambitious, it’s just that maybe your ambitions have broadened, right? And for not everybody, that’s gonna be kids.

For me, I’ve got kids, so that’s some of it. But your ambitions can broaden. think keeping work and life in these narrow buckets and pretending they don’t affect each other doesn’t really work.

Brittany Ellich (12:33) Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Especially, yeah, being also in a phase of my life where my kids are young and very heavily involved with them and like not willing to give up on certain things that otherwise you would miss them. So.

Dave (12:38) Mm-hmm.

I always think eventually

my kids aren’t gonna wanna hang out with me. They wanna hang out now. Work’s always gonna wanna hang out.

Brittany Ellich (12:49) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that’s true. You got to enjoy it while you can, really. So let’s talk a little bit about mentorship. I know this is something that is pretty important to you. ⁓ Like I said, we do a lot of stuff related to mentorship at GitHub together. I’m curious how that became important to you. How have you approached mentorship within your career? And why is that something that you ended up?

Dave (12:53) Yes.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (13:15) carrying about a lot at GitHub.

Dave (13:17) So I don’t know if there was a particular inflection point in my career where I’m like, this is going to be my thing. When I was in college, I had an internship. I think that really helped me get into the working world and helped me a ton. So when I started to be around the senior level and started feeling like I had a little bit more leverage at companies, I got excited about like

trying to do college recruiting, trying to encourage us to build mentorship programs, internship programs, things like that. And then that just got coupled with, I just got a lot of satisfaction around helping other people grow. That ended up being a thing that I noticed at the end of the day when I came home and I had helped somebody else with something, helped somebody level up, that felt like a good day. So just making a mental note of that, I dug into that a little bit more.

And I think as you become more senior, it’s important to find the ways you have the most leverage. That’s what seniority in software engineering is. It’s having leverage. And for some people, that’s going to be being really deeply technical, maybe doing deep architecture things, doing kind of cross-company communication. But I think making other people around you better is an incredibly powerful piece of leverage. And so I think as I figured out what it meant for me to be a senior engineer,

that was the aspect of leverage that kind of called to me the most is taking what I know and making other people around me better. So I kind of dug into that and it’s been really fun to watch people grow, watch people learn things. You kind of build these relationships and send people off and it’s kind of cool to see where they’re at. You had mentioned the boot camp thing that I had helped build at Instacart. I still go back and like…

check the LinkedIn of people who are in that. And like, that’s cool. This guy is, you know, a senior software engineer too somewhere. And we worked together when he was figuring out basic Ruby syntax. Like, that’s cool that I kind of helped push somebody in a direction. So yeah, I think it was just this really satisfying feeling of you can kind of help direct people’s lives, help people like.

make these big career changes or grow in their career in a way that really makes a difference. And I think a big part of the mentoring, I like doing the technical stuff, like helping people with all that, but I also like talking about all the squishy skills that come with this job. I think a lot of us get into this because we like the rigid technicality of code and of working with computers, but I think

When people realize that it’s not enough to just do that, you also have to have the interpersonal stuff, the awareness of your organization. And like we just talked about, the awareness of yourself to know that you’re doing what’s going to ultimately serve you. I think those are really fun conversations to have with people at every stage of their career.

Brittany Ellich (16:03) Yeah, yeah, I love that a lot. And it sounds like, you’ve mentored folks that were, you know, career changers getting into tech, as well as, you know, all the way up to, you know, I’m assuming folks that are early in career, mid career, etc. And I know you’ve worked as a manager at one point as well. Correct. Okay, so that’s

Dave (16:19) Yeah. Yes, which I

highly recommend to people. It is a great skill to have. I never thought I was great talking in meetings or like, you know, earlier in my career when I had a meeting, it was always a little bit of like, my God, that’s throwing off my day. I’m going to have to get up and talk to people. And then it was my job to talk to people all day every day for like four years. And now it’s way easier. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (16:43) Yeah, I

think there’s a a canonical paper that everybody always recommends about like the engineer or the manager IC pendulum. ⁓ That yeah about how like actually going back and forth between those things really makes you a better engineer and a better manager in a lot of ways.

Dave (16:50) Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, like

you gain a lot of sympathy for the decisions managers have to make. You understand how organizational decisions are made a lot better. And I think bringing that back to being an IC is a really useful skill.

Brittany Ellich (17:11) Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Is there anybody that you’ve, like, have you done any of the, you know, I’m getting into tech mentoring recently because I think that the world has changed a lot since when you were working at Instacart doing that. Is that still a thing that you’re plugged into at all or?

Dave (17:20) Yeah.

Let’s

see, I haven’t seen a lot of people who are trying to do the boot camp change thing. Like, 10 years ago, was a lot. There were a lot of people who were like, look, look at this great career path. You can go to school for 12 weeks and make a ton of money and be as happy as everybody else in San Francisco is. I see less of that. I have had a mentee through GitHub’s mentorship program a while ago who was pretty early career.

And I think they were struggling a little bit with, this for them? I think those are fun conversations. I mean, maybe not fun, fun, but like they’re interesting conversations. Like I really appreciated the honesty of somebody coming in and saying like, I’m not sure if this is for me. So I don’t know, I like that. And, you know, we talked a lot about checking in, like, do you like what you were doing?

Try not to run from something, like run to something. Figure out, try to dissect what you like and what you don’t like. Because software engineer is a broad title. I always think about like, you if this were construction, we’d use the same title for somebody who does carpentry and somebody who does architecture and somebody who does, you know, metals, like materials research to come up with stronger I-beams. Like there’s a lot of stuff to do under this.

under this job title. So I don’t know. I do think it is a little different today than it was 10, 15 years ago. So I think those are definitely conversations worth having, especially early in career.

Brittany Ellich (19:03) Yeah, I agree with that a lot. find myself drawn to mentoring other women in tech because I had some really strong, you know, women that were very senior that I looked up to early in my career that really like just having somebody to talk to and be like, look, there’s a person who is like similar to me ⁓ was, you know, it made a huge difference, I think, in my own career. And I think that there is a lot of conversation. The whole the entirety of women who code that that organization was built.

Dave (19:11) Sounds cool.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (19:31) primarily because I think it was like 50 % of women like left the industry by the time that they were 35. ⁓ Like it just, you know, so I find that there’s a lot of those conversations I feel like with the folks that I meet with they’re like, I don’t feel like tech is for me. I’m like, really it is, it can be. I think just like the traditional path might not be it. So I like that assessing of, you know, is this the right path?

Dave (19:39) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (19:57) Do have you had a mentor then within your career that was like very honest with you that like got you into this and the help you realize like this is a really great way to to meet with folks.

Dave (20:07) I don’t know if I’ve had as many like formal mentors to do that. I’ve had leadership that’s been really supportive in letting me build stuff that I was interested in building, letting me kind of run with things that I was interested in. I think that’s been really helpful. I’ve had, guess sometimes managers, sometimes like much more senior coworkers that have…

kind of falling on different parts of the spectrum of, I think it’s really good to have people that you can just bring half-baked, kind of kind of nutso ideas to and feel really safe being like, hey, I’ve got this weird idea, I haven’t thought this through, just be a sounding board, like do that. And then on the other end of the spectrum, people that you know, if you come up with a half-assed idea and you haven’t anticipated their questions, they’re going to maybe not be mean, but they’re gonna like,

you’re gonna get a sense you’re wasting their time. And I’ve liked having both of those people in my life. Like, it’s good to have a lot of psychological safety to like play around with things. But it was also good to toughen me up and like teach me to anticipate questions, teach me to like really form my thoughts and come up with, you know, not rely on other people to do all of the back and forth on things and get me to solid ideas faster.

by having that, I don’t know if I would call it a lack of safety, but certainly a more pressure to come with fully thought out ideas. People who have a little less patience for the chit chat about squishy ideas. So I think both of those have been really helpful in my growth and figuring out how to pick paths, pick things that I care enough about.

diving into.

Brittany Ellich (21:52) Yeah, I think one thing that I’ve noticed recently is that a lot of folks are using AI tools like, you know, chat GPT or Claude or whatever, like the chat ones where you could just ask a million questions to over and over and over. And, you know, they never get tired of those questions and are very polite when they respond, you know, that many times. And I feel like there’s been some discourse online that I’ve seen around like

Dave (22:05) Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (22:18) Are people talking to their coworkers less because they can use these tools to get a lot of the answers that they have about things? I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, if you have any at all.

Dave (22:28) yeah, no,

I’ve definitely been thinking about that a lot because this is a little bit of, almost reminiscent of, you early on when maybe tech was meaner and you’d ask a question, people would tell you to RTFM, right? The answer’s out there. Go look at the documentation. And yes, that’s good advice.

But it kind of misses what I think a lot of people are looking for when they reached out to people is not just the answer, but the human connection. at a fundamental, like, humans should be talking to other humans. That seems like a fundamental positive thing. But also, like, you build relationships, you build communication skills. Like, it’s important to talk to your coworkers to get answers, not just because that’s a great way to get answers or the only way to get answers, because clearly we can get answers other ways now, but…

It builds that rapport, it builds that trust, it lets you know who to talk to about other things. So I think looking at, I think if you’re just talking to chat bots to get answers, you’re looking at question answering in too utilitarian of a way, and you’re going to miss the softer, harder to measure benefits of conversations.

Brittany Ellich (23:36) Yeah, I’m really curious how that’s going to change over time because I find that myself too. I’m like, man, I’m not doing nearly as much pair programming as I used to because I think it’s just not as necessary to work through problems anymore. But it’s still, I I learned a lot from pair programming with other people, even if I wasn’t the one driving, because I got to see like, oh, especially working remote, like, oh, okay, this is how they approach this problem. Or these are the tools they know about that I didn’t know about.

Dave (23:43) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, you pick

up tools, you pick up keyboard shortcuts, like all that little stuff that’s not important. You’re never going to ask that question, ⁓ but you’re going to get stuff incidentally. honestly, it seems like there’s probably going to be, it’s probably going to produce a gap between people who have gotten that benefit just incidentally by talking to people, and now they’re not going to because they’re never going to think to do that because they can get their answers somewhere else.

Brittany Ellich (24:07) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dave (24:25) and people who are going to recognize that and then make the effort to interact with other people because they know they’re missing that. And I think that’s kind of the challenge. Whenever you lose out on some incidental benefit, you now run the risk of having this divide between people who aren’t going to proactively seek it and people who are going to recognize it and carve out the time.

and extra activation energy to seek it out.

Brittany Ellich (24:52) Yeah, yeah. And this might be just me reading into this because I know this is something that we’re both deeply involved in, but I wonder if formal mentorship programs are going to be more important to like, you know, there’s a reason to talk to people at least because like you’re paired together, like you got to talk. ⁓

Dave (25:07) Yeah, absolutely. And

I think that’s something that can fill that void is instead of incidentally talking to people, you might have to make it a little bit more formal of a thing or at least make it formal to get the ball rolling on things, to get people used to that being a thing that you have to do now that you can ask somebody without asking somebody.

Brittany Ellich (25:27) sense. So what does, switching gears a little bit, what is career happiness look like for you right now? Is it like the work you’re doing, the team you’re on, the craft or learning about AI? Like what is it that is bringing you happiness?

Dave (25:39) Yeah.

I think, let’s see, I think career happiness is kind of a limiting term. I don’t think you can have career happiness without considering other parts of your life. So not to completely avoid the question, because I think when looking at how the career aspects of your life affect your happiness, yeah, I think for me right now, it’s working on stuff that I think

should exist. I think if I were, I don’t know, putting ads in mobile games or something like that, I think I’d have a harder time. Mondays would be harder, right? I think it’s working with technologies that I don’t find frustrating. In general, I like the languages, I like the stack we’re doing, things like that. It’s the people I work with. I think you can work on a…

boring problem with fun people and have way more fun than working on a fun problem with terrible people. So I think that’s a big part of it. Am I learning stuff? Am I growing? Do I feel like at the end of the day, I’ve either done something that wasn’t done in the morning, I know something that I didn’t know yesterday. Those are good things to do. As I get further and further in my career,

recognizing that the turnaround cycle on that stuff is going to be a little longer. think earlier in career, you might get smaller issues to work on, and at the end of the day, you’ve closed three tickets, and that feels great. Being a little bit more senior, you might have longer satisfaction cycles. It might be pound your head against a bunch of SQL queries to try to figure out how the system really should work and whether or not this data is clean.

and you might end the day a little frustrated. This might be what I’m doing right now. But at the end of the week, the end of the month, whatever, you’re like, cool. There’s now an understanding of the system that maybe nobody in the company had before. That feels pretty good. And then I think going back to what I was originally saying when it sounded like I was trying to dodge the question of career happiness, it’s how does…

Brittany Ellich (27:26) So it’s like a personal story.

Dave (27:47) How does all of that fit in my life in a way that feels balanced for what I want right now? You know, like I talked about earlier, I think if I couldn’t, I don’t know, go to my kid’s soccer game or something like that because work was so all-encompassing, for me, that would be a problem right now. That’s not gonna be true for everybody. I think there’s some people like, hey, I’m going hard on this. I’ve got a career progression I’m into, a company I’m building, things like that, and there’s gonna be sacrifices.

For me, it’s knowing what I’m willing to push back on in every direction and making sure that the work I’m doing is accommodating to that, the people I’m working with, working for are accommodating to that. And then it all fits in a life that is ultimately where I want to be right now.

Brittany Ellich (28:38) Okay, well in the interest of time, I think we’re gonna wrap up because I think that you just answered all of the questions that I had related to the last segment there. So that’s great. So at the end of every one of our shows, we do a fun segment. At least we think it’s fun. have never come, we’re almost a year into this podcast and still have not come up with a good name for it, but.

Dave (28:45) Perfect. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (29:01) This, we do a different one for every guest that we have on. And what we’re going to do is a round robin with just two of us. So maybe we’ll both go twice. But we each get a an engineer at a career crossroads. And we give our most honest advice that we can for somebody at this point in their career.

Dave (29:20) Okay.

Brittany Ellich (29:22) Yeah, so we’ll see how this goes. Great. So we’re going to call this, What Would You Tell Them? So the first one, you can go first if you’d like. So this is an engineer who is three years into their career that just got passed over for promotion and is wondering if they should go back to school for an advanced degree.

Dave (29:27) Okay.

Hmm, okay. As somebody who did go back to school for an advanced degree, I would say do it if you’re actually interested in the degree and you’ve got the financial means to do it without putting yourself in a hole. Don’t do it because you think you’re gonna get a promotion or a raise. You will never pay for a master’s by promotions. I don’t know, for better or worse, like,

our industry doesn’t care that much. You can learn lots of good stuff, you can bring that, and it can be valuable, but the degree itself is not going to necessarily help you out.

Brittany Ellich (30:16) Valid, yeah, I think that in a lot of cases, you know, having the extra two to four years of experience that you might get by getting out of school and getting the degree might be valued even more than the degree itself. Yeah.

Dave (30:24) Mm-hmm.

Yeah. mean, grad school is fun, but don’t

go there like it’s not going to get you the promotion.

Brittany Ellich (30:34) Make sense, absolutely. All right, so the next one, I guess I’ll take this one. A mid-career engineer who keeps getting told that you go into management but doesn’t want to and is starting to feel guilty about it. I actually used AI to come up with these and didn’t read them too much in advance in part to do this. And this is hilarious because I am an engineer who gets told often to go into management but doesn’t want to.

Dave (30:53) You bet.

Brittany Ellich (30:57) This is definitely not a thing to feel guilty about. think that particularly I’ve noticed a lot of women in their career end up getting pushed into management. I think a lot of it has to come with, know, like women are often very like empathetic and like very good at like, you know, listening and taking into account, know, typically have high emotional intelligence, ⁓ not comparatively, but.

Dave (31:17) I have not had a male manager since

I’ve worked at GitHub. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (31:20) Yes, yes, exactly.

Yeah, I think a lot of women get pushed into management whether or not they want to. And then I think a lot of men typically get pushed towards like the more senior IC role. But it’s a very different job. It’s a very different skill set than engineering.

Dave (31:33) yeah.

Yeah, like, manager isn’t just the promotion

from senior engineer. It is very different.

Brittany Ellich (31:43) Yeah, and I get that even it’s a lateral move. It’s not even like a promotion. You go from engineer to manager and it’s the same level. So, yeah.

Dave (31:45) ⁓ yeah. I’ve seen that a lot of

companies. really do appreciate that they are parallel career paths.

Brittany Ellich (31:55) Mm hmm. Yeah. so I would say don’t feel guilty about it. And you know, if I think like if to parrot Dave here, I would say optimize for happiness and what brings you joy within your career. If you love mentoring people and love seeing them grow, then maybe a manager role is for you, but you can also be an engineer and be a really great mentor. And I think that that’s, that’s another path. All right. ⁓

Dave (32:16) Yes.

I would say as like

in seniority if you feel like there’s a good pendulum at your company It’s worth considering even if you don’t Think you’ll like it because I think even if you don’t like it You’ll learn a lot about stuff like as somebody who’s pendulums like there were things I really didn’t like about it and that is shaped The things I choose to engage in

Brittany Ellich (32:44) sense. Yeah, my last role was a manager for like the last year of it that I was like a tech lead manager. It was a very small company, so you kind of just wore all of the hats. And I do agree, I think that there’s a lot to be gained from like really trying to put yourself in a position where you’re trying to help another person grow in their career. As a mentor, you’re not necessarily as like tied to the outcomes as you are as a manager. yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. All right.

Dave (32:53) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (33:13) Next one for you, the career changer who is two months into a coding bootcamp but is struggling and doesn’t want to quit because they’ve already told everyone that they’re making the switch.

Dave (33:25) Wow, like two months is a pretty short amount of time compared to the amount of time you’ll spend in a miserable career. Coding doesn’t have to be for everyone, right? It’s okay. It’s a cool job. I like it. But that doesn’t mean everybody’s gonna be happy doing it. I think it’s worth giving it a try. It’s worth getting deeper into it if you have a good reason to keep pushing on it.

But I don’t know, you’re going to be way less happy working a career that doesn’t resonate with you and you show up and you’re miserable than if you have to tell people, oops, I changed my mind, right? I think that sunk cost fallacy is pretty weak, especially at the two month mark. I don’t know, I just talked to somebody who was a staff engineer who left and doesn’t really want to touch technology anymore. People can decide.

you know software is not for them whenever they want.

Brittany Ellich (34:22) Yeah, and think that’s actually pretty common. I feel like I’ve met fewer people that have been in the industry for 35 years or something, always doing engineering. Those are unicorns out there and usually find themselves in some sort of leadership role anyway, even if that’s not what they specifically set out to do.

Dave (34:29) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (34:41) Yeah, I agree. All right, last one. Senior engineer who is technically excellent, but quietly miserable. Great compensation, respected team, nothing wrong, but dreads Monday mornings. Yeah, I think my advice in this case would be you gotta probably make a change, because it’s not great being miserable. ⁓

Dave (35:05) Yeah.

And I think it’s tricky to figure out what change to make. felt like, especially when I was living in the Bay Area, there was this trope of new software engineers who would go hard, out, they’d, there a lot of yoga instructors, coffee roasters, like, there was this whole genre of jobs that were for burnt out tech people. And that always struck me as, maybe it’s a,

found the American extreme thing. We can only lunge from our extremes of burnout to complete abstinence from whatever was hurting you. I think if you’re feeling that burnout, that like, I don’t want to do this on Monday, you have to… Almost the easy path out is, screw this, I’m going to go teach yoga. Right? I think the harder path is figuring out like…

What do I hate? What do I like? Is there anything salvageable from this? How does this job fit into an overall lifestyle that I like? Like if the job enables a lifestyle you like and there are ways to do it in a way that doesn’t grind on your soul, you know, that’s a worthwhile path. If you’re done with it and you want to teach yoga, teach yoga. That’s cool. But it’s worth giving it a

a little bit of deep thought that doesn’t just lunge between extremes. ⁓

Brittany Ellich (36:29) of that.

Yeah, I feel a little personally attacked because yoga instructor is my backup career. I’m done with software engineering. But I think there’s also I mean, think people should also embrace like the idea of working part time too. Like do you have a lot of companies get have offers, you know, flexible working arrangements where you can work part time. ⁓ I’m sure a lot of companies do like you could you could just do less work and do more of the things that you really enjoy and maybe be happier. And I know that a lot of

Dave (36:44) Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (36:58) people that take that route too. yeah, needs more information, I think. ⁓

Dave (37:02) Yeah, and I think to your point

on kind of non-traditional setups, I think a lot of people are afraid to, one, figure out what they want and then ask for it. Like, what’s worse that can happen? Somebody says, no, you can’t work four days a week. All right, you tried, but now you’ve learned information. But like, some people make it work and, you know, work four days a week or work, you know, whatever hours facilitate whatever happiness works for them. Like, I don’t know.

Brittany Ellich (37:13) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dave (37:30) But you have to do that foundational work of figuring out what you really want or you’re not going to actually be able to find something that makes you happy.

Brittany Ellich (37:39) Yeah, very true. Well, thank you. That was fun. ⁓ Good example of a few different paths that folks find themselves on. Dave, thank you so much for joining us. Where can folks find you if they want to find you on the internet?

Dave (37:42) Yeah.

Let’s see, so I have a website, dinosaursytoeverybody.com. That’s just my personal site with a few blog posts and random stuff about me. I do have a site called Don’t Break Prod, which is tiny pieces of tech career advice. And then I’ve been posting a little bit on Blue Sky lately.

Brittany Ellich (38:17) definitely include all of those links to the show notes. And I can’t sign off too without saying that you need to plug your band. ⁓ Where can folks find your band?

Dave (38:25) yeah.

Yes, I do have a spooky ska band called Grave Danger. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you might find your music. And we should have a record out this October.

Brittany Ellich (38:43) I can’t wait. October even. Yeah, it’s like the best like Halloween theme.

Dave (38:47) That’s our thing. We always put out a record on Halloween. I’ve never released a record for that band on any other day.

I love doing album announcements on a tech podcast. That’s perfect.

Brittany Ellich (38:58) Yes, well I mean everybody has their parallel life that they’re leading. It sounds like music is like is your backup if you know once you’re finally done with tech. Yep. Yeah, that’s great. Well thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you do on the podcast app of your choice because they’re all different. Check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. Until next week, goodbye.

Dave (39:00) You

Yeah, that’s my backup. That’s my yoga instructor.

See ya.