In this month's episode, Steve Carroll, the director of development for the .NET team, interviews Scott Hanselman the Community Program Manager Lead for the .NET team about his career. Scott is a big believer in using the power of empathy and in this conversation he uses that power across the various skills necessary to be a successful programmer and program manager. [00:00] - Scott's role at MS [02:30] - Scott career overview - [05:25] - Finishing his degree while working while teaching [08:26] - Learning to be a consultant and what a CTO does [11:00] - meeting the early dot net team and coming on board [12:00] - the "warm" intro - the transitive property of friendship and opening doors for others [14:35] - being non-denominational in tech religions and strong fundamentals of scale [16:20] - knowing one layer deeper in the stack than your neighbors and sharing knowledge [18:00] - learning uncool tech, what's in common across stacks, and appreciating the history of [computer science [22:40] - difference between a mentor and a sponsor and finding one, being intentional [25:03] - being shown the ropes by a CTO sponsor, learning to navigate the room [26:43] - learning to navigate one layer down from his non-technical parents [29:10] - learning how to be a PM - building extreme empathy [31:53] - how did Scott learn to do empathy? Moving across worlds and practice [35:45] - Learning to do technical communication well - [37:17] - Using comedy, comedy as empathy, the value of improv [40:17]- "rubber duck" programming [42:31] - being the person who admits they don't know, helping junior people in meetings by asking their questions [45:14] - Scott's most valuable career advice - "don't waste your keystrokes"