Developer Tea

By Jonathan Cutrell

What's Developer Tea about?

Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.

With over 13 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell), co-founder of Spec and Director of Engineering at PBS. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Twitter: @developertea :: Email: [email protected]

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Using the Accountability Tr...

07.13.2023

Accountability can be complex. When something goes wrong, fingers start flying: *someone* needs to be held responsible. But true accountability starts before anything goes wrong. In this episode, we discuss the Accountability Triangle, a mental model for ensuring that your ...

Developer Tea episodes:

07.13.2023 Using the Accountability Triangle When Diagnosing A Failure Accountability can be complex. When something goes wrong, fingers start flying: someone needs to be held responsible. But true accountability starts before anything goes wrong. In this episode, we discuss the Accountability Triangle, a mental model for ensuring that your ...
07.03.2023 Career Growth Starts With Improving Your Clarity Improving your clarity is the beginning of your journey in engineering leadership. This takes courage and patience, but the investment will benefit everyone you influence, including yourself.
06.26.2023 Tech Lag Over Tech Debt If you've used the term Tech Debt, you probably know that the metaphor is loose at best. Taking on tech debt sometimes becomes a permanent choice, and the repayment isn't always a clear-cut investment. Most importantly, the concept of "debt" ...
06.12.2023 Good Negotiation is About Collaborative Problem Solving Negotiation is not about getting more of what you want out of another person. Real artful negotiation is about finding alignment, and solving the problems presented at a level of divergence.
06.03.2023 Tools To Deal With Layoff Anxiety Layoffs happen whether we want them to or not. Being prepared with a principled approach can help relieve anxiety and produce better outcomes for when layoffs occur. In this episode, I give you two principled mental tools to help you ...
05.20.2023 System Design - Limiting the Responsibilities Of A Given Actor Everything around us is primarily governed by some kind of system. The question is, are you designing your systems intentionally, or just letting them emerge? In today's episode, I give you one piece of advice when designing your systems: limit ...
05.12.2023 Focus on Process Orientation for Goal Setting If you don't have agency over your goals, how can they help you to begin with?
05.05.2023 How to Give Better Feedback - My Single Biggest Piece of Advice to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Feedback Good feedback isn't about getting something off of your chest. It's not about sharing your feelings (though that doesn't mean your feelings aren't important). It's about finding a problem that you and the person you are sharing feedback with both ...
04.28.2023 Planning is About Creating Clarity, Not Certainty Planning will give you the illusion of certainty. What you really need to execute on your plans is clarity. The reality is that the future is impossible to predict, and the further away from now that you get, the more ...
04.20.2023 Process is Primarily for Managing Critical Moments You may hate hearing the word "process." You aren't alone if you do. But, what feels like a slog today is really in place for when the most critical things happen in your career. Have a process, even if it ...
04.11.2023 Taking Advantage of Hedonic Adaptation The psychological phenomenon of hedonic adaptation can seem like the enemy of your happiness, but once you understand how it works, you can use it to create lasting habit change and focus on what matters most.
04.03.2023 Weber's Law and Contextual Framing Today we look at a mental model from the field of psychophysics called Weber's Law. This concept is a great analogy for a lot of problems we face as engineers and people leaders, and can help us understand just how ...
03.31.2023 What Defines a Senior Developer? - You Won't Use All of Your Knowledge A senior developer understands that they have to be very selective about how they apply knowledge. Know matter how vast your knowledge may be, you are limited in how you can practically use it in a given circumstance.
03.20.2023 The Pitfall of Control and Antidote of Trust Your intuition says that control is the ladder you climb to improve your career. But most great leaders tend to do one thing: the opposite of increasing control.
03.17.2023 Working Balance - Confronting Reality with Optimism In today's episode we explore the duality between confronting difficult realities while maintaining optimism. Specifically, we discuss a critical question: what does it mean to be optimistic?
03.09.2023 What Defines a Senior Developer? - Choosing the Right Granularity Level The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In today's episode, we'll add more detail to ...
03.04.2023 What Defines a Senior Developer? - Difficult Does Not Equate To Valuable The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the fact that ...
02.27.2023 What Defines a Senior Developer? - Systematically Communicating Value The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the importance of ...
02.24.2023 What Defines a Senior Developer? - Dynamic vs Static Understanding of Situations The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill ...
02.22.2023 Long Game, Short Game We play the short game so we get the chance to play the long game. Early in our careers, we imagine the best way to play is always focus on the long game. But in reality, we need both. Be ...
02.15.2023 The Rate of Change for Change Itself We can become accustomed to the rate at which we experience change, and imagine that that rate will continue to increase linearly. Eventually, change will level off. We accumulate fewer skills later in our careers, our network of connections might ...
02.13.2023 Protecting Flow State - Setting Your Session Feedback And Goal At the beginning of any work session, practice, performance, or any other activity you want to achieve flow during, you can give yourself the best shot at getting into flow by controlling a few simple variables. We talk about two ...
02.10.2023 Protecting Flow State - Plan Now, Pause Later Protecting your flow state may help you have more "peak experiences" - whether in your career or in your personal life. This is your opportunity to make the biggest strides and highest achievements. In this episode we start a conversation ...
02.06.2023 Golden Advice - Always Leave Margin For Extra Sometimes I hear advice that is worth its weight in gold. In today's episode I share one piece of advice that is almost universally applicable across life and career efforts.
02.02.2023 Your Purpose is A Projection of Your Complex Identity If your identity is complex, your purpose is by extension complex. In this episode, we talk about purpose as an expression, rather than a regulator, of your identity.
01.31.2023 Demystifying Purpose by Focusing On Your Purpose For Today You don't need to overthink purpose. Focus on clarity, and finding your underlying motivation. That clarity can be short-lived; purpose is a dynamic and powerful force, but only if you hold it lightly.
01.28.2023 Reframing Deficiencies as Strengths What you are afraid of in your career may be the thing that propels you. It's all about framing, and removing the negative and positive language. Instead, think about how you can best position yourself and that behavior to be ...
01.23.2023 Management Model of Ability and Will Applied to Self If you aren't doing something, you either can't or won't. In today's episode, we explore this very simple starting point for behavior change and habit development, and explore the boundaries of the model.
01.19.2023 Beginner Confidence You aren't going to put your foot in your mouth, or reveal some devastating level of ineptitude. Asking questions, especially as a beginner, is much more likely to gain you favor than disdain.
01.17.2023 Comparing Cost Curves and Second Order Thinking What does a feature cost? Your first answer will probably focus on the time to build, or the features needed... Maybe the amount of hiring necessary to deliver. But what about after that? The cost of our decisions is not ...
01.11.2023 Spectrum of Buy-In For Behavior Change There is a spectrum of buy-in for behavior change. In today's episode, I'll give you a thinking model for considering different types of buy-in along this spectrum, and when one might help you make better systems for behavior change in ...
01.09.2023 Your Learning Investment Portfolio What is your learning strategy? If you don't have one, you are implicitly saying that all learning is equal. Learning is an investment of time. Choose what you invest in carefully.
01.05.2023 Celebrating 8 Years - Plus, What it Feels Like to Be Wrong Developer Tea has been around for 8 years. Thank you so much for your incredible support over these years! In today's episode we discuss how it feels to be wrong.
01.03.2023 Using Strategy, Tactics, and Operations to Achieve Intentions Most resolutions aren't as simple as saying something and then doing it. Instead, focus on breaking apart your resolution by looking at intent, strategy, tactics, and operations.
12.23.2022 Resolve To Make Important Asks In The New Year Make a commitment to determine three requests that could change your life for the better, and the people you need to give those requests. Then, in the new year, make that a part of your resolutions.
12.21.2022 Complexity As A Depreciating Asset Complexity is an asset, but often it depreciates in value over time. Simplification strategies should evaluate what kind of value complexity is providing, and whether that could be replaced or if it doesn't provide sufficient exponential value versus the cost ...
12.15.2022 Your Biggest Opportunity is In Your Daily Influence Opportunity is in front of you every day. But, you may not recognize it at first, because you by default will likely imagine yourself to be an external observer. If you change that mental model, and view yourself as an ...
12.12.2022 Get Acquainted With What Holds You Back What will hold you back from achieving what you want to achieve in your future? How do you imagine your future, and what do you assume will keep you from going further? In today's episode, we'll do a visualization exercise ...
12.09.2022 How Ordering Your Events in A Day Can Matter Practical application of psychology can help us understand how to order our days more consciously. In this episode, we talk about priming and regression to the mean, and how they could impact our work as engineers and managers.
12.07.2022 Don't Fear AI Taking the Coding Jobs (Fixed Audio) AI and code generation will change your work... But it's time for us to find the path forward.
12.05.2022 Don't Fear AI Taking the Coding Jobs AI and code generation will change your work... But it's time for us to find the path forward.
11.30.2022 Focus On Activities With Asymmetrical Upside Focus on things that provide asymmetrical upside. This is a personalized ROI evaluation. This is how you invest your time wisely.
11.28.2022 Misjudging Others Attention On Us We imagine others are more interested in our mistakes or self-conscious areas than they are. We also imagine they pay little to no attention to us at most other times. Both of these are errors in judgment.
11.24.2022 An Outsider Exercise in Gratitude We adapt to our circumstances. This dampens our capacity for gratitude, as we become less aware of what we are experiencing the longer we have the same experiences. In today's episode, we use a version of an exercise from Julia ...
11.21.2022 You Know The Right Decision, Now Reduce The Friction You know how to determine what would be a good decision. You have the tools and the reasoning; if you find yourself still not making the right decision, you may be tempted to focus on the "left side" - increasing ...
11.16.2022 Using Observational Techniques to Find Your Personal Values Determining your values isn't just about fluff. This is what you personally care about. In this episode, we talk about two ways to use direct observation as a tool for determining your values, and why those values are not just ...
11.14.2022 Avoid Defining Success Outside Your Locus of Control Focus on what you can control. Create incentives and language and internal narrative that produces the right actions within your locus of control. Avoid attaching your definition of success to things outside of your control.
11.10.2022 The Toxic Laziness of Overwork Culture Don't buy in to the lie that you have to overwork to succeed. Not only is it not true, it's also dangerous - and the opposite is more accurate.
11.07.2022 Start With Precise Communication In today's episode, I provide a simple coaching tip on improved communication for software engineers. It's simple: always make precision explicit, and layer context. Start with precision, then create meaning on top.
11.02.2022 The Error of Discounting the Unexpected We don't think about the unexpected as a category of possible outcomes. This leads us to assign overestimated probabilities to things that are front of mind, and discount the likelihood of things we don't expect. This may lead us to ...

Older episodes

Developer Tea

What's Developer Tea about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Developer Tea episodes:

Using the Accountability Triangle When Diagnosing A Failure

Career Growth Starts With Improving Your Clarity

Tech Lag Over Tech Debt

Good Negotiation is About Collaborative Problem Solving

Tools To Deal With Layoff Anxiety

System Design - Limiting the Responsibilities Of A Given Actor

Focus on Process Orientation for Goal Setting

How to Give Better Feedback - My Single Biggest Piece of Advice to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Feedback

Planning is About Creating Clarity, Not Certainty

Process is Primarily for Managing Critical Moments

Taking Advantage of Hedonic Adaptation

Weber's Law and Contextual Framing

What Defines a Senior Developer? - You Won't Use All of Your Knowledge

The Pitfall of Control and Antidote of Trust

Working Balance - Confronting Reality with Optimism

What Defines a Senior Developer? - Choosing the Right Granularity Level

What Defines a Senior Developer? - Difficult Does Not Equate To Valuable

What Defines a Senior Developer? - Systematically Communicating Value

What Defines a Senior Developer? - Dynamic vs Static Understanding of Situations

Long Game, Short Game

The Rate of Change for Change Itself

Protecting Flow State - Setting Your Session Feedback And Goal

Protecting Flow State - Plan Now, Pause Later

Golden Advice - Always Leave Margin For Extra

Your Purpose is A Projection of Your Complex Identity

Demystifying Purpose by Focusing On Your Purpose For Today

Reframing Deficiencies as Strengths

Management Model of Ability and Will Applied to Self

Beginner Confidence

Comparing Cost Curves and Second Order Thinking

Spectrum of Buy-In For Behavior Change

Your Learning Investment Portfolio

Celebrating 8 Years - Plus, What it Feels Like to Be Wrong

Using Strategy, Tactics, and Operations to Achieve Intentions

Resolve To Make Important Asks In The New Year

Complexity As A Depreciating Asset

Your Biggest Opportunity is In Your Daily Influence

Get Acquainted With What Holds You Back

How Ordering Your Events in A Day Can Matter

Don't Fear AI Taking the Coding Jobs (Fixed Audio)

Don't Fear AI Taking the Coding Jobs

Focus On Activities With Asymmetrical Upside

Misjudging Others Attention On Us

An Outsider Exercise in Gratitude

You Know The Right Decision, Now Reduce The Friction

Using Observational Techniques to Find Your Personal Values

Avoid Defining Success Outside Your Locus of Control

The Toxic Laziness of Overwork Culture

Start With Precise Communication

The Error of Discounting the Unexpected