Mike McQuaid's Podcasts

Podcast: Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Sami is back this week with Mike McQuaid as they take a deep dive into the importance of open source maintainers.

Podcast: The Tech Lounge Podcast

Mike McQuaid discusses OSS Resistance: doing small amounts of open source work on company time, the risks involved and why it may help sustainability.

Podcast: Screaming in the Cloud

Mike McQuaid explains how Homebrew grew from a side project into macOS’s de facto package manager and how the project is sustained today.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

David Yee, VP of Engineering at The New York Times and head of its new AI platforms and products mission, joins Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra for a candid, behind-the-scenes conversation about why institutions are built to resist change and what to do about it. They dig into hidden norms, choosing the right battles, translating “how things really work” and creating stability for teams while you deliberately destabilize the system just enough to move it forward.

Podcast: freeCodeCamp Podcast

Mike McQuaid joins Quincy Larson to discuss career lessons and the software engineering skills worth prioritizing next.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

Performance reviews have a reputation for being stressful, confusing and often disconnected from reality. Too often they surface feedback that should have been shared months earlier or reduce a year of work into a single rating. In this episode, Mike and Neha unpack why reviews fail and how managers can turn them into a useful summary instead of a shock.

They explore what companies expect from performance reviews, what managers struggle with and what employees actually want to hear. The conversation covers documenting early signals, balancing positive and critical feedback, avoiding ruinous empathy and ensuring no one walks into a review surprised by the outcome. They also discuss practical ways to give feedback throughout the life of a project, align on growth goals and handle mismatches between perception and reality. A grounded, experience-based discussion for anyone responsible for giving or receiving feedback.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

In this episode, Mike and Neha are joined by Denise, an engineering leader and former colleague from GitHub and Pivotal, to unpack the reality of workplace politics and why ignoring them is not a neutral choice. Drawing on Denise’s LeadDev talk and hard-earned lessons from management and senior IC roles, the conversation explores political capital, information asymmetry, allyship and the idea of “table flips” as a finite currency.

Together they discuss when to spend influence, when to hold it back and how privilege shapes who gets heard. From advocating for promotions to using power responsibly on the way out of an organisation, this is a practical and candid look at how to navigate work under capitalism without burning out or selling yourself short.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

Product, design and engineering rarely agree and that’s a good thing. In this episode, Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra break down what healthy tension actually looks like, why alignment is overrated and how leaders can turn disagreement into better outcomes.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

Mike and Neha explore how leaders can recognise when things are going wrong, why admitting mistakes builds trust, how to spot low psychological safety, and the value of written plans, accountability and steady course correction when guiding teams through tough moments.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra break down how leaders spark momentum and keep it steady. They start with clarity of mission, ruthless scope cuts, and visible wins in weeks not years. They cover simple not easy systems that reduce drag, like milestone slices, anti-goals, handoffs that follow the sun, and temporary process as guardrails you later remove. They show why constraints breed creativity, how to automate recurring pain, and why teams should target low volatility over peak velocity. They close with saying no, letting the right fires burn, and building a candid culture through trust and social capital.