The Stack Overflow Podcast

Not surprisingly, engineers stay about half as long at their companies as the average worker in other industries. The reason? The force is on our side as tech workers. Our skills are high in demand, and we’re compensated well for the brainpower that we bring to the table. Plus, tech is evolving so fast, you need to keep learning in new environments.

The thing is, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Admittedly, it looks a little weird to be upgrading jobs every 3 months. But switching things up every year is understandable. Employers want to see someone who is leveling up and making major contributions, not tenure. In today’s podcast episode, the home team (Ben, Cassidy, Ceora, and Matt) gets together to discuss career advantages, LinkedIn A/B tests, and why gen Z is doomed when it comes to tech.

Yep, we know a bunch of you are thinking, “nope, no C-suite for me today.” Managing people dynamics? Doing things other than coding? Being responsible for a P&L, accountable to a board, and managing headcount? Before you stop reading, consider the case of our guest, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks, who began as a developer, got his start tinkering in open source, and was ultimately driven by the unstoppable force of curiosity to take on roles as coach and chief officer.

Matt reflects on the highlights of his career journey, how he managed tradeoffs between his love for coding with his momentum through managerial ranks, and how his passion to be a mentor has been the driving force behind his progress.

Cassidy Williams, who recently joined the C-suite herself, helps to steer the conversation.

Today’s streaming services have a vast content library, and a vastly different programming challenge than traditional television stations. Where linear TV tries to schedule content into time slots so the right demographics will see it and enjoy it, streaming services let you watch any content, any time you want. That means these service need to find a way to deliver the right content to every user, balancing what they will want with what will provide value over the long term. That’s where machine learning comes in.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Shrikant Desai and Sowmya Subramanian, two engineering leaders at Warner Bros. Discovery who shape how their ML program figures out what your next favorite show might be. We cover the tools they’ve been using to build their learning pipelines, how a viewer’s history can shape their future, and whether ML algorithms can fill a human curator’s role to surprise and delight viewers.

The best part about being tech builders is that we get to collaborate with some super-smart teammates. Every brain is unique, and we need this thought diversity to solve problems, build better products, and be more proud of our individual contributions as a result. But if you talk to a lot of people who self-identify as neurodiverse in tech, you’ll notice that folks tend to share the same experience of feeling a lot of pressure to fit in.

In today’s podcast, Matt and Ceora talks with Wesley Faulkner, senior community manager at AWS CIoud, and Mariann Lowery, Product / UX Research Lead here at Stack Overflow about their experience as neurodivergent individuals and how we can all do a better job supporting our teammates while taking steps to feel more empowered in our own differences, too.

As tech builders, it’s easy to get caught up in the tactical nature of our roles and responsibilities. From meeting deadlines to fixing bugs, we can forget the human side of work. In today’s podcast, Ben and Ceora discuss what it’s been like to return to in-person events after a two and a half year hiatus. Plus, Cassidy announces her new role as CTO and how she is juggling management with mastering an array of new technical fields.

In the world of technology, it feels like more and more software gets added to our workflows every day. Commit code, request a day off, expense home equipment, check your production code for errors—all these tasks use different tools. Sometimes it feels like all the software out there is just trying to steal our time. But is there some way that software can help optimize your time and let you get more things done?

On the fourth and final episode of our sponsored podcast series with Logitech, Ben and Cassidy talk with Paolo Passeri and Giulio Barresi about the ways that software can give us time back.

When we recorded this podcast episode, we heard rumblings that the Ethereum merge was coming. Now it’s here, and we’re in watch-and-wait mode to see its impact. Meanwhile, it seems to be the best and worst of times in the world of chip manufacturing. NVIDIA and AMD are releasing a new line of GPUs while automobile manufacturers have no choice but to cut back on features. Now that mining crypto is dead, maybe we can finally upgrade our video card.

Today’s podcast brings up a lot of questions about humanity and its devices. Ben and Matt reflect on the challenges of hybrid work for hardware developers, Apple Watch’s health features, and Ethereum’s promise for energy efficiency.

Well, we don’t hate it per se. It’s more of a love/hate relationship, if we’re honest with ourselves. You can do it wrong: excessive top-down structure is the kryptonite of developer brilliance. Or you can do it right: setting up the team so everyone feels empowered and blameless accountability lets you evolve from mistakes and improve over time.

For today’s podcast episode, we sat down with two of our public platform teammates: Jon Chan, Director of Engineering, and Shanda Woods, Certified Scrum Professional extraordinaire, who also happens to be a yoga instructor and cycling coach. We discuss how to embrace Agile and Scrum as a creativity-driving mindset rather than a system of micromanagement.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we discuss how the days of traditional application monitoring are fading. Applications today are no longer a single program, but a network of services connected by API and RPC endpoints across cloud containers that are created and removed as needed. There’s more data coming from sources that may not persist for long. Diagnosing errors becomes harder, especially in a crisis.

We spoke with Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder of Chronosphere, about the increased difficulty in diagnosing errors in production, especially during a crisis. Complex systems create more data, and to paraphrase: more data, more problems. Chronosphere wants to do more than just give you observability into your problems; they want to help automate the response.

Developers and software companies are always chasing anything that will make them more productive: to shorten the distance between thinking of a solution and coding it down to near-zero. We’ve talked about the mindset and methods for getting into a flow state on a previous episode of this series, but what if part of unlocking that flow is just better integrating your hardware with your software?

In the third episode of a podcast series sponsored by Logitech, we explore developer productivity, flow state, and the impact hardware and software can have on these key aspects of a programmer’s workday. Our guests on this episode are Paolo Passeri, Head of Software at Logitech, and Guilo Barresi, Lead UX Designer on the MX series of mechanical keyboards.