Work In Progress

Please welcome the Work In Progress podcast's first guest: Jeff Weiss!

Jeff comes to us from a storied career spanning over 20 years. In this episode, Jeff shares interviewing tips as well as his perspectives on what makes engineers successful.

If you enjoyed his perspectives, Jeff is always open to sharing his wisdom.

Tweet at us!

Jeff's LinkedIn

Special Guests: .

For the last episode of the year, we're having a very frank watercooler chat about some of the thoughts and struggles we're still going through.

It's a shorter episode, and we hope you enjoy a slightly different kind of conversation.

This is the last episode we're publishing for the year - We'll be taking some time off to recharge creatively and episodes will resume in the first week of January. We've got brand new stuff lined up that we're super excited to share with you.

Between now and then, hit us up on twitter! Let us know what you want to see!

Referenced in the Episode:

In any sort of endeavor, it's always worthwhile to stop and think about how you got to where you're at.

In the industry, we have a process for this and it's called a Retrospective.

While we don't necessarily go through a full-fledged retrospective process, Alan and I spend a bit of time thinking about the things that got us where we are with the show. On that topic, we want to thank everyone who's given us a listen and provided feedback. This learning process has been incredibly fun and rewarding, and the biggest factor of that is our listeners. Please continue to let us know what you enjoy and what you want to hear more of, but also let us know the ways we can improve. The show's always been a Work In Progress, and we, ourselves, are no different.

Bonus: Spotify's Retro Toolkit in case you want to conduct a retrospective of your own!

What's it really mean to be a mentor to someone?

What should you look for in a good mentor?

When do you know it's time to find one?

While mentorship is commonly talked about in professional development, it can be quite a confusing topic. For one, how do you even know when you're ready to be a mentor? These questions and more can often muddy the waters for prospective learners and teachers alike. In this episode we explore what mentorship means to us and how we've experienced it in our lives. Furthermore, we share what we believe can lead to successful mentor/mentee relationships and ways to seek them out.

In the episode, Minh refers to Simon Sinek's description of Mentorship - check out Simon's original comments below

Start off on the right foot, and stay in the driver's seat!

New starts can be really scary. You have new teammates, new processes, and brand new expectations.

In this week's episode we cover all these questions and more as we take a look into how you can start off a brand new job - being in control.

Additional Episode Notes:

Alan's new job Checklist

Links:

• Generic Onboarding Checklist

Burnout is a real problem.

More and more young people are experiencing the fatigue and exhaustion associated burning out at their day jobs.

In this episode we talk about what actions you can take to stave off burnout. More importantly, we discuss techniques and mindsets to have that can drastically change the makeup of your environment such that certain factors simply don't exist.

Taking action is not meant to remove the responsibility of preventing burnout from your organization's leadership, but rather it is to give individuals a sense of capability in contributing to the positivity of their environments.

Burnout is one of the leading causes of employees leaving behind their old jobs.

In this episode we talk about what burnout is, and share our own stories of burnout. We talk what causes it, why it affects everyone, and some early warning signs to keep an eye out for.

In this episode, we explore the idea of imposter syndrome, how it shows up, and how do we handle it?

Imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". We jump into a discussion about how this affects us as engineers and managers.

As we discuss how to mitigate these feelings of uncertainty, we explore small things you can do immediately in order to make an impact for yourself and your teams and learn that feedback isn't to make you feel bad.

In this episode we start by exploring our own interviewing experiences lately.

We jump into a discussion about business context and what it means to have to develop that for any given position.

As we talk about the importance of business context we also touch on what it means to put effort towards curating that sort of context.

Start with Why

We take a quick dive into motivations behind why we, Minh and Alan, decided to go into software.

Like many, we came from humble beginnings and we share stories and perspectives of our own growth through this industry.