About this DevOps Toolchain Episode:
Today's episode delves into the journey of transitioning from an individual contributor to an engineering leader. Our guest, Evan Niedojadlo, shares invaluable insights from his rich experience, beginning at a consulting firm and eventually breaking into the tech industry.
Register for AutomationGuild 25 to see Evan's session: https://testguild.com/ag-2025/
As someone who has navigated various roles, Evan offers practical advice for those considering leadership positions, emphasizing the importance of resources. He discusses the delicate balance between maintaining technical skills and embracing management responsibilities, sharing his personal routines and favorite learning tools.
Throughout our conversation, we delve into career path considerations, financial progression, and the potential fear of skill erosion when stepping into management. Drawing from his experiences with high-tier engineers and industry dynamics at companies like Meta and Google, Evan discusses the flexible and diverse career landscapes within tech.
We also explore the benefits and challenges of using AI and chatbots in management processes and touch upon the macroeconomic factors influencing tech industry hiring.
For those looking to transition to (or excel in) leadership roles, Evan's journey is packed with lessons on effective communication, stakeholder management, and personal growth.
Listen up!
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So, don’t miss out. Head over to https://testguild.me/devopsbook and grab your copy today.
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About Evan Niedojadlo
Evan Niedoajdlo is an engineer who rolled the dice, left university for a software startup at 19 and played in various metal bands on weekends.
After working at several early-stage companies, he took a new role, was offered a move across the country, packed a bicycle and clothes, and hit the road to Austin, TX.
He's currently focused on reliability, distributed systems, and infrastructure, with some security sprinkled on top.
If he's not on a computer, he's brewing, making music, or spending time with family and friends.
Connect with Evan Niedojadlo
- Company: www.peddle
- Twitter: www.eniedojadlo
- LinkedIn: www.evanniedojadlo
- YouTube: www.randomthoughtstech
- Git: www.evanniedojadlo
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tgdEvanShiftingfromContributortoEngineeringLeader172.mp3
[00:00:00] Get ready to discover some of the most actionable DevOps techniques and tooling, including performance and reliability for some of the world's smartest engineers. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the DevOps Toolchain Podcast and my goal is to help you create DevOps toolchain awesomeness.
[00:00:19] Hey, it's Joe and welcome to another episode of the Test Guild DevOps Toolchain. Today, we will be talking with Evan all about going from an individual contributor to engineering leadership and lessons learned from AI and a whole bunch more. Evan is a really interesting guy. He's done a lot. He's always switching between different types of almost seems like roles. Really excited to have his perspective here. If you don't know, he's an engineer that's currently focused on reliability, distributed systems, infrastructure, automation, security, pretty much everything. And he is a frequent contributor to the Test Guild podcast and Automation Guild conference in really looking forward to catching up with them. You want to miss this episode. Check it out.
[00:00:57] Are you ready to level up your DevOps game and crush those quality challenges? Whether you're dealing with flaky tests, scaling automation, or trying to integrate security into your pipelines, we got something just for you. Introducing the DevOps Quality Testing Playbook from TestGuild. It isn't just another PDF. It's your go to guide packed with actionable insights, best practices, and strategies to help you create a bulletproof DevOps toolchain. It's built specifically for engineers, testers, and DevOps teams who want to optimize their workflow and drive continuous quality throughout their pipelines. The best part? It's free and ready to download, so don't miss it. Head it over to Testguild.me/DevOpsbook and grab your copy today. Stay ahead of the game. Optimize your pipelines and let's crush those quality challenges together.
[00:01:48] Joe Colantonio Hey Evan, welcome to The Guild.
[00:01:51] Evan Niedojadlo Hey, Joe. It's great to be back.
[00:01:53] Joe Colantonio Great to have you. So as I mentioned, you're always working on something new. And so you recently posted an idea for a news show on going from an IC to an engineering leadership type of role. I thought maybe we'd start off there why did you go from? And when we say, IC it's individual contributor to more of engineering leadership, I get asked questions all the time. How do I move into leadership or management? Is that the right thing for me? So maybe a little background. What led you there?
[00:02:20] Evan Niedojadlo Sure. So, yeah, I've been doing software for a while now just in different tiers and levels and disciplines, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's something I've done for 2016. I took on the role of manager of Quality, whatever we were calling the title back then. So yeah, I mean, for me it's a matter of switching between IC and management and leadership and all that. More recently, I was given the opportunity to take on more of an engineering management role across multiple disciplines. In this case its managing application security, infrastructure security, so like that realm, software quality as well, and then infrastructure, just the infrastructure in general. That's what I'm doing. Given that, I mean, realistically, was an interest to have more say in the decisions and be more part of the actual decision making because just being an IC is great. Once again, I was a manager. I was an IC, I was a manager again. Here I am again. It's one of those things where it doesn't mean I stopped writing code. It's not the case at all, but there's definitely more of an emphasis on process management. And I think the primary reason was just in interests of owning something, that's my interests and owning the process, having a say in, approvals and these kinds of things. And then the management of where we're going, numbers of people and all that realm. And so that's really why.
[00:03:42] Joe Colantonio Nice. I assume when you first do this, I know you've gone back and forth. What are some of the biggest challenges you faced when transitioning from be an individual contributor to leadership and maybe how you overcame them?
[00:03:53] Evan Niedojadlo Sure. I think the first time I was honestly probably I would say probably time zone, if anything. Timezone was a big, big issue. That was like before we had a bunch of remote workers, of course, spread across the world. That was probably one of the bigger issues, it was definitely time zones and perfectly timing meetings and scheduling all of these different things that we had. And I say meetings, but realistically we're trying to keep it. I don't know, the term is like less meetings, more confidence documentation kind of thing. Like just an idea, I create a confluence doc if it's an architecture, if it's a new tool that we're using. move migration from another tool to a new tool, these kinds of things, and then a traveling to the location or I traveled and works the teams all throughout the world. That's the point. But I think the first time I want to say more the second time I traveled was just kind of setting a baseline of these are kind of like expectations of what we want to accomplish. And I think it was pretty great the second time I traveled to India, worked to some teams over there. Still working with those teams actually so to then worked with these teams for ten plus years now, which is rare to say in a lot of ways. Things have worked out quite well, but it was really just helping management of picking and choosing when we could meet and then kind of a process around how we can share these ideas more easily. Years ago, we were using a different tool. It wasn't complex at the time. Those kind of some of the difficulties. Of course, getting across the finish line was another thing. That was a whole different process. Finishing individual projects versus being responsible when those get over the finish line was a big, big issue. I mean, there's so many books you can read about that. I think one of the earlier ones that I read was the mythical man month and just understanding everything from Scrum to back in the day, my stuff that was doing XP advisor way back in the day like. So there's a lot of things I learned from him, a lot of things I had to pick up throughout the years, reading books and just hearing from people and just understanding like it's really like one of the more challenging things I think of all time is estimation. There's so many processes wrapped around that and books and still to this day talks and agile conferences and whatnot. For us, it was really understanding what worked for us. That was another, I think major difficulty. You can't just say like, Hey, I'm going to follow Agile now this flavor of Scrum and move forward with that. I think was a little more difficult than anything. But yeah, those were some of the difficulties and some of the ideas we get around those.
[00:06:17] Joe Colantonio Did you feel that because you started off as an individual contributor, you kind of knew how things worked because a lot of times you get management hired as management and they don't necessarily understand the technical, but you understand the technical and maybe understand the people. Did you see that as a benefit as starting off maybe knowing the business and how things worked before you became management or leadership?
[00:06:39] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was a big deal. I mean, I've worked with management, my first roles, for example, like when I was 19, I left school and got a job in software, and I remember a lot of scenarios where I had management. I didn't quite understand the code is some difficulties there, and that's not matter of not understanding the code, because nowadays you can quite literally copy and paste something into LLM and understand a bit more. It helps you understand it, which is great. I think it's a good thing. It helped me and it's helping other people. But back then I think it was more of an issue of when we were stuck on a particular block or something like that. It was difficult to communicate, always an issue. This was the first company. The things ended up getting better there and whatnot. I went to another company as a consultant. And then you're an IC, and you're dealing with companies, you're working with all sorts of different companies. They don't understand the technology behind it. Over the years, I've really like, I think, working in QA, working in software development, working in infrastructure now like over the years it's been a matter of getting better and better at communicating what needs to be done and why. I think that's pretty important, not just doing it for the sake of doing it or falling down a rabbit hole and getting really interested in specific language. Maybe I was interested in Crystal at one point or maybe I was interested in Elixir and Phoenix.
[00:07:53] Joe Colantonio Right. Kind about Crystal.
[00:07:57] Joe Colantonio Yeah. There's all these things that, you can fall down the rabbit hole. And I've been guilty of that, of course, before, particularly like 2018, 2019, pushing Kubernetes a little bit too early. That was before we were ready for any of that. I mean, it's definitely like over the years working in the industry, being hands on, actually finishing the projects, doing the project, committing the code, committing to infrastructure as code, potentially, TerraForm. But yeah, I mean that's been a big deal, communicating that to stakeholders, leadership, selling leadership on ideas and goals, not just to use the technology, but to use it for business impact. I mean that's kind of like the big thing is that level of communication, particularly across the business, is hugely impactful.
[00:08:37] Joe Colantonio What always stop me from going into management, not necessarily leadership because I did have some leadership roles as having a staff or people reporting to me because I control what I do. I don't want to have to worry about what someone else is going to do, what they're going to do. So did you have any people skills or people management skills you need to learn that maybe was something that you weren't used to?
[00:08:58] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, yeah. Especially with me. I mean, I'm the problem. I mean, I don't know, like there's different terms for people introvert and all these, all these different terms and whatnot and yeah, I mean, I think meet up helped me quite a bit. I mean, this is something I've run for quite some time now.
[00:09:15] Joe Colantonio That's the Austin meet up.
[00:09:17] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, yeah. So Austin, I mean we haven't done anything in a little while. Covid definitely destroyed a lot of those good times without a doubt. But we did one about, I think last year. We did one. Back in 20-God, when we started 2017, even before that, really before I started my own meetup, that really helped me with the whole people skills thing. What is the movie? Office Space, I think it's called. There's a quote for the office space, which is so funny because it definitely parallels to, a lot of people person and all these kinds of things because I wasn't a people person by any means. I think playing in a band helps.
[00:09:51] Joe Colantonio Really?
[00:09:52] Evan Niedojadlo Like playing in bands and touring like these goes a little bit. These goes like Rhode Island.
[00:09:56] Joe Colantonio Okay.
[00:09:57] Evan Niedojadlo Connecticut, Massachusetts, and whatnot. Like I don't have to do YouTube beyond that at some point. But I think that helped in terms of just being out there was a big piece of it.
[00:10:05] Joe Colantonio Why is that? Because I was in a band that helped me not be afraid so much because I would never get in front of people. And I'm just.
[00:10:11] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, yes.
[00:10:13] Joe Colantonio I'm in front of people kind of getting used to it.
[00:10:16] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah. So it's like a combination of things like meet up and playing in a band, but specifically playing in a band. It was more so like the collaboration aspect of things. When you're sitting there writing music, it's just you have to collaborate. You're forced to collaborate. You can't just, like, isolate over in your own corner and let me write these lyrics out or let me write these notes out or tabs. That was a big thing or even when like we were recording it or something, we had to communicate and understand how the DIY aspect of getting out there and finding venues to play with and collaboration with other bands and all that was a big, big deal. That helped me greatly, I think because I was working in software and playing shows during the evening, which is quite fine. Now, I'm older, I can't do that. I still have guitars and whatnot. For good times. And then on the meet up side, meet up helped as well because now like, there's the band stuff communicating with the bands, the communication aspect of things and now, meet up was here you're communicating with other professionals in your industry from different totally different backgrounds with what companies are coming from and everything else and all that. I think that was pretty impactful. So yeah, I mean, those two things really help me the most, like get out of my shell. That's definitely a big, big part of all of it.
[00:11:29] Joe Colantonio Good point about the band because I used to be on a band, we did a lot of improvization, so relying on other people, building up your trust skills and also listening skills seems like a lot of people in this industry have music backgrounds. I guess that would transcend to managing a team. Be able to trust your team, making sure you're listening to your team and being an in sync with them probably would be really helpful as well, I would think.
[00:11:52] Evan Niedojadlo Absolutely. Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned that I have friends that I played the bands with that ended up in software. So shout out to Joe. Yeah, like Joe Thibeault another friend of mine. But that's funny. Awesome.
[00:12:06] Joe Colantonio A lot of times people also they you just use like testing or entry level developing position just to get their foot in the door because they want to get into leadership in management for more money. Do you see that as a good enough reason to go into management or is that. I know different organizations sometimes have a technical track where you can make more money, not necessarily have to go into management to get there.
[00:12:29] Evan Niedojadlo Right. I mean, for me it's a little bit different cause I've only worked in startups for the most part. I worked in small and medium sized companies pretty much my entire career at this point. I've even helped other startups and helped other like help companies acquire companies by reviewing their tech stack and everything else. As far as I know, a company I helped with the acquisition, those engineers, some of them went into leadership at the company at different large organizations like Meta, for example. I noticed that they became a director of something, but that was the leadership track. That was a pretty good migration over there. Another person who was a very unbelievably skilled engineer, the tiers at Meta, I think was like L6, L5. I don't entirely know the tier system over there, but I know they were hired quite high up in terms of financials and whatnot. I don't think they needed to go down the track and it was more so what they were interested in. As a result, they built out a role for them. I guess it really just depends on the organization of the skill set. But like for me particularly, of course it was a matter of financial decision as well. It's like, hey, you could be nice and stay at this rate basically. Or you could go up to management and here's what your new rate's going to be. That's definitely a part of it. I mean, it's just what it is. I definitely as far as like small to medium size companies, I mean, honestly, like sometimes you even see that track available at all. Like you just have a role you're hired into, Hey, do two years here and do two years somewhere else. And I've seen that. But I definitely am in a different situation where like I've grown with the company, this company about now to the point where like, these rules were built out to put me in these roles. Given the opportunity, like, Hey, do you want to do this? So that's what the side I'm familiar with. But years and years of doing different roles led up to this, led up to more engineering leadership and being able to make the decisions. But yeah, it depends on the organization. But to your point though, some of the large companies, they have entire I mean, there's a website even I'm sure I can't think of right now, but I think it was a company website somebody launched and it showed the different levels you can achieve at those larger organizations because it was more public, more public about that.
[00:14:26] Joe Colantonio Nice. So you mentioned it a little bit already, but if someone's an individual contributor, I think another fear they have is losing the technical chops. Yeah, but I guess it depends on the company. If you're small and medium, you're probably still doing both. But is that a real worry? And if so, like how do you overcome that to also make sure you are working on your technical skills at the same time as well?
[00:14:46] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, I mean, that's a legitimate concern. It's so common that I've talked about, I think for myself, I mean, right now I'm lucky enough to be able to still contribute to the code. That's definitely something I'm very much interested in doing. But it's a balance really. There's a percentage of it that you can do so much per day. When I'm building out MPPs or architectural diagrams and basically putting on my solution engineering hat. There are all sorts of code that you write and whatnot. A couple days ago I did a demo. It's fairly frequent. Once again, it depends on the role. Like I think, if you go to an organization like a large organization, I'm sure there are scenarios where you could probably particularly like enterprise. I don't want to call any companies, but I definitely have seen the scenario where you can and you will lose your some. It's not all just like not keeping up with the latest trends or whatnot, and that's it's a good and bad thing. I mean, like keeping up with latest trends can definitely be bad. I've been burned by it before for sure. But yeah, I think for myself as well, if you have the time, like I have a family and everything else, like, there's definitely scenarios where you have to there's a life balance of all of this and you have to still have a life and everything else like outside of just what you do everyday. But I'm without a doubt definitely interested in building my own projects for fun. Like it's something I've always just been interested in just by doing. Just like for example, like I'm doling out some automation right now for a game that I played when I was a kid, right? Like just going back to the game and using label studio and identifying objects in the game to click with PyAutoGui. There's an interest you have to have. I think it's well, if you're a manager you got to go back to IC, if you have a core understanding of caching and just computer science foundations and whatnot, it's not going to be hugely difficult if you have a language under your belt, it's not even like picking up any language. I guess it depends on the paradigm, of course, if it's functional or your entire backgrounds, like object-oriented languages, whatnot. But there's ways around it. And there's of course, like even apps now what is it, brilliant app or something like that. There are different apps. I mean, I like the language apps personally, I like Duolingo, like understanding languages, but there's other apps out there like you can kind of maintain your skills or YouTube or like there's just so many. There's so much as far as resources that it's just an individual to maintain those skills. And if they want to switch back and like get deeper into it, like, hey, build out a couple of projects, get up to speed, whatnot. I think we're at a point, especially with LLMs I mean, we're at a point right now where like if you don't do the manager track, I could just be a lead for quite some time and get back in IC if you want to look at Amazon, I think Amazon as recently mentioned, they want to re-architect their roles more like a startup, kind of which is interesting. That's a whole other topic. But anyways, they want more ICs is the point. But they're going to get lead ICs, they're going to go through some strange times. But you can use LLMs to practice new languages. For example, if I haven't worked with Ruby since 2014, I could go to an LM and talk to it about getting back up to speed with Ruby. Is Ruby still using Capybara? All of these things you could just ask and work with and build out and whatnot.
[00:17:52] Joe Colantonio I don't know if that's a legitimate concern or not just because I'm older and I work for my own business. But as you get older, do you think there's a perception like you need to get into management because who's going to hire a 53 year old coder? As an individual contributor, I don't even know if it's a real concern. But like I'm saying, that's a lot of people seem to be concerned about that as they get older.
[00:18:15] Evan Niedojadlo I mean, I can't speak to it personally I haven't seen it. I've been at the same company for a long time at this point. I can't speak directly to it, but I you know, for sure, I've read about it in the industry. I think just in general, like even outside of this industry is like, it's a thing. I mean, like I said, it's my staff as an example, he worked in it with Java back then he was working with JS NetBeans, Struts. I mean, I don't know how I remember this stuff. I mean, I was.
[00:18:41] Joe Colantonio Taking me back.
[00:18:42] Evan Niedojadlo I was a kid at the time, but he moved on to more director type roles in more specifically outside of tech. There's definitely a different parts of these industries at this point where you can work in a technology company like Meta or Google, or you could work in a company that he chose, which was a university or like a factory. If you're an older individual, you could write C++ for industrial machines on dusty warehouse, which just depends on what your requirements are. There's a lot more to it, of course. But yeah, I personal experience can't speak to a too much. I think there are definitely scenarios where that is the case. I've talked to people, I meet ups who are much older than I am, unbelievably brilliant just in the industry. So it just depends. There's a lot there's so many different situations involved with that I read about a distinguished engineer at Amazon. I forgot his name, but I'm sure a lot of people know the person. Him and his wife just ride around in a boat like that's where they live, apparently. And yeah, and he's like a distinguished engineer and he's done unbelievably, like, groundbreaking work. Like, I can't even begin to imagine, like some of the impact of that I've been. I've worked with EC2, and all that kind of stuff, not any of that level but like it's kind of amazing. So I guess it really it's all situational at the end of the day. My personal experience is through family working through the industry and whatnot, like going to different, going outside of deeper tech into university roles and that kind of thing.
[00:20:09] Joe Colantonio All right. You mentioned LLM/AI a lot and a lot of people think of it in the context of coding. You mentioned something early on that was interesting. You said you were using it to help a management in a sense, did I hear that correct and if so, can you give us some other examples? I think a lot of people don't use it for other things, but also knowing what it can do.
[00:20:29] Evan Niedojadlo Right. I guess not in management necessarily. This is more so like process, I guess. So like there is a lot of work that I had to do. I mean, over the last three years, like when I was in like the more SRE type role, I considered sponsorship roles. There was like this process of creating run books and like we had to manually create these in confluence and then attach them to an alert. Like in our case, we're using an observability platform to attach them to alert. And that's a lot of work. That's a process we had to build, like we had an on call stuff totally different. Like that's totally different thing. But like this is just another piece where like we're looking at using k8sGPT to basically sit in our Kubernetes cluster as an operator and basically just be queryable like, of course we're going to anonymize the backend data, it's not sending back all of our secrets of like all of that type of data, which is pretty cool, is a really cool project for anyone to check out. Like there's open source project. So like instead of using run books as like a designed doc to eventually create automation around it, which is still a thing we can do. I wanted to really use k8sGPT just for the sake of just, hey, we have these run books, let's replace is runbooks with k8sGPT. You call it a day, that kind of thing. And that the feedback I did a demo on that four weeks ago now like maybe five weeks ago, a month, month and week, I guess. But the reception was really good. The team was pretty pumped about that because honestly, running run books is, as I looked at the more mundane stuff, especially on the test side or the other thing I'm looking at potentially over the next few months, maybe Q4, is something going to look into as a test case creation, right. We have a bunch of automated test as a bunch of automated end tests. That's great. But the problem is we still have to have some level of exploratory test, it's just what it is. We use exploratory testing to build out automation and all that kind of thing by walking through a service and application UI, identifying the areas of automation that we could do that we write and but definitely test creation itself. I want to take a Jira story and have and build tests around that. And then just maybe like I'll populate them automatically in Zephyr or something. So that's something I'm looking into, but those are the things I'm looking at as far as like A.I, where it's applicable and stuff like that. Because I mean, personally, I've had really, really bad experience building out projects in AI. Some good, some bad, mostly bad. I'll give you a direct example. So I was writing a service in PowerShell and all this was doing was just taking data that existed on multiple instances and then aggregating that data and pushing it to a Samba server and then basically taking that data and ingesting it into an observability tool that was custom built that was definitely over the top. But this is a project that had to be done. It was very bad at writing PowerShell, very bad at the specifics, Very, very, very bad. That was interesting. And then more recently, like a personal project was, as I mentioned, to automating a game that I used to play as a kid, right? Like it's just a fun thing for me to do, like go back to this game. It's a game called RuneScape.
[00:23:18] Joe Colantonio Okay.
[00:23:20] Evan Niedojadlo But it's yeah, it's a personal server, so it's not impacting anyone. People are not going to be happy when I just said this. It's on my local machine, so it's literally a local server that I'm running of the game because the source was never released. Keep in mind. This was a group of people who are very much smarter than I am, ended up doing reverse engineering many years ago and took the original source and use Java Reflection and did a bunch of really cool stuff to get that information and they built out multiple versions of it. But I have a version on my local machine that I'm running and it's always been a fascination of mine because that's part of what got me into automation when I was probably Pascal. So it's like they used it was a service that sat over this game and you could write Pascal to automate the game. It was very fun, not very ethical and well, anyways, the game was dying at the time, so a lot more people were doing this. But anyways, the thing that I'm doing now, taking the Python writing PyAutoGui and just using LM to work through the process of particularly on the object side and identify the objects, everything else. It's not ideal I think is getting better. I think with the most recent release, at least like with OpenAI, I think that's a 001 preview, for example. But in any case, that's my reason. I mean, over the past few years, I mean, I've been using it for these kinds of things and the team as well, like if the team can figure out like something that I can help with, by all means, like we're not afraid to use this tool. It's just yet again, like, I love copilot because they had the right idea for a name copilot because it's not doing the work like I can't-there's never a scenario where I can have an on right application to deploy to infrastructure right now, it's just not a possibility at the moment. Maybe at some point it's possible. But right now it's not there.
[00:25:00] Joe Colantonio All right. I'm an introvert and maybe there's a psychological I use ChatGPT for everything. For some reason, freeze up the email sometimes coming up with ideas on how to answer someone or even irate comments on my YouTube channel.
[00:25:12] Evan Niedojadlo yeah.
[00:25:13] Joe Colantonio So I'll just ask ChatGPT, hey, I just got this comment. How would you respond? And it just helps me, I take it and I modify it, obviously, but it helps as a good starting point. I could see how you could do that with management. If you have like someone ask you weird request that you don't know you've never dealt with before, like what are some options I can give them?
[00:25:31] Evan Niedojadlo yeah, that's interesting. That's super interesting. Yeah. I can always see that as well. I think there's definitely an infamous person on the internet, "Pieter Levels I think, he treated at all. I think it was like PsychologistAI or something like that. I don't know how well it's doing. This person is infamous for building a bunch of bootstrapped startups, which I think is interesting because the company apparently is bootstrapped. Like we didn't go through VC funds and all that kind of stuff. So like I just always that was pretty interesting. But in any case, yeah, people are trying that human level of AI whatnot, but it's tough. That's a tough one.
[00:26:02] Joe Colantonio No doubt. But what I've also seen is teams using their own chat bot with LLM to talk about, hey here's what I did today and the manager can just query like it's in-house trained on that chat bot for their information so it's able to know where everyone's working on. It just makes it better to manage projects. I've seen that work as well.
[00:26:22] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, that's definitely a good one. That's something we looked at in the past couple of years back. I think it was even before, like the whole LM like thing was a chatbot. I mean we had chatbots at the company for a while now. Dialogflow, we're using all that. But I think more specifically in Slack, we are using we user for a little bit. It did not take off, by the way.
[00:26:41] Joe Colantonio Not really?
[00:26:42] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, we use the bot, it was kind of Agile bot or something like that where like you could do your stand up bot. Like you could easily like say like what you're doing every day. Like we don't do daily stand ups like we don't do that. Like we know we're working on per sprint and everything else. Like there's no point in doing some of these rituals. But like for other teams, yes, but for us, no, but like, yeah, that did not work. I was like, no.
[00:27:02] Joe Colantonio I also have my notes something but I never heard this term before actually, ZIRP. You wanted to cover. What the heck is, What is that?
[00:27:18] Evan Niedojadlo In terms of management and like what Amazon is doing and just all the talk in the district now, like for the past couple of years. There's been like these amazing waves, like back when my family was working in tech and like you had 99 crash. There's a great book it's called F'd Companies, Philip Kaplan great, great book worth checking out. Definitely worth checking out. It's like Pets.com and like the history in everything. Also, like, I love the history of technology. Like I'm a huge nerd about like the old tech. But anyways, service, all macroeconomics, right? Like zero interest rate policy. Basically that free money guy wearing the question marks you and late infomercials in the 90s right like.
[00:27:55] Joe Colantonio That's what I'm turning into on Test Guild. Hey!
[00:27:59] Evan Niedojadlo That's awesome. That's pretty cool. What's neat about that is like I mean, neat, good and bad but like it was just ultimately like for four years, right? There's access to cheap capital, right? Like spiking, hiring frenzies. I mean, on the management side, like, wanted to kind of discuss it because it's like if what you're seeing in the industry now, like you see higher freezes and all these things like I remember Meta, Google, Amazon reaching out to me for work, right? And they're like, Hey, you should work here. The whole spiel, I probably would've been laid off. But it's like. Yeah, it's tough. That's a difficult thing, but like it's worth mentioning because, I mean, one, the interest rates yesterday, like I guess they kind of touch them up a bit which is a good thing, I mean, good and bad, but like it's good because now, like hiring might pick up again for people who are like looking to get into the industry. But I think this is more so for people like who are familiar with why these tech debt is taking jobs, that kind of thing. I think it's like I mean, I haven't personally seen AI taking roles, like I see it more so it augments teams, maybe can make teams much, much smaller. I've always worked in small, very scrappy teams that we just I mean, this is what we do. We go in and we get work done and that's basically it. My first role. Like we had a pizza Friday, like every once in a rare while we were lucky and blessed for this Pizza Friday, like there were options and stuff like that ever. Tech was not fun for a long time. Like I'm sure you're familiar with this. Like back in the day, it was like there's no ball pits and everything else. Like it was not ideal, not fun. But it's getting back to the point. Like, I think if people are interested in getting the technology, I mean, potentially don't look at the tech companies. Obviously there's financial incentive there, like real life changing financial incentive, just like no doubt about it. But then also, if you're interested in tech just getting into tech or just getting a door, maybe choose a boring industry. That's something that's a possibility as well. If you're interested in like stability versus high pay I said, it's one of those things that because of the larger issues we're seeing right now or over the past couple of years, just with like start ups and all the whole financial aspect of things. Maybe choose a boring industry that might be a ticket worth looking at as far as getting in a tech is concerned. When I was getting in a tech, like a definitely like 2008 happened, that was my like.com boom or whatever they call it. So that was like my issue because like I was speaking to the band, I was at that company with a friend of mine that played bass for us for a show, and I filled in one time. So that was. But in any case, what ended up happening was that company went under because we were basically building the wicks of real estate. And in 2008, of course, like that crash the real estate market crashed. And then we an angel investor at the time and like that was like that was it. So that was like my experience. And then after that, I was like, all right, that was it. TechCrunch We did all the fun stuff, like anyways, but like after that I was like, All right, how can I just like stay in a role? And then I just was like a boring consulting company and worked there for like a year before I joined my current organization. That's like some potential advice if anyone's listening to this wanted a break in a tech like these are ways to do it. These are ways to get around the nonsense you're seeing in an academic side right now.
[00:31:14] Joe Colantonio Great advice. Okay Evan, before we go, is there one piece of actionable advice you can give to someone to help them with their leadership management type of movement roles moving into that role and what's the best way to find or contact you?
[00:31:26] Evan Niedojadlo Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, do what you want to do. Go Listen to me. But if you're in and getting into more of a lead role, there's so many resources out there, I would definitely say please check out Charity major's blog. I think it's on. IC to manager. There's one back in 2017 that just unbelievable good. The Phoenix Project read The Phoenix Project. I use audible like if you're doing the dishes like I do or like whatever chore you're doing, like listen to Audible, like throw on The Phoenix Project, throw on the goal like read about Toyota Kanban, understand what your goal is and what you're trying to do as a people manager, as a process manager. There's other good books like The Making of a Manager, The Manager's Path, an Elegant Puzzle: Systems of engineering management like a lot of these are I don't read a million books about like pick and choose what you want to read and then be able to digest it however you want to, whether that's through the actual book or through audiobook, definitely get in there and understand these things and then, use an LLM talk about it. Talk about the book, the team topologies. What are the points from this book? What can I learn from this book, that kind of thing. Making work visible, accelerate. There is a bunch of really solid books out there and use an LM, talk about that book, understand it, read the blogs, just dive in and understand how you're going to make an impact as a technical leader or manager. And then as far as finding me YouTube these days, I know I have a big video and that's a release. So find me on Random Thoughts Tech at YouTube. There's a whole bunch of different videos on there. There's a lot more videos I need to do on there, but other than that, it's mostly where people can find me these days.
[00:32:53] For links of everything of value we covered in this DevOps Toolchain Show. Head on over to Testguild.com/p172. So that's it for this episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed in creating end--to-end full stack DevOps toolchain awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers!
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