DO repeat yourself! (Interview)
Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is “good taste” in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News.
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Featuring:
Sean Goedecke – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail?
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Avoiding worry driven development
What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
Situational Awareness: the decade ahead
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Shipping projects at Big Tech with Sean Goedecke
Supported by Our Partner
DX → DX is an engineering intelligence platform designed by leading researchers
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In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Sean Goedecke, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub. Sean is widely known for his viral blog post, “How I ship projects at big tech companies.” In our conversation, he shares how to successfully deliver projects in large tech companies.
Drawing from his experiences at GitHub and Zendesk, Sean reflects on key lessons learned, and we discuss the following topics:
• Why shipping cannot exclude keeping management happy
• How to work on stuff the company actually values
• Why you should take on extra responsibility to get projects done
• Why technical skills are still more important than soft skills
• Soft skills you should learn: including learning the “management lingo”
• First-hand remote work learnings: advantages, disadvantages, and how to thrive in this setup
• … and much more!
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(01:50) An explanation of shipping
(05:35) Reasons management may choose to ship something customers don’t love
(09:20) A humbling learning from Sean’s time at Zendesk
(13:27) The importance of learning which rules need to be broken for good business outcomes
(15:28) Common obstacles to shipping
(18:13) DRI: Directly responsible individual
(23:06) The value of strong technical skills and why moving fast is imperative
(28:44) How to leverage your technical skills the right way
(32:16) Advice on earning the trust of leadership
(36:10) A time Gergely shipped a product for a political reason
(38:30) What GenAI helps software engineers do more easily
(41:08) Sean’s thoughts on GenAI making engineers more ambitious
(43:20) The difficulty of building AI tools
(46:10) Advantages of working remotely and strategies for making it work
(52:34) Who is best suited to remote work
(54:48) How the pandemic provided a remote work trial for Sean
(56:45) Rapid fire round
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Software Engineers Leading Projects https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects
• Shipping to production https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shipping-to-production
• Paying down tech debt https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt
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See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast
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