The Journey to Principal Engineer with Joy Ebertz (Podcast & Transcript)
"I realized that [networking] doesn't have to be knowing 300 people at a very shallow level. Instead, it can be knowing 30 people, but pretty well, and really taking the time to actually go to the Women in Tech events. And even though it feels like you're hanging out with friends, those relationships still matter a lot, and they're still really useful.” - Joy Ebertz
Joy Ebertz is a Principal Software Engineer, prolific blogger, avid ultrarunner, and an advocate for increasing the number of women and minorities in Computer Science. At Split, Joy establishes technical direction for their backend team. Prior to Split, she worked at Box. At both Split and Box, Joy lead efforts around splitting monoliths into microservices, revamping authentication and authorization frameworks, creating REST API standards, audit logging, and more. In addition to designing software and writing code, Joy shares her learnings through (which has 2.7k followers on Medium), and is often invited to speak at conferences such as LeadDev and WWCode. In her free time, she does a lot of traveling, reading, and running ridiculously long distances (mostly on trails).
In this episode, we discuss:
How different-sized companies played a factor in Joy's career journey
The value of understanding your workstyle and motivations
Why she left people management
The power of written and spoken communication
What most people get wrong about influencing others
Networking tips for introverts
Transcript has been edited for clarity.
Karen Ko: Hey there. Welcome to Engineer Your Career, a podcast brought to you by West, a learning community empowering women technologists through mentorship. Join us as we hear from inspiring women tech leaders who are challenging stereotypes and paving the way for future generations. We hope their career journeys inspire you with new ideas to engineer your career. Let's get started.
Heidi Williams: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our latest episode of Engineer Your Career. I'm Heidi, and I'm excited to host my good friend Joy Ebertz. Joy is a principal software engineer at Split, leading the backend team from a technical perspective.
Prior to Split, she worked at Box, where I had the pleasure of working with her. At both Split and Box, she led efforts around splitting monoliths into microservices, revamping authentication and authorization frameworks, creating rest API standards, audit logging, and more.
In addition to designing software and writing code, she also maintains an amazing blog that I have recommended to more people than I can count on Medium at JKEbertz. In her free time, she does a lot of traveling, reading, and running ridiculously long distances. Welcome, Joy. So happy to have you with us today. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself in your own words?
Joy Ebertz: Yeah, so I'm Joy. I'm a principal engineer at Split Software. We do feature flagging and AB testing, I guess, sorry, I'm supposed to say experimentation software. But yeah, basically helping other companies release more easily and better.
Over my career, I don't know, I've worked a few different places. I tried out management for a little while. Heidi was actually my manager at the time when I decided I absolutely hated it, and so she got to deal with helping me transition back out of management into an IC role again, and I've been here ever since, and pretty happy with it.
Heidi: Awesome. Well, super excited to have you here today, and I do remember, I feel like that journey was actually really interesting for both of us, and I feel like I've referred back to it many times, your path to management and back, and I know that's something you've talked with a lot of folks about. So definitely a hot topic, and hopefully we'll dig into that in a little bit.
Well, I would love to ask a question of maybe even just starting at the very beginning, how did you first get into software and get into the industry?
Joy: It's perhaps a little less interesting than some people, but I took AP Computer Science in high school, largely just because I took all but one of our AP classes in high school, and I actually really liked it. There weren't that many women in the class, but the teacher actually was a woman, which, in retrospect, I didn't realize how unusual that was at the time, but in retrospect, that's pretty awesome, and I really loved the class.
And so when I went to college, I had been pretty set on being a math major, but I was like, oh, I really liked that class in high school. So I took a couple CS classes, and our school actually offered a math with CS degree. And so that was my original choice.
But then, as I got a little while in, I realized that I liked the CS classes a lot more than the math classes. I ended up getting a dual degree in CS and math separately, but mostly because I was almost done with math already, credits-wise and stuff. So it really was the CS side that I found a lot more fun. Yeah.
Heidi: That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that. And doing a dual degree is a lot, so congratulations on doing that. And I can see wanting to just cross the finish line with the math part of it.
Joy: Yeah.
Heidi: Interesting, interesting. And then you've had a long career in the industry, and you've actually worked at companies of a whole bunch of different sizes. I know you were at Microsoft at one point. I know Split is more of a startup. How has company size been a factor in your career choices along the way?
Joy: Yeah, so I interned at Microsoft a couple times, partially just because it's very easy to get, or not easy, but easier to get internships at some of the big companies. They're more likely to have interns, it's easier to find out and hear about them, so forth. So then I took my first job out of college at Microsoft. It was actually a really interesting team. We were building basically R and D stuff for Office.
So we would try to find what ideas did the Office team have, but they thought were too risky to actually ever implement? And then we would take those ideas and try to figure out how can we test them out? What practical way can we write code to make a little test app to see if people would actually use this thing or not? So that was super fun.
I left there, actually, for personal reasons, and then landed at a super tiny startup. So when I joined, I was the second person, and when I left, there were four people, and because I left, it basically immediately imploded. So I'm sorry, Susan, if you ever hear this, I am sorry about that.
But yeah, that was an interesting experience too. It was, I guess, because it was so tiny, I was forced to learn everything because I was the first engineer, so it was sort of this like, oh, you want to release an app in the app store? Well, I'd better go figure out how to do that. 'Cuz nobody else is going to do that. So it forced me to learn a lot.
But then, by the end of my time there, I was like, I know I'm writing absolutely junk JavaScript, but there's nobody I can turn to and be like, how do I make this better? And there was just a lot of stuff that I was like, I know this isn't good, but I don't know where to learn how to be better at this stuff.
So that was a big part of why I looked for my next job, which landed me at Box, which was at the time, what was it like, couple hundred maybe? It was pretty small, maybe even smaller than that, I think, actually. It was pretty small still. And engineering was also pretty small. Sorry, I'm going to not get the numbers right at all, but on the order of a hundred engineers, maybe a little less, but it was, yeah, and I was there for a long time, so I really got to a chance to grow with the company.
And when I finally left Box, it was actually, largely, because it felt like it had gotten kind of too big, and it was no longer the case where I felt like I really knew and connected with a lot of the people, like I did when I first joined.
And so when I picked Split, that was kind of what I was looking for, again, was something smaller. And I was actually even kind of targeting something a little smaller than my target size, knowing that a lot of companies at that time were still growing a lot. So I figured that way it would grow into the size I was looking for, and I would have a chance to hang out with them. So that actually worked out fairly well. Right now, we have maybe 125 to 150 people total, and then something like 60 or 70 in eng and product. So yeah, pretty good size where you still know people, but some interesting things happening.
Heidi: That's awesome. Yeah. And so it sounds like certainly the company culture is an important part for you, and being able to sort of know your teammates. Is there anything additional that you would add to that in terms of, it sounded like when you were the only engineer at Lat22, maybe that was tough because you didn't have other folks to kind of, I don't know, brainstorm with or maybe someone who had more expertise than you. How has that worked out for you as Split has grown?
Joy: One thing...So everybody's a little different. One thing, I actually got this as feedback, but it's not really news, in my last review, was that I work best when I work with other people. And that's definitely something that's true. So you were kind of hinting at, it's both the side of having somebody to just bounce ideas off of, even if they provide almost nothing, just having someone to talk it out loud through with is often very helpful to me.
But also the other side of I am motivated more by a relationship to somebody else. So if I know they're depending on me, I'm more likely to try to get something done more quickly than if it's just me. I'm more likely to be like, oh, I could do this or this or this, or I don't know. And then yeah, you find later that you've taken forever.
Heidi: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I feel like that accountability because you actually really know the people who are counting on you, and it feels very much like a team. It's not some sort of cog in some larger wheel, but you know the people.
Joy: Exactly. Yeah.
Heidi: I love that. I love that. Well, maybe switching gears a little bit, what was something surprising in your first role as you got into the industry?
Joy: Yeah, so, actually, I'm going to talk about my third role instead of my first role here. But when I started at Box, one of my, well, I got two pieces of feedback fairly early on. One of them was that I needed to ask for help more, and I'm not sure why I never picked this up at Microsoft, but Lat22 for sure was because I was by myself.
So I never had anyone to ask for help. And I had just sort of, despite having, I guess by that time, three years under my belt I had, it was not something that had really ever come up. So I had to be told, no, you have to go and ask other people for help when you don't know the answer. You can't just spin on your own for a week and expect to be effective that way.
The other piece of advice I got, which also makes a lot of sense, was that I needed to write more tests and I need to be better at testing, which I had somehow thought it was going to be great, but at Microsoft, I was on an R and D team and these things were prototypes that weren't expected to last very long.
So we did a lot of manual testing and almost no automated tests. They weren't expected to be there. And Lat22, again, tiny startup, you're not spending your time on tests, you're spending your time on, can we get funding? Can we get this thing to actually work at all? So yeah, I got to Box and they were like, Joy, you need to work on some testing. I'm not very good at that.
Heidi: That's awesome. And I can imagine a ton of reasons for both of those things sort of not being habits that you built up earlier. And I can imagine not writing tests. Some companies have a full QA team, and engineers don't write the tests; someone else is writing them.
And I think that's changed over the last decade or so. But still, I can see that's really interesting, that depending on where you are in the circumstances of the company, maybe those things are really important, and maybe they're not something that you have an opportunity to practice. So that's really cool.
Okay, so that was sort of thinking about the early part of your career. What has been a highlight of your career?
Joy: So when I was at Box, we had an internal blog, and I would occasionally write stuff for it. We had a few different things, but in general, I had this mindset of like, oh, I need to be a little bit more visible, so this is one way to do that. So I would occasionally write stuff for it. I would occasionally do some of the other things that would help bring visibility.
But after I left management, I wrote this one particular blog post that was basically about why I entered and why I left management. And it was hugely popular internally. And then I don't remember who, but I feel like somebody poked me and was like, you should really publish this externally. And so I was like, okay, I've never done this before. I don't have a blog, whatever. But then I was like, okay, why not?
So I set up a Medium account, and I posted that as my first blog, and it exploded. I was shocked at how much interest it got, and in a weird way, it's super awesome, but also sad because I didn't know how to try to get clicks. I didn't do anything to try to advertise this beyond post it on my LinkedIn and my Facebook, and it did really well.
And then there's been posts since then that I'm like, this is a great post, and it just doesn't take off in the same way. But I would still say it's a highlight, mostly because it did so well, but also, it really sort of opened up this blogging thing to me, and through the blogging, I got more into speaking and public events such as this podcast. And so I really feel like it opened a lot of doors in a lot of ways to me.
And the other thing, more personally career-related, is the upper levels oftentimes are a lot more social skills, soft skills, than they are about the technical side. And it helped me develop my writing, but it also helped me realize the power of communication and writing and how that can actually get you really far in your career. So....
Heidi: Amazing. I have to say that first blog post, I think it was 2017 or something like that, 2018, and it is still one of my favorite blog posts to recommend to people who are considering going into management, and whether it's right for them or can you go back if you don't, and whatnot.
Can you share maybe one highlight or piece of advice from that particular journey to management and back, and I guess the quick summary of why you decided that management wasn't for you, and that now you've now gone on the IC path and had a fantastic career there?
Joy: Yeah, I outline...honestly, probably the post will do a better job of giving the highlights than I'm going to right now, just because it was closer to mind at the time, but a lot of it came down to feeling accomplishment and how I felt accomplishment and management... It's a lot more squishy.
Even when I know that my managers were amazing and whatever, you were an amazing manager, but even...it's sort of like I didn't know how to feel that as the manager. You see your team succeed, and you're like, well, maybe they would've succeeded without me. I don't know what I did to make that happen.
Or even if you take blockers out of the way for them, you're like, well, maybe they would've found a way to get around it, and it wouldn't have mattered, or all these little things like that. It's just a little bit harder to see how it works out, and I really struggled with that.
So at the end of the day, there were other contributing factors that I didn't like as well. So I was sort of struggling with some of this other stuff, but then at the end of the day, I didn't feel like I was doing anything, and it was just really frustrating to me. And so that was a big part of why I left. But yeah.
Heidi: And I will say, just for the history books, you did great as a manager, even though it didn't give you personal joy and a feeling of success. Your team did great, and they loved having you as a manager, and so it was not by any means that you were a failure at it. It was entirely, I think, how you derived success and where you got your energy from. And so totally finding that, I think that's such a key aspect of how you define success and is really, really important for folks, so glad that you wrote that and made that discovery and then made the pivot to then have a super fulfilling career now as a principal engineer. So it's been great to see.
Excellent. Well, maybe just if I could insert a question, actually, about going from sort of senior engineer to staff engineer and then principal engineer, are there particular things that you think people really need to cultivate or learn to make that leap and to move up into those higher levels of individual contributor engineering?
Joy: Again, I have a blog post about this, so you should also go reference that, but to summarize, there's a lot of things, I sort of referenced this a little bit already, but it is more soft skills and less technical skills for almost all senior roles. I'm not going to claim all senior IC roles are like that, but most of them are.
So there's a few different things involved. So one thing is definitely communication, being able to, because if you do something super amazing or you get a bunch of people to do a project, but nobody outside those people knows it happened, you're not going to get credit for it.
And I kind of hate the politics of this, but it's like, at the end of the day, it's there whether or not you want to admit it, it's going to be there. So being able to talk about what you're doing, how it can help people, or even just to convince somebody that something's a good idea, you have to be able to communicate clearly. So communication, written and spoken, is super important.
Heidi: I fully agree about the communication piece of it, and I feel like that's an interesting one. Maybe the other ones that I think people talk about, and a lot of the women who go through the WEST program are curious, is about influence and leadership and how you cultivate those. Because, as a principal engineer, no one reports to you.
They don't technically have to listen to you. And so how do you influence folks, and how have you cultivated your own style of influence and leadership in order to have a team want to follow you as opposed to saying you have to because I'm the leader? Is there anything that you've done to cultivate influence in leadership skills?
Joy: Two thoughts. First of all, I often hear in the staff-plus circles, people are always talking about, oh, influencing without authority, we're stuck over here. Managers have it so great.
But if you really think about it, maybe it's a little bit more true now with the job market, but for most of my career, that was not that true because a manager, end of the day, if their reports didn't want to do something, they would just leave. And so they still had to convince them. It couldn't just be, there wasn't really that much authority there.
But ignoring that for a moment, I think the other thing I've always thought about, a lot of people think influence is all about, tell somebody the idea and then convince them that it's the right thing to do. And there's some truth to that. Obviously, if somebody thinks it's terribly wrong, they're not going to do it.
But I think the piece that a lot of people miss that I always think about, or maybe they don't miss it and they just underappreciate it, is thinking about all of the incentives that are behind somebody and then trying to figure out how do you align them all in the correct way to get them to do what you want?
In some cases...So at Microsoft, there was this interesting thing because it was like we're doing these really risky, we're supposed to be testing really risky ideas. So in theory, if we were testing risky enough ideas, half of them should have failed, but we're engineers, we like to make things work. So they had to over-incentivize failure in order to get about a 30% failure rate.
Even though they kept saying half of them should fail, half of them should fail, and we would have these big celebrations every time something failed and all of this stuff, and it was still about 30%. So that's one example of people's just innate incentives. They're incentivized to make things succeed.
You can also look at how are people getting promoted, what's actually on the rubric? What are people actually looking at? And is that what you want to encourage in the culture, and what you want to encourage to happen?
Or at a postmortem, a lot of times people say, “Oh, we'll just tell people not to do X, Y, Z,” but instead think about how can we make it harder for them to do that? It doesn't even need to be impossible, but if you can just make it a little bit harder for them to do the wrong thing.
A lot of times people are, a lot of us are lazy. Honestly, I had a former coworker who liked to say that the best engineers were lazy people because they would find ways to automate all of the extra work, but it's kind of true. None of us want to do more than we have to most of the time.
So just making the right thing the easy thing is often enough, or thinking through if somebody is refusing to do something, why is it? And most of the time, it's not because they don't think what you're saying is a great idea. There's usually something else motivating it. So figuring out that why and then figuring out what you can do to nudge things in the direction you want them to go.
Heidi: Yeah, I love that that makes so much sense to sort of align goals and to make the right thing easy. I do actually remember very clearly a conversation at Box where we realized one day that it was easier to make a breaking change to the API than to do a minor version increase or to sort of make it backwards-compatible, and we were like, oh my gosh, what did we do? We made the wrong thing easy and the right thing hard, and we needed to flip it somehow. I don't remember how we fixed it, but I remember it being an interesting conversation.
Yeah, I love that. Okay, very cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. So maybe, let's see, what else do I want to ask?
Has there ever been a moment where you thought about leaving tech? I mean, you have this amazing career, you've been doing this for a long time. Did you ever have doubts along the way?
Joy: Yeah, early on, actually I'm pretty sure it was between Microsoft and Lat22, might've been, yeah, I'm pretty sure it was that time period. I dunno, I've also always had kind of a creative side, and it felt early on like it was just a lot of, I don't know, doing exactly what I was told, and I didn't quite feel like I was exercising that creative side quite as much as I wanted to.
And so it was sort of this, I felt a little frustrated and I wasn't really sure, and I am sure it was emphasized by applying for jobs and like, oh, do I really want to do this and whatever, but I'm not sure there was exactly something that pivoted it, but I did get a job and because it was a super tiny company, I did have a lot of creative leeway because there wasn't anyone else, quite frankly.
But also, I found that as I got more senior, there's often a lot more leeway, a lot more you can do to influence various things, and a lot more creativity you can add into things, or you can always write or something too. So I feel like that itch got filled a little more later on. But yeah, earlier on, and I think along with that, I did the standard like, oh, should I actually be a PM or should I actually be a designer or something else? And yeah, I'm so glad I didn't, but definitely thought about it.
Heidi: Yeah, and it's interesting. I feel like what you got there, I mean I think some people when they're leaving tech they or thinking about leaving tech, they might be leaving a particular situation at a company and in your example, maybe it was a place where you didn't feel like you had a ton of creativity, but recognizing the difference between the thing that motivates you and even if you didn't get that one place, there might be another place that you can get that and sort of keeping hope that you can find what you're looking for, what motivates you at the next company or in a different role. And that's interesting.
Okay, cool. So let's see, I guess, oh my gosh, we've covered so many topics already, but I still have more questions. I guess I would love to ask about networking. I think it's something, honestly, that ends up being underappreciated or sometimes feels like a real slog for folks. What is your approach to networking, and how has it served you in your career?
Joy: Yeah, actually both networking and mentoring. I feel like I have kind of a weird perspective on them, but I feel like a lot of what I got from other people on the outside was that networking, you're supposed to go to these networking events, you're supposed to go to these Girl Geek dinners, and talk to everybody and meet all these people. And I tried some of that, but I'm an introvert, so I hated that, right?
Part of me always sort of dreaded them. And then I would talk to the two people I already knew, if I knew anyone, or I would stand there awkwardly for a little while and then just run away as soon as I felt like I could. And even if I did talk to random people, there are these people now that I'm connected to on LinkedIn, and I don't remember who they are. I'm sorry if I've met you before, but yeah, there's a good chance I don't remember.
And then I thought like, oh, this is kind of dumb. But then, when I got more senior, I realized that I had built really strong relationships with a lot of the other women within Box, especially. We had a women in tech group that I was a part of from basically the beginning.
And I sort of realized that it doesn't have to be knowing 300 people at a very shallow level. Instead, it can be knowing 30 people, but pretty well, and really taking the time to actually go to the Women in Tech events. And even though it feels like you're hanging out with friends, those relationships still matter a lot, and they're still really useful. And there's a bunch of the women from Box that I still hang out with regularly. In fact, I spent the weekend with a couple of them this past weekend.
And it's useful both in terms of having a support system, but also, I mean when I decided I wanted to leave Box, I basically just reached out to people I'd worked with in the past and that's how I found all but one of the places I interviewed was from those people.
And sometimes it feels like, oh, networking has to be these strange people in disparate places, but the fact is that even if it's the people you all work with, the people will start to leave and go different places, and then you'll have people at different places after that fact. So it's a lot easier to, or I guess if you want to meet 300 people because you're an extrovert, that's great, go for it.
But I guess I'm saying that it's also great to sometimes just cultivate deeper relationships with a few people instead. And since I mentioned mentoring, I'm also going to touch on that one.
Heidi: We'd love it.
Joy: So formal mentorship programs are great because obviously I've had some good experiences with WEST, but I've also sometimes found that the idea of asking for a mentor or having a deep idea of all that you want to get out of a mentoring relationship can be really scary and has kind of prevented me from going down that path a number of times, especially as from the mentee side.
And at some point, I sort of realized that you can get a lot of mentoring without calling it mentoring. Instead, just be like, oh, this person knows a lot about, I don't know, databases, and I want to know more, so I'm just going to set up a single meeting with them to pick their brain about databases. And that really is still mentoring. You're getting information, you're learning from somebody, you're creating more of a relationship than you had before. And usually they're more than happy to share whatever they know.
And it's easier because you have a clear topic, you have a clear idea of what you want to get, but at the same time, it's less scary, and they're less likely to be like, oh, is this going to be a three-year commitment, or what am I getting myself into? Instead, they're like, okay, yeah, I can spare an hour. That's fine.
Thinking of more in terms of constantly looking for people that you can have maybe one or a couple meetings with here and there.
Heidi: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Definitely. I've heard it called micro-mentorship or just more informal, that all of that can be still super valuable even though it's not an official commitment and relationship and things like that. But it does build a relationship. Just you have a couple of those, and then maybe they come pick your brain about something next time, and can be a peer relationship there.
Joy: Yeah, I actually had a friend one time who talked about mutual mentorship, I think is how she referred to it, and it was more like we would meet up every so often and just chat about everything that was on our minds, work-related, and pick each other's brains. And it was, it was a peer relationship, but we both had different perspectives and different experiences, and so it was useful to both of us, honestly.
Heidi: Yeah. Yeah. I think what it's all about is getting a different perspective and how maybe someone else would approach something you're struggling with or you're encountering and whatnot. So yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. And you've actually been a WEST mentor for a long time as well, so what motivates you to carve out time to mentor others?
Joy: It's mostly a desire to give back, I guess. I really enjoy my job. I feel incredibly lucky to have landed in the tech industry. I mean, I'm like all of us. I complain occasionally, but it's pretty well compensated.
On average, it's very flexible working hours. You can work on all kinds of different problems and feel like you're actually affecting change and doing interesting things. And at some of the higher levels get a chance to really sort of define your role somewhat.
And so the one piece that makes me a little sad is how few women there are in the room, and...there's a tech leadership meeting I'm in that I'm the only woman in there, and that makes me sad. I don't want to be the only woman.
It's like a great group of people, and don't get me wrong, I've been in situations where I felt marginalized because I was a woman. That's not the case here. But at the same time, it is still a little, I want other women in there with me. I want to see closer to balance. And so anything I can do to help somebody else get there, I think, is really valuable, and I would love to do that.
Heidi: Awesome. Well, certainly, thank you for all the years that you have supported women through the WEST Program. I know they've all appreciated it, and hopefully they have all stayed in the industry and are reaching up to those levels at this point now, too, so I hope so. Thank you. Yeah, so awesome.
Well, maybe one last question. Since you were actually talking about the great group of people that you work with today, when you're looking for workplace culture, your next job, do you have any particular questions that you ask to discover if a company has the workplace culture you're looking for or not?
Joy: It's been a little bit since I've interviewed, so I'm forgetting specific questions, but typically I am trying to probe at, can I be totally myself at work, or are people sort of putting up a front, I guess, essentially.
And then related to that, obviously, more questions about what are you doing to get more women into technical positions here, or how are you thinking about hiring, things like that.
But I think there's a couple others I would look at now, too, in terms of, when I was at Box, and I think this is actually fairly standard. The more senior IC roles tend to be kind of isolated. They're all in different teams, and it can feel isolating, quite honestly.
But my current role, our VP of Eng made an effort to get us all together and put us in a meeting, and it's honestly not necessarily the most useful meeting, but it has built a really tight connection between all of us. And I dunno, I feel comfortable talking to any one of them, and that's been really cool.
So I feel like I have much more of a peer group here than I have at past companies, so I think I would try to dig into some of that as well. Lke, do you know other people at your, especially if it's a senior person I'm talking to, do you know other people at your level? How often do you talk to them? Do you feel comfortable? What do you have in place around that?
Heidi: I love that. Yeah, those are great questions, and I feel like someone asked me recently, what do you do in your first 30, 60, 90 days at a company? And I think the relationship building is so important because at that point where if you are isolated, but at some point, you need to go ask a favor or maybe get them to do something. If that's the first time you've ever talked to them and you don't know each other, you don't know what motivates them, super hard to ask that or to feel guilty about it.
So I love that you're, like you said, maybe not a useful meeting on the regular, but now you know each other, so if you need something from each other, it's a lot easier to bridge that.
Joy: Yeah, my current company has a lot of remote people, so there's one guy I'm thinking of in particular who I was working with, and I was like, oh, this guy is so frustrating, and I can't handle this, whatever. Then we finally met in person, and we went for a run together. I'm a runner. And it was like, oh, this guy's great. I don't know what was happening.
And then later on, I would deal with him again, and it's like, okay, it's still kind of annoying, but I am going to cut him a lot more slack now. I kind of know this is probably just coming off weirdly on Slack or something. And not that he is a terrible person, because he's clearly not. So yeah, relationships matter a lot.
Heidi: That's awesome. That's awesome. Wow. Well, fantastic. I love that. I love that piece of advice in thinking about who the peer group is and who your networking connections will be internally. That's fantastic.
Alright, well, a couple of questions just to wrap up. Thank you so much for all the time that you've spent with us so far. Besides your own blog posts, any favorite books, articles, or resources that you could recommend to our audience?
Joy: I recently listened to Tanya Reilly's book, what is it? Staff Engineer's Path, I think.
Heidi: Oh, cool.
Joy: And I'm referenced in there, so I'm sorry. I would recommend it even if I weren't, but...
Heidi: [laughs] Totally fine.
Joy: Yeah, I listened to that, and it was like I was about to apply to speak at a couple places, and as I'm listening to her, I'm like, but she already said it all. She already said it better than I would. What do I even have to say anymore? I don't know. That's a really good one.
Heidi: Oh, that's awesome. Fantastic. I haven't read that one. I'll have to take a look. Awesome. And speaking of speaking opportunities, opportunity for you to give your own shameless plug, anything that you would like to spotlight or places where people can hear you speaking sometime soon.
Joy: I'm going to be speaking at a webinar in a couple of weeks for LeadDev, talking about getting beyond the senior staff level. And then there is, I'll be also speaking again for LeadDev for their StaffPlus portion of the conference in London. I will be talking about aligning incentives, so a little bit of what I talked about earlier, going more in depth with more examples there. And then I just agreed to talk at the WEST thing coming up. So I'm sure Heidi can give you a lot more details about that than I can.
Heidi: Yeah. Awesome. A few things. Yes. Yeah, super excited to have you speaking at our Engineering Your Future Conference. That is for software engineers, senior software engineers coming up on May 16th. So we will narrow down exactly what the talk will be. But yes, if folks want to hear more from Joy, you can certainly join us on May 16th for that.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Joy. It has been such an honor and privilege, and even though I know you well, there's lots of stories here I hadn't heard before. So I love it. Thank you for sharing your career stories and your insights with everyone.
Joy: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Karen: And that wraps up another great episode of Engineer Your Career, brought to you by WEST. Special thanks to our production team, Scott Williams and Alona Matokhina. If you have questions or nominations for future speakers, please email podcast@joinwest.org. Thanks for tuning in.
