Ep 10. – Dev Opportunities, Freelancing, Meet Ups, and Conferences – w/Marty Haught

Marty Haught: Engineering Director at Fastly. Tech community director at RailsConf, RubyConf and Boulder Ruby. Colorado. Husband. Foodie. Totally a dad. 

Get in Touch with Marty: https://twitter.com/mghaught

Talking Points:

Transcript:

Douglas Hirsh: [00:00:00] welcome to another episode of the junior to senior developer podcast. I’m Douglas Hirsch. 

[00:00:08] Tyler Lemke: [00:00:08] I’m ki, and we’re here today with Marty hot. Did I say that right? Marty? 

[00:00:14] Marty Haught: [00:00:14] You did. That’s 

[00:00:16] Tyler Lemke: [00:00:16] a miracle cause I’m supposed to ask him.

[00:00:20] Marty Haught: [00:00:20] Yep. So 

[00:00:22] Tyler Lemke: [00:00:22] Marty hot. He is a engineer. He is an engineering director director at Fastly tech tech community director at rails comp, Ruby comp and Boulder Ruby. He’s currently lives in Colorado. He’s a husband, a foodie, and totally a dad. I don’t know where we got that from, but I think that’s it.

[00:00:42] That’s your Twitter. He’s also a D and D master back. So we learned that before 

[00:00:49] Douglas Hirsh: [00:00:49] master, you got to get that right. Dungeon master. 

[00:00:52] Marty Haught: [00:00:52] I didn’t do. Or you might just say DM, like. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I, the backstory is that when I was eight, I got, my grandparents gave me, a first edition player’s handbook and DMG.

[00:01:07] Dinner’s your master’s guide and monster manual back way when I was little kid. So, that’s pretty awesome. 

[00:01:15] Tyler Lemke: [00:01:15] Awesome. Well, we S we got in touch, touch with you cause you have a cool, you got a lot of cool, Background of different things. I want to start off kind of with your story. So I found this cool article.

[00:01:28] I don’t know if you remember it, cause you stopped blogging some time ago. but this one was from 2012 and it’s called the developer opportunities. The rest of the story I’ll have a link in the show notes, but Do you, do you recall much about this article at all or, or, 

[00:01:42] Marty Haught: [00:01:42] yeah, I, it does. It does ring a bell.

[00:01:44] I, I don’t recall. Did I write it? Did I, is this one is for my blog. 

[00:01:49] Tyler Lemke: [00:01:49] This one is from your blog. It’s not 

[00:01:51] Marty Haught: [00:01:51] from, 

[00:01:52] Tyler Lemke: [00:01:52] so it looks like your, it says posted by you. 

[00:01:56] Marty Haught: [00:01:56] I’m sure. That’s right. I wrote a lot of things back in the day, so, you know, just, yeah. Cool. 

[00:02:02] Tyler Lemke: [00:02:02] Well, it’s, it’s pretty cool. Cause he, I think he had some, some previous blog posts that kind of talk talked about different opportunities in your career.

[00:02:11] Right? But in this one you mentioned how, you’re going to break down to different, the opportunities that come up and you broke down, what’s called the mid game. What you call the mid game and end game. Right. And you said, and the mid game, it’s a, as I’m calling it, it’s about building up the resume and negative experience.

[00:02:27] So you said you have so many options and see the, see the world, sorry, world of software, travel, stretch yourself and experience, I think make experiences there. So when you talked about a few different things that they’re inside the mid game, What, first of all, I wanted to break down what consider all the years of the mid game, right?

[00:02:48] Because we’re talking about junior to mid-level developers. What are, what are the years of the mid game as you’re defining it here? 

[00:02:56] Marty Haught: [00:02:56] Yeah. So I, you know, when I think about the mid game at this point in your career, you probably can get a job fairly easily. So when you’re a junior, I mean, you know, it’s, it’s fairly common that it’s hard for them to get their first break, you know, where they land their first job.

[00:03:12] They’re there. They’re pretty green. They probably are gonna make a ton of mistakes. There are definitely, most companies will view a junior as sort of, you know, it’s a project, right. You know, they’re not going to be productive and they may not be set up to help that person succeed. So they might have high failure rates on people not working out.

[00:03:32] And so, so the mid game is really when you have. Probably one, two, maybe three years of experience, somewhere in there, depending on how fast you pick things up and how comfortable you are with your tech stack, wherever you’re working on to where you essentially F you apply for jobs. You’re going to get interviews, you’re going to make through the interviews and you’re going to get hired.

[00:03:54] So you, at that point, you have a lot of options available to you. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? and, you know, you could go for a certain kind of tech stack. Maybe you want to change tech stacks, or you go someplace, we’ll let you work on different parts of the stack, or maybe you are going for more of like, maybe for salary or maybe you’re, trying to, get into a new industry or something like that.

[00:04:19] So you’re changing the different verticals, you know, in, in it. and so. You have a lot of options. That’s sort of what I’m think of with the mid game. And I’ve advised many folks over the years that, don’t worry about the money cause the money will come. And we’re blessed in industry where we’re paid quite well.

[00:04:39] I mean, we, we, we deliver the value, but like, Compared to the industry when I got started, it’s just night and day at this point. And the, so optimize for experience, you know, optimized to learn, to get exposed to maybe different ways of working, maybe, you know, consulting versus product, or kind of two other angles you might, explore, in terms of the kind of company and the kind of team you’re working on.

[00:05:06]I also advise that you want to take ownership of things as soon as you can, you know, let, you see if you can run with a feature all on your own or come up with a design of some service on your own or whatever it is you’re doing. you’re going to learn a lot to push yourself. You’re probably gonna make mistakes.

[00:05:25] Hopefully you’re at a place that will not punish you for trying and maybe not succeeding quite as well, but. definitely push yourself outside of your comfort zone. Cause you’re, if you play it safe, then you’re not going to learn as much. 

[00:05:39] Tyler Lemke: [00:05:39] I love it. That’s 

[00:05:39] Marty Haught: [00:05:39] great. 

[00:05:40] Douglas Hirsh: [00:05:40] Say that’s really good advice. I mean, that kind of sounds like oddly enough, that sounds like my career.

[00:05:47] I actually for the first time ever, when I took the last job that I’m at now, I’m an instructor now and I teach web development. But the, the, the, my code structure was like, Hey, it looks like you jumped jobs well, in the past five years, it’s been a little bit more than I would have liked. But, you know, when I, you go to startups, you take risks.

[00:06:08] And so I kind of jumped into the startup realm and yeah. And, you know, even, even try to hand it instructing before, but before that I spent time in different industries and different size companies to kind of understand how. How those things work. So I think that’s really great advice. It’s something where I know I could see people who say they have like eight years or 10 years of experience, but it really doesn’t feel like that they’ve experienced a lot of different things.

[00:06:37] It’s the same company and, and whatnot. So no, totally awesome. 

[00:06:43] Marty Haught: [00:06:43] Yeah. And you, you really can’t. You really can’t judge a person, short of tech, competency based on pure years of experience. Cause I’ve seen many folks who have stuck in the same time kind of job for years and years, and they’re really plateaued and they got comfortable and it’s.

[00:07:01] I mean, I’m not judging anyone for doing that, but you can’t look at someone who’s got eight years of experience where it’s like, you know, maybe the first two years there’s a lot of growth, but in the last six is, but the same year over and over again, you know? So like, yeah. They’ll they’ll know some things really, really well, but like, yeah, there’s diminishing returns on what they’re learning every year.

[00:07:21] And you know, certainly when you’re in the mid game, You, you want to make sure you’re, you’re constantly learning. You’re getting to, take on, harder challenges. be curious about how systems are put together about architecture. You know, you should be reading, blogs, books, whatever, you know, pushing yourself that way.

[00:07:41] Cause, I mean, it’s, it’s a lot to learn. But it’s, it’s worth pushing yourself on that. 

[00:07:47] Douglas Hirsh: [00:07:47] Do you have a specific set of books that you would recommend that people would read? Cause it’s what, since you brought it up. 

[00:07:54] Marty Haught: [00:07:54] Yeah. I mean, so I think some of the stuff, well, one test driven development is one of those books that I read.

[00:08:03] I think it was Charles. And for when I. When I read the book and it changed how I looked at programming and, solving problems with that person. And, and it’s, the book breaks things down to where it’s like baby steps. Like you want to like, Oh, surely I can, I can write more in this version and then run my tests and such, but it’s, I think it was really, good for me to break into that and understand, working that way now.

[00:08:33] You know, from now to back then, was that test driven development was not common back then. And, so I think certainly a lot of places now teach TDD out of the box or at least some sort of close proximity to what that is. And, but I think it’s worth reading that book regardless to kind of see how much like Ken’s process breaks down to actually how you might be.

[00:09:01] Practicing or not practicing TDD. refactoring was another book. Yeah. Martin Fowler that I read the same time that I think a lot of more dynamic languages these days, some of them. The refactoring, steps and, and patterns that you would use, you really wouldn’t use because this was like back when you were writing Java or something like that, that was a lot more structured.

[00:09:22] And, you had IDE support that would let you do these refactorings fairly effortlessly. But I think reading through that, interesting to see the process of here’s code in this one state that works, but it’s not optimal for some reason. And why you choose to. Pick a refactoring pattern and use that because it brings either more flexibility in design or clarity, or allows you to then build something else after you’ve done that refactoring.

[00:09:50] So I think that those, those two books were pretty pivotal for me, in how I design software, when I was thinking about it, from a more recent book. I think, Sandy Metz is a practical object oriented design. And Ruby is really interesting. Even if you don’t write Ruby, I think there’s seeing how she’s using a design to break down a problem and really get to the heart of it, I think is really useful.

[00:10:13] And it’s a pretty quick read as well. I’m trying to think if there’s any others that really jump out at me as something that I would grab and looking at my bookshelf right now. I think those are, those are good ones to start with. but reading blogs and kind of seeing where people are going. I think understanding microservices, I think is pretty useful why you would, or wouldn’t.

[00:10:34] Want to, you know, follow that pattern, there, one of the books that, I don’t know if I’d recommend it, but it certainly very, you learn quite a lot, which is patterns of enterprise application architecture, which is also Martin Fowler. It’s a huge, 

[00:10:47] Douglas Hirsh: [00:10:47] huge book book. 

[00:10:49] Marty Haught: [00:10:49] It is. And it’s, it’s, one that, I think if you’re ready, you’ve built some software you’ve built, you’ve worked on some systems.

[00:10:57] It’s good to kind of see these patterns and how they explore that. 

[00:11:01] Tyler Lemke: [00:11:01] yeah. Got a question on that one because I actually have that on my shelf and that we started reading that in a book club recently. And I, I don’t know about you guys, but when I start using, seeing UML diagrams, when I cut my eyes was kind of like glaze over and my brain turns off like reading this book was really difficult for me.

[00:11:19]could you I’ve I’ve got, I’ve got about four years of experience for like professional experience, roughly and. my, my experience has mixed, so I’m sure other people will be much more advanced than I am at their careers, but can you talk a little bit about that? What would you suggest, for people who feel like that if they pick up one of these books, the same with the same thing with the TDD, by example, like, if you haven’t done unit testing, jumping into T like TDD, same is like overwhelming.

[00:11:46]at least it was for me. Can you speak a little bit to that for people who might feel like I do. 

[00:11:51] Marty Haught: [00:11:51] Yeah, I, I do think that, the writing styles that they used back then were a lot more academic and they are, they are pretty rough. some of those books are pretty rough to work through. And, I think what I would do, if you find yourself in that sort of, situation is, is maybe Google, You know, blog articles or something like that, that kind of touch on the same subject matter and something that’s been written in the last maybe five years, because they’re, they’re going to one, probably a riff on whatever they’re talking about.

[00:12:24] Maybe the use of a pattern, maybe some sort of process with a modern language that a modern, stack that you would be more comfortable familiar with and the likely speak in a way that’s more engaging and more relevant to how you’re thinking and working. And there’s plenty of folks that are, that are sharing sort of, you know, this process, you know, now on blogs or medium or whatever, and it’s very approachable.

[00:12:52] And I think that that’s a, that’s a good way. Usually those. Kinds of posts are quick to read, you know, maybe you spend 10 or 15 minutes on them and, and then just try it out, you know, grab your peer editor and your favorite language and just try to follow along and see how that goes. So that’s, that’s why I would recommend, I mean, I also recommend that, that it’s great to have, someone, a mentor or someone you can.

[00:13:18] Talk to that has more experience because sometimes there’s nothing better than sitting down and pairing on something or walking through where you’re getting stuck or what you don’t understand, and they’ll be able to kind of help unblock you, that maybe you, you wouldn’t, you might struggle more with if you’re just reading through material yourself.

[00:13:38] Tyler Lemke: [00:13:38] Yeah. I think it was helpful to kind of do that through book club, even though that fell off. But I really liked that suggestion because I think it helps. Douglas and I are both into like how hard brain works. I think it helps you kind of get the mental model faster that way. And then you can fill in the gaps with the book because the book is going to give you this huge, it’s like 10 pages on one, one design pattern of 20 pages.

[00:13:59] And you’re gonna be like, what did I just read? And it’s in a completely different context, right? It’s a context of 20 years ago, which in programming is like a hundred years ago. Right. So it’s like, so I think those are really good points. Thanks for that. 

[00:14:12] Marty Haught: [00:14:12] Yeah. And I think there’s another piece here, which is like, There’s another, there’s another great classic book, but it’s going to be on the same, sort of a spectrum of maybe hard to work through, which is called design patterns.

[00:14:26] Yeah. It’s usually called the gang of four book and, that, that’s kind of, that was the first book that I got that really got into that. And I think I got that book in like Jasmine one or something like that. And, and, the thing is with a lot of those patterns, you, you know, you might not. Be in an environment where you had that problem.

[00:14:46] And so it’s very abstract. You’re like, okay, I’m reading this. I think I get why I do this. But like this isn’t a real person for me. I’m not, I don’t know when I would grab this and apply it. And that’s, that’s sometimes, a challenge with these sort of design patterns or Beck breast practices is that if you haven’t felt that pain, if you haven’t run into that wall, then this is gonna, like, I think I understand it, but then like, You might use it and it might not even be the right situation and it doesn’t fit.

[00:15:15] And of course it’s probably not going to work. So, I think there’s something to be said about like, yes, I have this problem. I recognize this pain. And this is a very, this is getting me to think about, I could approach this problem with this solution and it may be enough to get you going down the right direction.

[00:15:30] But if you don’t have a problem, right, like, okay, So 

[00:15:34] Douglas Hirsh: [00:15:34] that’s what, yeah. That, and whenever anyone says, Hey, throw a pattern’s book at somebody it’s like, well, you might be doing more damage to that, to that junior then than you think, because maybe they should go through problems, not understanding how to talk about the problems and then, and then be introduced to now, this is how you talk about them, because reading about them, what do they say when everything, when, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[00:16:00] Marty Haught: [00:16:00] Right. 

[00:16:00] Douglas Hirsh: [00:16:00] You know, that’s, it’s funny that comes back like a book in the 18 hundreds from a psychologist, but it really, it really kind of, it plays out in our field a lot where someone like I’m going to make everything a Singleton now, because I read about it and it’s, you know, I think it should be, but no, like, yeah, like let’s have the problem where you try to figure out how to have only one instance of something ever created.

[00:16:23] Now let’s show you how to. How to create one. So sometimes it really is about the mentoring. I think that what you brought up about mentoring is, is very important because it does come down to passing down some of that. I don’t know if we can write everything down in our heads, in a book in a way that would let someone pick it up.

[00:16:41] Like you need to go find, go find someone who’s done it for a while and sit down with them and see what, what you can hammer out. 

[00:16:49] Marty Haught: [00:16:49] Yeah. And one thing to kind of tie it back to our original, sort of, sort of topic was that when, you know, when you’re looking for potential places to go work, hopefully you should be asking a lot of questions in your interview, interview processes, not just them.

[00:17:05] Grilling you to make sure that you’re a good fit. You should be asking them tough questions to make sure they’re a good fit for you. And I think, especially if you’re in that maybe if a junior, you don’t have this luxury yet, so you just want, you need the job, but like definitely the mid game, like, you know, Ask them about mentoring, ask them about what, what they’re doing, how they help, you know, mid-level program or succeed, you know, with concrete examples and see, do they have those helpful seniors that will sit you down and kind of talk you through like, Hey, let’s solve this problem.

[00:17:37] And here’s how, you know, the pattern or sort of the approach we use. To get into that. Cause I mean, they should be able to explain that if they can’t then they probably don’t have, have that a good practice with that at their workplace. 

[00:17:50] Douglas Hirsh: [00:17:50] There may be, they may be a senior just because of how long they’ve been there or how much money they make.

[00:17:55] Marty Haught: [00:17:55] Right. Yeah. 

[00:17:56] Tyler Lemke: [00:17:56] I don’t ever want to complain about that though. So 

[00:18:00] Marty Haught: [00:18:00] although, 

[00:18:01] Tyler Lemke: [00:18:01] although I guess they do once they, if you get, if you get pigeonholed into a job and lose your job, then, then you might, you might complain about it. If you got advanced too quickly or whatever you want to call it. But I want to get back to the, the mid get like the developer opportunities.

[00:18:13] Cause you also talked about, there’s you separate these two opportunities and in the mid game, and two’s two separate sections and maybe it’s a mid game and end game, but you said one’s based on your work style and one’s on the project domain. So you said there’s five different types of work styles.

[00:18:28] And if this, this doesn’t ring a bell, then we can kind of move on to something else. You talked about product companies, consult, consulting, freelancing training, and content. Can you kind of relate the kind of your career and how you came up with these five different, work styles? 

[00:18:47] Marty Haught: [00:18:47] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so.

[00:18:50]let me maybe back up and give you a little more sort of, kind of how I got to this point, in my career. So this is 2012, so I was 15 years into my career. I w I had, was running a consultancy that I had founded. It was, you know, at this point dozen 12 were probably eight or nine. total I kept hot code works fairly small.

[00:19:16]but I had. Spent some time early in my career at, startups that were, you know, product companies. So like you are on this team that does this one thing inside a large organization and digital river is where I got my start I’m in Minneapolis. And I was on this client services team that was basically using our platform, which is e-commerce to build out sort of customized solutions for some of our more like enterprise.

[00:19:44] Customers that need special things. And so I learned how to build solutions in that sort of limited sandbox on that platform. And, I moved after that to do that some consulting and then, move from sort of like more generic consulting where I’m joining a very large team and I’m just doing what is one thing to where I was more like, in a very small team of like two, three, four engineers that are building a product or building out some new, functionality.

[00:20:16] And it definitely stretched me in different ways. And so when I was writing this, I had seen a lot of these different models. And, you know, if you’re a freelancer, you have to develop a whole different. Set of skills to succeed in that world, which I think is great. And they’re there. They’re nice, but they’re different than if you’re at a product company where you’re on one team, that’s really going deep in some part of the technology stack, you know, maybe you’re doing something with email or maybe you’re doing something with, you know, content delivery or whatever it might be.

[00:20:50]and so. I think that when you are, you’ve got enough experience, to where you can start choosing your, the next job. You, you may have been working in a product company where you were known as the person who just did this thing. Maybe you’re the guy who does react, or maybe you’re a backend engineer there.

[00:21:11] Maybe you get, you’ve gone the dev ops a route, and now you’re kind of in the SRE territory and. sometimes what’ll happen is you, you might get stuck there. And like, now this is, this is what you’re known for, because what you’ve done for the last two or three jobs, and maybe you don’t want to do just that.

[00:21:29] I’ve certainly encountered plenty of folks that were on dev ops and they realize that really want to do more software, not, you know, building infrastructure. And so I think it’s important to recognize that these different types of opportunities are out there. you know, training and, and, Douglas, you mentioned the training piece, and I think that training is really nice because you have to think differently than if you’re just shipping software.

[00:21:56] And I think there’s also something to be said about, like, if you’re on a, On a product facing team, or you’re building a product and you’re working very, very quickly, but you don’t get time to ever really go deep and really sort of like scale up or sort of a hone or shine something up because you’re building features so quickly.

[00:22:16] So like early stage startup, you’re going to be, is it a very different mode than like you’re at an enterprise? sort of like it type company where you’re, you’re just scaling and really making this one. Aspect of the software, gets to the next level. And so I think it’s good to recognize that those are all different opportunities and you might want to just try different ones, and, and see which one you, you gravitate towards.

[00:22:41] You might find that you’re more girl and you’ll want to help build products. Cause you like the creativity where, or you might say no, I really want to become the expert at this one thing. And thus, I need to find a product company or some other type of enterprise company. That’s. That has that a team that’s focused solely on that and you’ll spend the next four years doing it.

[00:23:02] Tyler Lemke: [00:23:02] And then you, then you went into, you talk about, we’ll let people kind of read more about your article, that dig deeper into that. Cause we’ve got a lot of stuff to discuss, but the, you talked about project domains as well. And I don’t know if you, you hit on some of this, but you talked about like high concurrency throughput type companies that makes me kind of think of like, you know, the Netflix and Googles of the world, like where algorithms actually, matter.

[00:23:25] Do you want to kind of touch on some of those other project domains as well? 

[00:23:28] Marty Haught: [00:23:28] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I mentioned rescues, which was something that is, I think rescues are a fascinating sort of line of work that you get to win. Well, generally when you have a little more experience, you’ve, you’ve been burned different ways.

[00:23:44] You’ve seen teams get burned, you know, pursuing software in certain ways to where you can walk into a, a project, or a team that is struggling, you know, that things aren’t working very well. And you can recognize here are the reasons why, and here’s how we fix it. And this is something that when you’re getting kind of towards the end game, I recommend that you definitely.

[00:24:05] Get into some rescue work because you, you already have all this, this rich sort of, base of experiences, you just know like, Oh yeah. Well, this process here is one of the root causes of why we have these problems. And so if we fix this. Then this will get better and extra thing. So I think that rescues is one that I mentioned that, that I think is really good to have that experience.

[00:24:31]the hiking currency throughput is actually like with Fastly, the teams that I’m involved with, this is the world that we live in because we have, or it’s not Google level, but like it’s, it’s serious scale and there are. Teams that are really focused on efficiency and what at one particular part of the stack.

[00:24:51] And they’re super expert at that one thing. And I think it’s, you know, when you, you get to where you’ve got to have experience, you can land a job like that. I think it’s really valuable to go deep that way. The, yeah, I think enterprise. Oh, so this I gave here is when you’ve got lots of different larger teams and there’s this collaborative cross functional piece across these different teams that you have to work with.

[00:25:17] And I think that’s a great experience as well, because if you’re like working at a small. engineering company where there’s maybe 10 or less engineers, you’re not really going to see that, but the moment you need to see a project that has four different teams at different parts of the company, you have to work together, you experience a whole nother different set of problems that, I think it’s good, especially when you’re growing to have that exposure to then, you know, be able to then.

[00:25:46] In nether situation, be able to be more effective and recognizes things. 

[00:25:53] Tyler Lemke: [00:25:53] That’s great or explaining all those different ones. Now I wanted to get into the end game sections, but we don’t have time. So I want to talk about your end game. Now. I noticed you started, hot code works. and you did that for 13 years.

[00:26:05] Can you explain a little bit about. your journey in that was that, was that like a solo, like a solo, a solo gig? Or where did you have your own company or? 

[00:26:14] Marty Haught: [00:26:14] Yeah, it was initially, it was me freelancing essentially. I mean the, the, the short answer of why I started is that I was tired of working for idiots and, you know, I, I had just recently come off a project where some really questionable management that was really bad, like really toxic.

[00:26:32] And I’m like, I. I was frustrated that I had a lot of experience at that point and they weren’t really listening to me. And it’s interesting that at the moment I became a consultant, all of a sudden these same types of people they’re paying me money would actually listen to my advice when, and when I was an employee, they wouldn’t, it was just like, I couldn’t believe it.

[00:26:54] It was, it was so true. and I mean, I think. I traded one set of problems for another set of problems. So I think it’s okay. And that’s fine. I think with, with hot code works and starting that I made a ton of mistakes. I, the, one of the classic problems is I was. working in the business, not on the business.

[00:27:13] And so that’s the idea that I was focused more on, how do I write great software? How do I help build good stuff, software, as opposed to, how do I build a consultancy that does those things? And I eventually caught on to that. But like, I didn’t think of that in the beginning. I was very focused on the craft of creating software and shipping projects and all that, which is fine, but I really need to be thinking about other things.

[00:27:39] So, but it CA how code works, pretty good, quickly moved in from a, I landed a nice contract for myself to where I wanted to do projects that required more than just myself to do. And so I needed scheme. And so I started to build a team into those projects. And I had enough experience where I had built systems.

[00:27:59] I’d been an architect and lead designer, a engineer on several projects to where I was comfortable. If I’m going to be the boss, if I’m going to be the one who goes to say a potential customer who wants to build a product or whatever, that I, I could do it all for them. And I’ve seen plenty of freelancers that.

[00:28:22] Got into the situations and they hadn’t had enough experience and they’re actually the ones that would end up rescuing because they would make lots of mistakes and, and they just didn’t have the experience to know any better yet. And I don’t blame them for that, but, but you know, that happens quite a lot.

[00:28:37] So once I got comfortable with that, that’s when I knew it was time for me to, or I, you know, it was time, but I felt it was time for me to try out running my own. Consultancy and that worked and, and, you know, I may have done it longer than I should have. I, I, you know, it’s kinda like the, you know, we talked about having, you know, a lot of years experience, but like maybe the last five were kind of repeat of all those years and I could have moved onto something else, but it’s okay.

[00:29:06] I think it’s important that you do what you love, but. I did scale up to where we had, you know, usually three to five projects at once going on and we are largest at 13. So we were never a very large consultancy. I kept it purposely small. but it meant that we had very interesting early stage work where it was teams of two to three to four building out something.

[00:29:29] And it might only be nine months. We built an MVP and we, we turn over to them and they would. Scale it up or whatever. 

[00:29:35] Tyler Lemke: [00:29:35] It’s not a tiny company though. Like when I, when I think of, I think I like one mantra, you’ve got 13 other devs. That’s pretty cool. 

[00:29:41] Marty Haught: [00:29:41] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was, I did all nontechnical stuff. and the others were all engineers, building software.

[00:29:48] So we were super lean that way. And I think, 

[00:29:52] Douglas Hirsh: [00:29:52] I think this is super important that if anyone like comes, like when people come in to listen to this, I want to reemphasize what you just said about going freelance. Because I made that mistake myself. I actually went freelance and I shouldn’t have, and I wanted to go write code.

[00:30:09] And that was, that was the problem. And a lot of people who would listen to the show that would think that they might be the point where they want to go freelance. You need to have in mind that when you start a business, It’s not just about coding. You’re going to probably put yourself in it places to write code, but you’re running a business and you know, it’s the E myth revisited comes to mind really quick.

[00:30:33] That’s a really good book that if you ever want to think about going into business for yourself, read that book first before you make the leap to do it. And if you still want to do it, you gotta do what you love. Like you said, you really should do it. Try stuff. It’s fine, but right. But have kind of an idea of what you’re jumping into.

[00:30:51] Cause if I had known Douglas Judy to go, you know, and I was lucky, I was really lucky. I always had another client. I was when one client dropped, I had another client. my network was strong enough that I could just go, Hey. And usually within 12 hours, I would have someone else that would pay me money to write code.

[00:31:09] But. I never did what you did, which was now I want to scale up. Instead, someone offered me more money than I was making, doing the stuff that I was doing to go back and be an employee. And I was like, you know what, tired of doing this. I’m going to go back and be an employee for a bit and see what, what happens.

[00:31:26] And it was, that was a mistake too, but that’s a whole nother story. Yeah, 

[00:31:31] Marty Haught: [00:31:31] go ahead. I can say a hundred percent on that. It’s, you know, there, there are, it’s just a different deal and, you know, I stopped coding. I actually got to the point where if I’m wrong writing code, if I am taking on, you know, a feature work, something’s gone very wrong because, once you get to a certain size, I had to make sure there was work for everyone because people were counting on me, right.

[00:31:55] To keep them busy. And, you know, I, if I didn’t, then I would have them. Very large, expensive problem on my hands. And so, yeah, you get to very much where you need to either have partners that are going to help with some of the business aspects or else you’re going to own it yourself. And you’re pretty much not going to code, but maybe that’s okay.

[00:32:17] [00:32:17] Douglas Hirsh: [00:32:17] For not coding anymore. Right. 

[00:32:19] Marty Haught: [00:32:19] That’s right. For sure. 

[00:32:21] Douglas Hirsh: [00:32:21] You had told me that like, like I really, at the time when I did this, I loved code. Right. But it was like, I’m going to go do it for myself. And that’s, that’s the thing that I w I would, I would actually really encourage people just from your experience.

[00:32:35] Like we could, we could. Put our two experiences together and it’s like, you, you, with the right way, you’re like, I’m going to stop coding and go hire people and get really big projects. And I was like, I really want to go back and write code some more and, You know, both of those were not bad to say, right?

[00:32:52] They, both of those were just a difference in the way that we wanted to do things. I still wanted to play around as a technician a little bit more while you had the options Purdue or newer, and manage your mentality. So bringing in more of that E myth revisited book into a, into place, a really good stuff.

[00:33:11] Yeah. So 

[00:33:12] Tyler Lemke: [00:33:12] I’m curious, did you, you had mentioned how FA did Fastly acquire your company or, or can you talk about that at all? You said that, your, your whole team joined Fastly. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[00:33:23] Marty Haught: [00:33:23] Oh, but yeah, it was not an acquisition in a true sense. you know, product companies like Fastly.

[00:33:29] Really want nothing to do with a, a consultancy, cause it’s a different business model. It’s all liability, but there was a, arrangement. So a bulk hire, if you will, to take the whole team over, that we worked out. And so I, I ended up closing hot, good works down. I actually had two contractors that didn’t want to.

[00:33:47] Follow us to Fastly and they helped the transition and we did over three or four months, depending on the client. And so, but yeah, it was, it was something that I had been considering. I was, I was ready to not. Do the running a small consultancy thing anymore. I mean, I’ve been doing it for 13 years and I was like, ready for something different.

[00:34:09] And, you know, you get to a point where like, and this is where I kind of talked about with the mid game earlier, where like, you know, you can get pigeonholed and stuck on doing this one thing. And I think it’s good to like, what else do you want to do and make, and, and chase that. And so that’s kind of where I got to where I, I mean, I loved.

[00:34:27] My team, I really, that was hard to not work with them anymore. So I wanted to find something where we could all go together. And also, I want to really be careful about what was next. There’s so much choice. And obviously we’re blessed, to have so much choice. And especially when you get longer in your career, like I like.

[00:34:49] Like where I am like, yeah. I mean, you know, I could choose lots of companies if I, if I were just Twitter. Hey, I’m, I’m available for hire. If I probably be overwhelmed like 20, 30, 40, you know, invitations to interview and talk about their startup or join. Stripe or whatever, you know, it could be all these different places that they’ve known me through my network or through conferences and they would, you know, want me to join them.

[00:35:15] So, so I really thought about what I wanted. and I took, over a year to find the right place for the, for the team and I know land and, been very happily at Fest. It’s, it’s, it’s a great company and a lot of different problems. It’s neat to go deeper with that. but yeah, that’s kind of how it all happened.

[00:35:37] Douglas Hirsh: [00:35:37] So you mentioned, you did mention, like if you put the call out that you, that you might need, you know, that you won’t work and stuff like that, you’d have a bunch of people contacting you and, and you mentioned conferences and that’s something that I’ve noticed you have spent some time at. I noticed your name on an O’Reilly conference.

[00:35:55]you know, I’ve noticed like you you’re, you’re pretty prolific. I, you know, and so, you know, maybe, maybe talk a little bit about that and. 

[00:36:04] Marty Haught: [00:36:04] Yeah, absolutely. So I would say the first seven years of my career I was, was, drifting or was sleepwalking or whatever you would call like a wasn’t really very intentional.

[00:36:16] And, it was towards the end of that, where I was more involved. I started going to user groups and started talking to more people and it’s a whole, it opens up a whole. Bunch of doors. The moment you do that, you have to put the work in sometimes depending on your personality type might be super uncomfortable to go to a meetup or to a conference where you don’t know anyone or, you know, very few people.

[00:36:43] And you’re super shy about. talking to someone and introducing yourself, and it’s something that you kind of just need to get over. one of the things I tell folks that have that problem is that, well, you’re here at this event because you both care about this subject. So you already have a bunch of things in common, and there there’s some easy icebreaker questions that you can start with.

[00:37:05] And no doubt like you, you can ask, like, what are, what. What are you working on? What’s cool that you’ve explored lately, that those questions are easy. And usually if you’re, if we’re talking about programming and some sort of meetup or conference where that’s a thing, the other person will be happy to tell you about the cool things that they have discovered or they’re interested in or things they like to do.

[00:37:26] And that you mean you can talk for, you know, probably hours if you’re pursuing that. And so. But the reason why this is so important is the more folks, you know, the more people will know you, the more you’ll hear about this, that, and the other. And a lot of times the best jobs are going to be referrals.

[00:37:47] Like, you know, me and my friends got this team and they’re going to be hiring, opening a rec for this position. I think this would be perfect for you as those kinds of, of. that you want to have happen. You know, you want to find the jobs because someone knows you been, when you’ve been working together, chatting at a meetup, or maybe you’ve been working on some open source together and they vouch for you and you, you don’t even go through the normal interview process because someone’s like, you need to hire X on your team and they just make the intro.

[00:38:24] Douglas Hirsh: [00:38:24] Referrals are top. Like, if you can get a referral, you are, you are so far ahead. 

[00:38:30] Marty Haught: [00:38:30] Yeah. And I think the other thing that’s really important with conferences is that you’re dedicating yourself to learning, to exploring. And all of a sudden you hear about this cool thing that you wouldn’t have heard about if you hadn’t gone to those conference.

[00:38:43]and so, when I started, I intentionally chose to do this when I moved to Colorado from Kansas, I didn’t know anyone, but I knew at that point that if I wanted to have. More options for work. And this point, right? I was fairly, I was far enough from my career that I probably could have thrown my resume out there and I would’ve gotten played there.

[00:39:04] He was eventually gotten something, but not to the point where people would refer me for positions because that is, they know who I was. I was brand new. And so I made the point of going lots of different meetups. I started talking to, for people telling them what I was interested in and asked what they were doing, where they worked, if they, if they liked where they worked, you know, tell me about the teams there.

[00:39:22] I would, I would just. Talk to him about that. And, and so that was one piece. And the other piece was learning about the cool tech that was coming up, or like this company is now doing this one thing. And like, I didn’t know about that. I should. And that’s how I, which I discovered rails and Ruby and that it was back in 2005.

[00:39:39] So that was, it was just now coming on the scene. And so I was very interested in digging into that and finding people that were talking about it and using it and, It was just very magical. And I think, any of us can do this. You can go, there’s plenty of meetups, although I’ll go right now with COVID is a little bit different, but you can, you can seek this out, in a virtual sense as well.

[00:40:03] And I think it’s just sort of, this is kind of two prongs here. One, it’s just sort of this learning aspect where you’re, you’re hungry and you’re trying to learn new things and understand what’s out there. And the other one is just expanding your network. 

[00:40:16] Douglas Hirsh: [00:40:16] You’re talking about the, the virtual meetups.

[00:40:19] I noticed a few, quite a few of them that I used to follow just like dropped off the face of the planet when, when COBIT hit. And I’m like, you know, I’m thinking to myself, why would you do this? Like we’re, we’re in technology, just fire up a zoom meeting or whatever. I hope that more conferences really kind of take, take that.

[00:40:42] And we could see some innovation in how to, to, to navigate like conferences and user groups, because I really do think, cause right now I actually do spend my entire day on a zoom call. So it is a little hard for me to jump into a zoom call at the end of the day. because I’m in a zoom call all day talking to people all day and, But I really, I hope to see some sort of innovation, coming in, you know, in the near future.

[00:41:10] Cause I don’t think this is something that’s this is not a blip on the radar. This is, this is something we’re going to have to adapt to and innovate on. but. No, that’s, that’s kind of, when you, when you were talking about that, it just, it brought that up into mind that that we’re, we’re at a different stage.

[00:41:26] Now, do you, how do you, do you think that the same tactics are going to work in these, these electronic or virtual meetups than, than how they work when you actually walked in face to face with people? 

[00:41:40]Marty Haught: [00:41:40] I think it’s probably mostly we’ll work. It might be a little bit harder, but, I think it still can.

[00:41:46] I mean, Boulder Ruby went virtual and it’s not exactly the same, of course. but you know, you have the ability to do direct messaging and chatting. And so I think, you know, if you’re having. In a virtual setting, more conversation. And I think this is kind of the key is that, you know, in looking at virtual events, how do you share a recreates or the interactivity?

[00:42:13] How do you recreate the hallway track? And, I don’t know if we have any great answers, but I think there are. options where you can have dialogue about something where maybe someone posts a question and, you know, you have, if the meetup isn’t too large, like maybe there’s 20 or last, you can have people talk about it and you’re seeing faces.

[00:42:33] You’re seeing what they’re talking about. You can say, Oh yeah, that person right there. I should ping that person. Talk to them about this. Cause I have a question and I think that’s, that’s sort of like, Maybe the easiest way to pursue that is like you identify someone who maybe you’d love to have a conversation with.

[00:42:51] If you have a question you’d love to ask them and, and do go ahead, ping them. And maybe it’s, maybe it’s something you do over Slack or, or maybe email or Twitter or something like that. So it’s not exactly the medium that maybe you’re in when you’re in the meeting and that’s fine. but maybe then try and set up like a, like a virtual coffee.

[00:43:10] Set up or something like that, where you can chat afterwards and have a direct one to one conversation, because I think it’s, it’s finding the people you should be talking to is key. And then just initiating those conversations in whatever format you all feel comfortable with, but then you can get pretty close to that.

[00:43:27] Yeah, I 

[00:43:27] Tyler Lemke: [00:43:27] think it’s interesting. Cause I think you have to, I’ve been to several meetups and I actually liked going and, and going to meet up. So though I can be, you know, sometimes it can be shy. Sometimes I can be outgoing. But I think it’s, what’s your experience with, with, cause you talked about meeting the right people.

[00:43:42]I’ve had experiences where I’ve gone to meet up and I’ve handed out a business card and I got work through that business card. I wasn’t, I was just trying to connect. And can you talk a little bit about, you know, meetups where you’ve met tons of people or meetups that where you’ve met? No, no one or conferences.

[00:43:57] And how, can you talk about like the. 

[00:44:01] Marty Haught: [00:44:01] The, 

[00:44:01] Tyler Lemke: [00:44:01] the frequency of, of doing it. And if people just go once that, why they shouldn’t give up, 

[00:44:06] Marty Haught: [00:44:06] maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, if you just go once the chances that you’re gonna meet someone that’s going to have a ongoing relationship with, or that will lead to some sort of referral or work is probably not very high, but you never know it, but there’s definitely something to becoming a familiar face.

[00:44:26] To where like, Oh yeah, I saw that person show up to this meetup and, and maybe that person asked him interesting questions during one of the sessions, or I remember overhearing that person talking about this cool technology that they’re they’re dabbling with. And, you know, I’m interested in that. And so, so the more you do that, the more that those opportunities can come about and that, if.

[00:44:51] If they’re not happening, then you have to kind of make them happen by seeking people out, you know, asking them questions. you know, trying to get that conversation started handing out business cards is fine. I think that that’s, that works too. it’s really just. You know, getting out there and talking to folks and see what happens, that that’s really key and sticking to it.

[00:45:10] And, and don’t just go to one meetup. Like, I think it’s good to go. If you have a particular, like, if you’re into Ruby, then obviously, you know, if we get a Ruby meetup scrape, but maybe, maybe you’re interested in multiple languages and there’s different types of meetups in your area that all kind of cover those.

[00:45:26]there’s the spectrum there then and go for it and then go to all of them and, and, and. And most likely you’ll find someone you’re really interested in chatting with, like, this is a really cool person that I want to learn more and maybe we’ll collaborate. Maybe, maybe we’ll, you know, grab some coffee sometime or something like that.

[00:45:44] And the more you do it, the more chance that that’s going to happen. 

[00:45:49] Tyler Lemke: [00:45:49] I think that’s really good. Thanks for covering that. Now you’ve spoken on a lot of good points so far one that I’m interested in. Cause I like, I like speaking, I’ve actually spoken at a few meetups before, but how, how do you, how do you become a speaker at a conference or meet up?

[00:46:07] Do you just need to be, you know, this wealth of knowledge or is it something that you can do earlier in your career? 

[00:46:12] Marty Haught: [00:46:12] Oh, you can, you can do it. From day one. so usually the first piece is one you just have to commit to, to sharing. And I would pick something small, like at your meetup. See if you can do a little lightning, talk on something cool that you learned recently, and there you’d be surprised how many.

[00:46:30] Folks will value hearing your experiences as a junior or as a mid dealing with normal stuff, like how you solved a problem or this interesting, sort of challenge you overcame. And you don’t have to be the world’s expert at this thing. Matter of fact, none of us are really, but that doesn’t mean that you sharing your experience.

[00:46:52] Isn’t valuable because there’s most likely there’s going to be a lot of other folks in the audience that will, that will resonate with. You, you might have stumbled upon something that they haven’t heard yet, and that will help them, or maybe it might be to more of a senior person will hear about like some struggles or challenges that you, you have faced that you didn’t overcome.

[00:47:13] Right. Did they be like, Oh yeah, I love to like. You know, help you with that, or let me offer you my experience and how I, I dealt with that when I was at that phase in my career. And so there, you absolutely can do that, even as a brand spanking new junior, that that just is out of a code school, or maybe even just interested in that code school.

[00:47:33]But I think there’s, I don’t have any resources off the top of my head, but there, I think you could look up to like how to put together a really compelling lightening talk, how to put together, a presentation and start small start simple. Don’t you know, you’re not trying to, You know, present definitively on this is how you do one thing, you know, tell your story, people love stories.

[00:47:56] And, the main thing is you just get going on it and then you’re doing so for a place that you want to share something, your experience, something that, you know, maybe your passion for something, and you start with that and, you just get better. You just, you just work on your craft and you just give it.

[00:48:14] And I mean, I’ve given plenty of user. group meetup type talks at work. Not very well. They were, they were polished at all. The slides were terrible and it was just me talking about this thing, but it was still useful because people were like, that’s great. I love hearing your stories about this Marty, and you know, over time, if you, if you want to become a speaker.

[00:48:33] And I do think it’s really good because there’s something about teaching people that you get dramatically better at that thing. And. It pushes you. And, you know, we’ve kind of talked about that several times tonight, but that, that speaking is that at all whole nother level, plus the moment you start speaking at conferences, you have, I mean, this sort of this authority effect where like, clearly this person is on stage.

[00:48:59] This person must be an authority at something, right? They wouldn’t be on stage, even though they might be sharing their experiences as a junior engineer or whatever it’s still is served. It’s one of our biases that we have. and it’s, I think it’s worth doing because all of a sudden new doors will open for you.

[00:49:16] If you start speaking and sharing. And if you keep working on that craft, 

[00:49:21] Tyler Lemke: [00:49:21] That’s really cool. So you start, you talked about doing lightning talks and stuff. And can you go dig a little bit deeper in, this is kind of selfish of me, but, how do you, how does one get, how do you get to be chosen to do a conference?

[00:49:35] Cause doing meetups is much easier. In my opinion, like I can go ask a meet up direct. I can go ask the, meet up director directly on meet up. I’ve messaged people that they let me come or they don’t. Right. 

[00:49:44] Marty Haught: [00:49:44] Yeah. So conference talks, I mean, the first thing you need to understand is is that, why are you giving the talk.

[00:49:52] Why wouldn’t you even come to the talk, it’d be really clear. What’s the message, what they get out of this and you have to sell it. So when you’re writing an abstract, when you’re submitting to a CFP or some other process for a conference, you need to get really clear on why. The thing that you want to share with them is valuable to their audience.

[00:50:14] How is what you’re going to cover, going to make someone better. Right. And there’s actually, if you’re not familiar, Kathy Sierra is really good at this. you can look her up. She’s got a book called badass, making users. Awesome. So if you ever get usability, this is a really fantastic material to get into.

[00:50:31] She has a. Had a blog, you can look up Kathy Sierra and she really talks about, you know, thinking about your users and how do you make them better. And in this case, you’re thinking about how do you make the audience better? What are they going to get out of going to your talk? Right? And as soon as you can identify what that is, then you make sure you sell it in your abstract.

[00:50:52] So that if someone, you know, someone who’s attending a conference was to see that in a program, they would be like, wow, We’ve got to go to this because I want whatever they’re selling in this thing. I want to learn whether they’re going to present whatever it is, like you want that reaction. And so, and it might, I mean, there’s a lot of luck in, in this, but there is a craft to, you know, selling what you’re going to present.

[00:51:18] That like, this is valuable. You don’t want to miss this. This is gonna really help you. And, the other piece is to understand the audience of course, and what the conference is looking for, hopefully in their CFP process or whatever, they, they make that fairly clear. and also just to do it a lot, like if you don’t submit a lot of proposals, you’re not going to get a lot of proposals accepted.

[00:51:39] And I don’t know what my proposal exception rate was over the years, but it was not good. Like maybe 25%. I’m like, it was, there was embarrassing. It, there were points where I was like, this is really terrible. Why can’t I get in my talks except yeah. Well, until you have a name for yourself, you, you know, it’s really kind of, did you sell it well?

[00:51:57] And is that what they’re interested in? It could be that you wrote a fantastic talk, great abstract, and they’re just not interested in that topic and that’s okay. Like you just don’t take it personally. You just gotta keep at it. I do think that. If you’re serious about that, you go to meet ups, present, ask for feedback, ask someone who does go to these conferences and say, you know, tell, give me honest feedback back on how I am.

[00:52:23] How close am I to, to having something that’s like conference grades really high quality. And, think about that. Think about how Ted talks. Work, how they really focus. There’s no fluff in those. They’re like, you know, five, eight, 12 minutes of pure focused story that really delivers whatever they’re trying to deliver.

[00:52:43] And you want to make sure that when you put your talk together, that you keep that in mind with every single slide that you put out there so that there’s no fluff, you can have fun. You can, you can tell jokes, get silly stories and whatever, but that’s. Entertainment and that’s there for a reason, but do you have just filler slides that go on and on now?

[00:53:02]they probably won’t know that, you know, before they accept your talk, but, you know, hone that, get, get good at that when you’re at immediate, because, you know, they’re, they’re very forgiving usually about who they let talk. So, 

[00:53:14] Tyler Lemke: [00:53:14] all started. You’d need to like tell, tell a good story. And maybe that book you’re suggesting talks about that, but that’s like one of my weaknesses, I’m like, I’m really good at facts and like presenting things factually, but not good at weaving a story.

[00:53:26]have you had any experience with that or? 

[00:53:29] Marty Haught: [00:53:29] Well, yeah, I mean, usually stories are, are how, humans connect and can internalize something. Like, if you imagine. you know, if your prediction just presenting facts on a slide, you know, that might be interesting, but it might not be very memorable, but if you weave a very compelling story and people were falling along and, and the, the lesson learned at the end of the story is the point you’re trying to make more impactful because you’ve woven this narrative around it.

[00:53:59] And, you know, if, if you’re not great at making these things up, you know, you can just, you can find existing stories out there that people have told or that you’ve heard or that you personally experienced. Like if it, if you can’t make it up or if you can’t fake it, that’s fine. Like, you know, you don’t have to be that way, but stories are fairly compelling for humans.

[00:54:20] And, I think it’s good to, to. Weave a story in anytime you can give like, activity examples of the thing that, that you’re trying to present, I think probably can come up with it. Like here’s a time when I was building this feature and I use this pattern or I used, you know, I didn’t do this one thing and here’s what happened.

[00:54:41] And here’s where I learned about that. And here’s why now I. Yet the importance of writing these tests or, you know, getting those codes or wherever it might be, that you’re the point of what you’re exploring, you know, trying to find some sort of story where you make it more personal. 

[00:54:59] Douglas Hirsh: [00:54:59] Yeah. I really liked that point because the way that we learn, like, if you look at any of like memory techniques for people, it really is come up with an outlandish story in your mind to remember the facts.

[00:55:11] You know, it really is the crazier, the story, the more you’re going to remember it. And that’s that really does kind of come down to weaving stories. Storytelling into trying to get people to remember the fact that you even told them something. Cause if you just, like you said, if you just give them the facts, they’ll, they’ll hear it go in one ear, kind of like my eight year old, it goes in one ear and out the other, anything I ever say to him, but you know, as far as talking to adults, if you, if you give a really compelling story with it, that’s really good advice, man.

[00:55:42] Appreciate it. 

[00:55:43] Marty Haught: [00:55:43] Yeah. Yeah. I think if you look at Ted talks, To tucks are a really good example. They’re very accessible. They’re all over the place. You know, think about how like, you know, break down what they’re doing, you know, how are they weaving the narrative into it? How are they teaching with the narrative?

[00:55:57] How are they using stories and how the facts get in there? And, you know, it’s, it’s interesting to see how they break it down. 

[00:56:06] Douglas Hirsh: [00:56:06] All right. So at the, you know, at the end of all of our podcasts, we do ask one final question, which is what is, what is the question we didn’t ask you? What is something we didn’t ask you that you want to?

[00:56:24] Marty Haught: [00:56:24] Hmm, what is the question you didn’t ask me or that’s, I mean, I don’t know. so we’re, we’re for, this is for junior mid level engineers. So maybe like some advice to possibly pass on, maybe. I mean, I think that, that there’s, everyone’s paths going to be a little different and. It’s okay. If you go about ways about this in a different way than anybody else, you know, you know, it’s your, it’s your story.

[00:56:54] It’s, it’s your truth. And I think that. It’s really good to get clear about what you want. there’s an interesting, the thing that I remember hearing recently, which is, you know, just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. You should try and do the things you want to get better at, not the things that you’re good at.

[00:57:13] And so if you’re not. If you’re not good at something, it doesn’t mean you can’t get better at of course you can get better at, so maybe you should pursue that. And I think it’s really important when you’re growing and you want to get better to be intentional about what you want to get better at and then seek those opportunities.

[00:57:30] And I think if you can get your foot in the door, you know, so if you’re a junior, get your first job or your second job, then you can. You have more options as we kind of have our, I talked about and so be really clear about what do you want and it’s okay to like go and, and I mean, it’s okay. You don’t succeed.

[00:57:49] Especially the first time. Like, you know, it’s not all about being successful every time, you know, failure is an opportunity to learn and get better. And so you shouldn’t feel bad if you didn’t succeed at something. But if you don’t try, if you don’t get intentional about what you want to get better at, then you’re probably not going to get better at that one thing.

[00:58:09] That’s great. I 

[00:58:09] Tyler Lemke: [00:58:09] love that. That’s probably going to be a clip because I think that was some great advice. So, Marty, what’s, what’s the best way people can get in touch with you if they want to reach out and, and, or 

[00:58:20] Marty Haught: [00:58:20] follow you. Yeah, I’m not as active on social media anymore, but I do. I do. If people DM me or if they mentioned me, I will see it.

[00:58:29] I’m happy to, to, To a chat or, respond to things. 

[00:58:35] Tyler Lemke: [00:58:35] So is Twitter the best place or 

[00:58:37] Marty Haught: [00:58:37] Twitter’s probably the best place. 

[00:58:39] Tyler Lemke: [00:58:39] And what’s your handle on Twitter? 

[00:58:40] Marty Haught: [00:58:40] M G hot. So H a U G H T. Awesome. 

[00:58:46] Tyler Lemke: [00:58:46] Well, we’ll put that in the show notes. Thanks again for your time. I think we could have talked for hours 

[00:58:50] Marty Haught: [00:58:50] and hours about a lot of different stuff.

[00:58:52] Tyler Lemke: [00:58:52] We got some good conversation there, so it was great to get to meet you and, and, We’ll hope to be falling in and see, see what happens next in your end game here. 

[00:59:01] Marty Haught: [00:59:01] All right. Nice. Well, thanks. It’s a pleasure. I love the chat.

Write Your Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Tags