Zubin __ Faris Pod
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Speaker 3: [00:00:00] Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of thousands of dollars worth of self-development that I did on my journey from 37-year-old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are easier said than done
Speaker: Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Easier Said Than Done podcast.
And I'm very excited today to have Faris. Now, I know I haven't done an episode in a few weeks 'cause I've been traveling, but while I was traveling, Faris and I have been, you know, messaging quite a bit, and this guy travels and gets around way more than I thought a human being can or should. So I'm excited for you to meet him 'cause he's quite a quite an overachiever for somebody, you know, who's just kind of been, been around in the industry for about, you know, less than five years, I think.
Is that right, Faris?
Speaker 2: Roundabout, yeah, I'm 25. Yeah ... sometimes I don't wanna admit it but yeah, I'm 25. Man. But I've, First dev job started, like, June 2020.
Speaker: If I, if I... That's what I remember. If I, if I was half of what you are at 25, you know, I, I would've been something else altogether, man. But this is great.
Thank you for [00:01:00] joining the show. Why don't you introduce yourself, Faris, and tell everybody a little bit about who you are and the multifaceted personality that you are?
Speaker 2: 100%. I can keep it simple. I'm a staff software engineer at Smallpdf. If you can't guess by the name, it's a company that makes PDFs small, although I don't know anything about PDFs which is the funny part, 'cause everyone likes to ask me and bring me weird PDF questions.
... I take care of payments, architecture, and monetization, so making money with PDFs, all those kinds of financial systems. Then I am also the co-founder of ZurichJS, which is the JavaScript group in the Swiss German region, and we're hosting ZurichJS Conf this year in September, and I'm also a dev rel by mistake.
I travel the world. I have fun going to conferences and just yapping about resilience, performance, React, Next.js, monetization, and everything in between.
Speaker: That's awesome. And, and for those who are listening, in case you think he's j- talking about just React.js and performance, no, he's actu- actually talking about human performance too.
This guy is very multifaceted. [00:02:00] It's not just about code performance. He also talks a lot about human performance and resilience, and not just about the code base, which is kind of important because it starts with the engineer, even in the era of AI. Now, you know, he's very humbly said that, you know, he's sort of...
he's the founder of, and co-organizer of ZurichJS, but this is a pretty big conference. And if you guys are in Europe, you should absolutely go and check it out if you haven't already. And go look Faris up, 'cause he's, like, just about the most friendly person in the world. He's awesome. So, you know, definitely look up ZurichJS, and I'll put some notes in the show note.
Now, Faris, I know you know, I'm, I'm sure people have, have mispronounced your name, so let's talk about that. Tell me about some of the funny pronunciations of the name Faris.
Speaker 2: I don't know anything as pronunciations. I think I've received more emails with my name ending in Zed than I have in S. So I keep on h- it's not even just the French pronunciation of Faris.
And I also have the- Right ... most interesting work journey, where I live in Geneva, but I work in Zurich. So when I wake up, everyone speaks French. Then when I get to the office, everyone speaks German. So I can hear different pronunciations of my name [00:03:00] as I commute to the office. That's
Speaker: weird.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
That, that's the amazing thing about Switzerland, is just how many languages exist in a very small region. Like, and, and, and even some dialects. So how many do you speak?
Speaker 2: I just, I speak French. I speak a little bit of German. I used to speak a lot more German 'cause I was born in, in Zurich, but let's just say we have a lot of different ways to misunderstand each other.
Speaker: Oh, I bet. I bet. Yeah, when I used to work at the UN a long time ago, and my friends, my Swiss German friends and my German German and my Austrian German friends, it was a lot of fun listening to them-
Speaker 2: Oh,
Speaker: yeah ... listening to the banter. Had tons of fun. Yeah, and, and names are funny things. Like, I get all kinds of things with Zubin as well, right?
Like, I, I remember the funniest thing I ever got was actually from a colleague, for some reason thought my name was Lubin Proton, and I'm like, "How did you get from Zubin Pratap to Lubin Proton?" Which is a total foreign surname anyway. Like, what is this name? You know? And they were so apologetic 'cause I have a feeling they may have been using Siri or something to dictate something, and I think it came out as Lubin Proton.
Oh
Speaker 2: my God.
Speaker: So it wasn't... And they didn't [00:04:00] check it, yeah, which is pretty funny. Anyway, man, look,
Speaker 2: Did you guys approach that as a sponsor or something after that?
Speaker: Exactly. Exactly. Funny stuff. Names are, names are funny things, man. They're, they're really funny, especially if you travel- Yeah ... as, as much as you do.
Yeah. It's great, it's great to see how different peoples have experienced your name or how you experience their name and, you know, how just- Yeah ... syllables are hard, you know? Syllables are hard, and you think humans-
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker: Yeah. They, they, they're quite hard. All right, man, let's let's dive into it.
I really wanted to talk to you because you I first heard you talk on Tejas's podcast, Contagious, and that's a great podcast as well for those of you who are looking to understand more about development careers and DevRel careers and what life as DevRel can be. Tejas's podcast also covers a lot of other broader life subjects, which I think is, is why I listen to it.
It's, it's, it's a really valuable podcast, and that's where I first heard Farris, and he was very vulnerable, very raw, and also very personable, which is why I, you know, pestered him to, to, to join this show as well. Now, Farris, why don't you, I know you and I have talked about it a little bit. Why, why don't [00:05:00] we start about, you know, some of the things that worry you most about- life life and work and engineering and careers in the post-AI world.
You know, this is something I know you've thought about a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is something I was actually thinking a lot about this weekend even though I was meant to, you know, keep it a sacred weekend and not think about work. I didn't do any coding this weekend. I did not, which is, like, the first time in a long time.
But I mean, I mean, at, even, even at work or for the longest time in engineering, you always think about, you know, trade-offs that you have to make, right? Tr- whenever you're building something, there's always a trade-off or a compromise you're making. Some of the trade-offs we most commonly make is I don't have enough time to write unit tests for this, integration tests- Right
end-to-end test. I don't have time to write the documentation. This will be a fast follow. Who, who loves saying fast follow, right? You know, when you don't wanna do something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Or, ah, we can't refactor this part of the code base. It's not gonna be as extensible or modular or something else, so we're just gonna do it later and we're gonna do a tech debt sprint, right?
And funnily enough, like, AI was meant to solve [00:06:00] all of this for us, right? Give us more time to do the stuff- Right ... that we always had excuses for.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: But now we just have the same excuses and are compressing the amount of stuff that we're shipping in a period of time. Instead of doing 20 tickets per week, maybe I'm doing 60 tickets per week.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: And I'm, I'm, am leaving the same amount of debt in my code base. Right. In that same sense, maybe we were meant to use AI to delegate certain things, not delegate creativity or thought process, but delegate the kind of stuff we don't wanna deal with, maybe administrative stuff, and give us more time for higher level thinking, more time to go on walks and see the sun, more time to just You know, live life in general, and we're doing less of that because we're so hooked on this dopamine train of one more prompt.
Speaker: This is that, And that
Speaker 2: seems, it's so, yeah ...
Speaker: LLM psychosis thing that you're referring to, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. And I mean, I've got this thing myself. Like, I was going crazy with this idea this week, and Claude [00:07:00] Design has been amazing, and I've been prompting, and prompting, and prompting. All of a sudden it's 1:00 in the morning.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm like, "What am I doing?" This stuff is meant to give me more s- time to sleep, and I'm sleeping less than I ever have before.
Speaker: 100%, and, and it's, it, it really gets in your mind, 'cause I've been working on a couple... You know, that's the thing, like a lot of people from Andrej Karpathy to, you know, Gary Tan and others have talked about how they've now gotten back to coding because they can via the agent.
But it is incredibly involved because you s- always feel that massive progress is within reach just a few prompts away. Yeah. And then you see how much progress you make, and it's really like, you know, one of the slot machines where- Yeah ... you keep getting the hit, you know? You keep getting the hit, and you get the dopamine hit of rapid progress, and so you're like, "Okay, just a little bit more, just a little bit more."
Yeah. Exactly as you said. But this also at work I think you referred to this as the industrialization of, of software engineering. It's producing huge quantities of output with not a commensurate or [00:08:00] corresponding level of improvement in skill, knowledge, insight, or craftsmanship. Yeah. Right? What do you think about that?
Speaker 2: I think we're, I think we're, we're, we're more often than not losing touch with the code that we ship, and that's a, that's a dangerous path to go down. Very true. Because even though in the past we'd experienced this thing where, like, I'd look at a piece of code and I'm like, "Who wrote that crap?" Right? And then I'd see, you know, the g- history and I was...
Okay, it was me, right? Yeah. But you'd still have a relationship with that code. You would have the memory of going down a rabbit hole, the memory of searching through Stack Overflow. You would create your own mental model of how you went about- Mm ... creating a solution, to the point where almost as a trauma response to having found the solution to that, the next time you experienced or heard something relevant to that, you'd be like, "I know.
Look this up. Do this. Do that." And that would have actually formed what today would be your prompt, right? But if you never go through that journey, what does your prompt look like today, [00:09:00] right? And the more and more we lose touch, are our prompts actually degrading, Mm ... is something that I'm curious about.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, that's part of the reason I kinda joined DevRel many years ago is because when I was teaching myself to code, you know, I was much... I was in my late 30s and, you know, starting out, and it was so hard because most documentation or, you know, sort of quick starts and stuff can be written for people with a certain foundational level of knowledge already- Yeah
and it's implicit and understood. But if you're completely new to a topic, you have no idea what some of the words mean, even though they're English words. Yeah. And so a lot of the learning actually comes from, like you said, the trial and error, the, the extraordinarily long and frustrating trial and error, stubbing your toe all over the place-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker: and building those mental models because that's actually what's teaching you the entire decision tree, right? The final outcome is- Very sparse on actual information of how it got there because it's the final outcome. Yeah. All the decisions that went into it are invisible. All the [00:10:00] wrong choices that went into it are invisible because you only get the end result, and it's those wrong choices that teach you a lot of the craft of engineering, you know, of how to think about a problem, how to break a problem down.
So, you know, I th- I think everything you're describing there is, it, it makes me sad a little bit because I find myself falling to this as well, which is the temptation of speed is overriding my own judgment about my own learning, about what I need.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: A- and, and that discipline to just say, "I'm gonna take the long road even though it'll drop my velocity v- velocity by, I don't know, 50%," whatever it is.
But my learning will be so much more robust. But, you know, for folks like us who give talks and stuff for that, we kind of need to know what's going on. We can't just- Yeah ... let the clanker produce the output and demo the final result- ... 'cause we'll get questions. Yes. ... and you'd hope a good, you know, you'd hope a good engineering manager, reviewer of a PR would ask you questions too, but maybe not.
These days I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people are shipping PRs that don't have a lot of review on them, or they have [00:11:00] AI review on them. And so none, none, none of the humans actually seem to be may- or maybe may not be following what's going on in the code base. Are you seeing that as well?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
I'm seeing that as well. And then just to touch about, like, talking about stuff on stage, that's such a responsibility to be able- Mm-hmm ... to talk about something on stage. And- There, there, there are two things that I've seen, and it was very interesting that some of the people in the industry had put forward me, is that, like, when you're really early on talking at conferences, everyone's looking to prove why what you're saying is the wrong thing.
Oh, interesting. That they know better than you.
Speaker: Right,
Speaker 2: yeah. And so you're like, you're fresh, you have no background. You're like, "That person's wrong. No, this opinion's not right, and I'm gonna go up afterwards and I'm gonna challenge that." And some time eventually passes, and then you build so much credibility that what you say is taken as fact.
And that becomes even more dangerous because then nobody fact checks you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Then one person, or you have maybe 500 people in a room. Let's say even 10% of those. Let's say 50 of them just go back and they do their own internal knowledge sharing on [00:12:00] something that you talked about, took your slides, did not fact check a thing, and influenced another subset of people.
All of a sudden one 30-minute talk has spread into, you know, almost infecting 1,000 people- Right ... with an idea that may lead to building systems that weren't meant to, you know, do whatever you said they were going to do, for example.
Speaker: Yeah. Bear that load 100%. So how do you, given given the, the temptation of what AI can do now for coders and, you know, since you describe yourself as an accidental DevRel how do you you decide how much time and effort to put into the preparation of something given the opportunity cost of that time is all the other work stuff you could be getting done?
'Cause it's, like you said, the tickets haven't reduced in number. Yeah. You know, how, how do you sort of make that trade off? How do you reason about it in your head?
Speaker 2: For preparing a conference talk?
Speaker: Yeah, how much time- So the bigger- ... to allocate. Yeah, you know, because you could do it the, the artisanal way, which is handcrafted.
Yeah. Know everything that goes into it, or you could clank it and just demo the happy path, you know?
Speaker 2: I [00:13:00] handcraft it every single time. That's something that's a non- almost a non-negotiable for me. I think when it comes to code demos it's much easier to go down the route of prompting something together that resembles what you had built the slides for, handcrafted the slides for.
Right. I've not s- done this as much as where it's been more useful in workshops where- I mean, AI's really good at writing code comments, right? I don't need to step through the entire code and write to, to, you know, to-do comments. So I can just take a solution that I built and ask AI to just strip it down and replace it with comments.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: This is not going to move away from my original intention, nor will it take away from my understanding of the code base. It's doing a very minimal effort that, again, would've been, like, an opportunity cost for me to do instead, right? And then you just review the final diff and so on and so forth.
When it comes to preparing a, a talk I tend to stray away from trendy talks. Maybe this is to my own detriment. Some conferences really like exclusive talks. They're like, "Oh, we want you [00:14:00] to talk about the latest version of React 19 point this and whatever, and show us all these activity components and whatever."
And I'm like, "Yeah, sure, I can, I can totally demo you how to use something production before anybody's realistically used it in production at scale somewhere." Which is interesting, 'cause when I was writing an article about it, like, I at least researched that 60% of code bases were still on six- version 16, 17 17.
Yeah. Which means that should I be talking to the 5% of people that are on the latest thing and looking to, like... If your React app is so souped up and so fantastic that you're looking for that just additional gain that you're getting out of 19, then, then, then it's an interesting problem to have, sure.
Right. So yeah, I spend a lot of time iterating. My best talk that I have today, which is Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts, I think I've presented almost 20 times. Wow. It is the first talk I ever delivered in 2024 in February. The exact [00:15:00] same core.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker 2: And it's been iterated. It went from, you know, slide dev to Google Slides to keynote experiences to, it went from being 20 slides to 128 slides, to being presented in 15 minutes to t- one-hour formats.
There's so much you can do layering a singular talk over time- Mm-hmm ... and basing it on engineering fundamentals. Like, I built this talk in a time where ChatGPT, well, ChatGPT was just about becoming a thing. Yeah. So we weren't really in this AI coding craze, and it's so interesting to see that same talk build on foundations that we're not, we're now losing a little bit.
Speaker: And
Speaker 2: when you say- And so I mi- Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry, Faris. S- sorry to jump in there. Yeah. But when you say this is, like, one of your best talks, what, what... Why do you say that? What's, what's so important to you? What dimensions do you consider to make this such a valuable talk?
Speaker 2: Because Because the talk is no longer c- I speak about the topic, but it was no longer crafted by me.
It was [00:16:00] crafted by people around me.
Speaker: Interesting,
Speaker 2: yeah. And so, so many iterations of that talk, so much input that, "Ah, what about this?" "Oh, I have this question." "What about that slide? It doesn't make sense." "Oh, no, use light mode. Don't use dark mode." Something like that. "Oh, the diagrams are too big or too small."
"Oh, maybe you should switch this to using streaming instead, and we should move away from that." It's all being baked and iterated by what people ask for, and if you're not crafting a talk for the people and you're just doing it for yourself, what's the point of talking altogether? Gotcha.
Speaker: So it's interesting.
So it's almost like this talk has taken on its own life, become like a product, and you're iterating- Yeah ... on it based on feedback, right? Yeah. So you're constantly evolving and shaping the product. Interesting. Okay, that's, that's fantastic. Yeah, that's I think that's a kind of conference circuit that I've never had direct experience of, where you reuse a lot of the same talks.
A lot of the sort of demos I've had to do in my career have been new product releases, and then you- Yeah ... you know, you sort of try to promote those. So that's actually a really valuable lesson for me to learn also, is to try and find those [00:17:00] enduring sort of topics that matter, that can evolve over time rather than just- Yeah
be tied to a product release, you know, which, which makes a lot of sense. You know, one of the things you also mentioned you know, in your context is, while you do all these talks and you're an accidental dev rel, but I know you and I have talked about- These These days, the level of this, this cultural... It's not just tech, but there's a cultural obsession with ambition, optimization, hustle culture- Yeah
that sort of mix mix and blend into this, this environment, right? What are your views on that, especially in tech and stuff? And I've just come back from San Francisco, so I've got some interesting observations about that as well, but, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I went to SF, I got a little bit of a taste. I think I was pitched 20 different times.
Right ... I had to clarify I was not an investor of some sort. Right. Yeah. It's so easy to get wrapped up in hustle culture because y- all you experience is the outside persona that other people give off, right? [00:18:00] And everyone else around you seems like they're hustling.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: Everyone there you know, you could, you could always find somebody that's, has more success than you, and you're always trying to draw yourself towards that success.
Right. What you seldom see is all the longevity and all the consistency over years that has led up to that concentrated success. But all you view is the concentrated success- Right ... and you're trying to leap towards that immediately.
Speaker: Yeah, from day one- And- ... to day 100, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2: E- exactly, right? And th- that's all we see, and I fall into this all the time.
Like, when I first went to the conference circuit, I'm like, "Oh my God, everyone around me is successful. They don't need to use a CV anymore. They are... They've got it figured out, and I'm lost, and I'm an imposter here." And then I started hopping on calls with people, and people have their own health problems, and people have their own addiction problems, and people have their own AI psychosis.
Right. And everyone's dealing with something. We've just become really good at putting on a mask, [00:19:00] and that same mask then makes other people feel like they have to put on that mask. And so it is a conscious effort of a group and as a collective to create a vulnerable and psychologically safe space where we can all blend that hustle culture together in a way that we can also openly express ourselves to it in a healthy manner.
Speaker: Yeah. And you know, it's... So when you were in San Francisco, you know, not just the pitches, which are like you completely relate to. But what was your interpretation, you know, here in, now in, you know, April, May 2026 in the lead up to the, you know, possibly some of the biggest IPOs in, in history? Like, what is your interpretation of the energy in the tech, tech scene over there?
Speaker 2: Seems Seems like either everyw- everyone's either running away from something or running towards something. Right? And And I mean, I was at Stripe Sessions, right? And so you're at the core of where people are trying to move the economy, right? Like- Yeah ... Stripe is everything about internet economy. Like, on their website, they're like, "How much of the world's [00:20:00] GDPR that we process," right?
And it's re- it's really cool. And so you can see that, like, the amount of time that I heard AI agents, the amount of time I've even heard people trying to build something that don't even understand their own product, but they're so en- like, almost engorged by AI. They're just almost like so en- wrapped up by this, like, the, the story that we're building that the only way to do anything is to bake agents into it.
Right. Now they're, now I think with the latest stuff that the dynamic workflows that have been released along with Opus 4.8, everyone's like, "If you, if your product has workflows in the name, don't bother." Everyone's now gonna be gunning towards removing workflows and going for something else, right? Yeah.
And so it's all about also being an entrepreneur was making a bet and making a long-term bet, and if we're so wrapped up in hype, we keep changing our bets. And of course, there was a part of, like, okay, product market fit, or what I really love is somebody once [00:21:00] said promise market fit where, okay, you try something for six months, and then it doesn't work out and you've got to pivot, but you had a bet that you stuck by for six months.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: We're changing our bets so often, I think that, that it get- it's a hard time. I have a hard time buying into a lot of ideas.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, this thing about changing bets 'cause I met a bunch of old friends, people I've known for decades and, you know, new friends at, you know, my, at my new work at Cartesian and stuff like that, and I was just listening to all the different perspectives and worldviews, right?
'Cause I come from- Yeah ... a different worldview. I'm a lot older than a lot of the folks and, you know, I, I was there at, at a time before the internet was a big thing- Yeah ... and, you know, I've also seen the internet sort of become this massive thing, and including the mobile web and all that. And, And, It It seems to me that there's the, the, the drive towards action because action has become so cheap, right?
Yeah. Taking any, especially coding related action, has become so cheap that the need need to think [00:22:00] has dropped in the sense that there was a time when you had to think, "Well, I have all these options in front of me, but the cost of pursuing each of these is pretty high." Yeah. And so the trade-offs are high, you know.
And so I need to be very intentional about what I decide to do next because that means I can't do the other things. But now when you can do all the other things in parallel, whether it's through, you know, multi-agent or swarm or whatever you wanna call it or, you know- Yeah ... whichever tool you use, then you don't need to think so hard anymore about what's the right thing to do.
And I worry that the downside of that is that we're just optimizing for speed without thinking about directional correctness anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: You know? What do you think would happen if we continue to do that? If, let's assume my thesis on that is broadly correct, what does that mean for developers in five years?
What is it that we're doing, and how do we actually know we're doing a good job?
Speaker 2: I think I think one thing that you alluded to very much is like a lot of things that we may have [00:23:00] considered to be closer to one-door options have now become two-door options, right? Or two-way door options. And so if you were to like pick a framework like Astro and you just went for it and built something with it, like yeah, technically you could migrate to something else afterwards with a one year of effort.
But now you can be like, "Hey, I can just prompt something to one-shot it over to TanStack Start if I really need to." And so like we've all these options that we have, we, we've created and I think What What we're losing is the beauty of the decision-making process. Mm-hmm. I think we're making less ADRs. We're d- we're having less three amigos or, like, architectural decisions.
W- it's so easy to make 10 decisions single day- Yeah ... whereas those same 10 decisions would've been made within the span of a month- Yeah ... that we don't even bother with the process to record said decisions and hence never learn from- Right ... the losses that each decision made. Right. I think the, the, the weight of a [00:24:00] decision has increased and decreased at the same time, 'cause it's cheap to go one direction, undo, and go in another direction.
But at the same time, your ability to make 10 really good decisions in a short period of time, because the time between decisions have been compressed, is ever- Mm ... so more valuable than just making decisions for the sake of decisions.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker 2: If you make five wrong ones just to switch back to five right ones, you almost canceled the time out a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that, that's, that's what I think. I think part of it- Yeah ... is also wasting a lot of time.
Speaker: Yeah, and, you know, speaking of time, I think it's... A lot of folks don't spend quite enough time, myself included, learning some of the things that we should just because- Yeah ... like we talked about earlier, you know, the AI, AI seems to he- l- help us leapfrog to the outcome without the actual-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker: trial and error and effort. So would you describe yourself as a front-end Faris Faris?
Speaker 2: I don't... I I don't... I think I, I, I lost it at... that [00:25:00] definition a long time ago. Right. I cannot... I, I've, I've, I've always said that I'm somebody with front-end expertise and full stack awareness. Okay ... and, and I cannot be a database expert at the same time as being an, a GraphQL expert at the same time as being a React expert.
It's not possible- Totally. Yeah ... without some sacrifice. You know, I've always lived by trying to be a T-shaped engineer as much as I could, but if you're a staff engineer at some point or a principal or whatever, you get to a certain level of seniority, even where you're tech lead, you have a responsibility no matter what end of the stack that you're on-
Speaker: Right
Speaker 2: to first of all have an awareness and care for what correctness looks like on the other side of the stack. Totally. Like at my current day job, I help make a lot of decisions for the back end, but I'm not the one writing the Go code. Sure. I'm helping build the interface that I think will stand the test of time.
Speaker: Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2: And then, Beyond Beyond that, you're also a product engineer at heart [00:26:00] because you have to care what the end result is. Totally. You can build the most beautiful React component, but if it's not available and reliable, and you're not working with the DevOps team to make sure it reaches your users in every corner of the, of the world, there's no point in building that component.
You lose all pragmatism and all point of engineering, and- Right ... it was really interesting, like, a video I was watching the oth- the other day is that, like, in larger organizations we're so far from the end result that our performance is sometimes even just based on these OKRs that have nothing to do with what an end user is actually facing, right?
Right. And the closer we can sit to just, like, you know, forward deploy engineer state to the end user and what they're experiencing allows us to develop this connection that creates this intuition we have for how we wanna build for that user.
Speaker: Yeah. No, I think that... And the reason I was asking that, Faris, is because I sort of wonder where all these distinctions, where five years ago these were career paths, right?
I used to coach- Yeah ... career changers to code quite a lot, and they were always like, "Should I be front end? Should I be back end? Should I be a full stack?" And there was a time when that [00:27:00] was an important decision to make.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: What do you think now? What do you think in the next five years will be the important decision that, you know, people trying to enter the industry will be thinking about?
Speaker 2: I I think it's not too different than it was before. I think there, there's, first of all, a lot of change in hiring and perception. It's, like, a lot of companies are just like, "Hey, you don't really need to know, you don't even need to know Java. If you know the front end, it's fine. You can prompt your way through figuring out how to write Python, Java or whatever."
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: You know, so that's, it's not as big of a deal. We're putting less, you know, weight on implementation details or even the language that we use, the way that we express something. In the same time, I've always thought there was a difference between a coder or programmer and an engineer.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: Right? Like, you know, to open one file in one c- part of the code base of the front end and edit that and know how to string a bunch of syntax together to be able to make something that functions entirely different to being able to make a system work end to end, and your ability to make a system work end to end, your [00:28:00] ability to communicate product requirements into engineering roadmap and vice versa, your ability to do stakeholder management, that has never changed.
We've just moved where the bar is and how the role is composed- Yeah ... to be able to execute on that. So I think as long as you are somebody that can understand a product story and the engineering story behind it and how to tell that story to multiple people of technical ability or not- Mm-hmm ... you're going to be set well in the future.
And I think more often than not now, we also have to tell the pe- people interviewing us what our part of the job is and where we fit in. We, we rely so much on other people placing us within an engineering organization, that we fail that we need to be somebody that figures out how we integrate into that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: And so I've also worked in organizations where I got a role that did not exist until I was interviewed because I helped shape the role in the interview process- Mm ... to then [00:29:00] finally get it. We have to do more and more of that, and to be able to tell our story of what we are and how we add value to something.
Speaker: Yeah. And, I mean, everything that you're saying makes sense. It's, it's definitely a very different way of thinking About About jobs and careers for the younger folks out there who started entering the industry, 'cause I get a lot of these questions around should I bother being an engineer? I get a lot of questions from existing very experienced engineers, far more experienced than I am-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker: who'd be like, "Why did you leave the law and come to engineering?" It's, it's almost like I feel like I should leave the engineering, y- you know, discipline and go to something else 'cause I don't know- Yeah ... what the future is with AI. And I think that's true of every profession now, right? I mean, what we need to know to succeed in a given profession is probably gonna change with AI, whether you're in, you know, law, medicine, or engineering.
I don't think it, it, it really matters. You still have to learn a completely different set of skills to-
Speaker 2: Yeah ...
Speaker: in addition to the core skills in order to use AI because your tools have changed. Yeah. You know, y- your tools have changed. There was a time when farmers needed to know how to, you know, ride a h- horse and, you know, mount a, a [00:30:00] plow to an oxen, and now they need to know how to, you know, operate a giant piece of industrial farming machinery.
Yeah. Which is, you know, and, and don't need to worry about the oxen and the horse anymore, you know? So that's kinda how these things are gonna evolve. But a lot of people, I think, feel quite Dismayed or or overwhelmed, scared, et cetera, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: You've seen a lot of this change 'cause you sort of, you know, built a career right in the midst of it.
How do you stay positive and focused? Like, what's your mindset and beliefs around what success looks like to you?
Speaker 2: I think all of all of this AI stuff, all this acceleration, all these tools, I think they create a bigger divide than previously. Whatever was mediocre will just end up being more mediocre. Whatever was great will continue to be great, because anyone that was an A player before knew how to think on their feet, they knew how to be agile, how to adapt, how to learn new- Right
technologies. These are just a lot of new technologies to learn really fast. Maybe it's a new [00:31:00] challenge for those A players. But it's harder to be mediocre. It's harder to get away with doing less, because now all of these things expose weak points or expose things that previously were easy to get under the radar, right?
And so, the... And, and I also see this a lot at conferences or a lot when I interact with people. People are very lost, and I, I, I wish I was in the conferencing world pre-COVID, because I saw it was such an era of easy to get sponsorships. Some people told me that they would send one email for, to 15 sponsors, and they would get 10 coming back without even a go...
Like, like, that's a world I don't live in, because I call... I, I have 100 calls, and when somebody tells me yes they'll sponsor, I have to double-check the internet connection was working. When When they said yes, Totally ... yeah, and, and that, yeah, and, and that, and that existed, right? There was so much of that, that, that abundance, and I wish I grew up in that.
And the way I stay positive is because, you know, if you surround [00:32:00] yourself with the right people, and that's been for any walk of life, that's been the right friend group, that's been the right colleagues, the right company, the right environment, the right stimulus, you've always been able to find people that lift you up.
Mm-hmm. And surrounding yourself or being the person responsible for creating those environments, that what, that's what we're trying to do at ZergJS. We're trying to create an environment that lifts everyone up through positivity. You will evolve as a human being. As an engineer.
You will evolve culturally, you'll evolve psychologically, to be the kind of person that has grit and resistance to withstand all the battles that come ahead. Right. And then you d- almost detach yourself from that process, right? I mean, I've, I've, I've compressed the amount of bad experiences I've had in such a short period of time, that they no longer phase me.
Like, I make mistakes. I've made mistakes on stage sometimes. I've made mistakes during panels. I've said the wrong thing plenty of times. And back in the day, it would embarrass the [00:33:00] living hell out of me, and I would not sleep and not, not stop thinking about it for a week. Now I do not even have the time to go through the embarrassment.
I'm like, "You know what? It's onto the next positivity or attach myself to the next light." Right. And there's all of that opportunity around us. I think we just have to change the way we see finding those opportunities. And the light has a way of finding us.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, one, one of the things you said to me is that, you know, most of these opportunities that we end up getting kind of come from reputation.
But the, the question I have on that is, and I, and I don't disagree, I'm just, you know, for the benefit of people listening or watching, you know, who, who, who could legitimately say, "Well, that's easy to say when you have a reputation." 'Cause, you know, you and I have s- whatever, our runs on the board, our track record.
But what happens to people who don't have a reputation or who may have made a big mistake and lost their reputation? How did they rebuild their opportunities?
Speaker 2: I think think what we may have is public reputation, right? I [00:34:00] think reputation exists in more spaces than just the known or the, the, the social spaces, right?
You also have reputation within a company, right? Somebody that always delivers, somebody that you can rely on, somebody like... I've, I've been so held by the fact that, like, your ability to get promoted is, is based on your ability to give peace of mind. The more... And the biggest compliment a manager ever gave me, he said, "The, the biggest compliment I can give you is I don't think about you, 'cause I have so many fires to deal with in a day, I don't think about you at all."
Yeah. And that's a great thing. Before, that would offend me. I'm like, "You're not tracking every positive PR that I'm shipping in here?" And so it's, it's, it's peace, it's peace of mind. Yeah. I... There are very few things you could do besides gross misconduct that are, like, irreversible reputation damage.
Right. And, and most things are human mistakes. And at the end of the day, I've, I've changed, I I, I messed up an indentation once in a YAML file early into Smallpdf, and I took down Japan and South Korea. Nice. You know, for [00:35:00] 45 minutes, right? And maybe I was just doing so many tickets that I couldn't think of something, I, I couldn't think of the right indentation.
I didn't lint. I didn't take the time to set up my local machine properly. Like, the biggest CI errors I get today is, are prettier errors, right? Mm-hmm. Because I've just, I, I s- I just haven't bothered fixing- The right ... my local setup. Yeah. And the CI... I probably cost a couple of hundred bucks in CI time just because of prettier, right?
Yeah. And, and I'm at this level in my career, right? Why am I making silly mistakes like that? I think we need to find ourselves in environments that are forgiving of mistakes, understanding of our human sides, where we have bad days because we have maybe issues with our partners, we ha- we having, are having a sick day.
We have to be able to make mistakes. M- the question I tend to ask most of the time when I have a new manager is, "How much am I allowed to mess up before it's a problem?" Right? Right. And understanding this, this ground for mistake making that you have that allows you to understand, [00:36:00] okay, how much can I innovate within this space, or how restricted am I to breathing, right?
And if you're in an environment where maybe you're working out on a financial product and you cause downtime, and that's reputation damage, 'cause, like, we can't hire somebody that caused this many down- this much downtime in our product, right? Sure, Sure, you're going to mable- maybe not have the best reference checks for the next job, but you can always start afresh, right?
I think if you carry the despair or you carry the, the, the negativity from the reputational damage into your rebuild of your new reputation, that's gonna be damaging the new reputation in and of itself. You have to be able- Yeah ... to reset. You have to be able to refresh your browser. Yeah. Totally. You have to be able to say that it's a new day.
I maybe have done wrong by somebody, but can I have an honest conversation with them and walk through the embarrassment and actually build this authentic connection [00:37:00] with human beings around me that allow them to become allies that help lift me out of this hole that I've dug for myself.
Speaker: Totally. You know, and e- everything you talk about there is, is not specific to coding.
It's actually a, a lifestyle or, you know, a life skill. Yeah. Right? It's, it's, Yeah ... it's the ability to say, "We're gonna make mistakes. Some mistakes will be worse than others." Yeah. And sometimes you'll be in environments where the mistakes do have pretty serious consequences and sometimes not. This could be in a coding world, this could be in our personal lives, this could be while operating a motorcycle.
Yeah. This could be, you know, a bad night out on, on, on town drinking too much. What... You know, people are gonna make mistakes. And I think, you know, everything is, you're talking about there, especially if it's a mistake that, you know, you end up having a conversation with your manager, I've yet to meet somebody who doesn't forgive a person who learns from their mistake, you know?
Like, in the moment- Yeah ... you're probably not going to... You may lose a job. You may not get the reputation back in the company. But nobody downstream [00:38:00] really holds it against you too much if you've clearly learned from it and you have humility. At
Speaker 2: least not long term. But when I've experienced- Right ... that somebody's unwilling to forgive you, it's probably because they're unwilling to forgive themselves.
Speaker: Interesting. Okay. You're obviously thinking about something very specific. I'm, I'm, I'm almost- ... tempted to to dive into that, but I made up something we could talk about. So, Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That, that's very deep. That's very deep. 'Cause now I'm 'Cause now I'm thinking all the listeners will be like, "Yeah, it's not my fault.
It's not me. It's you."
Speaker 2: It's, It's, It's, al- it's always shared, but- There's There's always an, there's always a human being on the other side of that story. Like-
Speaker: Yeah ...
Speaker 2: I think so when I was in, doing my, my recent tour, I went to Warsaw and I went to Portugal and I went to Porto. I actually met my ex-teams there, right?
I me- I used to manage teams in Warsaw and I used to manage teams in Porto, and I was, like, passing through and I had dinner with them and it was like, "Let's catch up." Almost all of them I used to manage, right? Right. And so I was part of their performance reviews. Some of [00:39:00] them I had actually laid off, unfortunately- Yeah
because of difficult times in the startup that I worked at. And there is a human way to build a connection even after something that can be almost as, as, as embarrassing or as personal as a layoff, right? Totally. Totally. And so we were for the first time discovering who we are as human beings outside this work relationship that we had built, and understanding that, like, okay, why did those layoffs occur?
Why did we experience that? Why was that the decision-making? Why... Like, and I was for the first time able to tell my personal side of the story, and they're like, "Oh, wow, so there was a human on the other side that cared even though I felt like I was having the worst day of my life."
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah. And I think we often don't, we, we, we, we, we put people in boxes that we shouldn't.
Speaker: Yeah. No, that's totally true. I, and I th- and I really wish more people would pay attention to what you're saying there, Faris, because I think we lose sight of the fact that- What What helps anybody, whether it's a manager, an employee, a [00:40:00] partner, a colleague, a friend or, you know, patron or whatever it is, is remembering that there's a life form and an experience at the other end of this interaction.
Yeah. You know, I- a- and even if you're on the receiving end of bad news, like I've been laid off, I've also, you know, had to fire or pull the trigger on a f- f- on people in the past, and if you're doing it conscientiously, it's, it's not an easy decision. You know? It's, it's- Yeah ... it's not as hard as receiving the news, but it's not an easy decision.
Yeah. And like you said, sometimes sharing that makes the invisible visible to the other person, and you can really, really connect human to human about this is a really shitty, messed up situation. Yeah. Neither of us wanted the outcome, but when you step back and look at the scenario, the outcome is understandable.
Not pleasant, not okay, you know, from an emotional point of view for s- Yeah ... everybody involved, but it is understandable. There was a logic, an internal logic to it that, you know, in the context of a business or in the context- Yeah ... of a company or in the context of a startup made sense. And you know, unfortunately [00:41:00] there were outcomes for everybody, and I think not enough of that gets told.
I think everybody tends to avoid those difficult conversations about, you know, and I'm glad that you sort of took the time to go and meet with these folks in, in your team, because I think that will be an enduring relationship, you know, for decades. Yeah. Yeah. It also builds trust, you know? A- and they know that you're thinking about...
A- that's what most people want, man. Like, most people just want to know that you recognize their experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: Even if you couldn't change the outcome, that you recognize that they had an experience that was not great or was great or whatever it was. Yeah. They just wanna be acknowledged in that, you know?
Man, that, like I said, I promised at the start of the show that you're one of those guys who's extraordinarily deep. And there we went, you know? Went into- ... a very deep conversation about, that had nothing to do with code and more about, you know, especially in the age of AI, something that's very important is to keep that human connection up and, and that human,
the human the human, angle must always be front and center no matter what we're delegating off to the AI, and no matter what we're doing with our [00:42:00] workflows, we need to remember that there are human beings that, you know, on all, all sides of these relationships, you know?
Yeah. And the outcomes. So thank you so much for that. One last question for you. Something you said, again, that I totally agree with, but I want more people to hear about is you did say identity drives behavior, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: Very true, I know Tony Robbins and a bunch of other people say that as well, like who you think you are or who you decide to be or who you believe yourself to be sort of ends up choosing a lot of your actions.
How did you come to this conclusion?
Speaker 2: I think a I think a lot of things, a lot of things are choices, right? We could either be subject to the emotions or whatever state we're feeling on a particular day, or we can choose to be something else. Like, just because I'm going out and I'm speaking on a stage, or I'm on a podcast, or I'm doing anything in life, doesn't mean I'm having a good day or bad day, even though I'm going in, and I'm screaming positivity the entire time, right?
Right. I [00:43:00] choose to be positive. I choose to be somebody that lifts other people up. I choose to be better every single day. I choose to not let other things affect me. And so I, I before I I understood my own identity, and I'm still figuring out my own identity, you latch onto other people's identities or p- pieces of other people's identities.
There are people that I used to look up to, and still look up to, and that evolves over time, and I'm like, "I really like this part of your identity and personality. I'm gonna, I'm gonna inherit that for the day. I'm gonna test this out. I'm gonna take this piece, I'm gonna take that," I'm like, "Ooh, I don't like this," or, "I'm not feeling this.
Oh, this feels natural." And slowly, almost like iterate, beta test yourself and figure out- Yeah ... when you're gonna release it out into the world, and then every day you're making a choice to stand by that. Like, I've had so many experiences where, like even at my own meetup on a subject that I'm considered to be an expert on, on financial technology, [00:44:00] I've had somebody point at me and say that, "You're wrong, but it's okay, I understand why you can be mistaken."
Whereas I totally find being wrong, I'm the most happy person in the world to be the dumbest person in the room. But there's certain things at some point you've had enough experience where you're like, "I kinda know what I'm talking about here."
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: Like, that's that's the moment where you're like, "Who am I, and who am I choosing to be when I respond to that?"
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: And I choose to be understanding, I choose to be accepting, I choose to create a space where that person can grow, rather than being the, that, my identity being that I'm right.
Speaker: Right. It's, it's so true, but especially about, you know, people... And I, it's a human nature thing where, you know, going back to what you said earlier is, you know, when you, when you're giving a talk or when, you know, in a conference circle, a lot of people- Want Want to challenge, you know?
Yeah. And, and they wanna sort of assert their point of view because our need to be right is more important than our need to be factual or correct, [00:45:00] you know? Yeah. And that's, it's sort of a slight semantic difference, but it's important. And, you know, the identity thing, everything you said there was so wise.
A- and, and, you know, having done the career change thing myself, I, I can share with that it was a huge struggle because a lot of the time over the years, your identity becomes defined by the things you've done in the past. Yeah. Right? So it's a reflection of your past, and over time it kind of gets calcified.
You know, often a lot of it is derived by what you've done for work. So for me, for a long time- Yeah ... it was, you know, I'm a lawyer. And it's very hard to remember that the identity required by, by over time is not actually locked in stone. You can- Yeah ... you know, to your point, you can choose every minute of every day.
You can choose- teach, teach, to take on a different identity, and there is a long period of discomfort when you're in transition, you know, from one identity to the other. Whether, you know, from fit to off somewhere, whether from unfit to fit, whether from addict to [00:46:00] non-addict. Like, I've spoken to all sorts of people.
There's a very long period of un- uncertainty and discomfort, but it's always the choice until one day it's the default, you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: One- one day it's the default. And so I, I really hope people tune into what you're saying there because it's really, really important for all the folks out there who are struggling with their sense of place in their world, their displacement professionally, what AI means to them, what their career means to them, especially for the young folks coming out of college there.
You know, there, there's a lot of confusion because they, they feel their identity was kind of defined four years ago, five years ago. Yeah. But in, in many senses, you get to choose whoever you wanna be next, and it's not gonna come, it's not gonna come to you on a platter. You know, there's a lot of work that has to be done, but no one's...
There's, there's, that door that is, or that prison you think you're in has no lock, has no key.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, you can just open that door anytime you wanna walk out. It's just gonna take some effort.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean- Would you agree with that? At the end of the day, at the end of the [00:47:00] day, I completely agree. At the end of the day, your your success really is dependent on how comfortable you are being uncomfortable.
Right. And when you're uncomfortable, that's the time to get excited because you're like, "What am I gonna do with this feeling? Am I going to avoid it or am I going to embrace it and do something with it?" And that's- Right ... the challenge that the more we face, the more we're able to lift ourselves out of that feeling and go face the next discomfort.
Yeah. Not run towards comfort, but go face the next one, right? True. And it almost becomes a love for the journey of seeking discomfort, and then realizing when you're up high in the clouds, the the comfortability that you've built for yourself through that. Right. And I think that's a beautiful story we can all tell for ourselves eventually.
Speaker: Well, I really wish I get to that point where you clearly are, where you look forward to the discomfort. I do not. I, I, I I kick and scream and grumble on the inside. I mean, I do it. I go walk towards it because I do take it as a sign of [00:48:00] where my growth lies. Like, everything I want- Yeah ... is on the other side of my comfort zone, but I, I don't look forward to it.
I, I have to get out of bed. It's like- Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm a little different. I have no choice 'cause for the last decade I've lived most of my life uncomfortably, and that was not by my choice.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker 2: That was by the choice of health conditions chronic health conditions, and there are days where I've had three hours of sleep and been- deathly sick the day before.
Like, this happened at JS Day Bologna, actually. Geez. I was, I was, like, deathly sick the night before, fever. My co-founder Bogdan was, like, you know, there with me, and he was like, "Are you okay, man?" I'm just like, "Ah, it's a Tuesday," you know? And I mean, it's not a regular Tuesday, right? But I went out, and I delivered my talk and everything, rebooked my flight.
I went that afternoon, right? And I actually wouldn't have done that if, if, if Nadia and Bogdan hadn't pushed me to do that. So I sometimes don't realize what my weak points are. And he said the [00:49:00] scariest thing that he had witnessed is that nobody would've been able to tell what condition I was in the night before, right?
Speaker: Yeah, wow.
Speaker 2: And, and so while that's not something I live with most days, there are a lot of times where I'm subject to the uncertainty of my own health condition, and I know many people have uncertainty with life in At the end of the day, like I've had, I've been subject to a lot of discomfort as a result of my health condition.
I have a lot of back issues. I'm somebody that needs a lot of sleep. I'm always sleeping at like before midnight. After midnight I'm absolutely broken. I am not somebody that drinks. So, like, there's so much I have to do to live with that discomfort that there's no choice but to want to live a beautiful life, you have to see the positivity in most things.
And to see that within yourself is to then also then see that eventually in other people.
Speaker: Yeah. And that you said this, for those who haven't sort of, who wanna know more Faris Faris thinks about this, you know, go and check out the the Contagious with Tejas with Tejas as well, because you talk about it there as well.
I didn't wanna sort of- Yeah ... dig too much into it 'cause it's [00:50:00] been covered there and, but y- y- for those of you wondering how the Faris Faris goes around thinking like this, listen to that podcast as well. It'll explain how he, you know, sort of formed this point of view. But the, the, the, the important thing for everyone to take away is that these are all choices.
These don't come naturally. These don't sort of, you know, y- people aren't just born with these things. Maybe some people are. I, I haven't met too many who are born with it beyond a certain basic amount, but then after that they have to really whittle it down. So- Faris Yeah ... I know Faris has to go and, you know, do a standup and ha- you know, has to go and, you know, sort his team out and work with, with, with his team.
But thank you so much for taking the time, man. That was I really enjoyed that conversation, and more importantly, I enjoyed getting to know you a little bit more, because I know you've been, you and I have been texting a bit. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate
Speaker 2: it. This has been incredible.
Thank you so much, and you're, you're an absolutely wonderful and such a well-spoken podcaster. It's like I have, I've loved every minute of it. I wish we had longer. Yeah, no- A second episode is due at some point.
Speaker: Almost certainly is, my friend. Almost certainly is. I, to be honest, I, I didn't do very much.
You're just an [00:51:00] interesting person with deep thoughts and things. That makes it so much easier. I just had to riff off you, so really the- ... credit is, so, you credit is, so, you know, thank you for that, man.
Speaker 2: Have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on. You too. Have a great day.
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