Director of Engineering at Motorway - Brad Jayakody

00:00

When we are interviewing for individual contributors, the one thing we can't teach is passion for building software. We can't teach that. Everything else we can kind of teach. When it comes to managers the one thing we can't teach is passion for people. You either have that, or you don't have that. If you don't have the passion for helping other people get the best out of themselves, you'll be an okay manager. You're never going to be a great manager.

00:24

It's the same as a programmer. If you know all the skills and stuff, but you don't have a passion for building awesome, awesome software, you're never going to be great. And when you have that, a lot of it is about those conversations to work out. Yeah, this is what makes you happy. This is what makes you tick.

00:43

If knowledge workers are pursuing work from a place of intrinsic motivation and they follow their own calling, how does that relate to you and what was your itch?

01:04

That's it, everyone does follow extrinsic motivation. Everyone does care about what they get paid and making sure that's getting... That's part of it. That doesn't necessarily make you completely happy. Having a bigger salary will make you happy in the short term. It doesn't make you happy in the long term, as long as your needs are met. But the interesting one's an interesting one. I've now been in tech for 25 years, which makes me almost old, but not old. Actually being paid for being in tech for 25 years. I've been interested in programming for a long time.

01:34

There's a difference.

01:35

Yeah. My first 15 years, the things that made me happy and made me excited was being an engineer and solving complex problems and go, oh, here's something, how are you going to build it? How are you going to get creative to design an architecture, build a system to solve this so it works and it doesn't fall over and it's easy to maintain? Then about a decade ago, my motivation kind of changed because that started to get too easy for me. It was like, it was no longer a challenge or there was no longer the itch.

02:04

That's when I moved into management and then building teams and organizations that can deliver software, the same kind of philosophy around how do we make sure there's no single points of failure in the human kind of side? So if somebody leaves or does something else, it's not going to fail. How do we make sure everyone's supporting each other within an organization? How does it all ticking? How's that engine room more of humans getting to work and talk to each other and communicate so it becomes efficient? That was my motivation and efficient's partly that word, but it's efficient includes having fun, enjoying it. And that became my motivation about building a well running engineering organization to move more from the technology. So that's me on a personal level.

02:47

It's interesting when you ran through that it was less about the people side of it and it was more about the intellectual challenge of building a group of people who all work together.

03:00

Well, people's part of that. People are complicated, fun, awesome individuals. Every single one of us is a unique human with different needs, wants, and the ways of working and part of that is about when you actually build a way of working, which is going to help every single person be satisfied, happy, and do their best work, you get happy people. It kind of matches up the both. Yeah, it's a real fun trick, which is never perfectly right because. There's no easy answer to it.

03:32

When I talk about building an engineering org which makes things work, it's about helping everyone be successful and everyone works in a slightly different way, has slightly different ways of working, slightly different ways of their motivation and how they process information for example. Some people process information by listening, others from reading, others from doing. You try to build a org in a way working that can kind of help everyone do that. It's a fun challenge to do at times. It's a fun challenge to make sure it all works out.

04:03

When you are reflecting on your own itch, how do you identify where it comes from?

04:12

One of the biggest challenges I had was when I moved from having scratching my maker itch to scratching my manager itch, because as a maker, your itch gets scratched very easily because at the end of the day, you can look back and go, oh, I built something. And then when you move into manager mode, scratching that itch is you don't get the dopamine hit on a day to day basis, for the most part. The impact of what you do is seeing six months down the track or a year down the track when you have spent time coaching somebody or mentoring them about how to do something or setting up the building blocks in place for that to hit. So a lot of that scratching the itch is I need to keep them looking at that bigger picture because I'm thinking 12 plus months out, both as how I'm helping people grow, how I'm helping the organization grow, how I'm putting those in place.

05:02

And then that's how I scratch that itch or doing kind of these kind of things where I do a talk and I get to talk about all the stuff I've done, because it's compressing a long period of time. The happy days when you celebrate is when you found somebody who's now grown into a new role or you've delivered a major initiative and project, which take a long time to hit or you go on vacation and nothing goes wrong when you're away because you build an organization that runs without you and everything ticks well and everyone's stepped up because again, your big job as a manager is to make yourself redundant and irrelevant and if you've built an org and you've empowered everyone to do so without you, you've succeeded.

05:38

So that's how I kind of scratch that itch. It's a very tricky one to do. And you have weeks where you look back and you go, oh I have no idea what I've done this week because you've had 20,50, 100 different side conversations and bits where you are coaching and mentoring and nudging to get everything back online. But there's no practical output sometimes.

05:58

But how do you know where that itch is coming from? Because I guess it's natural that I guess if you worked backwards from the maker itch, it was something that you want. And the next challenge that seemed right. But there are also plenty of makers who spend their whole lives building and choose not to go into management. How do you reflect on what it is that's motivating you there and understand it properly?

06:29

This was just me on a personal level as my interest just started to move more into the people and how people work together. And that's where I could see that I was interested in more than actually out writing the code and building the software around that. And that's when I kind of see that, hmm, I'm enjoying this more than I enjoyed... My interest shift. People, we grew up and we change. It was like I I never started my career off wanting to be in management. I used to have a healthy disdain for management as an engineer. As an engineer, I was a very practical person just wanting to build stuff.

07:05

Healthy disdain.

07:06

I would I'll call it healthy disdain. Some of my managers at the time probably called it more of unhealthy disdain. And a lot of that was also outside work in my volunteering I started to do a lot more stuff with people and organizations and helping lead groups of humans. That's where I started to go, oh, I could do this at work as well. That's where that kind of itch started to scratch. And then I started doing it on a smaller scale and I quite enjoyed it. And I was like, yeah, I kept on doing it.

07:32

When have you felt furthest away from doing your best work?

07:36

Furthest away will probably be when I don't have as much influence or control as I think I do. So a lot of what I do is try to empower people and empower myself. And I'm not one that is very good at being micromanaged and going, hey specifically you need to work in this way, that way and how we do things having principles and guidance of how we do things in a vision about what we do, the freedom to do it in an interesting way works, whereas when I'm tightly narrowly defined that you need to move this from point A to point B, and this is exactly how you're going to carry this, for example, that's not where I do my best work. The other way I don't do my best work is when I don't get to bring a bit of spark and sparkle into that.

08:21

I could never work at a company where I have to wear a shirt and tie to work, for example. It's constraining. It's not allowing my individuality and everyone else's individuality to shine and it's irrelevant to how you do your job. So those kind of things. It's when I have very narrow rails about how to do things. And there's certain things that you need narrow rails. Occasionally I do fire performance with people where if you do stuff in a different way, somebody's going to get sudden fire. There's reasons for having narrow rails or when there's narrow rails for no specific... It's not empowering. Again, I'm a knowledge worker. I need the freedom to actually be creative problem solving, not being told that this is exactly how you have to do things, which is probably why I wasn't a great... I was a good engineer at times but when people told me I have to do specifically X, Y, and Z, and one company I worked for, fora very brief period of time where I had to wear a shirt and tie to work. It was never going to work for me.

09:16

It sounds like in some ways it's also a self-expression and a desire to just be yourself in that moment, not just follow what someone else is telling you.

09:31

We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion and inclusion to me is being able to bring your true self to work. Being told what to wear and how to wear it is not bringing your true self to work. It's not doing what we do as knowledge workers, which is about creative problem solving, not about understanding and pushing the boundaries or what we're doing. And so for me, it's a clash.

09:52

So if we, as part of our work, want people to bring their full selves to work and be that creative and expression led individual, how do we then manage the difficulty that we have with wrapping our sense of identity and our sense of work together? If they become so close, should we be separating them in some way, or should we be mindful that they're becoming the same thing or does it not matter?

10:32

The lines blur quite a lot. So I think about work outside work hours, but when I'm not actively working, because again, work is central to what I do, but it's not the pure everything be all and end all. It kind of blurs, the lines blur. For when I'm away on vacation, like I was away this weekend, I didn't think about work. I'm doing other things. The thing is, again, it's knowledge work. It's not something you can just show up and you do work for a period of time, because it's fixed, then you go through... It blurs both ways, especially when you get into it and you're trying to solve an interesting problem. Some of the best ideas I've had is when I've been on a run or lifting weights or in the shower or on the motorbike. Motorbike's probably one of my most meditative kind of areas.

11:16

Because all you can think about when you're riding a bike properly is the bike, but then a little idea pops into your head about, oh, we can do this and that. So it's healthy in areas. If you're working constantly, it's not healthy, but that kind of drift between the two kind of works through. But again, for me, work is important to what I do. I could be doing a lot of other things and I enjoy what I do and I'm okay with that blurring. And most people I work with, if they got a tricky problem at the back of the head, it's going to suddenly pop into their dreams occasionally and that's okay. It's just when it becomes all consuming, that's when it becomes unhealthy when you're working like 50, 60 a week and all you can think about is work.

11:55

What are you optimizing for here? Are you optimizing for happiness? Are you optimizing for meaning fulfillment? What is it?

12:07

You're not optimizing for any of them. You're trying to balance more. So if you're optimizing for happiness and fulfillment and success and all that, it's kind of very happily interlinked. If you wanted to be purely happy, like I love smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, I couldn't do that 24 by 7 or I could, but I'll be very disastrous and it would be a very destructive period of time.

12:31

It would be fun.

12:31

But it's the same with fulfillment as well. It's like, I'm happy when I get teams running and working well together and that kind of ticks through. And again, success and helping that succeed and helping people succeed. So it all kind of interlinks between. I call it a bunch of different spinning plates. It's like sometimes you might go spin this plate a little bit more and focus on the happiness, self care, the wellbeing. Other times you might be focusing on this, just trying get that balance right, and the balance is going to be different for every person.

12:58

But the balance is also going to be different for during periods of time. There's periods of time where I'm completely and utterly focused on work because that's where my brain is at the time. There's other times when I know what I need and what's good for both where I'm working is for me to take a step back. I had a lovely weekend where I completely disconnected for five days. That's great. It's all about balance and working out what balance is going to work well for you. And I call it the spinning plates. Because even if you are completely focusing on satisfaction at work, you still need to spin that happy plate. You still need to spin that self-care plate. And there are times when you see those plates wobble and that's when you need to go, right, I need to take a step back and go focus on that one.

13:42

What would you say to someone who said, well, the outlier success comes from complete and an utter focus on one specific thing over a longer period of time, complete dedication. Don't spin your plates, don't spread your bets, don't find balance, stay hyper focused on one thing.

14:03

You're going to burn yourself out. You can do that for a short period of time and the short period of time for one person might be a couple of years. If you do that for a constant period of time, you are going to burn yourself out and you're going to let the other muscles atrophy and not work it out. You're not going to work out what happiness is and that joy of just spending some time doing nothing without any goals or spending time in the company of somebody just for the sake of spending time with them.

14:32

You're going to miss out on that other bit. You can do the hyper focus for a period of time and there's times I've completely hyper focused and spent on work or spent on something else. You can't do it forever and you shouldn't do it forever. You need to have a balance in life. Life is too short. You need to balance.

14:49

Is it healthy to do sometimes?

14:52

Again, it depends. Everything about is about having the awareness about what's happening with both yourself and what is going to be sacrificed. There are times where I'll focus and I'll work silly just to get something done because I know I want to do that. And I need to do that. If you're being forced to do it, that's a different question. That's unhealthy. If you're choosing to do it and you're having the choice and you're seeing what the impact is to yourself and everything else, that's okay. But if your boss is coming to you and saying, you need to work 90 hours this week to get something done and they're forcing you to, that's not healthy. If you're choosing to step up and do something and focus on it, I think that's a choice. And the biggest thing we have as adults and humans is to have that freedom of choice.

15:33

Yeah. Freedom of choice is big. An easy example is I still do hackathons occasionally and hack days where I write code and for that day I'm completely zoned out because I'm writing code again and scratching that itch. And that's a hyper focus for just a period of a day where I'm not paying attention to other bits going on. You don't need to do hyper focus for months and years, but it's a choice. And having the awareness about what you are doing and why you are making that choice is very important.

16:01

I would love to dive into choice because as a knowledge worker, we have so many different choices and especially as someone software engineer, you have so many different options that you could pursue. And I would love to dive into how you've made decisions in the past when you've had multiple options and how you've then made those decisions. Perhaps we could run through your decision to join Hotels and Smart Pension and then Motorway. And at each point you will have had multiple choices. What did your process look like and how did you run your, your decision making?

16:41

It's very separate. When I was an engineer, it was very different. So at hotels.com, I'd just come out of my first proper management job at VML. So the big thing I was looking for was an opportunity to be able to learn off other people and where there was a cohort of other engineering leadership within the organization. And so hotels.com in particular, had both a good reputation and they still do, and they're still a great company with engineering as a discipline and also as engineering leadership. And so when I was meeting people there, it was great. It was like, oh, I can learn off people. There's a group of other engineering managers I can learn off. And that decision was right. I learned off a huge amount of people over there, especially my boss who joined after I joined, Sue, who was absolutely wonderful and great, who I still learned lot of my lovely little tricks and techniques of her leading teams.

17:41

So yeah, but it was a lot about that at that point. And then when I was looking for a new role, I was looking to kind of step up to the next leadership level, which is helping grow and run a engineering org. And so when I started looking around, I interviewed at a few places and I went in and I went to Smart Pension and I met the first group, which was Martin and Maria who were absolutely wonderful. And they were looking after the people team. And I started to talk about the culture of the company, because while I can help build out culture at a organization, you can kind of build on what's already there. And so you need to find a group that again, matches to my core values and some of my core values in particular are around collaboration, around trust, around inclusion, around bringing you to yourself to work.

18:27

And so that kind of matched up. And then I met Sam Barton who is CTO at Smart. And we just got on great within our first meeting. We were starting to solve problems in the org before I even joined during our interview. It was just a perfect kind of match. And so yeah, what I'm looking for was I'm interviewing people as much as they're interviewing me. It's like I'm looking for an organization whose cultures matched me and then plus the people I'm working with. And then, yeah, I got up to the point where I was doing the same thing again, I'm going 'Oh, right.' I was asking myself, what do I want to do next? I've built one company up from a series B into a world class engineering org. Can I do it again? And that was my trying to challenge myself.

19:07

So I started looking around and Motorway reached out to me and I went and had and chat with them. And I met again, the founders, the rest of the exec team, and I went, right, this is a great match. We have the same core values, we have the same beliefs about what we want to do, you're people I can spend time working with. And again, yeah, a lot of it is at finding the people who... And I tell this when I tell anyone I'm interviewing as well, you should be interviewing us as much as we're interviewing you. You need to find a place that's a fit for you as much as we need to find somebody who's a fit for us. And the things I look for is it's that passion for doing a good job. It's nice humans. It's doing something that's going to change.

19:41

And yeah, but it's, again, people that I want to work with. I often think the more fun question you should be asking me is what about the companies you rejected? What happened, do I second guess myself about those choices? And sometimes I do. I did that the other day. I was looking up a couple of places I didn't choose to go join and what happened and go, what would've happened if I joined? End of the day, though, it is a job and there's a lot of jobs out there and it's a very important to see because I spend most of my life at work and having that satisfaction and fulfillment is very important. Does that answer that question? That was a little bit of a more rambly answer than normal. Normally I'm very specific.

20:22

I liked it. And I think it was clear that it's people. I am really interested that you reflect on the choices that you haven't made with that type of... It's not regret, is it?

20:35

It's not regret. It was different choices. And the biggest choices are is when I've met the people and it's just not a fit. I can see that, for example, there's a place I interviewed with a while ago, where they were very, very, very focused on how do you crack the whip? How do you make sure you're getting the most out of people? And they ask questions about how do you get a team to work more than 50 hours a week and all this? And I was like, this is not healthy. That's not my job as a supportive manager and leader to get the best out of people by supporting them and helping them, and you get more delivery out than that kind of push.

21:16

Sometimes that's been a close call. It's like, oh, maybe it wouldn't worked out. But again, it's that click and that chemistry. You need to be able to bounce of whoever you're working with. You need to have your manager you're going to learn off. You're going to need to have a team that you're going to be able to work well together. It's that chemistry. It's a hard one to describe, right? It's a hard one. You can't make it mathematical. Interviewing is part art, part science. And that art is that chemistry about whether you connect with the people you're chatting to.

21:42

What happens if you connect with two people in an interview process. So it's two companies in an interview process.

21:48

Then you're looking at more the vision and the overall goals about what's happening. And what's going through. For me, it's the challenge of the company and the problem space you're trying to solve.

21:58

And how do you know what resonates most with you there?

22:01

That's when you do the big lists and the checks and the, ooh, what am I trying to solve? And what problem am I trying to do? What do I want to be doing? And again, that's a point in time kind of thing. So when I was interviewing to join Motorway, I think I interviewed with 12 different companies and I rejected 10 of them. And it wasn't bad. None of the companies were bad or anything. It was just not a fit for me. I didn't either click with the people we were interviewing for whatever reason or the vision wasn't right. A good example is I could never work for a gambling company, for example. I needed to work for a company that's doing good out in the world.

22:42

It doesn't have to be you're massively changing the world with solving world hunger or something, but it has to be something that's solving a problem to make people's lives better without making them worse. So a gambling company, for example, I have no issue with people gambling, but the way they make the money is by making other people's lives a little worse.

23:05

So the vision of the company and the goal that they want to do and yeah, around the impact around that. That's part of it. But again, I also understand I'm in a very privileged state and most of us in tech and engineering are in a very privileged state where there's more jobs than there are people to do those jobs. So we can get a bit very picky and choosy. I remember back twice I've gone through the recession where you had to be a little un-less picky, because all of us need to work to put food on the table at the end of the day. So it's a question about how long my principles would last if I needed to do that.

23:45

And it makes it so much harder to know when to quit too, if there's so much grass on the other side. A point at which, for example, at Smart pension where you are leading a department of 250 people, you've grown it. This is so personal. What process did you go through to know how to quit?

24:12

So I've also trained as a psychotherapist for a while and I've done a lot of group therapy. So my awareness of what's going to upset me and what's not going to upset me is quite high. So I knew that at the time, the things that were annoying me... Annoying me is the wrong word. Things were frustrating me were going to get worse and that wasn't going to be healthy for me and the rest of the organization. I kind of hit the point where I'd done all the change I could do.

24:39

At the same time, I'd helped a lot of people grow and it was probably the hardest conversations I had was to let my team and people know I was going to move on. Yeah. And that was a hard one to do. It was more letting the team I was working with and the people I was working with know I was going, but I knew it was right. I'd hit that limit for me. And that challenge for me. And it was time for also for the good of the organization for somebody else to come in with a kind a different view and thinking about what's going on and how they could do things. If you ask me about regret, sometimes I regret it and go, what would it be like if I'd stayed? But no, it was the right decision at the time.

25:22

I think with your psychotherapist interest, we should just dive right into your parents. How have they influenced what work you're doing today and how you chose it?

25:35

Parents are part of it. I would actually say more about... Again, I'm just trained so therefore everything that happens in my life kind of influences the choices I make and everything that happens is kind of impacts how you see the world and go through. I fell into technology. I was a geeky introverted kid that did not like people and humans and I was shy. And so therefore I fell into programming because that gave me satisfaction at the time. I had a Commodore 64 which I used to both play games on it and write code occasionally. I never spent time looking at a career plans or goals. The first time I found out that programming actually paid well was after I finished my university degree and I got offered my first job and I was getting paid more than my mother who had been working for 20 years with the tax office.

26:21

And I went, what? I just fell into it because I was passionate about it. I enjoyed it. So that choice went through there. Falling into management though, that one is a lot kind of from my both my mother and father. My mother passed away earlier the year. My mother though was what I call that proper natural leader. She cared about people and she cared about looking after humans. And that kind of has always drilled into me. That's why I do a lot of volunteering work as well is because I think I'm privileged enough that I should help the world be more sparkly. And then my father, he is the one who kind of has a very forthright, forceful will, which for those who know me know that I have a very forthright, forceful will and help people see what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.

27:14

So yeah, I still don't think my dad understands what I do for a day to day, even as a programmer. My mom never did, but no, it's an interesting one, that. And more about how I've developed my management and leadership has been when I run into different individuals throughout my life. Every single person I kind work with, I kind learn and I steal another couple of tricks and techniques and ways of thinking from them and keep on building up my own unique style of how that all works.

27:51

Do you think that your ability to think through these things and recognize them in the way that you do has helped your search for your own best work?

28:00

Yeah. A hundred percent. Being reflective is a very, very important thing. It's I think one of my strongest ways that I can keep improving as a person. If you dropped me into stuff 10 years ago, I would do it completely differently because I've grown and constantly grown and learn. And even if you asked me for a month ago, it'd be different as well. The challenge though is to make sure it's reflective and not unhealthy what ifs. What I've done differently. It's about learning and tweaking and understanding, and then having enough people around you that will tell you when you're being a muppet.

28:40

And reminding you when you've done something wrong or a little off pace and giving you that feedback. And one thing I'm rather good and rather proud of is I tend to surround myself with... My engineering managers in particular at work will have fun arguments and discussions with me in that healthy way when they tell me they think I'm wrong, which is good. And that's how you build up a healthy, diverse team of people that are going to get the best work done.

29:01

So having those kind of difficult and hard conversations, it's a good thing. But yeah, the introspection is it's a good thing. If you ask me about a plate spinning, it's good to have that introspection. It's good to take that step back. It's good about having a think around it. It's also good to have an external party, occasionally being able to bounce that off to make sure that you can reflect back on it.

29:22

It's interesting that your parents play the typical high achiever card. You've got the mother who's deeply caring and the father who has the iron will, the polar opposites that kind of give you the golden ticket in some ways. And that's funny how that works itself out.

29:52

And I will also say as partly the products of their time as well. And it's about they kind of fell into the stereotypical gender roles all the time. And for me, I tend to be much more of a very blurry line around a lot of things and how it works, but I'm a weird and unusual mix of both my parents, hopefully in a good way.

30:13

Interesting that if your parents there were shaped by their time and their society, it is inevitable that you were also changed by it. Do you see any changes in the people that you lead now? Is it helpful to be able to spot people from different generations who can kind of give in different ways?

30:47

If you do it that way, you're bringing a huge amount of biases into play, because you're taking assumptions based on somebody's age about how they're going to work and operate and everyone's kind of very, very unique. So some people might come from X background and therefore they think differently or whatever, but you need to actually spend more time working out what somebody's motivation and what their actual, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is more than they were born in this generation, therefore they've come from this culture, therefore their X, Y, and Z.

31:15

And the only way to get to that route is to have those conversations and chats with people. I'm fascinated and I love humans. I love people. So when we are interviewing for individual contributors, the one thing we can't teach is passion for building software. We can't teach that. Everything else we can kind of teach. When it comes to managers, the one thing we can't teach is passion for people. You either have that, or you don't have that. And if you don't have the passion for helping other people get the best out of themselves, you'll be an okay manager. You're never going to be a great manager. It's the same as a programmer. If you know all the skills and stuff, but you don't have a passion for building awesome, awesome software. You're never going to be great.

31:58

And when you have that, a lot of it is about those conversations to work out. Yeah. This is that makes you happy, this is what makes you tick. You're you're asking me a lot about how I get my best work. A lot of what I do is to try to do the same with people. It's working out what do they need? What's their motivation? What makes them happy? What makes them tick? What's making them scratch that itch?

32:18

Why are they getting out of bed? Why are they coming to work? And every single person is slightly different and they're different at different times as well. People change, people grow, people decide, oh what made me happy a week ago isn't what's going to make me happy now. And if you've done everything right, then you can kind of help people get that best work. And there are times that they're not and then there are times they're going to go do something else. And that's also fine. The world is a very small place. I keep crossing parts with people frequently and often it's kind of mysterious.

32:50

We spend a lot of time talking about how you can perhaps reflect on your own working life or make career decisions that can move you in a forward direction. There's also, I guess, another element to it, which is just spending more time thinking about what your expectations are and what to do with those expectations. Because sometimes they're too high and sometimes they're too low. Do you ever spend any time thinking about your expectations and how they relate to work?

33:19

I spend a lot of time thinking about work. Sometimes I think maybe I'll want to go back and become a programmer again where I can leave and stop and go do other bits. So I do that focus occasionally and I think about it, but I enjoy what I do. That's the problem. I really enjoy what I do. And I like building our teams and getting teams and the best out of people. That's what scratches my itch right now. And I threw a comment at someone the other day is like, yeah, I've done this for 25 years. Maybe I should go do something differently and they went, don't be silly, you like what you do too much.

33:55

And again, we all have good weeks and bad weeks. There'll be weeks where I go, why am I doing what I'm doing? I spent all week dealing with the messes and then other weeks it's all yeah, ticking over and everything's great. And you're getting that dopamine hit from things happening, but yeah, what makes you happy? And it's like, yeah. And again, now I've done management for about 10 years. Maybe I'll change again. I've got another 20 years of work ahead of me. I couldn't retire and sit at home and do nothing because I'll be bored out of my brain. I might decided to go do something differently.

34:29

That's when the time you start to explore and like go, oh, what does make me happy? What do I want to try?Again, as we talked about earlier, the biggest thing that we have is we have that freedom of choice and having that chance to actually go explore.

34:42

You're a kind of human logical thinker. You look at these things kind of rationally. And one of the difficulties I think with finding work is that at the moments at which you need the information, you usually don't have it. So if let's say you are slightly earlier on in your career and you're deciding whether you want to go into, I don't know, infrastructure engineering or backend engineering, you probably haven't done it, which is kind of cruel because in other decisions, you can feed data into a system where you can then make the decision with real time information. And I guess it's just your kind of classic problem of an existentialist. How do you make decisions when you can't predict the future? And when you can only make these decisions with information that you've got at hand and our discovery of work is is a classic example of that. How do you think one should navigate it?

35:47

This is one of those things where I'm just going to say deciding where to work: it's a life altering decision, but it's not a life changing decision too much. If you spend six months working in infrastructure and you go, this is not for me, changing that, it's not like when you have a child where you can't get rid of that child. You're with that child forever, whereas with a job and you've tried something out and go, oh, this is not for me. That's okay. And if you find the right company as well, which you can always dabble in those kind of things. If you join a company, you join it as a backend engineer. You want to dabble a little bit in front end to see if that's for you or vice versa. That's kind of the choice.

36:28

What you should be looking for is to find that place which is going to give you those opportunities to grow and to try things out and see what's going to fit for you beforehand. And so when I started my career, I started my career off as a front end engineer. And I spent that for about a year before I realized I hate front end. Well, not hate, hate's too strong a word. I got more satisfaction building back end and connecting up the big blocks.

36:52

But yeah, it's more about finding a place where you get to try those things out. Again, it's a challenge though, right? This is one of my biggest frustrations with tech as an industry, the number of junior jobs is so out of proportion with everything else. And we as a complete group do not grow the next generation as well as we should do because it's a zero sum game. If you're not growing everyone's competing for the same senior and mid-level talent, which is crazy. No, does that help answer that one? It's a really hard one to do. But if I go back to my career, my first job though, it was the first place it would take me because it was not as challenged. And then from there I kind of build up and then started to delve into different things. And then again, I got very lucky. It was a dot com boom the year I started my career, which meant I had a huge amount of opportunities to do a huge amount of different things.

37:52

Yeah. But then it's interesting because I don't think we necessarily hear the stories where things went wrong. We usually just hear the stories of where they looked right and in a kind of LinkedIn age where we're all looking at ourselves compared to someone else. It's like, well, how am I meant to know whether I'm... That looks perfect. Oh my God, look at Brad. He just basically figured it out. And then he went from hotels.com then he went Smart Pension, and then he went to Motorway, oh my God, he knew what was going to happen before he even did it.

38:27

Let me just say this. The one thing I'm looking forward to most when I retire is deleting my LinkedIn because it gives a very warped kind of view. And there's a couple of companies I picked and worked on earlier in my career, which I would never have done again. It was just the wrong decision because I didn't ask the questions about the culture of the company, how were they going to help support me? How will they help growing? And I kind of didn't know that at that time and you make mistakes, but again, the mistakes you make... The big one, because people get very, very worried about my career choices and how it's going to impact me. You're going to be working for quite a while.

39:11

You learn, you can change. If you've got a job that's paying the bills and giving you a bit of growth and you can look around and move around. And the more you work, the more you realize what makes you happy. It took me a long time to work out that, oh, what makes me happy is helping grow and build organizations. I thought what made me happy was writing code kind of shifted. Yeah. You're making me think back about the bad choices I made. I wish I could name them, but I can't name them because it's just bad, but there were a couple of bad choices earlier in my career, which did not work out well. Couple of great choices, but a couple of really bad ones.

39:47

And what a relief. It's so heartening to hear that you made bad decisions and it's almost a bit like the kind of... Yeah, I don't know. When our life is so public, it feels like actually the better decision is to just preserve your image and not take risk.

40:15

Yeah. It's the illusion, right? We all make mistakes. We all make the wrong choices at times. And again, part of it was when I did make those wrong choices, I worked it out and I decided to move on and change at the times. But the biggest bit is even wherever I worked where it was slightly not right, I learned stuff. I met people. I learned bits and bobs. I grew. I learned more about where not to work for the next place and took those lessons through. But this is why I love and hate LinkedIn. I have a love/hate relationship, but it is everyone wants to keep shouting about this is great, this is great. I've done this, I've done that. It's the illusion about that we're all perfect in having this wonderful... Yeah.

41:17

Technologies of the future, products of the future, they all look a little strange before they appear. So for example, it's almost like most great things look like toys. They almost feel like scams because their secrets hidden in plain sight. Take an Airbnb, let strangers stay in your house, this is weird. What's going on? And there's that classic story of the guy who invented the sandwich, it was like really late. And it was only because he's an aristocrat and he didn't want to get his hands dirty whilst he was eating the meats, but he just wanted the meat. So he said, bring it to me between two pieces of bread. And then all of a sudden he becomes the guy who made the sandwich, but it's so obvious, but you just wouldn't think about it. You just wouldn't do it.

42:08

And I think it's the same potentially with technology, with positions of the future, with the things that we need to lean into. It's almost as if these things appear like toys, but we need to get over the fear of looking a little strange in today's society. And you strike me as the type of person who doesn't have a problem, necessarily feeling a little not like you're running the normal path. And does that help you lean into things of the future where you can be more abstract with the way that you think?

42:41

Your whole big descriptions, especially that's how good engineering org kind of works. You solve complex problems simply and you do it in such a way that people go that was so easy, but behind the scenes, there was so much thinking and working out to make it happen. It's the same with a lot of what I do. I know sometimes what I do looks easy because there's a huge amount of thinking and processing and based on my previous experience and it makes it look easier, but there's a lot of brain power that have gone into a lot of things that were there. Yeah, I don't think I've answered your question. Yeah, because some of the best solutions it's like, oh, I didn't even know I needed that.

43:26

And it's like, ooh, this works wonderfully. It's great. And behind the scenes, it's so complex to actually sort out and make look simple. The things that look very simple, the ones that actually have taken the most thinking in brain power is if you look at my career, all of that is I've fallen into, but the last 10 years I haven't, but a lot of that has taken a lot of thinking and reflection and what makes me happy, what doesn't make me happy, what do I want to be doing now, what do I want to be doing in the future? I don't think about the future that much, but yeah.

43:54

It's really interesting because in your circumstance I find it's a little more tricky to ask those deeper questions, I find because your understanding of your own inclinations is relatively stable and it's often the hardest part I think of finding work other than accessing the people you actually need to talk to are accessing your own inclinations. And the amount of people who get in their own way is unbelievable. How do you get in your own way when you're trying to find your best work? There must be obstacles that you yourself are putting in your own way.

44:43

Yeah. One of the big ones is both overthinking and projecting my own things in those situations. So a lot of what I do is around helping people be successful and setting people up for success. But if I sometimes overthink or I go, oh, this happened five years ago because of X, Y, and Z, the same situation and the same thing's happening right now, the same conclusion's going to happen. And then I'm actually using my previous experience, not as in a healthy way, because I'm projecting what happened last time into that situation because I'm overthinking it. So sometimes it's taking that step back and understanding it. And if we go with when we run a retrospective as part of a team and we're taking the assumption that every single person has done their best work and they've done their best, sometimes I forget that and I go, oh, because I know this person they've done this because of this, this and this. And they're thinking of that because I'm overthinking it.

45:41

If I was taking that step back and relaxing and getting in my own way. And then sometimes for me as well, what's important and what's not important? It took a long time for me to learn to be able to step away and go I can let these things go. It's work. It's important. And I care massively about my work, but at the same time, no one's going to die if I take a couple of days off and taking that kind of learning around that. And then if I spend too much time working on something, it's actually going to be probably negative impact versus taking it through things. But yeah, that's how I get in my way. The overthinking is a big one which sometimes you just need to do. And then at the same time, because I'm a very decisive person and human being I'm suddenly too direct in making decisions. And sometimes I need to take the step back and actually go, right, it's about getting that balance right.

46:27

Yeah. And I think each time it sounds like the answer is taking a step back.

46:31

Yeah. It's a step back and it's awareness because... I trained as a therapist for something for my outside work interest and I didn't realize how much that awareness would help me with work. And having that awareness about what's impacting you and what's causing you to feel that way or think that way because when you have that, you've now got information to make a decision. Why don't I like this person? What's causing me not to like them or all right why am I making this decision in this situation? When somebody tells me this and when somebody sends me this email or whatever, why am I feeling this way? Again, when you get the awareness, you can think you might want to make a decision, right? None of us can control how we feel. How we act on that is by getting that information. It's like, all right, I now know what makes me happy. I now know what makes you sad. I can now actually make a decision about what I do with that. Yeah.

47:29

Do you have to train as a therapist in order to access that?

47:35

No, that was bonus life kind of thing. I think the same thing if you do the same introspection and thinking about that either working with a career coach or working with a mentor or going a senior therapist helps you get awareness about what makes you happy is just because part of when I trained as a therapist, a lot of that was going through therapy myself. So then you spent a lot of time learning about yourself and how your past has helped shape you, what triggers you have, because you get a lot of awareness out of that. And that's the benefit around that. Ignore the training. That was a separate kind of bit, but the awareness which comes from that dedicated time with a mentor or a coach or a therapist has massively help me. Keeps massively helping me.

48:20

And interesting that it has to come from someone else. It's difficult to find on your own.

48:29

Yeah. I don't think you'd be able to do that yourself. You need to have that awareness of yourself and all the work has to come from yourself about learning what your triggers are, what your emotions are, how things impact you, but you kind of do need somebody to help you go on that journey. A good manager will help you get that as well, much as almost anyone else.

48:49

Thanks so much for breaking down this. I've loved it.

48:53

No problems. I've enjoyed this chat quite a lot.

48:55

All right, cool. See you around.

48:57

Take care.