This episode features an interview with Julie Yang, Vice President of Product at Spec. Julie’s extensive career took her to companies like Bloomberg, Bain & Company, and Bestow Life Insurance where she served as a software developer, management consultant, and product manager. In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Julie to discuss prioritizing productivity, setting boundaries, and the meaning of life.
This episode features an interview with Julie Yang, Vice President of Product at Spec. Julie’s extensive career took her to companies like Bloomberg, Bain & Company, and Bestow Life Insurance where she served as a software developer, management consultant, and product manager.
In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Julie to discuss prioritizing productivity, setting boundaries, and the meaning of life.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:21): What Julie is working on right now
(02:44): What Julie’s day-to-day looks like
(07:09): How Julie got into the industry
(15:58): Rapid Fire Questions
(29:16): Random Segment Generator
(37:43): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“In a hybrid or full remote work position, people try to demonstrate that they're on the job or that they're working. And so the most visible way to do this day-to-day, ends up being responsiveness. And so, people are always breaking their focus time to respond to a work chat, email. Or some people just like helping other people and interacting when they're at home with their coworkers through these chat programs. I think it turns out to be like a fire drill kind of way of working, where you just work on whatever pops up. Which I don't think is necessarily the most prioritized way of working.” – Julie Yang
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Dev Morning Show (At Night). I'm Cassidy Williams and I am here with my wonderful co-host, Zach. Hey,
Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. Okay. I have to vent for like a second. because we are both wearing sweaters. We are in the Midwest. My house is very cold, .
Cassidy Williams: I was complimented today by some youth who said that my sweatshirt was drippy.
It, it appeared to be a compliment. Have you, have you heard this term before?
Zach Plata: Have heard like drip like Yeah. Like that is, I can't, using a sentence trip. Looks drippy.
Cassidy Williams: Cass. Uh, thanks Zack. You're drippy too. Speaking of cool drippy people, we have Julie Yang on the show today. Julie is the VP of Growth at Spec.
Hey, Julie. Hello. Do you know what drippy means?
Julie Yang: I can make up a, a meeting for it. great dripping in.
Coolness .
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. There you go. That's right. Watch out the filter of the
Julie Yang: 10 things I can do. This is your future .
Cassidy Williams: Gosh. Anyway, Julie, what are you working on right now?
Julie Yang: I am actually on mat leave, so I just had a baby a month ago. Oh, congrats. So I'm Congratulations. I'm working on keeping a human alive. Uh, it's rough y'all, but I have three more months of mat leave.
I had a friend say the easiest day of mat leave was when she went back to. So that's a good description. But before I went on mat leave, I was working, um, closely with the sales and marketing team at my company to find ways to increase revenue. So we are a pretty young pre-series a startup out of San Jose, and my title is VP of Growth.
So that was revenue growth that I was primarily working.
Cassidy Williams: Nice. That is awesome. Also, thank you for being with us today when you're trying, of course to keep a baby alive. I appreciate it. .
Julie Yang: You might hear him wake up. That's
Cassidy Williams: okay. . All good.
Zach Plata: The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast, means someone has to pay the bills around here.
We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly, and LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want. Fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business.
Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy Williams: Julie, I know that you are on maternity leave right now, so that is completely different day-to-day. But when you are in the office or working from home, what does your typical day-to-day look like?
Julie Yang: Uh, so my typical day, we are a full remote company. I work, uh, from home pretty much every day.
Um, do you travel a bit, but. Probably 50% meetings. I would say that I'm a former programmer. I switched to business after going to business school, was a management consultant for a couple years. Mm-hmm. a product manager at a startup where I used to work with Zach and, uh, then joined this company where I am VP of growth.
So, um, the day really revolves around a lot of collaboration with other tms and also some external meetings with. Clients, prospects. So we have about my, my schedule's about 50% meetings, and I would say as an ambivert, um, somebody who's highly extroverted, but then there's like a limit of how much I can handle
Um, after three hours of meetings, I basically feel like I'm drunk and I can't process anything and I can't think straight. So I try to squeeze all of those meetings back to back in the afternoon and really have some focus time in the morning. But, um, a lot of it is. In the morning trying to set my day straight.
So it's pretty important to me to have productivity, um, maximized output, especially as we take on more and more responsibility and like there's just too much to do. So every day I use this tool called Sin Ama, and it helps me track what meetings I have, what free time I have, and then I can chunk together all the focus time in the morning and really get out what I need to get out and make sure that I.
Meeting my deliverables. So planning every day, it's almost meditative, um, and thinking about where I spend my time and chunking that out through the day, and literally it integrates into tools like Jira and Gmail and Google Calendar, so I can pretty much see minute by minute and how I'm tracking against longer term deliverables.
So that's pretty much it at a pretty high level.
Zach Plata: Is this like a, like a website that you just kind of keep hoping or like a, a desktop. .
Julie Yang: Um, so it can be both. sunsama is like a productivity tool. It's almost like, uh, competitors you could say would be Trello or Motion For me, I really like it. Um, I believe that they've basically created a UX flow that helps you plan your day by day and incorporates a lot of the research that I've read about maximizing productivity.
So, light plug for sunsama, , uh, Basically you start your day with literally every task that you have, every meeting, and then you line out your day, and then at the end of the day, you also track your, your, um, how well you stuck to your schedule. So then you can actually, uh, push off week by week or month by month and, and start becoming better.
Uh, doing deep work is ultimately the goal, to be able to focus and do deep, meaningful work where, um, today's world, which is filled with. Texts, messages, emails, and trying to prove that you're a good worker. Um, it just drives people to become more responsive minute by minute, and that's actually the opposite of meaningful value work.
So it's trying to help. You, um, create those chunks of time. So that's why I really like it. So light plug for sunsama Light plug for the book. Deep Work. I really believe in it and I believe that's a, in ignoring people. Yeah. . In order to get your work done.
Cassidy Williams: That Deep Work book, which. Deep Work by Cal Newport, anybody who, who might wanna read it.
It just made me set so many timers on my phone for like distracting apps and get really good at the do not disturb. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. , because it's true. So, so many tools and things today are designed to get your attention in some way and keep your attention as much as possible, and you kind of have to set those boundaries everywhere.
Otherwise you'll be sucked in.
Julie Yang: and like he mentioned, you know, there's a difference between the knowledge worker and the exec. And I think it was Jack Dorsey, was it that he said famously stood at a table where anybody could come to him with a decision he needed to make mm-hmm. . And so Cal Newport was like, so if you're that kind of person, this isn't for you.
But most of us are not the CEO of two companies. Yeah. . So, yeah, I, I think it's, it's, he changed the way that I work and the way that I approach work. So I really enjoy. ,
Cassidy Williams: I'm very curious about how you got in the industry in the first place, because a lot of people that we've talked to switched into being a developer of some kind, and you switched away.
So how, how did that transition go? How did you get into this industry in the first place? .
Julie Yang: Okay, I'll start at the beginning. Beginning. I'm gonna try to limit this, but it's kind of a f a long story. Long story
Cassidy Williams: short, I would love to hear
Julie Yang: the whole thing. Um, so I actually took a bunch of AP classes, so this starts in high school,
I took a bunch of AP classes in coms sci, um, and then skipped into a mid-level course in college to film my quant distribution, cuz I thought it would be fun. Although my mom's a mainframe programmer and her company had layoffs every year and she was like, never become a programmer. Julius . And so I was like, okay, well this is fun and it's a different way to do math than doing math.
And my, um, problem sets each week ended up being longer than like if I had just taken straight calc and I was like, I am wasting my time. So I went to my dean and I said, Hey, can I drop this into a hot switch? And he said, yeah, you can see that, but you won't be a senior next year , cuz you had to fulfill requirements by year.
And so I was like, I will stick with this course . And then, um, He, uh, I ended up putting c plus plus on my resume then because obviously I had taken the class and it was a mid-level class and um, I got called for an internship with three letters on my resume, c plus plus, like, it didn't matter what else. I said, I just got a literal cold call and they said, Hey, it looks like you fit the bill.
And so I ended up with this internship. That was really nice. , I work for a bunch of. , I worked, uh, with a bunch of other interns in the Denver area and for an m i t, uh, entrepreneur who basically my task was to outer watermark to a Fujitsu scanner driver. So it was really fun. Um, off of that, I ended up getting an internship experience where I then senior year had come, I was applying for jobs and somebody.
I went to interview for an associate role at a social enterprise based in Kenya, and he was like, it looks like you have a program experience. And then he pushed me into a technical role where I learned how to build relational databases for the organization, working with their roster and their payroll so that they could scale with automated functions.
Um, cool. And from then on I was just like, well, I guess it's the. . So I,
Cassidy Williams: and up, I guess I'm a developer
Julie Yang: now. . Yeah. I mean, I, I know how to go to Stack overflow. , . I could figure this. So I call myself a backdoor programmer because I always just picked it up on the job. And, uh, I did write production level code I worked for at Bloomberg for four years, and they had a very intense training program that was 16 weeks when I.
Mm-hmm. . And then you had to pass fail and then you would get a real job. So it was the first time I knew stress, cuz I signed a year long lease on an apartment in New York on the Upper East Side. And then I was like, if I don't have a job at the end of four months, I have a remaining eight months where I have no money.
Cassidy Williams: I cannot pay for
Julie Yang: this. That is stressful. Yeah, that, yeah. But for the, so I will say I hustled though, like when I went from the social enterprise to Bloomberg, I had returned from Kenya to the US and in that three week span for a vacation, I was like, I need to have a job when I go back to Kenya because I don't wanna be interviewing off cycle.
And then I checked out c plus plus in a nutshell, right at front to back and
Cassidy Williams: then got a job, dang. . Yeah. At Bloomberg too, cuz they're like a hardcore c plus plus shop.
Julie Yang: Yeah. They actually have four Tran underneath the
Cassidy Williams: sheets. . Oh dang. Oh. as
Julie Yang: fact. Um, but yeah, the, so like that's how I ended up switching, getting, becoming a programmer.
I was always a backdoor programmer. And then, um, Coming out of it. I think I was a program owner at a different time. I'm in my thirties now, so I feel like there are generations of, um, the tech world looks like. And when I was in college, literally like that mid-level course had less than 20 people. And so now I heard that it's like as big as all the pre-med courses or all the history courses for people who wanna become lawyers.
So like, I think I was a developer and potentially a different time. Cause before me too, it was before a lot of, um, diversity discussions. Mm-hmm. . So when I was a programmer, . I felt like it was also during the time where like legitimately the big tech companies had a, a soft agreement to not poach from each other.
And they were also Yeah, sued for discriminating against older people. So I felt like there was an inverted triangle in programming where your best talent is your youngest talent cuz they're most up to date, they're also your cheapest talent cuz they're entry level and. They don't have necessarily obligations like children to go pick up after school.
And so people just end up like throwing extra time after work cuz they have that time to give sometimes. And o oftentimes don't push back and say no, like that sounds like you're working me overtime and you should pay me for that . So it was your youngest talent, it was your cheapest talent, was your most up-to date talent.
And also, um, I had listened to a lecture. I think it was Jenny Remedy at ibm, and she basically said that a lot of women after 30, 40 years in the industry were leaving and they did a postmortem on it, and it was because they were facing discrimination on the job and they weren't just leaving for other tech companies.
they were just leaving the industry period. They were doing a full career switch. And so at that point I was like, maybe I can try to explore something outside of tech where I feel like I'm not pigeonholed. And also since I was a backdoor program, didn't feel like there was much forward movement for me from a technical perspective.
Like I would have to go get. a master's in Comp Sci. For me personally, to feel like I had the chops to become an e manager and manage a technical team, I don't think that's true anymore. Looking back,
Cassidy Williams: yeah, I think, I think you're right though in that like that period of time, it was not a requirement, but it was one of those things that looked really good on a resume and
Julie Yang: helped you move forward.
Yeah, and I think I, I think a lot of. Those are hot takes. All of those are hot takes. Um, that was my perspective at that time. I think my, my, some of that has shifted for me and I certainly think other people have their opinions, but that's how I got in and that's how I got out by accident on purpose.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, a lot of it does sound like you were kind of swayed in the wind of like, well, I guess I'm doing this now. But it sounds like you accomplished a lot of really cool things in that time where you were a developer and even cooler things now that you're not.
Julie Yang: Yeah, and people always, whenever I talk to people, whether that's friends or job interviews, they're like, you have a very interesting career track record.
And I'm like, I just call it a . , the positive spin on it is just a rotational CEO position where I just do everything, a little bit of everything, , and I know how, um, the basic organizations within a company work. But, um, yeah, it's, it's a little bit of a meandering career path, and I think that that's what's true for the upcoming generations.
Like nobody stays at the same job anymore. Nobody should. I think, um, that's another hot take for maximizing your ability to adapt for. Better pay. People often are willing to give external candidates more than they are willing to give internal candidates,
Cassidy Williams: so, which is so backwards, but very true.
Julie Yang: Yeah. When I was in my twenties, like I know some of my friends, my programmer friends had a rule of thumb, three jobs by 30 to maximize your salary.
Cassidy Williams: Uhoh. That's, that's a pretty real rule. I think
Yeah, it's true. It was a, it was a constant joke when I was at Amazon. Like the fastest way to get a promotion or a raise is to leave and come back.
Julie Yang: Yeah. It's crazy. I don't
Zach Plata: now it's just like social norm in, in this industry. It's just like, , I mean, it's, it's hard to, to make that significant change or, or pump in, you know, your lifestyle and stuff at a, by staying where you are, which of course is amazing, you know, if you want to go that route.
Um, but we're seeing so many people these days like just taking that. , like, like candy. That, that advice, you know?
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. I, I read a statistic recently where it was saying like, the average tenure in general, uh, like in across industries is around four point. It was like 4.2, 4.3 years at a given company. And in tech it's like just less than two.
And, and that's just mm-hmm. The industry. And I feel like because of all of these practices, it's just how it is.
Julie Yang: Yeah, very true. It's crazy. All
Cassidy Williams: right. It is time for rapid fire questions.
We're going to ask you questions rapidly. Um, we have domain names and project ideas and things that we're squatting on. What are some of yours? Oh, I
Julie Yang: actually, I feel like the, I'm a bad tech person. I have not squatting on anything though. My husband and I did talk about squatting on some for our. Or a newborn.
Yeah, that's a thing. But then I was also like, is the internet where people are gonna go in the future? . Like I know people are going to TikTok to do searches instead of Google. And like with Covid, um, people actually ended up like businesses, went to the individual and did individual shopping. And social media has really changed a lot of patterns.
So I don't. Yeah. But, um, I do know that, uh, the last two companies I've worked at , whoever was squatting, wanted six figures for the domain name, and I really wish,
Cassidy Williams: gosh, uh, I, I've seen some parents squat on email addresses for their kids, which is interesting to see because yeah, I feel like email has changed over the past.
however many years, so many times. I'll be curious to see if that pays off.
Julie Yang: Yeah, I know when I first signed on an aol, my email was Jules Deka and I certainly was not thinking about like high value . No,
Zach Plata: don't ask me , but aol. Those were the days ,
Julie Yang: they were. My mom thought I had a sickness cuz I was on AIM all the time.
Zach Plata: Next question. What is the most recent thing you over-optimized? .
Julie Yang: Um, so whenever there's the opportunity to use coding on my job, sometimes I will, whether that's Excel or whether that's Python. But because I don't do it that frequently, it just takes super long and it gets the job done at the end of the day.
But like it's definitely an over optimization for something. I could have brute forced
just,
Cassidy Williams: that's always so fun though, cuz you're just like, aha, I made my life easier if I ever have to do this specific task again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm
Julie Yang: like, I'm so tech right now.
Zach Plata: I should have that as like my, my desktop background.
Julie Yang: I'm so tech .
Cassidy Williams: I'm so tech right now. , what is your golden rule for coding and working in
Julie Yang: general? Um, I mentioned a little bit about this before, but my golden rule is really that focus time where it's just being able to hammer out real chunks of meaningful value work.
So no slack, no emails, no messages, hours at a time. Um, I, I would say that. . I've been accused of being transactional before where like literally I used to love my old working relationship with a boss, where I would literally go in and have a bullet point of like, I need this from you. Can you answer this?
And what is this? And then I would walk out the door. . . And guess I don't realize I was so transactional once when somebody was like, hi Julie, how is your day? My day is good, . I was like, oh, okay. So sometimes there's something to be said about meetings just for the sake. Building relationships, but for me, I actually like try to cancel all meetings that are not productive.
in an effort to maximize
Zach Plata: productivity. What is your favorite? It depends. Question. This one
Julie Yang: gets existential. This one gets real juicy, so, Ooh, ooh. Um, like, it depends. Is is like, what is the meaning of life for you? Um, for me it's, I feel like there. so much that you can get out of life and what something, what you want out of it is very much, it depends.
So like as a, to make it relative into this podcast, as a programmer, you are graduating from. College probably, or maybe a bootcamp. And you're landing this role that's really high paying. Uh, people are really delaying life decisions these days. Like the average age of getting married is in your late twenties, if not in your thirties.
For men in certain cities, um, people aren't. able to buy houses in most metro areas in this market. Um, there's a lot of disposable income floating around and there's not a lot of obligations. And then you come across this existential crisis that I also went through when I was in my twenties of what is the point?
Like, hmm. The point was to get into a good college, to get a good education and that I got this job and now I just have a ton of money and. , what am I doing with it? Just make money to spend and it feels kind of empty because at that point I was working for a private company, which I don't know if people know this, but Bloomberg is literally one of the richest men in the world.
So my everyday job was to make a rich man richer. Mm-hmm. . And I was solidly middle class every day. Um, but like for some people that's perfectly fine. That's, that's it. That's the life. , make money. Spend money, let's go to the bar. Have a good time. Let's do it. . Yeah, I think I literally had to learn how to have fun in that way.
Uh, I grew up in a pretty frugal household, single mom, so for me that just wasn't the reality, like where I just throw money, um, at the win. And so it really was jarring for me at the first, um, when I started my professional life. So my favorite, it depends. Question I guess could be. , what is the meaning of life?
Why do you do what you do? And I actually ask my husband this all the time, like, why do you do this? Why do you do that? And I think everybody has their own answer. Humanity is so different. Everyone's so different. And it depends like, is this worth it? It depends. I, I, I love the human side of things.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah.
And that those are also the significantly harder questions to answer because it is, yeah. So different as people figure out, like the balance of being content while also still striving for things and, and the balance of like being happy with where you are or figuring out should I be, am I too comfortable?
And, and that, that's, that's a hard question to answer.
Julie Yang: And then if you're like, but I'm capable of doing, But I also like watching tv, .
Cassidy Williams: There's just so many K dramas to catch up on. That is the right answer. Yes.
Julie Yang: There's a new
Cassidy Williams: Netflix show.
Zach Plata: We'll talk after . I wanna know
Cassidy Williams: which one is it? Okay. On the complete opposite side of the meaningful spectrum, what's the oldest piece of tech you still own?
Julie Yang: Oh, I'm. Bad. I don't actually like, have a software attack that I, um, personally wrote to my own GitHub for, but that is fun. I did, I do have a MacBook . It's a brick from the late two thousands when I was in college. Wow. And over 10 years later, it's the works. Oh. I switched out like, oh, my hard drive died when I was writing my senior paper.
That was the worst. I rewrote it in like two days. Oh gosh. I *bleep* that out. , sorry for cursing so much. I just pumped that out. Um, I, yeah, I, that was back in the day, so like I switched out my own battery ram hard drive. Just keep on tracking. They make them different these days. I sound old that it
Cassidy Williams: is so different these days cuz back then you, you could kind of Lego brick it into a hodgepodge machine, but it worked and got the job done and now it's basically, it doesn't work anymore.
Oh no. You have to trade it in for a brand new model and plan some deprecation and all that and
Julie Yang: then pay a punch of money. .
Zach Plata: Yeah. All right. Have you written a piece of cringey.
Julie Yang: I don't know what your definition of cringey is, but this is like one of my worst professional experiences ever. , where Bloomberg?
Um, when I was at Bloomberg I was in charge of revamping a bunch of old functions and so, um, using new technologies, re-skinning it on the front end, maybe writing some new backend. Anyway, um, I then sat over a bunch of legacy functions, one of which had to get updated and. . What I didn't know was that there was an arbitrary limit on the number of variables that could be used in this function.
And so I ran outta memory. Oh. And it came out as a compiler warning in the dev environment that I honestly just ignored . Because you know that you're like watching a link libraries and like, what are, what are you gonna do? Read? Like every single line? No, you just go to the bathroom or something. Anyway, um, the dev environment for whatever reason, well, this is common.
The dev environment did not match the beta environment. And so what ended up happening was it got approved by a senior programmer on my team, and it rolled out to the rest of the company of 7,000 developers, and it broke our beta environment. So, and this was like, my program was linked into what they called bigs.
And so it was all these functions that were. on every single one working, and so, , I, I basically created a seg fault by overrunning memory. Oh. And brought down the de beta environment for literally everybody. And then I got a ticket about it, and I didn't understand the enormity of the situation yet because it's an arbitrary limit in the code.
There was no documentation anywhere. Oh gosh. And when I tested it in the dev environment, it obviously worked. It was just a compiler warning. And so I, I got a ticket to fix it and I was like, okay, I'll do it after I finish this other work. And I only realized you had ity of the situation when literally like the most I.
Engineers and that company waited and they were like, fix it now. watching my minute by minute update of being like, oh, okay. It's just like, oh, this is a big deal. Yeah. And then you have to watch this big piece of software compile. So I was like, I'm working on it. And then you have to like, wait. minutes.
Yeah, like tens of minutes, which feels like an eternity. Anyway, um, I went to go work out at the gym and that's how I relieved, felt the stress that day. But that was a cringey piece of code. And my boss, so a senior programmer approved it, but my boss wasn't there that that day, and he came to me and was like, so what happened?
And I was like, well, there was no documentation, so I did this really bad thing and brought it down for. Well, and also
Cassidy Williams: if a senior programmer approved it, then that's not
Julie Yang: all on you. Yeah. I mean, if you read it, it's in tactically the code was fine. It was just somewhere in the environment. Like you're not allowed to do that.
So what, what, what the fix was. This is the, maybe the more cringey part. The fix was just reusing a variable. . . Oh no. So like just using another like, so who knows what I. in whatever edge cases by doubling up. But anyway, ,
Cassidy Williams: man, I, I gotta say I love being a developer now where these languages protect you from that kind of thing.
And, and I mean, you can create some very unholy code with something like JavaScript or, or Python where they're just like, you can do whatever you want, but you can also do whatever you. , but they'll, they'll save you. There's a lot harder lessons when you're doing like four trans c plus plus machine code.
Julie Yang: Yeah. But I actually had a coworker who would not white space consistently for the life of me, and so when I got into Python, I was like, this would fix him. at last, literally like, I'm not even kidding. His own code on his own editor, he would have like the same block with different like, I dunno, , it
Cassidy Williams: killed.
Oh man. We are blessed to be coding in this day and age. Um, , do you have a favorite programming pun?
Julie Yang: I don't, I feel bad. I feel bad. Don't. I love standup comedy and I don't have any. The first thing that came to mind was bite me, but I was like, that's not a pun. That's true.
And then I was like, I got nothing. .
Cassidy Williams: That's good. I'll count it.
Zach Plata: It's, it's good enough. All right. Um, what is your most used
Julie Yang: emoji? There's a designer that I used to work with and he made a custom emoji. This is not my most used one, but this is my favorite one by far. Um, where he smashed together the crying emoji and the party emoji so that you could have a sob party.
it's so relevant. Like I was telling somebody the other day, like, . I just had a baby. And so a lot of people are dropping off food and also a lot of people are dropping off treats like congrats, like a cake, a bunch of cookies, like a bunch of treats. Yay. Yeah. And so my cousin gave me a bunch of baby gear and then she also, she's a professional baker, gave me like banana bread, bagels, a dozen cookies of one flavor, a dozen cookies of another flavor.
And I went home to my husband and I was like, I got good news and I got bad news. It's the same thing. Salsa we got, we got. We gotta eat them. It's a sob party. Yeah. We're gonna be fat.
Cassidy Williams: We are fat. I, I do love those emojis that, that convey, like the happy, sad, like that new emoji where it's like the teardrop, but it's still smiling
Yeah.
Julie Yang: Perfect. Yeah. Use that religiously . It's the small things. Like, that's actually what made me love slack too, is the, the custom Gies.
Cassidy Williams: Gies. Yeah. However, however you pronounce it. It is time for the random segment generator.
We're going to ask you things randomly, and the first category is dev opposites. So outside of your day job, and when you're not on maternity leave, what do you. .
Julie Yang: Well, going back to the whole Met leave thing. . Uh, aside from trying to keep the human alive, which is wrecking every sort of plan that I have, I do love reading.
Um, I was told once that when I say that I sound really square, so then I told them I just like to read smut. Then
so that's different. . I also, I'm, I love knitting. I love picking up like small creative things. Like I've done some creative writing, but honestly, a lot of things have fallen by the wayside. And like my baby's crying right now, and I could hear him. Um, , uh, it, and it, it really is just like chaos and trying to feed, sleep, wash all the bottles.
Um, that's, that's
Zach Plata: really been a full-time job. So if you weren't in the industry, what would you be doing? ,
Julie Yang: uh, this is not helpful, but I'll probably be trying to break into it, like you were saying, because tech is so pervasive and it's so, there's nothing that it doesn't touch in it. I feel like as somebody who is non-technical, I would be just salivating to like, try to be in the, in the cool kid crowd.
Uh, what did you say earlier? . I'd try to be drippy. Word
Cassidy Williams: drippy with the tech drip drippy with the tech kids. . Heck yeah. .
Julie Yang: I'm almost there. And that's not the way that you're supposed to use it, .
Cassidy Williams: It's fine. It's fine. There's going to be so many Gen Z kids writing in saying Cassidy totally used that word, right?
She is drippy. Julie . .
Julie Yang: Like, lemme put up my glasses. Um, I think, yeah, I think that would be what I would be doing. Otherwise, it's totally analog. If I had the guts to, I would probably try to be a writer. I mean, I really do love reading and I think I would love writing too, but it just, it's, it's rough out there for writers
Cassidy Williams: It's, it's very rough if you wanna be a writer,
Julie Yang: unfortunately. Yeah. I like something called stability. So, um, yeah. Fair
Zach Plata: developer,
All right. Uh, our next segment, uh, that we're gonna move on to is talk and ship. So let's spill some tea. It's funny because Julie and I were just talking about . Oh. I had taught her that word at when we worked together. Um, she was like, what does that mean anyway, uh,
what is something that is underrated or overrated in the deaf community?
Julie Yang: Ooh, we talked about this a little. Um, I think something that's overrated in the deaf community. There's a couple things here. One is like responsiveness, . Mm-hmm. , uh, I don't think it, it's, people try, especially in a. Hybrid or full remote work position, people try to demonstrate that they're on the job or that they're working.
And so the most visible way to do this day to day ends up being responsiveness, and so people are like always breaking their focus. Time to respond to. , uh, work, um, uh, chat, email, whatever. Or some people just like helping other people and interacting when they're at home with their coworkers through, um, these chat programs.
Anyway, I think it turns out to be like a fire drill kind of way of working. The other thing that I was going to say was career switches. And so I think a lot of, um, devs, I think a lot of people, not just devs in. day and age risk becoming obsolete, whether that's staying at the same company, whether that's working with the same technologies and not learning how to be adaptable, especially when there's not just industry interruptions, there's also economic interruptions, there's global movements of jobs, nearshoring, offshoring, whatever.
And so I think the ability to land a new job, to interview, to land a new job, learn new skills on the. or in prep for a new job. I think that's totally underrated. A lot of people are like, I got the job at the company. I'm staying, and sometimes companies abuse, abuse this. They're like, well, we're a really high good brand name, so we're gonna give you equity and you don't need cash, salary.
Or they also say like, You could go somewhere else and don't give the salary. So I think it's really underrated to switch jobs, although I feel like a lot of people are increasingly becoming comfortable with that. Um, so those are the two things that I think are underrated in the dev community.
Cassidy Williams: And finally, our last segment is what you're proud of.
What's something that you shipped or created that you are proud of? Oh, okay. Um, besides your,
Julie Yang: That one. I feel more like I'm failing every day when I'm like, why are you crying?
Um, oh. Something that I recently, that I'm pretty proud of was, uh, when I started this job, I was actually not VP of growth. I was head of growth and, uh, I was working with the company to, I, I worked on a 30, 60, 90 day plan with my boss who. A month after we wrote it about was like also, uh, side bullet. Like, can we add this in somewhere into your work plan?
Can you, um, port the marketing website to WordPress or like, just figure it out. go. And, um, I started asking around and found out about Webflow from a former coworker. And, uh, it turns out Webflow is a no-code developer for websites perfect for what we were doing relatively new compared to WordPress. And I did a side-by-side comparison, ended up not only proposing that we do the webflow change, but also just doing it myself.
And so it was ex. , like literally, I think my boss said I had expected this to get done in two quarters and it got done in like a month to launch. Um, and it was also, that's when I feel so tech right now. , I know how to do this actually. I think Zach, you taught me some css. Yes. No,
Zach Plata: maybe, I don't know.
Julie Yang: Hopefully Zach was a friend and developer and we sat on the same row and I would ask the questions all the time. Um, but. I think the ability to deliver, um, without having to get an outside shop and consultants, contractors to, um, take a long time, longer time to do it with more money. And we didn't have to have a dedicated dev team or, um, we, it was a no-code editor.
We could just continuously ship updates. I think that was something that. contributed to my getting drafted to the leadership team. So I think it made a material change on my career, um, and my job, and really proud of that moment. Even though if you looked at the website, you'd be likehmm . Is this it? ? I'm like so proud of it.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. No, that's huge because, because like you said, they didn't have to hire extra people for it. It got done significantly faster and it was just, it was doing something that they didn't expect with a different solution stuff. That's awesome.
Julie Yang: Yeah. Yeah. And I would say the experience I had earlier in my career where I just looked things up on stock overflow and figured it out, definitely translated here with community forums on Webflow, um, is very helpful.
Zach Plata: I was gonna say like, you know, even beyond all those side of things, it's like having to learn this new tool that I'm sure has somewhat of a learning curve, even if it is like a website building kind of tool for non coders. Um, ,
Julie Yang: it had its own quirks on top of, I didn't know anything, like, I didn't know what RM versus EM versus pixels were.
That's where I started. .
Cassidy Williams: I still don't fully understand all the differences between , bw, b R, there's so many now. , speaking of Stack Overflow, I have a keyboard that's designed just to copy and paste from Stack Overflow. It
Zach Plata: is the coolest thing.
Cassidy Williams: It's very relevant to the job . Okay, well that being said, we are out of time.
I will give you some sage advice first before you go.
So for all of you out there, all of you drippy. Set boundaries and really protect your focus time. Kind of like what we've been talking about throughout the episode is there are so many things that are trying to get your attention at all times, whether it's apps on your phone or the notifications you receive, uh, the emails you might get, the pings that you might get from someone, have heads, downtime, and actually really, those boundaries for your mind and just in your space because you actually get better work done when you are that focused.
So set those. That being said, Julie, thank you so much for being with us on the show today.
Julie Yang: Thank you for having me. It's been so fun.
Where
Cassidy Williams: can people find you on the internet? Do you have anything you wanna plug?
Julie Yang: Ooh, I, I think this is the difference between me and later generations. I don't really have a social media presence.
Good for you. But you can check out my company Spec . Hey, . specprotected.com.
Cassidy Williams: Specprotected.com. Cool. Thank you. Perfect. And once again, because making podcasts is expensive, this show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly Toggles Peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day. And that number continues to grow, and you should use them.
You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible. LaunchDarkly, I've been Cassidy. You can find me at cassidoo, C A S S I D O O on most things, and I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach. And I'm a DevRel at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter at
Cassidy Williams: zachplata. Thank you for tuning into the Dev Morning Show (At Night).
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