w/ bram gruneir, software engineer at cockroach labs

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Brahm, give the people who you are, give the people what they want. Who is Brahm, what do you do? Let's see, I'm an enterprise architect at Cockroach Labs, the manager of enterprise architects, focusing on financial services.

So I didn't know what an enterprise architect was. I did engineering at Cockroach Labs for four and a half years and then I switched two years ago to be an enterprise as architect. And what we do is, Cockroach is a database. We, Cockroach DB, it's a distributed SQL database. It's great. I don't want to go into all the details, but if you need a database, please look at us. Please be a brom, usually how GC2 dash it up. However, databases are tough. If you're doing a migration or even working on a new project, getting a database into production takes a lot of effort, especially a new database that's a new paradigm.

Discroovative SQL is relatively new. So I use my expertise to help companies, large firms, go from, okay, we wanna use Cockroach, so post sales to getting them into production as fast as we can. And prudently, because this is, you know, sometimes dealing with bank accounts and whatnot. So we wanna make sure all the right steps are followed and that they're doing things in the most cockroachy way. That's awesome. So, so Braum has had an incredible career. Braum has worked at places like Square, like Microsoft, and then Cockroach Labs, which from our conversation that he and I had offline seems incredibly difficult and challenging and fast paced and exciting.

It's fun. I wanna say something though, today, we're having what we're calling a roach and relax day. What's that? It is a day off. Yeah, a town. Roast. Roast and Relaxed Edge. Roast and Relaxed Edge. Everything's got to be cockroach themed because... I love it. Let's name a database after... Well, come on. Roached and Relaxed. Yeah. So, generally we actually have... We don't really do a four day work week. We do a four day plus a day of... for yourself. We call it Flex Fridays. And if you have a project you want to work on, work on it. You want to... Technology you want to learn, spend the day doing that.

amounts of meetings if you need to put like I always put like doctor's appointments dentist appointments whatever on a Friday it's it's a day where you're not supposed to have any real responsibilities normally and then once we started this remote thing where everyone's remote sure I'm still in Brooklyn and the office is well currently closed it's not going to open to January if all goes well but having it's a lot of pressure and you know the leadership of cockroach figured, you know what, let's give people some time to breathe during this. And so every month or two, we get a roach and relax day. Just a day where you don't even have a flex Friday.

It's just a day to do what you want. It's also contribute if you can. Why do you think that's so important? Right? So let's go ahead and dive in. I love that you brought this up, right? You know, I think right now people, individuals, engineers are tired. I think everyone's tired, right? My team's tired, right? Because because people have spent obviously their time working that they could do other things. And I may have just answered my own question, but I want to hear from you. Why do you think organizations, especially the engineering focused organization should give more time off like this? So originally when Cockroach was started, I was there right at the start.

I'm one of the first employees. There was the assumption that look at what Google was doing, where they had their 20% time. But everyone knows that that's true on paper, but in reality, it's never really followed and hasn't been for years. Maybe, mind you, the founders all came from Google. So from earlier days in Google, so there's a good chance that they actually got to experience it because you know classically what Gmail was created on a 20% time and a bunch of other projects like that. And so the idea was okay let's do that but let's make it so that everyone has to take it.

So you don't just save it up and bank it for the moment. Because one of the things that's really bad during engineering is if you just have an engineer that's like oh well I'm taking three months off. You've got a plan around that. You've got it or even if you did say say you did four months then took a month off that's a lot of time to not be around to help. And so, yeah, it was just decided let's do Fridays. And let people work on what they want on Fridays and not be the main product. Because the idea being as the four-day work week is being talked about in the news more and more, you can get just as much done if you're more relaxed and you actually can breathe a bit more.

And then with COVID and And yeah, things got tough. Well, and that's something I'm seeing, right? And especially, you know, my role's kind of morphed over the last year. I think there is not enough emphasis on actually giving people space and the ability to think. I feel like in today's world, we're so focused on what's next, what's next, what's next, what's next, what do we gotta push to prod, right? What's next, what broke, you know, let's go, go, go. And what I've realized after interviewing individuals like yourself on the show day in, day out is coding is a little bit like art. And some of the best artists, you know, my wife's an artist, she kind of just like goes into our own space sometimes and then comes out.

And it's like she has these great ideas. And so do you feel like that's the same? I always thought more like writing. Like so, yeah, it's, it's, it's, if you're trying to write poetry with extremely strict rules. And you have to think about what every line does. You have to be focused. And the killer for productivity for me was always meetings. Yeah, real quick, I put out a poll, this was crazy. I put out a poll on the internet on Twitter and LinkedIn. I said, hey, any developer out there, percentage amount of crime, how much are you hands on the keys during the workday? the most common answer I got, 20%.

Yeah. 20, like that number absolutely just blows my mind because like I just feel like that's not good. Right? Remember back at Microsoft we considered, if I recall correctly, we considered a four hours of working day to be the most productive time my person can have. Even though you're there for sometimes, you know, somewhere between seven, 10, 11 hours. Like you can be there a long time, especially with Seattle traffic, it used to be. I used to do longer days just to avoid the traffic. But having four hours was considered a really good day. And then the moment you start throwing more and more meetings in there, and the more senior you get, the more meetings you need.

And so you have to find ways to be more productive. And the classic trick, let's put down a bunch of like book time slots. Well, managers tend to not care. Oh, it's your focus time. I'm sorry. This is more important. Yeah, I love it. So, one of the things we were talking about offline, I want to pivot conversation just a little bit, is around, so right now, it is a feeding frenzy in the market, right? People getting higher left and right, people are getting huge offers, but there also is a little bit of push to get people in the boat, right? There's a little bit of pressure to get people in the boat.

Let's talk about your strategy and maybe impart some wisdom on job seekers. If they get an offer and maybe they're not feeling it or maybe they feel pressured, what's your advice to those individuals? It depends what situation you're in, right? If you don't have work and you need work, You take a job offer as long as it looks good. If you're, but for a lot of developers, it's the market, there's so many jobs out there right now. You can allow it to be a little picky. And if you have a current job, the people that make the big moves, I've never been able to do this.

I've never had the freedom to do so, but I see them take a month or two off. Yeah, I've seen that too. They quit, they prep, because look, if you're interviewing for a developer role, you have to prep. you have to practice your algorithms because you're gonna be expected to perform. And so like at Cockroach, we do live coding. And I love it. It's better than a whiteboard because for me, I do better if I can see correct spelling errors and doing that on a whiteboard. My code is gonna look messy. And the intention's there, but being able to do live coding means you get feedback right away from execution, hey, this is wrong.

And it showcases your debugging skills. It showcases a lot of more skills than just can you spit out an algorithm. Right. I'm not, I don't think that these algorithm type, you know, live coding questions are the, the be all and end all of hiring. I think they're an interesting way of doing it. I don't know if they're the best way because nobody codes, hey, you gotta get this algorithm done an hour ago in real life. You're sitting there, you're looking up stack overflow for alternate solutions to see if yours is the best or if you're going in the right direction, you're mixing and matching things together, you take your time and you're deliberate about it, and then you spend more time testing it.

At least for all the work at Cockroach, I would say 20% of my time was writing the code and 80% of it was testing it. Really? Yeah. And then you discover the things that were wrong with your code. Sure. So what's your suggestion for interviewers, right? So let's say hire major CTOs, VPs of engineers are watching this, they're like, All right, Bronn, that sounds great. How do you all interview? We do a combination. These things might have shifted. I haven't done interviews for engineering in about a year, a year and a half now, but now I'm doing interviews for the customer success work. Where I'm doing behavioral interviews.

Yeah. So I can talk about some of the things we changed at Cockroach to make it more. Because we had a lot of trouble finding good candidates or Leo. We obviously didn't know each other then, but if we did, you wouldn't have problems finding candidates. True. Yeah. We were looking for people in New York, so that was a smaller market to begin with. Now we're remote and everywhere. But at the time, you know, we're a tiny startup. We needed everybody local to start. We realized we were discounting any resume that didn't have a large name tech company on it. wasn't Microsoft or Google or Facebook or Amazon or something.

We were just, no. Really? Yeah. And then we were looking at the schools they went to. Oh, these are not the big name schools. And we were tossing them a lot of resumes. And that was a bad practice. And we realized it and we corrected. And so now when interviewing, we do a blind interview as much as we can. We do have like the visual, we can see the candidate. And we do the coding, but we don't check resumes before an interview. We have the HR department go through them quickly. Do they have the qualifications? And that's it. And then we go right into the interview and I'm not coming in there with a bias of this person should be good because they were at, let's say Google.

Yeah. And a lot of people go from startup to startup. And they may not start up, so you're rolling a dice. You're rolling the dice every time that you go to a startup. You don't know if it's gonna be a successful company or not. I've been very fortunate with both Square and Cockroach. Yeah, you're very fortunate. Yeah, you hit two of two, which shot you. I don't know how. But the move to Cockroach was the legit, mind you. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So you and we have some comments coming in that I want to get to. So Alicia comes in here goes, he's selling himself short, this is a bit ago.

Alicia goes, he's also worked at Square, Microsoft, he's weak, at least smart. I love it. you guys are blood much going on. I'm going to see you. Alan says, hey, then Alan comes down here and goes, sorry, Alan goes, is it rude to shop for web devs while Taylor is presenting? No, Alan, that's why we do this. But Alan, email me back. Email me back. I emailed you. You need to email me back so I can help you. I can help you do this thing. Yeah, so not checking the resumes. Listen, I'll tell you this. And when people work with me, like, If you work with me and my team, you don't check resumes.

You trust us enough to do our job where you know the type of caliber you're getting. I mean, literally I just spoke with a company that's big in the NFT space recently who wants to engage me and my team. And they're like, listen, like, send us resumes. Like, we'll look at them and we'll figure it out. But that's not that's not we. We just want good people. And so, um, so again, like that, but you got to have trust. You got to have trust. You got to have trust with the HR team or your, your external recruiting vendors and then Annie comes in and says I appreciate the transparency.

And so, so, Bronn, let me let me let me ask you this. What are some tips for job seekers right now? Right? What are some tips for people who are I don't know feeling nervous? I hate where they're at. I mean, any any good nuggets from Bronn that you can share? I can only share so much because I went from from Microsoft square I interviewed at square. I had five or six other residents five or six other companies lined up to interview and they had me an offer and said here's a really good offer. Decide. Yeah. And yeah, I was about to interview with Jack Dorsey's other company too.

I was going to interview with Twitter next and I didn't because I took the job. I was like, you know what? I really like I liked what Square was doing as a company. So for me, that was an active choice to jump to cockroach. I I was already working on Cockroach. It was an open source project. And I was working on it, sitting next to the founders at Square. I got fortunate there. And I was just interested in working on hard problems, which Square had promised me, and I didn't really get when I was in the New York office. Starting a new office is hard.

That's a whole other conversation. That was interesting. Tips for job seekers for me, it's going to be tough, because I went to a good school that got me recognized. Like I went to Waterloo. And then I pretty sure I got interviewed by Google and Microsoft because I did a logic contest. I love puzzles, and I saw there was a Google puzzle challenge that happens every year. It was huge. But that's great. Google doesn't sponsor it anymore. But they used it way back then, so in 2007, for recruiting purposes. And I scored well in it. And the next thing I know, I got a Google interview.

I'm like, what is this? How did this happen? I never applied and then Microsoft came right after. So their departments are hungry for candidates. But I think to, but again, I think you're selling yourself short, like you put yourself out there, right? So let's talk about your time at Waterloo with getting projects or co-ops and stuff, right? Oh, Waterloo was a great school because, well, there's feedback loops. Like a good school gets a good reputation, gets the best students in and it cycles and cycles. But Waterloo is tough. you're doing six co-op terms or internships throughout the program. So instead of being a four year, exactly, four year engineering degree, it was a four year and two thirds.

Because you, and it was nonstop. You don't get summers. You do, so I was in a, I was in the fourth stream, which meant I did four months of school, one semester school, one semester of work, back and forth all the way until fourth year where I did eight months of school back to back, and then a final co-op term, and then a final, and then a final school term. So it's how it's up. And how did those help you? Cause they, I think they did, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's a difference between what you're learning in school and the application of that. There it is.

In actual work. And there's such different environments. Everyone knows people that did poorly at school, but excel at work. Or vice versa. But me, me. My SAT score was like a 900 out of 1,600. So yeah, not great. Yeah, it's, and so this gives you, what a leadership both, right? So I was doing coding. I worked at, I had a co-op permit Cisco. I did three co-op permits at ATI, now AMD. Did I work on the coolest stuff? No, I did four months of school and then was suddenly in a job. I don't know. And it's more of a real job than anything, like I worked in high school at like retail computer stores.

I think that's like nothing serious. And suddenly I was in the IT department rewriting how they, they brought systems online and trying to add efficiencies everywhere. But by the third one, I was learning how to do hardware design. Yeah. Well, but again, I think it's stressing, I think it's stressing to go put yourself out there, right? And actually get experience. Because I think that's the big thing. And Alicia comes in here, Alicia, what's one technical thing you'd want a junior dev to be good at or type of project you'll want them to work on the kind of thing that makes you go oh they have interesting experience and do you care if it's a personal project or professional company.

I would say there's always a bit more weight to it if it's a professional project. I'm trying to think of the exact type of experience. You want something that so nowadays if you're working on open source it makes it so much easier because you can just go and see what's a word. Actual type of project. I look when looking for engineering at a cockroach, it was always, did they do something in the space? Was it a distributed engineering project? Was it a database type project? It takes a special type of engineer to want to work on databases. But we were happy with anyone like my background is machine learning.

And so distributed systems and machine learning and it's the sweetest system stuff obviously that I've done more with recently. Mind you, machine learning companies are taking off right now. I just wish they would stop calling themselves AI companies. That's all another company. So, so, so, so then you're saying basically for junior dev to maybe try to take on a personal project that relates to the company, which is, which is actually aligns. That's a lot though. Find a project you're passionate about. Yeah. Because that's going to shine through. That makes sense. And having, like you don't want large gaps in your resume. That doesn't look good.

You don't want to be jumping from company to company. Cause that's always a bit of like, oh no, be careful this person doesn't have any loyalty or whatnot. But having a passion and doing things on the side, I mean, yeah, well, until I had my daughter, I was doing side projects all the time. Cockroach for me was a side project where I stayed in Jerusalem. late at work at Square, I'd hang around and spend a few hours, a few days a week working on some cockroach. That's awesome. Learning Go so that I could program for cockroach. But again, right, I think the one consistent theme, and for those of you who are watching or have questions, please ask them, but stress to people watching, as Brahms has kept saying, be interested, experiment, research, like Brahms, everything you're saying is like, Hey, listen, you got to go out and you got to, you got to take on a little bit more work and you kind of have to get after it, especially earlier in your career.

But it sounds like everything that you have done has led you to another opportunity because you've taken something on. Oh, even weird side projects. I started a side project to do wine recommendations. Oh, I love that. It would have been great. Yeah, it worked recently well. It was using machine learning algorithm to. Nice. The problem was I'm a Canadian, I'm working at Microsoft, I'm waiting to get a green card, and I'm just in a holding pattern. You can't just, as an immigrant worker, you can't just say, okay, I'm gonna go to this full time and self-employed working on it. I think it could have been successful if I was to go full-time on it.

But I could. Well, if you ever wanna talk wine, I mean, no, let me know. It was supposed to be a scotch tasting side originally. Not to talk to me about that. It mutated into wine because there was a bigger market. And we going through all of that, it was just, I learned a ton about how a company runs and all these things. And then I felt safer going into a startup and knowing what to look for in a startup. Stressing. So that took time because a lot of these little startups, you don't know if they're gonna be around in a year. And things like why it's important for them to have real funding?

Because it's not just the money coming in, it's also make sure that they have leadership from the board from people in the industry that know that can open more connections that are and can help lead the company in the right direction. make sense. Yeah, Alan Chime in here. So Alan, I've worked together in the past. Alan was was at Disney for a bit. He was at Disney. We look for passion about engineering. Again, passion could come across as taking on other projects, right? And then he goes out Adobe, my organization was full of diverse range of backgrounds, but everyone was authentically passionate about their specific engineering tech.

And I think I think what I've seen, especially interviewing individuals like Brahms, like all my previous guests, it really, it's passion. People just want to work with people who are passionate about their craft. And so let me, and then right here, LinkedIn user, leveraging your college, university's industry context for internships, I think it's critical to breaking that experience job. I was a junior dev and ultimately making your degree pay for itself. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. And I did not do that, right? Like one of the things, and that's why I'm so passionate, Hence guidance counselor 2.0, Brom, is because I went to a business school I don't think I was educated properly.

Like I, I didn't really know how to leverage an internship. Like I didn't know how to do any of that. And, and so that's why I'm so passionate. I think you absolutely need to dig into your college. If you're in college now, go to your whatever admissions or whatever and get tried and leverage their name and internship because I did not do that. Um, Brahm, go ahead. You have some words on that. Yeah, I was just going to say there's a lot of tools that most colleges offer. And companies are like, we're going to, like, cockroach does this all the time. We go to colleges and universities and are looking for people.

And we love internships because internships means you get someone, they get a taste to see if it's a good fit. And if it is, then we, our hope is that they come back full time. Every time. Absolutely. So last question, and we'll wrap it up here. And I knew this would happen. It's already been 30 minutes. Time flies when I have great guests like Brahms. The last question I always ask individuals, especially that are more senior in their career. Why now, again, you have three minutes to answer this. And I know this is a loaded question. Why is IT leadership so shitty in tech? One reason is we promote high performing developers who should really stay in an IC role.

We don't have that many great examples to go off of. I can give you a litany of horrible bosses I had. That's a fun conversation we can have at all different organization sizes. Yeah. It's always considered secondary. It's not as important. It takes a completely different skill set to manage a team as I'm discovering now. Yeah. And it's interesting and you have to be willing to step away from coding. Yep. And so I'm like I haven't done that much coding in a while now and I'm itching to do more because I will always be a builder of some sort. Yeah. Because there's that passion to always be doing something and building something new.

I love it. So yeah, it's we need better examples. Yes. Coaching is not the only answer. You need coaching. And especially smaller teams getting coaching is tough. But even then you need more than that, you need, you need mentors. Yeah. That's what I did. The first thing I did was I found a mentor who of a good example of a boss who I could go to and say, Hey, as a manager, what's the best approach for for these types of situations? And questions, I go to them right away. Awesome. Cool. Well, y'all, thank you for tuning in this morning. I appreciate it. Alicia goes my final question.

When are we going for 3 AM pancakes? If y'all go to 3 AM pancakes, we just make it like a 10 PMer and I'll join y'all. Alan, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Listen, Braum, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. This is fun. Yes. Y'all go ahead and connect with Braum on LinkedIn. I will tag him in today's video after we'll wrap the pier. Again, I'm off for two weeks. If you only need anything, shoot me DM and I'll get back to you when I get back. Brom, let's stay in touch and y'all have a great rest of your fry.

I appreciate you. Y'all have a good one. See you, Brom. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again.

If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. Destin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.