how do you 'do' a recession w/engineering manager, andrew wyborski

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. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it for 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 VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdss 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. All right. Alrighty, what's going on everybody? Good morning. No one's here yet. I'm still gonna be energetic. It's great to see y'all this morning. Alright, okay, what's going on here? Send, I'm trying to send, no, hold on, send, hold on.

Send it now. There we go. Cool. Alrighty y'all. Good morning. It is Monday, February 20th. Low key is today for my birthday, tomorrow's a birthday. Andrew, sorry we didn't have a lot of my birthday. You picked today. But happy birthday Eve to me. 34 getting old. We're getting there. We're getting there. So really excited to hang out with Andrew. It's always a good time to hang out with Andrew. Andrew and I met a while back and we were being friends. I really value Andrew's mindset around many things. I think the one topic that we could talk about for like nine hours is leadership and culture and especially in tech engineering.

and but but but today I was interesting so Andrew so so I gave Andrew my cow I was like listen I love your ideas whenever you have an idea I said I know you want to use it I said whenever you have an idea let's book it and and and I saw Andrew's invite come through the other day and I said sweet yeah I said what are we talking about? And he goes basically how do you do a recession? Yeah and he didn't say that those are my words but he basically you know he wanted to unpack how to deal with the recession you know job seeking networking interviewing all of that so it's going to be a be a great conversation today.

Before we dive in two things, one, say, hey, comment, engage. We'd love to hear from you. Again, this platform, this show is a two-sided platform, I would say. First off, it's a networking platform, right? So we're not in the metaverse yet. We don't have our goggles on. Like we're not chilling our avatars. By the way, if there's avatars, mine's gonna be like some 80s vibe for sure. Like it's gonna be, it's ready player one. Like that whole movie is like one of my favorite movies because of it's rooted than 80s nostalgia. But we're not there yet. And so I need you to comment and say, hey, because this is, I've had people message me.

They said they've made it new friends. I've had people say they've gotten mentors out of this show. I've heard people get jobs from this show, and it's all because they DM people who comment, right? So don't lose your chance. But even if you watch this like three days from now, I would still comment because people still connect with people on this show. The second thing is this is a live show for a reason. There's very few times you can get an engineering manager that's here, an engineering manager on a somewhere live. And people say, hey, and ask you questions, and Andrew can't charge for it, right?

So now's the time to ask questions. And so anyways, I think that's it. So Andrew, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll go from there. Let's see here. I'm an engineering manager, Kroger. He kind of already dabbled in that. Again, really what that means is some places called resource managers, other places, call them technical directors, whatever. I think it's important that we call ourselves engineering managers, because we are meant to solve problems, but more so we solve the problems that prevent our people from solving problems. Been here for four and a half years now. And yeah, you mentioned it, we were actually talking just pre-show.

One of my big focuses is culture and how do I help my people deliver and get the best out of them? You said some fascinating stuff. So, listen, we're not gonna talk about this too much today because I think there's a lot of things to unpack. Yes. I don't think there is. But I mean, even Andrew was talking about the importance of a, you said a signature, right? Like on your email? Yes. So, salutation and signature. Salutation and signature. Right. So I'm fascinated with this, right? So just talk about that real quickly because I like that type of intentionality, especially if you're a more remote company is huge.

So talk about that briefly, because I thought that's fascinating. Yeah, and I think that's kind of where my focus has been. And I think your point about people commenting, even though folks might watch three days later, we live in a very now society. So I was beating myself up this morning of like, I've kind of gone dark over the last couple months where I've been publishing stuff on LinkedIn to try to engage with folks and get some thoughts out there just to try to make sense of them. And, you know, the key is always take advantage the moment you're in, right? Because again, people aren't going to necessarily look back and be like, Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, though, that guy didn't post for three months.

I don't like that guy anymore. We are in a very remote first environment. And so sees upon that and be engaged and meet people where they're at. And that signature and that salutation can be so critical because you said it, intentional has kind of been the theme for the last couple of months with me where it's very small stuff, but you need to be intentional with what you do every day because it will compound and build up over time. If I put the time in five, 10 minutes to have a nice email signature, that can save a lot of pain because it's got my phone number in there, it's got my position within Kroger so people can understand where I fit in with things.

And just like with the salutation, it makes things more human. And I think that's the key is that we are in a remote first environment, regardless of what the company is actually operating in. I think you have to start there and kind of ease your way back into stuff. And so I think it's very important that your intentional these interactions. Great example today. And that's dope that I got the trucker cap on, but like the hair was just not working. And so I made the choice of, we're gonna go with the more relaxed like hat look as opposed to the floofy updo kind of deal because that'll play better.

So that's just a little taste here. But I don't know if you wanna try to get us back on track, Taylor. I'll get us back on track. I wanna give a shout out. We've had a bunch of people tune in. Alex, John, Colin, Arunis, JC, Kevin, We got Brazil in the house today, Daniel, Brett, Fritzin, Nicole, Hey dad, our jam. My mom's here too. My mom and mom. Yeah. Listen, listen, talk about 80s, Hurt Wave. I need to list that, Dean. I'm not familiar with Hurt Wave. Christopher, David, we have South Africa in the house today. Chris, Nicholas, Curtis from the ATL. We have Pamela from Italy.

I've never had an Italy on the show, so we are very international today. Pamela, RJ, it's great to see you. I think this is my boy Jonathan Love that also anticipating async response with remote is awesome, 100%. Randall, it's great to see you. I gotta say the front end for Kroger.com where my wife calls from the store and can't find the capers. It's funny. All right. Use the app, if you're in store, use the app, they've got maps and I don't know if it's coming soon, but AR type of decorative directions that guided them capers. Yeah, I can never find capers every time we go.

We still got people coming in affected in this Mitchell. We'll definitely dive in here in a second. And Melina, it's great to see you from Orlando, Florida. All right, so let's dive in actually while we're here today. It's a fight with giving Kroger props. I love it. We got Pakistan. We got Pakistan, no, it's great. It's great to hear from you this morning. So all right, recession, we're in one. I don't know. People can argue with this. We won't get into that today. But what would you tell people? Let's just start there, man. Like for who just commented for Mitchell. Like what would you tell Mitchell?

Yeah, so I think it's interesting. And I'll leave my finance degree at the door because I'm in pretty field curve for a while, GDP growth rates inflation. All the metrics and indicators are weird these days. But the key really, and I think this is why I feel like it's a good time to talk about this from a technical perspective is we're seeing stuff that we've not seen, I would say, for like maybe 10 or 15 years. And I think the obvious thing is you see all the layoffs and tech and things like that. But to me, what's even more intriguing is the way that the market and consumers are holding tech responsible for actually generating profits.

I know it's just mind- Wow, I'm not gonna say like, actually expect companies to make money and be profit positive. But I think it's important because it's showing a bit of a shift in the overall climate. and I think as engineers, we need to be aware of it. Because I was thinking on it over, I think I booked this in like December maybe. And I was talking to some friends and stuff and just doing typical career planning as one well. And someone was like, well, but there's a recession coming, like, well, I gotta take that in account. It's like, well, do you really need to take that into account?

Because like we were just saying with the email signature, I think the most important thing is recession or not. What are you doing about your career on a day to day basis? Because if you're intentionally building your network, if you're growing your skills, and you're constantly pushing yourself to evolve into the type of leader you wanna be, you don't really care what the macroeconomic climate is. Because you're doing things to set yourself up for where you wanna be in life, and doing the right things to get there. And I think that if that's really how you approach your career recession or not, you're gonna find your path.

It shouldn't be like, oh, a recession's coming now, I have to throw everything out. It can be more of like, okay, that's input. that's something to take into consideration. And I really think it's still a scenario, especially within engineering, we're still in a very blessed space where there's still a lot of power on our side of the desk when it comes to interviewing and hiring, but consistently over the last 18 months, we'll say, because of the way that the climate has changed. I noticed the candidates that stand out to me are the people that when you have a conversation, I'm not pulling it out of view.

Like there really is a difference in people who are an intentional and approach their career with that growth mindset. And that's always gonna stand out whether it's a recession or not, because if you flash back to 2020, when everything shifts remote and you saw this massive glut of hiring, I think we actually shot that video podcasts together. That's all. We were talking about how much people are just throwing money at anyone who has engineering their title. And I think that's a good opposition where we are now. We're back then, even though it was a lot easier to get a job, your career search and growth shouldn't have been any different than it was now.

You should have been just as discerning when you go into that environment and say, this person's about to pay me two X what I'm getting right now. Why? Is this really the right move for me? Is this something that builds on to where I wanna get in five years? Like, so again, I think that's really to me where the recession or whatever the opposite of recession is. No one ever calls it. There's no need for it because things are good. Yeah, in a boom, boom or bust, you should have the same exact approach because you should also be looking at it of true sensitivity analysis.

You've got your bear market, your bull market, and then you're considering the market, right? So you should take all three of those consideration, but you shouldn't dramatically change your approach just because of what the Fed said last week because they're gonna say something else next week and everyone's gonna be completely up on arms. So that's a lot. Right, and I wanna get tactical here, right? I thought that was great. People are dapping you up, obviously, in the comments, but I want to get tactical, right? So Andrew gets laid off tomorrow. What are you doing? Drinking a lot. Heavily. Yes. So, for at least, but, but, but, there's a little validity to that.

Great. Breathe, right? You're not, listen, listen, it's going to suck. I had to lay off somebody on Monday, last Monday, right? Like, I still am eating up about it, right? And, but, but I would tell the individual if you are watching one, I love you too. If you are watching, just breathe. Yeah. Because nothing, you can't do anything in like a day or two. Give, give yourself that or drink heavily. So, Andrew, what would you do after that? I, you know, I think again, there's, there's some logic to it of take that time and let things kind of settle a little bit. And I think, cause again, you want to be intentional about the way that you activate your network, right?

So if I get laid off tomorrow, besides drinking a lot and then figuring out, okay, how are you in terms of the rainy day fun? Yeah, you know, don't worry. It's like, but again, that goes back to you drill your well before your thirsty kind of deal. Like, you shouldn't have to have such a knee-jerk reaction to the career aspect of things if you get laid off. Because the other reality, and I don't want to get too much into your specific situation, but no one where you sit within a company and knowing where you sit within an overall realm is important because there are definitely roles that are going to be much more sensitive to fluctuations.

And again, that's a scenario where you may be that sales guy that hits the road and does all the cold calls because you're fantastic at it and you make a fat commission check off of it. But you also have to recognize that that could all dry up like that, right? And so again, you should always kind of have that mitigation planner or what do they call it, the backfill, the next man up. You always need to have that in your back pocket because you never want that to be the case. Especially in bigger companies like where I met Kroger, there's a lot that happens that's outside of your control.

You need to be okay with that and do what you can to make sure that you're solid and that it's not impacting your day-to-day ability to deliver. Because there's no other aspect of it too, whereas if you're in an organization where you know of playoff's are coming. You want to do whatever it is you can to make sure that you're not in the portion that might fall under the axe. And gen time is straight up. Sorry, this was an R&D group. You're working on a moonshot project. We can't afford that anymore. Y'all are the ones that got to go. But that still means that you need to be doing the best to make sure that when that playoff happens, you've got someone like Taylor who's ready to educate for you because you've built the strong relationship and made it very clear, this is just about dollars and cents.

This has nothing to do with my ability as a professional. 100%. And so what, I mean, are you going to your phone? Are you calling people? Are you going to LinkedIn? Like where do you think you're going the first week that you're laid off? Because I'm just curious. I don't think I've ever gone this granular with anybody on the show, let alone an an engineering manager. So I'm curious where would be the first place that you would go? I think my phone, I think again, and I think that's telling of, you know, LinkedIn, all those things are great. But I think in those types of scenarios, if you're trying to navigate that tricky situation, you need to go to people you trust, get advice from them that's non-bias and figure out your next steps and be intentional about it.

And again, we're hand-waving a lot of like, look, y'all, If you don't have a rainy day fund, get one. That's not the purpose of today, but that is one aspect of it, because you need to make sure that you're able to kind of float and give yourself the space to be able to figure out how do I go about this. And that's where you're gonna leverage your personal connections, whether it's your mentor, whether it's a peer or a colleague that maybe is just good sounding board or it's someone that you know may be able to open you up to other opportunities. That's where you're gonna wanna start.

Cause I think if you go up on LinkedIn and you get laid off at nine a.m. and by nine 15, there's a post, if I just got laid off, come quick, talk to me, start firing off a bunch of stuff. People pick up on that and they'll notice that. And even in the scenarios, like if I respond to those emails, I get my inbox of seeking immediate contract to hire and, you know, Prince of Persia, mall area out there in Jersey, they show up all the time. Even if I respond to that today, I'm probably not getting hired on at that joint for a week, right?

So you can move fast, but don't be panicked. And again, make sure that you're leaning into the plans that you've laid out ahead of time. 100%. I want to get to RJ. RJ makes an interesting case. The issue in a bust that you don't always have the luxury of the choice between what pays and what grows your career. Again, that's fine. Being aware of that and knowing that ahead of time, I think, is also what can be so key. So that even if it is a scenario where you get laid off, like you have to understand where you sit. If you need to make X amount of dollars just to be financially solvent and in a state where it's not gonna erode your mental wellbeing to where you get to where you wanna be, that position you just say, okay, I'm gonna make this choice because it pays while still understanding this is where I wanna get to eventually or this is what my true purpose is.

Because even in that scenario going in and you have to make sure that you communicate this properly. But I would encourage you to say, look, I'm gonna jump in here because you got this feels like a match where we can make the short-term work, but this is also what my longer-term vision is. Outside of a place where you work in the phones and cold calling people for diet supplements, like always sharing that career progression and plan with an employer is always gonna do good things for ya. I love that, I love that. Let's see here, just kind of going through here. Daniel comes in, I recently faced layoff in next Tuesday's my last day at the current company.

I think it's an interesting opportunity to learn new skills, improve others before. Yeah. Moving back to the market's competition. Is on a high bar. Any thoughts on this? Yeah, I know, I, again, this is where I encourage people you should always be training and show is be pushing yourself to grow. I know that it can be difficult when you're, you're at least billing 40 hours, you may be working more than that, that can make it difficult, but make sure that you're doing your best to make the best use out of everything. Like, again, I give a lecture where I put up a slide. It's as computer scientists are lazy.

We are. We're really lazy bunch. But it also makes us really, really effective. So look for opportunities where it's on the job training or it's getting engaged in a new project and your current position. Seek out those opportunities that can either show you the new skills that you wanna learn or at least give you a chance to say, I dabbled in that thing. I don't know it extensively, but I know enough that I could learn it or that I would be interesting in learning it, potential new employer. I do think too though, having an actual sabbatical, whether it was voluntarily chosen or not, could be good as well, because then you can dig in and you can really get into some stuff, but I think there it's important you go into the plan as well.

Treat it like you're developing software. So again, make sure you're holding yourself accountable to proper decorum of I Wake Up. I do this, I get this accomplished today. I should be here by this point. Yeah, well, you can think of that one too, because I think again, even there, there's a way you leverage that to go to an employer and say, yeah, I've been out of work for three months, but this is what I've been doing with those three months. And that's just been sitting on my butt or firing off blind LinkedIn invites the job post. Like I took this time intentionally. And that is how you stand out from the crowd.

Yeah, I want to, I want to dig into something. you just said, because it's so key. Your job search, if you are laid off, is an eight to five job. Yes. Oh my God. Yes. And I so so there's two I have topics that I kind of ebb and flow on in my content creation journey. And the two that are really big for me right now is job descriptions. The importance of job descriptions and getting talent in your your organization from a job description perspective. And the second thing is we've actually navigating the job search as an eight to five job. So what I would do, if I were you, and Mitchell, it was the one that kind of commented he was just affected with this.

So this is my framework that I would do. I would get up every morning just like you're going to work. And from the hours of an honest, I'd probably start even before eight a.m. because you want to send DMs on LinkedIn's before people get into the office so you're top of their mind, right? So from like seven to 11, your entire morning should just be sending emails, texts and DMS the entire morning. Take a lunch, take a lunch, right? You've got to step away from your computer, right? Go real hard, step away for two hours from 11 to one, come back from one to five.

And that's when you should be having these networking calls, right? Whether it's seven minutes with Andrew to talk about his, you know, you know, intentionality for a signature or whatever, it's those things. But the biggest thing that people talk to me about, they're like, well, I don't have anything to give somebody else. Networking isn't about you. That's the problem. Right? Like, like, like if you heard something on this show and you message, Andrew, Andrew's a busy guy. So I'm not saying he'll meet with you. But if you hear something on the show and message Andrew, like I need to can I have six minutes of your time?

I love what you said about this. He's maybe more inclined to speak with you than just a random DM. But it takes that type of intentionality through the job search. So I don't know if you had any more thoughts on that. No, I think this is all good advice. And I think I just, I want to kind of take a spec point of like all this stuff we're saying right now, we probably would have said on this podcast 24 months ago. Yeah, I mean, I was saying the same thing. Yeah. And I think that's, that's the power of it. Where again, you can be really lazy because if you figure out these mechanisms or how this stuff works best for you, then like you'll be able to lead into it.

So again, I've shifted positions five times or something like that, you know, externally moving to different companies. And as I've done that, I've realized I have a similar pattern. And there's definitely some scenarios where it's like, oh, okay, well, I kind of get the sense now, time before something may happen where it's up my choosing. Now it's time to start activating and having those conversations with people. Or now it's time to take a look at the resume and realize, holy shit, this thing is ugly. I need to make this look pretty so people actually read it. There's gonna be those things that you go back to.

So again, if you're in a scenario where there's layoffs, and it may not be something you chose per se, doesn't mean you throw your playbook out, right? Maybe you're just starting it a little bit differently than you would normally or how you'd prefer. So, you know, I think again, the way you're saying it's a nine to five job or eight to five job or whatever. In theory, if you're doing it well, you're not gonna have to grind that hard for that long because there's gonna be things that you've already had kind of stoked and active, right? Your career should be a lot more about where you log on and spend eight hours a day.

And I think that's what's important is the people who don't ever have these issues with layoffs and finding a career are also those people that you look at and they're like, wow, they're doing a way a lot more than just committing code to production. And that's, that's the key. 100%. I want to give y'all a shout out. The comments are absolutely on fire right now. And I'm trying to get to all of them. But thank you so much for every, I mean, literally like, y'all are having full on dialogues in the comment section. It's incredible. I do want to get to this thing. It's Jonathan right here.

Pro level point. I love this. I talk about this a ton mentor if you don't have one sequel now. I think I think finding a mentor I think is one of the most underrated ways to network right because let's say this let's say now again I have an episode it's it's it's a few very much episodes back about a mentor mentee relationship as the mentee you need to be driving conversation you need to be booking the agenda you need to be doing everything it's not Andrews responsibility but I have a feeling that if you're like, hey, Andrew, if you want, can I, can you be my mentor?

I'm trying to learn these three things from an engineering leadership perspective. Can I meet with you for 10 minutes on one Friday a month? Andrew may be willing to do that, right? Cause it's intentional, but you have to drive it. But I think it's a great way because once you start to build that relationship with that mentor, he's going to open up other doors if he likes you to other people. So I think that's great. I do want to get to, there's another point to be made here. While you scroll there, I'll vamp for you. And I think another part of it too, is don't put so much importance, or try to really be like, oh man, I had to identify a mentor, and they have to have a credentials and mentoring or whatever.

The other thing, and something I kind of stumbled into, so I moved from one group and Kroger to another group. And I actually kept a lot of my regular one-on-ones with people in my old group, because they're moving up, we're all kind of at a similar level, but with similar career aspirations. And so between those like four people I meet with every four weeks, I rotate every week, I meet with one of them, but I go weeks between each talk. I get my mentoring done that way where I'm able to pick their brains and it was very intentional where one of them is in the product management side, another one is in the product design side.

So again, there's ways that you don't think you've got to find that very perfect person that has all the degrees on the wall or whatever as mentor. other ways you can kind of stitch that stuff together where you're like, all right, well, I can go to Kate for this kind of stuff. And all I know, you know, Brian can help me with that, whatever, like find those little pockets and don't make it that difficult. Just talk to people. I mean, that's it. Just talk to people. I love that. RJ comes in here. I love this. I want to give a shout out to Emmet. Emmet's been on the show too.

He, he's a great facilitator. And, and, and, and I love that RJ said this because there's many different ways to navigate the job search, right? There's the send a bunch of DMS. I love that. There's the facilitator aspect where, you know, you get a group of people together or you constantly post about opportunities. You know, I know there's a few guys on Twitter that whenever I post a job, they always retweet it and they've used the hashtag tech is hiring. So like, you there the answer, you can be a facilitator and just network people. And by you doing that, you're going to naturally meet more people.

So RJ, thank you for bringing that up. I love that. Hilary comes in, so you're having a hard sort of schedule to follow, gives you a plan and sense of purpose, absolutely. I love this. I want to get to Alex's question. How are there any thoughts on if how a recession can affect devs looking for early career roles? So junior devs, junior. Yeah. And I think that's where this all kind of came about because I was thinking about some of our early talent efforts and things like that where I don't know from my perspective it shouldn't change about how you go about it but I will say it definitely changes the climate in which you're entering and so I think generally early career hiring for junior devs is very difficult to get your foot at the door so that is always going to be a challenge no matter what however I think in a recessionary period like this it is a harder hill to climb because you lose out on some of those smaller shops that may be willing to take a chance or say, I, we need somebody.

So we're willing to take on a junior and have them grow with us. But I think again, from your perspective as a candidate, you should be approaching in the same way because regardless of what the macroeconomic climate is, the things I look for in junior devs is always consistency. Like it's, it's, do you show up? Are you professional? Do you speak with the thought of what you want to do. Like honestly, it is the it's I can't I need to let it go, but like it still bothers me in my mind that I got feedback on one of our early talent folks who was on a call with HR and they're laughing off screen with someone else and ignoring the call to run right now.

Like those are the kinds of things that you can't do as a junior engineer regardless of whether you have the job or not. So like get that basic level professional decorum in place. And then when you go into those conversations, you shouldn't have to take in the back of your mind. Well, it's a recession. So I got to take, you know, bring that in conversation. The conversation should all be about, here's what I've done. Here's where I want to go. And here's how I think I can add value to your organization. So you should have those external groups you participated. You should have those side projects you're constantly doing outside of school, bootcamp, whatever it is you're doing actively.

So So I think if anything, it puts more of an onus on the junior candidate to communicate effectively as to why they belong in that organization. I do think there is also a reality that you're going to be more affordable, we'll say, than a more senior person. And I think if you can kind of show how willing and able you are to continue to grow and how you're going to very quickly be able to close the gap between yourself as a junior in a mid-level, actually might give you a leg up because again, if you talk about the reality of the situation, if you're coming in a lower salary number, that might work in your favor.

But these are all uncomfortable things and they're difficult things. So the key is to just be aware of them and be able to talk about them as an adult. I love that. All right. So Tom flies when you're having fun. I want to wrap up. I know it's not. We got to do another one for sure very, very soon. Honestly, probably you know, follow-ups. I feel like there's a lot more to say. So also Hilary, I have an episode. It's, I think it's posted. It's with founder and CEO, Brandon Bayer of Flight Control. So it's definitely on my YouTube and he actually writes his own job descriptions and they were brilliant.

So I actually break, we actually share his screen on how to write a job description effectively. So I would, I would highly check that out. So Andrew, kind of last three questions, rapid fire here. Because it's my birthday tomorrow, what is your favorite type of cake? Yes, all of them. I'm notorious that when my birthday rolls around, I have multiple cakes. We do a thing in my family called birthday week. So it's like the week of your birthday. It always slides, whether it's like the seven days around your birthday, the seven days prior, or the seven days after, you can kind of make it the way you want.

But what I'll typically do is I'll have a different cake each day of the week. But what's your favorite? Like, what's your favorite? Like, give me, give me your favorite. Man, right now it's like the, the death by chocolate. I used to get one as a kid way back in the day. Just like 12 layers. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think I'm in Cincinnati next week. I'm in Cincinnati next week. We need to, we need to grab a, we need to grab a chocolate cake together. Yeah. Uh, I, my, my wife got me. So, um, I'm trying to eat more gluten free cause I just feel better.

Um, my wife got me the best gluten free German chocolate cake ever this weekend. And it was the best. Nice. So I think gluten free baked goods are the goat. Because they're more moist and they're more like, they're more rich. So I think if you haven't had a gluten free, like baked good, highly recommend it because they're usually greener and like more wonderful. more. Yes. People are people are popping off on the comments right now. I know we get a lot of veins on this on this show today. This is in my opinion and I'm not saying this is Andrew here. Y'all this is the most active the chat channel has ever been to the three years of me doing the show.

It was today. You're like this is insane. This has been the same. Second question. What tech tech trends just things that you or your team is looking into that you just want to talk about real quick. And don't say chat GPT or open AI. Yeah, definitely neither one of those. We'll let everyone else make the mistakes and burn a bunch of cash trying to figure out how to make it viable and profitable. And we'll come back around after that. However, big data, data engineering, data processing data flows right now, we're looking at modernizing our stack here at Grover. And we got some really exciting stuff going on where we're kind of building what would be the future of the engine that drives the company.

As a result though, we get to deal with a lot of fun nuances like an egg, like a chicken egg that was birthed in Cincinnati cannot be sold in Dayton but can be driven across the border into Indianapolis. Sometimes, I don't know. There's all kinds of crazy stuff when it comes to grocery and item data that now we get to dig into the nuances and figure out how do we engineer our our ways around all these complex like real world laws. Yeah. So that's interesting. Fun. You're the second person in a week that has said some data. Another guy said Kafka and data streaming from that perspective.

So you're kind of a second guy in a week. We're actually using Kafka as a lot of data streaming, a lot of making sure that all the things flow and update candidly. Like I think we've got our tech in a pretty good state of what we know we want in our stacks, like in what is our modern stack, but now it's really more translating all of the business rules that, well, we applied it this way at this stage for the last 50 years and it's like, cool, it's not the right time to do that now that we're in a digital age and an e-commerce company.

How much is those narratives? So again, a lot less code engineering, a lot more people, process and business engineering and that's up to me super exciting. So I'm very good to talk forward to it. Love that. Final question, because we gotta wrap it up. I gotta go. Curtis, I see your question. I will get to it in the comments. But last question, Andrew, obviously the show is called Guidance Councilor 2.04 reason. We had Guidance Councilors of Middle School, High School College, but now it's a dose. We don't really have them. What would be your biggest piece of career advice right now if somebody were to come up and ask you to be like, what would you tell your younger self?

Man, that's a good question. I think last time I was something along the lines of like, always be pushing right over. But actually I do want to answer Curtis's question. Yeah, that's fine. We call that one out. Because Curtis says, what can you say about those that were affected by the layoffs that never had college experience? Who cares? Why does that matter? Yeah. Yeah, Curtis. Like college, listen, this is a hot take. College just doesn't matter. Nope. It does not. And that's a hot take. And I know people can get mad at me with that. But it just doesn't. I've had this conversation with my wife.

She went to SCAD for arts degree. She said she didn't learn anything. She said I could've learned everything by an internship. I could've learned everything by an internship. I mean, internships with a goat. I think college is a man. The only value I still see in college these days is that you took four or five years of your life and you stuck with something to finish it. Well, law accounting, like law accounting. Oh, well, if you want to talk about that. Like specialty things, yes. I will walk it back a little bit. Sure. But I think that the point I want to make Curtis is, Okay, if you have never had college experience, why does that matter?

Why is that what defines you? What is it that's made you a great employee outside of that? And I would ask the question, if you have an organization that's like, you cannot work for us unless you have this piece of paper, why do you wanna work there? Yeah. That's such a narrow, exclusive line. Right. And I don't know if there's actually like rules around this, but like I don't think you actually have to join, or I don't think you actually have to put your educational experience under CV. I think it's a scenario where again, you need to make sure that you're putting your foot forward in the way that best sort of shows who you are.

Here's why I'm a great associate and this is why I'm gonna be a great addition to your company. Apparently I do have to drop, I'm being called in by my VP, so I'm gonna. Love y'all. This is great, Andy, love you. Y'all have a great line. Go check with Andrew, repost this if you like it. Bye. Hey, you did it. You listen 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 finish 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 Tdastin on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.