climbing the career ladder w/ tim cheadle, vp of engineering

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So Tim, let's kick it over to you, man. Who are you? What do you do? Then we'll go from there. Yeah, I am Tim Cheetel. I'm vice president of engineering at a company called Binti. It's a startup that focuses on child welfare software. So we work with child welfare agencies across the country, states, counties, local, private, to help every kid find the loving home that they all deserve. That's so cool. Yeah, it's what I'm calling you all been around for. I think the company's been around seven or eight years. I joined five months ago. That's awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, I've been in tech. Or did you find them?

They found me. That's awesome. So I got laid off in May and had decided to take the summer off and about three weeks in the CEO of Benty. Her name is Felicia. She emailed me and it was almost deleted it, but I kind of read it. And I'm like, yeah, this is something I can't ignore. So she hooked me in. I love that. That's awesome. All right, well Tim man, we got a lot of cover today, a lot to cover. So let's dive in the first thing that I'm really fascinated with is career ladders, right? You and I kind of chit chatted briefly beforehand and kind of working your way up.

And it kind of goes to what I said earlier, like people are always wanting the next thing. And I think that's good. I think companies should have that. You and I talked about the fact of putting titles in place for people to work towards something because a lot of companies like to just be flat, but they don't realize that like people want to have a hot people want to work towards something. So can you break that down for me? Yeah, I mean, everybody calls them a career ladder at Shopify. They actually called a career jungle gym, which I think is more accurate. That's actually, I love that so much.

Yeah. But, you know, when I first, when I was a more junior engineer and I saw career ladder and there was this spreadsheet and here's all the things I'm supposed to be doing, I'm like, and I'm a human being, I don't fit into this. Like what? It didn't make any sense to me. But the longer I'm in the industry, the more I get into leadership, the more I realize how important that is. And it's for two reasons. One, people want to know how they're doing. I think even more than promotion, people just want to know, like, am I doing a good job? Is the work I'm doing visible and doesn't matter?

And then the second, of course, is they want to get promoted, make more money, progress in their career, etc. And so a career ladder to me is where all of that starts. It's like you're not going to know where you stand unless you know what the expectations are. And one of the things that bad managers are really good at is really avoiding setting those expectations. So kind of this is what I think the role looks like. Here's what success looks like. And then making sure that both sides understand that and are interpreting things the same way. Why do you think managers are so bad at setting expectations?

Because I talk about this all the time. I think everything, not everything, I think most things could be solved in the hiring process by setting expectations in better job descriptions. That's literally it. So not to be short about it, but I think they don't know what they want. Right. It's so freaking true, dude. And I think putting, that's what putting the thought. So we just did this at Ben T. I came in and it was pretty clear that the team was craving that renewed sense of expectation. And so I actually worked with some of our staff devs to develop a revised career ladder. They had one, but it was kind of like really abstract.

It was based on the company values, which I love, but that was like such a high level thing when it came to the nitty gritty of like how am I doing as a junior developer? Yeah. Really was unclear. So we worked on that. And that whole exercise made us all clarify, well, what is it that we want? And I would make sure to not do that unilaterally. It was important that my team not only had buy-in, but had a voice in what that meant, because they're the ones on the front lines, not me. Yep. Yep. And then Christina chimes in here or moves the milestones.

Oh goodness. You know, I think part of my motivation for doing this is seeing how many people have been screwed during the course of my career. It's bad. I mean, you know, again, I'm on the other side of it definitely helped with hiring, you know, companies, you know, and obviously placing engineers. Tim, if you need anybody, let me know. But, you know, like for me, like, it's just jacked up, man. Usually leadership is so jacked up. It can be. There's also some really great leaders out there. And I'll let y'all be the judge of which category I've fallen. But I think it starts with truly loving people.

I just genuinely love people. And also understanding that leadership management is a different craft than programming. I mean, that's kind of obvious when you say it, but so many programmers just become managers by default. Like that's the promotion path, which I think is really like, it's a totally different job. And then I think that goes into like, well then they don't know what they want. They approach the job like a programmer instead of a leader. And then, you know, some of the changing milestones too comes down to like, if the company has financial stress, they may move the milestones. Yeah. You try to keep people from, I don't know that it's keep people from getting promoted, but keep from having to pay them more, which of course is just unethical in all sorts of ways.

Right. But they also move the milestones, because if you don't know what you want, you're going to change it over time. Right. And then your employees are chasing a ghost. So how did you come in and set milestones? And like what's your process behind that? Because for me, this is the first time in my career where I haven't led a team in like six or seven years. And what I've realized is like people want to be managed and people want to have expectations, even though they don't think they do, I think they do. And how I know they do. What milestones, how did you come up with milestones, man?

I mean, is it something that, you looked at the business, kind of cross-referenced, obviously your background, yada, yada, yada, but like, I'm kind of curious, like, just your thought on setting milestones, how to while we're at it. Yeah, do you mean milestones for the career ladder or just milestones for projects or career ladder? Career ladder. So it starts with a really high level understanding of, it actually starts with at the company level, what levels does the company have? And do we have equity and fairness when it comes to pay and the promotion process, whatever? So leave all that aside. Sure. And then it's like, well, how do I translate that into the engineering I see scope?

And to be fair, we only did the career ladder for ICs, a benty, the other roles we need to work on. And then it starts with kind of day to day, what percentage of time, if I were to break this person's day or week time into chunks, how much percent is writing code, how much percent is code review, or percentage is writing design documents, kind of all the things that go into a successful product. It also involves things like relationship building. Do they work with product managers and the design team? Or do they have to report to executives that kind of thing? And each role kind of builds on the role before it, but it's not perfectly linear.

Like, first of all, it's way harder to get from senior to staff than it is from junior to senior as it should be. Right, right. But I think a lot of people think like, oh, yeah, one, two years, like you should get promoted. It's like maybe Well, I see a lot of that right now and I saw a lot of that during COVID I don't know about you, but it was like basically these two-year engineers are now senior engineers What are your thoughts on that kind of whole thing? And and and like I don't mean to hate on people there I have worked with some Savants as I like to say who came out of college and checked out as a staff I mean, it just it's very few.

It's only one guy in particular rings a bell and in my mind He's been on the show a few years back But like I just feel like that was a bad trend that happens. Yeah, there's definitely title inflation too Yeah, especially before the last couple years when you know tech industry got Parachaped a bit. Oh, yeah, we saw title inflation like crazy just so we could keep people I think I've mixed feelings on this. At the end of the day, what matters is your impact and how much value you're bringing to the company and your team. That's all that matters. And also how much risk you're introducing.

So it's this balance, right? I've worked with people that have gone from junior to senior in a year or less because it's pretty clear, like, oh, they've got the jazz. They get it. And the stuff that they're producing is so far ahead of what I expected. And it's like, well, let's, you know, the promotion is to match what their impact is. Right. I've also worked with staff devs that like absolutely were not ready for that role. I have a paper bag. Yeah. It's not that they didn't have chops. It's that they maybe worked on the wrong things or just like didn't anticipate things like I would expect a staff dev to do.

And so it really does come down to impact The mixed part of this is, especially for like an operations role, the first half of my career, I was in the site reliability engineer and that kind of thing. Some of that just takes time to learn. 100, but you just got to be in it. Yeah, and management is 100% in this category. We're like, you need time and reps, you need practice. Yes. And you cannot get that fast. So the idea of saying, you know five years experience for a leader I think is fair. Should it be four years or six years? I think that's a judgment call but I don't think that matters as much.

But it's kind of like do I want a leader that's only got six months experience? Probably not. Yeah absolutely. Got a few comments that have come in Joyce it's good to see you. You know Kristina I canceled contract number one one month because they want a social media manager for hiring me to be a brain strategist. My expectations, job descriptions weren't clear or were clear, but they didn't follow it and changed it. Yeah, it happens all the time. It happens all the time. The markets, correct thing. I do agree. I mean, I think there's a lot of correction going on. And she goes, I've got the jazz merch, please.

I love it. Shabab comes in here. What are the qualities of developers who got the jazz? I think, I think you've coined a new phrase to him on this show. What are the qualities of developers who got the jazz? Is it all learned along the way? Yeah, I think it all can be learned. I want to say that really cool. Like if you could like be like, if you got this, this and this. Yeah, I think if you focus on delivering value to customers, that's number one. Okay. And that's ambiguous on purpose because it depends on the company and product. Sure. But it requires that you understand who the customer is, first of all.

Because at the end of the day, everything is a people problem. Like you're doing this for people, you know, it's understanding that. Anticipating needs, so not having to ask like exactly what to do. I want you to be a chef, not work off of recipes, right? Ooh, love that. Love that. I can't cook, but love that analogy. And let's say number three is unblock yourself and that could be asking for help. It doesn't mean going everything alone. In fact, it should not be going everything alone. But like you should learn over time how to unblock yourself, how to get what you need. Yeah, I love that.

I love that. Nick, Nick comes in here. Impact is the way to go for assessing folks. For staff as well, you need to be speaking to several teams. You're still coding with those coordination as well. I love that. And Nick goes, yes, Chef, the bear reference right there. So I love that. And I think with me, I think I want to, Ben and I talked about this yesterday in our live, Ben's CTR brought on. I feel like people just want to rush to get the senior staff. And like I get it, there's money and tied with that, there's responsibility, there's clout, I get it. But man, I think there's something special along the way of just learning and just being in it and just soaking it up.

And I feel like that's a little lost right now. I agree. I also feel for those folks because good luck getting a job as a junior dev right now. Right? It's tough out there. And I think the reason that we see that desire is because there's a lot of gatekeeping behind that title. And my worry, when I promote anybody to any level is you're gonna have new expectations at that level. Are you gonna be able to live up to those? Right. Because if you can't, you're actually setting yourself up to fail, even if you're making more money, right? That's not what you want. I think we like to think about that.

It's like, you know, like you want these, but like, if you can't handle it, like you're going to get fired. Yeah, it's like, it's like going from high school to the NBA. Like, unless you're LeBron, you have to make the sports analogy. Sorry, but I love basketball. I love it. Like, unless you're LeBron, like you're, that's probably not going to work for you. Right. Exactly. Maybe you should be able to Glee your college or something first. Like, yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with it. Um, I got a question on TikTok. any advice on what kind of educational background you were looking for in candidates.

I want to pivot. That's a one. Yeah. Yeah. What do you, what do you think? Yeah. What do you think, man? I mean, we didn't even talk about this. We could do an entire show just on this, but oh man, I, I'll start with this. Some of the best, give it to me. Some of the best people that I've ever worked with went to schools you have never heard of and got degrees, not remotely related to tech. In theory, in class, like a BS in knitting or like history, right? you know, or like German literature or something. That's gonna sound irrelevant. I actually think it's extremely relevant because what I care about the most in programmers is they're the way that they think about problems.

The way that they, can they look at things holistically, see patterns. At the end of the day, it's just pattern matching. Like being a really good programmer is playing computer in your head. Yeah. And that's all about pattern matching. So I personally, it is just my opinion. I don't think the school matters that much. I mean, like I went to George Mason University. How many of you have ever heard of that? Well, maybe until we got to the final floor. We have a great hockey program when I was in college. We played against them. Okay. There you go. Well, you've heard of us. And they have a good basketball.

They made that run. Other than that, that's it. Other than that. But we're not known for computer science, right? And for a while, I thought like, oh man, that's kind of a ding against me and my resume. like I don't have the Stanford or Caltech or the carnit and the world. It's money since I think George Mason is like an elite college, though. My point, though, is I don't know that the school matters as much as people say it does. At the end of the day, though, is a game we're all playing. And if you've got Stanford or NYU or some recognizable place on your resume, you're going to stand out.

Whether that's worth the money that they charge, I'll leave that to the, you know, everybody else to decide. But from like, from what I look for, I don't look at that too much. What when I'm reviewing this actually gets into the hiring manager thing. When I'm reviewing a resume, I'm looking for, I'm looking for patterns. Like, have they seen the kinds of problems that I'm working on before? Yeah. Maybe not exactly the right shape and size, but whatever. Um, and then, yeah, if they've got Stanford on their resume, that's a signal. You know, it's like a prestige thing, but is it a deal breaker if they don't have that?

Absolutely not. No, 100%. And going back to that question on TikTok that I had, you know, about educational background, I think at the end of the day, it comes down to real world practical experience. And Tim, I don't know if you can speak to this, you could have a person that was college, very good on paper, just from a degree perspective, but no real world experience. So you could take a boot game, grab a two years of real world work experience. Yeah, I mean, I can tell you firsthand, I went to school a long time ago, but like we did not learn software engineering in school.

We learned from you in science. Yeah. Totally different thing. Right. I was fortunate that like I had an internship and which morphed into a full time job. I worked at AOL back in the day. Nice. I got to work with the Winamp crew. I mean, that's a whole story from a long time ago. I love it. Because I had a full-time job and I went to school full-time, I got to extract from school what I knew I needed for my job. I think you're spot on. Like that real world experience is not right now. Yeah, because the problem is there's so much saturation in the market with degrees.

So how are you going to stand out? If there wasn't market saturation, degrees would still be it, but there's too much market saturation there. So I used to mentor folks and I always tell them, I was like, okay, your resume says, you know, you're great at JavaScript and react. And you did this or that project and you did bootcamp, whatever. But like there's a hundred thousand other JavaScript programmers. Right. It's commodity. So what stands out is you, like your story, the way you approach problems, the way you vibe with people. And so lean into that, like don't undersell that. Right. Tell your story. So I love that.

Yeah. Yet comes in here. What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on open source? I'm a big proponent of it and my career has only been accelerated since being in it. I'm also learning in public, streaming, et cetera. I would not be where I am without open source. I've been a Ruby programmer for 13 years. Almost every language I've ever programmed in has been open source. I've built my entire career in open source. What do you think about going into public? What are your thoughts on that? you look for that as a hiring manager as a plus? As a hiring manager, no, because I think it introduces a lot of bias.

Interesting. Like, I've got two kids. I don't have time to program in public. Is that kind of true? Is that like mean I'm not a good programmer? True. No. Or is somebody, especially for a junior dev, that's just trying to crack into the industry, and they might be working two jobs, minimum wage, trying to make their way. Like, I am not going to ding them for not having some, you know, flashing GitHub profile or something. Sure, sure. If you have programmed a public, it's just like the Stanford thing, like, cool. It's another signal I can use. It's not a deal breaker though. Yeah. Building in public as a team is a whole separate question, and I did that two jobs ago when I worked in public health.

That was amazing. Our whole product was open source. Oh, wow. That's a whole separate conversation. Wow, that's awesome. Simple.org, you can go check it out. I love that. Did the Whoop, the llamas asked. That's a win-app reference. You might be too young with my friend. Okay, yeah, don't get that. All right, Andrew comes in here. How important is tech stack familiarity? I can't say that word. If I don't have a ton of React experience with plenty of Angular, are you passing? Because the job is a React. Ooh, Andrew, come in with a good question this morning. I think it depends on how much room the company has for you to learn.

Like, and when you are trying to get a job, Like what the hiring manager is looking for again is like, have you seen the kind of problems that we're facing before? My guess is that if you've done Angular, you could learn React, like I have confidence, right? But have you seen the kind of problems we're using those technologies to solve? Interesting. Okay. You know, because they build different things in them. Yeah. I think if you have only ever done Android development, and I need you to become a backend programmer. Well, there's a mismatch, right? There's a steeper learning curve. I may have the room for you to learn that, but a lot of companies these days with financial pressures, they don't.

Like they need you to come in and hit the ground running, so to speak. So. I love that. It's harder, but. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends. I mean, Andrew, it depends. I'm not a developer, but I know that's a great answer. It depends. I've seen hiring managers go both ways, right? I see some hiring managers where they have a whole and they are bleeding and they need somebody to come in with a react and they just can't have the ability to train up with react. But then I've had, you know, you know, I'm working with the company right now that's hiring 10 engineers that were helping staff them up and they're not really picky about tech stack because it's a full-time role, they have time, they can come in and train, they're just, you know, they're more open to it, they're just looking for really good problem solvers.

So I've seen it both ways. Yeah. I mean, I'll keep it simple, familiarity with the tech stack is a positive. Sure. Yeah, sure. I'm not 100% Thomas hate to say it. That's a rag on students with prestigious schools, but a sense of entitlement can push potential employers way. I have heard this. I have heard this. I've never personally run into somebody that's like, oh, I went to Stanford. I deserve this job. I don't know why I keep calling out Stanford just comes in my head. So the schools, I've never seen that. Does it exist? I'm sure it does. Sure. But you're not wrong. Yeah, if you feel like you're entitled to the job.

Yeah, that's a red flag. 100% Tim, Tom Flies, we're having fun with friends. I do want to get to parenting real quick. You know, I think I've talked with a bunch of dads and kind of balancing, you know, work from home life. Let's start there. How do you balance it? You know, have you found any tips or tricks? Typically it all comes down to communication, over communicating, but kind of curious if. Yeah. And then kids, right? I've got a 13 year old and a seven year old. And so, you know, a little further into this journey than some folks doesn't even know anymore. It just means I've got more gray hair.

My best parenting advice is just survive in advance. Is you care enough to ask questions about the right ways of doing things than you're already doing a good job? I love that. I love that. So like be easy on yourself. That's just take it easy on yourself because it's hard. As far as the balance, I think putting yourself first, if you have the priority of needs or whatever, put yourself first, put your, if you have a partner, put your relationship with your partner second because in most kind of traditional family situations, like your love with your partner is literally where your kids came from. So that's the foundation.

So put that first and now kids come third. And it doesn't mean I'm deprioritizing my kids. It's just like I gotta take care of the foundation first. I love that. And then work comes after all of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. How do you balance working from home? I've been working from home for 13 years. Holy smokes, you did it before, it was cool. Yeah. You know, I ran my own business from home for a long time. I think. For me, I like to have like a psychological distance between my work set up and my home. So I have an office in the front of our house.

Like it's supposed to be a bedroom. I'm really fortunate to have that. If you need to go with like a coworking space or something like that, like for me, that distance really matters for four years during the pandemic, I worked out of our bedroom. And I basically never left the room. It was brutal. That happened to me. I worked out of our guest bedroom at my old house. And so we moved right after the pandemic. And I'm in the front of the house, but we're moving me downstairs away from everybody because I do a test to that, I think, having space. Like I walk out my door right now and I'm in it.

I mean, I'm in it and I hear it all the time, right? So having kind of a space, that's something I've talked to my wife about actually recently and we're moving me downstairs. But also too, like I worked out of my guest bedroom for two years straight. Yep. When with the newborn, some people can't avoid that. And so, you know, it's a luxury. I totally, it's a privilege to have an office. I think as far as balance to like, don't kick yourself or just take in breaks, like going to get a snack, walking around your living room for five minutes, you know, whatever, whatever you need.

To me, that's the joy of working at home. And don't view that as a distraction. It's like, well, maybe that's your brain telling you, like you just need to chill for a little bit in order to solve this problem. But also like take care of yourself physically. I can't stress that enough. Dude, that's when I'm focused on 2024. I'm on this cleanse right now. I have drank so many juices and I'm eating so freaking lean, but I feel great. And my mental therapy is better. Just take care of your body. That's the easiest thing to let slip when you work at home. 100%. Believe me, I'm literally in my sweatpants right now.

So it's all good. I'm going to hold that right now, Tim. But you got to take care of yourself physically and mentally. That's where it all, again, it's taking care of that foundation, right? I love that. I love that. All right, last four questions, four rapid-vire questions. One, if money was the same, what would you do outside of tech for a job? If the money was the same, I'd run a record store. Really? Nice. I love that. I love that too. What brings you joy outside of work? Cooking for my friends and my family. I love to cook. Next time I'm on the Charlotte, you're cooking for me.

Yeah, hell yeah. Third thing, what tools, technologies, trends, frameworks, are you reading on right now that you're just kind of keeping an eye on that you're interested in? Yeah, like we talked about React. I actually don't know React, so I need to learn that. I am a big fan of GraphQL and those two go hand in hand. Okay. As far as frameworks, there's also, I might get this wrong, don't quote me on it. I think it's called the rapid framework, and it's how to decide who the stakeholders are for a given project and what role they play. Like do they have a veto or are they just an advisor?

Kind of. Interesting. Yeah, I think it's called the rapid framework. So I'm trying to learn more about that. I love that. Last question as we wrap up here today again, y'all thank you again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. The show's called Guidance Council 2.0 for a reason. We had Guidance Councilors of Middle School High School in college, but now as adults, we don't really have them. So what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Tim? Trust your own decisions. Just, you know, you can only be you and the younger me wanted to fit in. And the older I get, I realize that like fitting in is the opposite of confidence.

Yeah. Because if you're trying to fit in, you're inherently like believing that you need to be something else to matter and like, no, you matter. Trust yourself. I love that. I love that Nick. I'm glad you liked it. Awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. I went blurry. I have no idea what happened. Um, but, uh, Tim, stay on top. I said, bye to you off air, but y'all have a great one. Thank you again, uh, for Tim coming on, Tim, where, where can people connect with you? Like, like where, where are you? You see my name? I'm at Tim Cheetall everywhere.

I want you to find me. Um, and, uh, Yeah, like threads. Well, I don't use Twitter anymore, but email. You can find me, just search Google and you'll find me. I love it. Awesome, awesome. Well, Tim, thank you so much. Again, thanks y'all for tuning in tomorrow. Unicorn Finders, so check us out tomorrow. And then Friday, it'll just be me, myself, and I. And then our unghosted series that I have with my dear friend, Alicia Novin, who's a senior product owner at Microsoft, we're reviewing resumes and LinkedIn doing mock interviews live on Friday from noon until one central. So you all check that out. So Tim, thank you my friend.

And we'll see you all tomorrow. Peace. Thank you. 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 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 at Tdaston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.