counselor 2.0 w/jason lengstorf, vp of developer experience at netlify

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I have a very special guest Jason on with me. Jason, how do you pronounce your last name? Langstorf. Langstorf. Awesome. And what, what origin is that? Because I'm curious. No idea. No idea. My family tree is like an orphan branch. At some point somebody spelled their name wrong. And so I'm the only only Langstorf with this spelling. That's awesome. Between Langstorf and Deson, people are just going to have a heyday trying to trying to share this with others. And what's going on, man? It's good to see you. Obviously, we got some people trickling up on this thing. But again, very excited. So today we're going to talk about so Jason, I've been following Jason for a bit now.

And he tweeted something the other day and I was like, man, like I really would love to pick his brain and kind of see what he's doing in his crew. And so we're going to dive into that. Erica, what's up? Good morning. Good morning. So Jason is a busy man. And I want to get him back to doing what he does best. And that's being the VP of developer experience. So Jason, if you want to introduce yourself, tell the people who you are, what you do, where you reside, by the way, Portland is the shit. I love Portland. So I went there on a road trip two years ago.

But, anyways, Jason, take it away, buddy. Yeah. So I'm Jason. I work in Netlify. And I also host a show called Learn with Jason, where I pair a program with people in the community to learn things and share what we're learning. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is my personally, it's my favorite Portland. I think it might be yours as well. If you're from Portland, Maine, like, hey, that's also cool. Listen, Portland, Tennessee's pretty lit. You haven't been there yet. There's a Portland, Tennessee too. You don't really want to go. But yeah, yeah, that's that's that's really the short version, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So Jason, so I know, so we got people chimed in, what's going on?

Emmett doing the dishes. I love it. Joe, what's going on? William, what's up, dude? It was good to see this morning, by the way. Was it what's what the egg had crew this morning? David, Steven, what's going on? So all right, Jason. So, between something about retaining top talent or taking care of your people, I was like, man, like, I really want to pick Jason's brain. So the biggest thing that I'm seeing today's market is is keeping top town, especially in the engineering side of things, right? And obviously with a company like yourself, you know, I'm sure you all have your own host of problems, but I'm curious for hiring managers and leadership watching this now or in the future.

What's just some general advice that you will give that you give people right now with kind of retaining top talent? I don't know, some nuggets of Jason that you could start out on. I would say the biggest one is recognizing that, you know, especially right now, people are toast. We have been inside for 14 months. We are all like the vast majority of people I know in tech have been using work as a way of maintaining some semblance of normalcy through a pandemic. We are all nobody's been on vacation. Nobody's really seen their friends and family. We haven't been able to have new experiences. And as a result, we're all like a little bit pent up here, right?

And so I think we're seeing that with so many people are changing jobs right now. And so if what I'm pushing for on our side at Netlify is give people space, let people have some time off. Now that thing, you know, people are getting vaccinated, people are able to safely go and travel, give them space to do that, right? And also keeping in mind that the last thing that somebody wants when they are feeling completely overwhelmed is to have to add an extra chore to coordinate time off. So if you can swing it as an org, if nobody's taken vacation days in the last 14 months, just scheduled company wide vacation days.

So an example of that at Netlify, what we just did is we added Juneteenth as a company holiday. So Friday was a day off. But we also know everybody's been burned out. So we also added yesterday as an extra company wide day off. So everybody at Netlify got a four day weekend last week. And we did that at the leadership level specifically because we know how hard it is when you're working in a role where if I'm out, who covers for me, who has to take over my extra work, who's going to deal with stuff. But if the whole company is out, I don't have to figure that out.

We're just we'll get back to it on Tuesday, right? And so, so as leadership, like think about that, look at your PTO usage, look at, look at whether or not anybody's actually taking their time off. And if you can swing it, give the whole company days off to give them space to recharge. We're doing this throughout the summer, one Friday per month from now until August, the whole company is just building in a three day weekend. So we have extra time, so we'll be separated and have some space for ourselves. And that sort of thing, there are companies that are going even further. There are some companies that just all of summer they do four day work weeks.

And there are some companies that are experimenting with straight up like only four day work weeks. And this is sort of what I'm seeing with pertaining talent is that we can't pay Netflix prices. We can't give people the huge like half million dollar salaries. That's not in the budget for the vast majority of companies. So we can't compete on salary, which means we need to compete on lifestyle. How's good is your life when you work for this company? And we have to deliver on that promise that if you come here and you're going to get work life balance, you're going to get it. So we offer four weeks of PTO.

That's in addition to, I think, a 14 company holidays a year. So you're basically getting six weeks of time off every year. And because people have trouble scheduling that sometimes, we do the coordinated days off. We have other allowances and things that we're doing to make sure that people have like a good work from home budget. We're staying fully remote. We were already fully remote. But we went so far as like we didn't even have a headquarters anymore. We used to have one in San Francisco. We were not going to do that again. So we're fully remote now. And so all of those things are really built around this idea of if we can't go out and pay fang salaries, we have to beat them on lifestyle.

So this is a 30 hour, it's a 40 hour work week. We're going to show up in your DMs and yell at you if you're working on the weekend. We're not going to high five you and say, yeah, way to go a extra mile. It's like, no, take care of yourself. You're no good to anybody if you burn out in six months. Right. And we want to see people stay in tech. We don't want to see people kill themselves to work here. And then we see that they're leaving tech a year down the road because they're so burned out. That's not the way that we want to go.

So that's really core for us. Where does this come from? Right. Because like, I don't know, the companies just don't do it. Like companies aren't doing this. Right. Like at the end of the day, companies still struggling. So is this like, is this y'all's leadership team? Is this like, I mean, who's driving this? Is it a group thing? Because I just don't know why. I mean, there are so many companies Jason on site all the time. We're back. And it's like, and then they're not even paying market. Let alone like, I mean, I think so part of it is, you know, it's partially driven by leadership.

Right. So, so this is something that I advocated for before before me. Like Sarah Drazner and and Dalia Haven's and other people in leadership. And that if I really pushed for, like, more time off, take care of people. And so this is, this is something that did come from leadership. But it also came from the team. We had multiple people on the team saying, this is how I feel, right? And creating that that sense of trust, that foundation of like, hey, you can be transparent here. When people don't feel like they can say, I'm feeling super burnt out. And I don't know what to do about it.

If you don't feel like you can say that, you just keep grinding until you fully burn out and then you quit. Right. And so we work really hard on making it comfortable and not punishing people if they speak up. And yeah, we get it wrong. Like we're not perfect. But we are working hard on trying to make sure that if somebody is at the company, they feel confident to say, I disagree and not and they can say that right to the CEO space, you know, Matt Billman or CEO, he's very good at taking feedback. And that's that's kind of core to our culture. So, but in terms of like why it doesn't happen, like, first of all, it doesn't happen when you're buried.

Like if you're if you are working and you feel like you, you have a million things that you need to do, everything is on fire. Your leadership team is always in meetings about like, oh, we're missing this metric or we need to get this number up. Then when you start saying something like, hey, we need to think about like the mental health of our team, how do you even define that? Right? It's another thing that you have to think about. And a lot of times, what I think happens is that it's it's sort of like if you're if you're in a building and you've got a kitchen fire, right?

The kitchen fire is the big thing. Hey, we're missing our revenue numbers. But if you focus all of your energy on the kitchen fire and you don't notice that all around the building, our little dumpster fires, if once you put the kitchen fire out, the rest of the building is on fire. And so a lot of it is is recognizing that, you know, we have to be mindful of the second and third order effects. Like if we lose a lot of our senior engineering talent, they take a lot of contextual knowledge with them that could extra stress on everybody else in the organization who then are kind of forced to fill these roles while we try to desperately back higher when we were already understaffed and trying to higher up.

This is the most competitive hiring market I've ever seen for senior talent. And if we don't have enough senior talent, we can't mentor early and mid level talent, which means we can't hire them without completely failing them. So what's the cost to us of not dealing with our burnt out seniors? It's astronomically high. But if we're looking at, well, also our shipping velocity down is down. And also, you know, we're not hitting these projections that we had for ourselves, it can be really hard to say, okay, well, our solution to that should be to give everybody time off. Like it's it's a really, unless you're thinking hard about the way people function, it's easy to say, well, we'll give everybody time off once we fix this.

But by the time you fix it, it'll be too late, you'll burnt everybody out. And thinking about like the counterintuitive part of this is that a lot of times we think we can work our way out of problems. But the unfortunate fact is humans don't work that way. Humans can't work their way out of a problem. Humans need to work at a balance. And the optimal amount of work is, you know, 30 to 50 hours. If you work more than that, you actually start to make more errors, which means you get less done over time because now you're fixing errors that wouldn't have occurred in the first place.

They did a study with sleep deprivation, where they figured out that if you get less than six hours of sleep a night, you are actually just as mentally impaired as if you were drunk. No way. Yeah. So basically, you know, if you, if you, I've had a drug work and month ago, then, yeah, well, that's what I mean, right? So if you, you got to still, you got to get enough sleep back, like that, let's your brain work. You need that detachment of like your subconscious is one of your most powerful creative and productivity tools. Yeah. If you never detach from your work, if you never have a vacation or go for a walk or sit and stare at a wall sometimes, that subconscious part of your brain can't work to make new connections and to, to understand the way things fit together.

And that really hurts your productivity. You get stuck in this, the, the, the analogy that I use is like if you're in a maze, if you're, you're in a hedge maze, all you can see is directly in front of you and behind you and the next option, just one term, right? But if you were to get in a crane and go above the maze, you can map all the way through, letting your subconscious work, take getting some distance from your work is how you get above the maze. That's so good. But if you don't think about that as a leadership team, if you don't create that space, people who are in the individual contributor role, they don't always feel confident that they can take that time, right?

That's like as a, as a senior dev, you don't always feel like, well, I'm going to take this day off so that I can think or like actually not even take this day off. I need some time to think about this work. So I'm going to schedule a day of no meeting so that I can just stare at a wall and like let these problems percolate a little bit. I did that one time. And that could tell you the stress that we're under right now trying to staff up companies across the country. But I did that one time. I took it, I took an afternoon.

It was beautiful outside. It was no humidity, which is not normal for Nashville. And I just literally took out my notebook. I didn't have, I had my computer, but I was like, just journaling. And I came up with so many good ideas. It was like, holy crap. Like, why don't I do this more? And so that analogy just, that analogy just resonated with me for sure. Yeah. It's been critical to the way that I've developed in my career is, you know, you got to take those, those, that's why one of the goals that we just set for the company is like, yeah, we've got three weeks of, of PTO.

We would encourage you to take two consecutive weeks of PTO and give them you know, so they can't get that distance. No one's saying that. No one's saying that. Props to y'all. So let me ask you this. So I'm fascinated. So let's talk about hiring real quick, evaluating talent. And then I'll get you back on your way doing your, doing your thing in Portland, by the way, next time I'm Portland, I'm hitting you up. I do just some proud Marys is like my favorite brunch spot. I went there. Me and my wife went, there's the only place on our road trip. We went twice just incredible.

And then salt and straw is absolutely absolutely. Oh, absolutely. Okay, I'm in Alberta. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the, yeah. I was in the arts district, because that Alberta, I think, yeah, it was all that. So, um, let me ask you this. I mean, I want to get the last question, because I think this is going to start to be my question, right? So I had Nate Taylor on Director of Engineering at Pluralsight. And I was like, why do you think leadership within tech organizations is so shitty? Now, I want to, I want to ask you this. I think this is going to be my question from here on out, because I'm curious, right?

And this kind of goes off what we were talking about, why people don't do it, but just specifically leadership, what you see, why do you think it's so shitty? Sometimes. No, okay. So here's what I'll say. I, uh, I don't think it's shitty on purpose. I think that it's shitty because I think what happens is that the career progression is I am good as an engineer. So I level up as an engineer. So I now I'm a senior, then you level up as from senior to staff. And then when you get to staff, they start saying, well, the way that you level up from here is you start having an organizational impact.

You've got to, you know, like make the people around you more effective. And that naturally leads you toward management. So then it's, it's sort of like saying, um, there's an old Mitch headberg joke that I love where he said, because he was successful standup comedian, people have started asking him to do things like write a movie and, and, uh, and, you know, produce things. And he was like, that's such a weird thing. That's like saying, you know, hey, you're a great chef. Can you paint? It's like, it's like sure it's like sort of creatively aligned, but they're not the same skill. It's a completely different job.

And so a lot of engineering leadership are engineers who never actually got trained to be leaders. So you, you go into management as a really good individual contributor. And unless you make the effort to go and read the books on leadership, to read the books on team building and establishing trust and what makes people function, you'll end up thinking about engineers, the way that you think about engineering problems. And the, the big catch to that is that engineering problems tend to be predictable. Like the problem space evolves over time. So there's always work to do. But generally speaking, if you solve a problem, you can apply that solution over and over again.

And it tends to mostly work. People are not like that. You can apply the same solution to exactly the same person two days in a row. And you'll get a different result because people aren't predictable the way that machines are predictable. And so that means that you have to approach management with more of an, an, you have to embrace ambiguity. You have to embrace the, the, you know, the capriciousness of the way that people are. We feel differently on different days. And that's not because we're irrational or because we're unwilling to work with each other. But it's because we're not robots. We have things going on.

I'm coming to work one day. And it was my birthday. I'm in a great mood. I'm coming to work the next day. And I just got into a big fight with a friend of mine. And now I'm in a shitty mood. And I'm going to take the exact same news very differently on those two different days. So as leaders, it's very important for us to go out and get that training. And I think the problem is that a lot of us don't know that that's out there. And a lot of us never get the feedback because our as an engineering manager, my skip level manager is a director of engineering who used to be an engineer or who used to be a manager of engineers who used to be an engineer.

They never got the training either. So the way that they manage is by treating me like a machine. And, you know, some, and you'll see that like VP's of engineering are the same way where they've, they've only ever really thought like engineers. They don't think about people and systems of people. And the, the way that all those things move and interact and how much of that is built on trust and not process. I think that a lot of it is that people they start to think that they can systematize their people's like their whole people team. They can say, oh, we'll just make sure everybody goes through this process and this process and this process and then we'll never have any issues because everybody will check all the boxes.

That's why like big enterprise companies are a nightmare of bureaucracy is because instead of like building trust and building cohesive teams, they build processes to negate the need for trust. But it doesn't work because if you don't trust somebody then the process doesn't work. And, you know, it's all, it's all a big mess. So yeah, I think at the core of what I'm saying, I would say that the, the reason that engineering management tends to struggle in a lot of cases is that they are not approaching people as trust at the core. They're, they're treating them like systems that they can program instead of people that need to be led and explained to and who need context.

I love that. I love that. That's such a good answer. All right. So let's, let's talk about hiring real quick, evaluating talent and it will get you on your way. So hiring stuff right now, hiring any levels tough, hiring senior levels tough. How are you guys combating, how are you guys combating speed, evaluating talent like you guys have things in place where you guys are all on the same page? How are you guys doing the interview process right now? What are you doing well? Maybe what aren't you doing well? So I think the thing that we're doing really well is we're establishing data. We have a career ladder and that career ladder is very clear about to be senior.

You need to be, you know, clearing these bars. We are pretty good at our interview loop. We, um, we've kind of established some patterns. What I think we could do better at is more systems to make this faster because I think the way that we treat it is the way that you should, where we don't want a waste of candidates time and we don't want to waste too much of our internal time because, you know, we got to interview a lot of people to find that we're candidate and we can't make somebody's entire job interviewing. So we are, uh, we're trying to get to the point where we figure out what the proper gates are and then we batch everything.

So if, if we know that the, the gates that we need to clear are a recruiter screen, a hiring manager screen, a technical screen and then a culture screen where we, we have them interview with the rest of the team. Sure. What we might do is batch the recruiting and hiring manager, uh, in one day. And then we might batch the technical screen and the culture on the next day. But we also know that we can pull the rip cord in between them. So if we get through the technical and it doesn't work, we can just say thanks, but no thanks and we cancel the, the rest of the day.

We're not currently good at that. So it ends up being spread out across multiple weeks instead of being spread over a couple of days. Right. And that has hurt us. We've had people accept other offers because they, the other team move faster. We didn't get to an offer. Um, the other thing that I think is, uh, is really important for us is getting clear on how to interview for like being a functional member of a team. Because a lot of times we interview for whether or not you can code and being able to code is important. But the more important thing is, are you a jerk?

Like, are you, do you funk, why are you leaving your last job? Are you leaving because you needed a growth opportunity? Are you leaving because you alienated all your co-workers because you were a brilliant like we, you know, how do we, how do we suss that out in our interview process? And so what, what I would like to see is a little more interview training, like what kind of question should you ask? So instead of asking people to estimate what they want or what they will do, start asking story based questions. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker. Tell me about a time you had an idea that was better than your managers and they didn't believe you.

What did you do? And if their answer is, you know, I got the data and I wrote a proposal and I worked around it and I overcame their objections. That's great. We want that person. If your answer was I hated them and I told them they suck and then I quit. Okay, well, probably not going to work out here either because. Appreciate it. Right. So it's, it's that sort of stuff that, you know, if we get good at asking those questions, then we can, we can short circuit our interview cycles faster, you know, and those are, that's a, but it's hard. It is a challenging thing.

Why do you think? So in my opinion, I think hiring evaluating town is one of the most key, one of the more key essential things for organizations, especially right now, especially in tech, right now. My dad's a restaurant owner. He's having a hard time evaluating good town, right? I mean, it's everywhere right now. Why do you think companies don't spend a lot of time doing that when essentially, if you think about it, it is like the core and building a successful organization. I think it's hard. I think a lot of people assume that they are not good with people and that makes them bad at assessing people.

I think that some people believe that all that matters is that you can do the job. I think that some people, you know, they assume that the team will shape the people they hire. And so if they bring people into a culture, the culture will change them and not the other way around. But I ultimately think that at the heart of it, it's, you know, if you look at, if you look at somebody who has always thought of themselves to be a computer programmer and the core of their identity is like, I'm introverted. I'm not great with people, you know, whatever, then they're looking for somebody that they want to hang out with and not somebody that they want to work with.

And I think that this is the challenge, right? It's like you have this tendency to default to people that you like. And to tell somebody, you know, hey, I know you don't think you're good with people, but actually being good with people is a skill you can learn, then that forces somebody to confront their identity if they feel like they've suffered because they're not comfortable talking to people. If they, if they have to admit that that's a skill they could have learned and that like they could have saved problems or that like their relationships that are suffering right now because they're not going to communicating could be solved by learning to communicate.

People tend to buck on that. They're like, well, that's clearly not how it works. You know, I just get a, I get a feeling and I trust my gut, right? Like, you know, those sorts of things are, it's hard. And the other part of it too is instincts. Like, you know, that if you look into my eyes, you can see the sadness and pain that I have caused through being bad at interviewing and a lot of that has built a set of instincts where when I'm talking to somebody. Looking at my kids, if you're talking to somebody in an interview, you'll hear them say like they'll say a phrase in a certain way and that little radar in your head goes off and he goes, Oh, okay.

All right. I need to dig into that because that's yellow flag. And then you uncover by asking the follow up question like, holy crap, this personal throw their team all the way under the bus. But if you don't have that instinct, if you don't have that little thing that goes, oh, that's not right. You need to dig into that. But you only learn that by getting it wrong. And that's the other thing about retaining talent. You don't want to lose that institutional knowledge. What went wrong before? If that goes out the door, nobody's right in that down. Nobody's got that. And you can't write down gut feel, right?

Like you need people with experience to train people. And in that panel interview, afterward, they go, Hey, you like raised the yellow flag and I didn't understand why can you talk about that. That's where that, you know, we need that knowledge. But if we keep losing all of our top talent, if we keep losing the people who we need to retain the most, how we never learn that, you know, and that's the thing that I think that's the thing that is the most painful about like, the average career length that companies dropping down to 18 to 24 months is, it's so hard to get that like really good institutionalized culture of like we act like this.

We have these skills and like really training people up, you know, I love it. I love it. All right, Jason, I look at the time. It's already 130. So I appreciate you coming on, man. One 30 central that is. I appreciate you coming on, man. This was wonderful. Um, I obviously the comments have come, I'm so behind on all the comments. But again, I mean, there's so many good posts and thoughts. So again, Jason, thanks for coming on. Let's definitely stay in touch. Um, and also I definitely want that hat. So send me a link on how I can buy that hat because I love it.

Um, but I appreciate it. Um, I think you've shared some wonderful knowledge and I'm looking forward to continuing following you through your journey. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was, uh, this was a blast. All right, man. Have a a good one.