Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature‪?‬ Nikhil Suresh

This episode's guest is Jesse Alford, a former staff engineer at Pivotal Software, and the host of Radio Free XP. I've been corresponding with Jesse daily for a month or two now, and am consistently blown away by his insight into any topic I dredge up. We discuss a whole bunch of things, ranging from seriousness in job, whether entering management to drive organizational change is wise, to what you should learn from crashing prod.



I have also used a compressor for the audio this time, so we move ever closer to respectability. Enjoy!

This episode is one that I've been super excited for - it's with Kijana Woodard, who runs kaizen.io! Kijana reached out to me a few months ago to talk about some writing, and we've been talking ever since. We're spiritually aligned on what fulfilling work looks like, and had a fantastic time talking.

Today's topics range from how it's terrible that I.T has three-year seniors to how most actual decision-making authority looks like it's distributed, but in reality most managers don't have the ability to buy their team a pizza.

Kijana also tells me one of the funniest stories I've ever heard in the tech space in the last three minutes.

As always, feedback at nik.suresh@hermit-tech.com is welcome, especially on audio quality. I think I did a lot better this time, but I have listened so many times that I feel like I've lost the ability to even tell what's good anymore.

This is a re-upload of the first episode with more post-processing done.

In this first episode, we speak to Stephen Deutsch, the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action's Principal Data Scientist. At the time of recording, an article I had written on the grotesque overuse of the word 'leadership' had just hit the #1 spot on Hackernews, where Stephen was named as one of the the best actual leaders I've ever worked with. Spoiler: He hired smart people and let them lead themselves. I was so impressed that we added him as the final member to my consultancy even though we have an equal profit sharing model. We've put our money where our mouths are on this guy.

In this episode we talk about helping your people live their best careers, treating people like people, corporate theater, the difference between management and leadership, how Stephen is a fraud that still doesn't know half of the nonsense phrases that the organization uses, and Saint Hicks.

Audio quality will hopefully become better with each passing episode as I learn what the hell I'm doing, but feedback is welcome at nik.suresh@hermit-tech.com. Anything good in the audio is attributable to Dennis Crenshaw, and everything bad is my fault.