P2P Podcast Series: Lennart Querter from Dj to Developer

Lennart Querter (LinkedIn, Medium) was working as a DJ before deciding to become a software development engineer. Six weeks at an immersive boot camp started his path to becoming a Staff Engineer in just six years.

Our journeys are 20 years apart, but we find many lessons are timeless.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or your favorite platform.

Zeke Arany-Lucas is a developer, leader, and consultant from Seattle, living and working in Berlin since 2014. He has been in the tech industry for more than 25 years, starting with web browser development in the 90s, including long stints at both Microsoft and Amazon in multiple leadership roles. You can also follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Artwork by Emre Aydogan & Laura Diezler — ©️2022 Zeke Arany-Lucas

Read the full transcript

Zeke: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Introspective Developer. I am Zeke Arany-Lucas, and we have a great show for you today. I have Lennart here with me. Lennart is a software developer that I met in the last year. We started at the same time at Forto. I just want to bring him on and talk about his journey a little bit about how he, got started and you know, where he is now.

And I'll compare and contrast with my own journey. So let's just start by by Lennart introducing himself. Lennart, can you tell me a little bit about what you're doing right now and, what your interests are and stuff like that.

Getting unlost in Amsterdam

Lennart: Hey, Zeke, sure. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Very excited to do this with you. At the moment I'm working as staff engineer at Forto. So I think when we started I think six, no it was ten months ago, I think. I started as engineering manager and I thought that that was the next step in my career. After being a tech lead for a couple of years, I'll get back to that in a [00:01:00] moment.

But you, for some reason saw potential in me to go into the staff engineering path. And after some discussions, I was very happy to move from engineering manager to staff engineer. So I've been staff engineer now, I think for three months and yeah, it's, it's still a journey, right. I'm still trying to see what a staff engineer does and figure out how to lead people, but without actually managing them.

Maybe we can get into that later. A bit about myself, so when I was young, I lived in a couple of different countries to settle down when I was 12 in Belgium, I studied math, but. Went on to do film school. For my college, I was a film editor. Worked a bit in the film industry, worked on two, three feature films.

At that moment in time, I moved to Amsterdam and in Amsterdam, I didn't know what I was going to do. And I always liked software because I used a bit of python during my film time. And I found a cool bootcamp, a bootcamp that trains you to become a front end application [00:02:00] developer.

Zeke: I'm curious, did you, did you go to university? You said you studied math. Did you go to university?

Lennart: No, I studied math in my, in my middle school. So in Belgium, you have, you can choose different paths. And one of them was like six hours of math week and stuff like that and more physics and, and sciences. But I didn't never studied university. I did one year of economics, but that completely fell through.

I never went to class and uh, I spent most of my time deejaying because I used to DJ for some time.

Zeke: How long were you deejaying for?

Lennart: I started deejaying when I was 16, before that I did like, from my six years old, I was drumming and playing guitar with my father and some friends but I transitioned into doing deejaying for like house and techno music since I was 16.

And then I stopped when I moved to Amsterdam, that was when I was like 23, 24.

Zeke: So from 16 to 23, you were a DJ.

Lennart: Yeah, next to my college. And next to my studies, of course,

Zeke: Yeah. And then [00:03:00] when you were moved to Amsterdam, why did you move to Amsterdam?

Lennart: For a girlfriend actually I thought, I thought it was the love of my life. And I said, Hey, I'm going to follow her to Amsterdam. It didn't end up that well. I think I only stayed like four months with her in Amsterdam and that, yeah, no I, I stayed, I think she went back to Belgium. But this was, this was a fantastic experience because if I hadn't moved to Amsterdam, I would never have gotten into software.

So I am super happy that that actually happened.

Zeke: So let's, let's talk a little bit about that transition. Like, what was it that you like, how did you decide to kind of get into software.

Lennart: I didn't really decide. I didn't have the focus of saying, Hey, I want to get into software.

For me it was, I moved to Amsterdam, I packed my bag, and like one week without a plan, I moved over there, found a room that I could rent very cheap. I think it was like 300 euros a month. It didn't even have a toilet. I had to go like two floors down. It was really, really shitty.

But I needed a [00:04:00] job, right. I couldn't live, I had money for like, I think two, three months without a job, because from my DJ career I still saved something up. But yeah, I needed to find a job. So I started looking around like, what are my skills?

I didn't want to work in film anymore because they were long hours and the pay was not that fantastic, but it was always a backup plan. If I didn't find anything else, I could always go into that. I applied at various places. Like. I wanted to work at the apple genius bar. I wanted to work just at the Albert Heijn. It's just like a supermarket.

But I stumbled upon a bootcamp and this bootcamp from YoungCapital, they promised you to become a full stack or a front - a junior front end engineer within six weeks.

Zeke: Junior end engineer in six weeks. And you just stumbled on it like you had, I mean, no. Did you know anybody who's a developer?

Lennart: No, no, not at all. I actually never worked with other developers. Yeah, okay, in - [00:05:00] in the film sometimes film and video games are kind of, kind of related. And video games, you have a lot of programming, of course. So in the company I was working at was a post-production studio. They were working on development pipelines for video editing.

So they were doing a bit of python and I also got interested in that, but wrote very minimal scripts or talked a bit about it, but I didn't know any professional software developers at all at the time.

Zeke: Did you do like any programming in school or something?

Lennart: Yeah, I think when I was in middle school, I did I think like a extra curricular class in, in JavaScript. And that was one hour a week, but that was just because my other friends were doing it and we just played around the whole time. I don't think I learned a single language or anything during that time, but it did stick. It did stick in the end because I still was interested in software.

Zeke: Yeah, that was me too. In high school, there's a couple of times where you take some [00:06:00] classes and there wasn't anybody that I met at that time who was really into computers or programming, but I always thought they were cool mostly to play video games. I'll just admit that that was primary case.

And I pirated a lot of video games, fact, my favorite video games. I was always trying to see if there's somebody else could had a copy that I could take.

Lennart: Were you ever interested in like hardware?

Zeke: Good question. I mean, not really. We had like Apple 2+s and Apple 2es. You know, these really kind of ugly looking computers with green screens and, you know, really solid keyboards. You could kind of, you know, beat the crap out of you know, they're good for school. They're those what I that's, that's what I learned on and, you know, yeah, just played some, some crappy games on floppy disks and stuff.

I always thought, I always wondered, like, how do people make these things, right? But there wasn't, there weren't really any resources that I could [00:07:00] find, like, like it's funny that you'd say, oh, I just stumbled on a bootcamp for, you know, how to become a programmer. And I remember like there was like, there was almost nothing that about how to become a developer or how to program.

Lennart: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. I was always interested in like hardware, but more like gamer hardware. So like I used to build my own gaming computer. Of course I grew up a bit later than you did. And there, we started playing with Counter-Strike and stuff like that, and you wanted to have like a cool computer and during my film school you wanted very powerful computers to render your video.

So I got really into like building my own computers, but like on a very high level. I wasn't going into the CPU or whatever. That was interesting for me. And I think that always gave me the spark. That's why I applied at Apple at the Genius Bar, because I knew a lot about what RAM was or what a CPU was not on the detail level, but it was interesting for me.[00:08:00]

Zeke: Yeah, see, I was I was completely ignorant of all of that stuff for a really, really long time. I mean, I when you talk about. Does, the kind of what triggered me, it's similar to what triggered you, which was I was in a fairly, I mean, I was managing a gas station and I already had a kid and I was trying to figure out how to be, you know, a good parent or support myself kind of some future, like, what am I going to do, you know, with my life?

And of course, one of the things is like, oh, should I go back to university? Or should I do, you know, like this, that, or the other thing.

And one of my friends who was a software developer, oh yeah, "You know what they need?"

This is in 1993, they said what everybody needs is NetWare administrators. Everybody needs a network administrator, sys-admins and stuff like this. And he says, you should just go get your, and at the time, Novell NetWare was the LAN software for business and they had 80% of all networks were run on NetWare.

And so I got this [00:09:00] idea in my head that I would become a network administrator and they did have classes for this. What I didn't realize when I signed up for it was that it was really designed for corporations to get certification for their people. So I was the only person there who paid for it out of pocket.

All the other ones were paid for for by their, by their companies.

Lennart: I also once had, like before I went into software, I also had the idea, like, how do I get into this, into this development world? And they had these Cisco classes, the CCNA and stuff like that. And for me, that was also like, how do I get in software? I have to go, go to the network layer or something to figure it out.

And I was really thinking of enrolling in a class, I'm 100% sure it would have been the same thing. Right.

Zeke: Yeah, probably.

Lennart: Like a lot of corporations wanting to do CCNA. And then I would be the only one there. I didn't think about it at the time. I thought this was the way to go. I have to do this. I have to understand the OSI layers because I, of course, did some research on it, [00:10:00] uh, before I can continue becoming an actual software developer.

Zeke: Yeah. The cool part about doing that. So the first of all, I'll just tell you the, the, the end result was I did get my certification and I decided that there was no way that I was going to be a network administrator if I could help it, because that was what I really learned that that was not the right tech stack for me to be in.

But as a, as part of it, I definitely learned a lot about kind of computers and networking and all this others stuff, that really, I mean, that really did hold over for a long time. Like many of those things still still matter.

Lennart: It gives you a good fundamental if you're doing web application development, that you understand how the internet actually works. Because I think I think this is something that they do teach at universities, right? When, when you're starting to learn computers, you have to go to those hardware labs.

Because I also looked into some of those curriculums. They always have like lab days where I know that you're plugging in routers and seeing how network actually works.

Zeke: Yeah, I learned about you know, the [00:11:00] OSI stack, the OSI model, right. And you know, how TCPI were TCP/IP works, as compared to IPX SPX, because that Novell class was not super interested in you going and using TCP/IP, they wanted you to use their protocol and their software and stuff like this, but you still learn just by, you know, even, you know, just by talking about it.

So there you were, you had your, kind of your extrinsic motivation for becoming a software developer was like, Hey, I gotta pay some bills. I gotta have a job. And you know, what's available to me locally. What are the choices available locally?

Um, what was the name of the place again?

YoungCapital Professionals Bootcamp

Lennart: It was YoungCapital Professionals. So YoungCapital was actually a recruitment firm that did a lot of recruiting for like bars and restaurants and events. But then they had a professional like thing where they did more recruitment for software developers. And they had this [00:12:00] fantastic model where they would train you to become a developer, if you came from a non-computer science background.

Um, you got paid to do this. So I got money to go to that bootcamp. I think it was like 600 euros a month. Even though it was one and a half months. So in total you have something like a thousand euros to do the bootcamp and they paid for hotel during the whole period.

So actually I said, Hey, I have nothing to lose. They, they pay for like a place to live. They pay me money to be there so I can at least get food. And after that they promised they would get me a job. So actually the way of money was then employing you for the year afterwards, but the company that you worked at would pay a premium

Zeke: Interesting. So, they were basically headhunting you and prepping you for the head hunt. And they got some must be not insubstantial amount of money to make that profitable because not everybody's going to turn out and that's quite a serious investment. I mean, my class in [00:13:00] 1993, Was 6,500 bucks for a class that was once a week for 12 weeks, I think, you know, for two hours in the evening.

So that was really expensive back then and here you're getting one for free and they helped you find a job. That sounds like the best deal.

Lennart: They did do a very long interview cycle. So it was not like you applied and you automatically got selected, right? You had to show that you are motivated.

So, I think I did like three rounds of each one hour, where I had to go there, I had to do like a, IQ test. I had to do just a general presentation, why I should be selected. And then just talk about me as like a culture fit. So only not everybody that applied would actually be able to do the bootcamp because I think by doing this pre-selection process, they were finding smart people that had a focus on [00:14:00] engineering, right?

Insight: selection process matters

Zeke: What, what were, what did you write for your intrinsic motivation? Clearly, I'm trying to look for why you, why you do it and saying like, I need job probably is not enough, right?

Lennart: No indeed. I, I don't, it's it's six years back now. I remember giving a presentation that in the evenings I was already doing like a Team Treehouse or Pluralsight, learning JavaScript uh, if they would select me. So I, I already liked the concepts of coding and I was already doing my best to learn these kinds of things.

And I gave a small presentation where I grew up, what I had already done. So that was it a bit, but I didn't, I didn't know what code was, right?

Zeke: So you didn't have a clear intrinsic motivation. Like it's not like you were like, oh, software development is going to solve my problems.

But you did actually have some level of, you know, motivation that if you're doing Pluralsight or other kinds of [00:15:00] self-learning tools, even before you got into the class, so you were priming the pump, right?

Lennart: So this is about motivation a bit, like I never felt super motivated during my school time to actually learn new stuff, but that switched a lot after doing like film. Maybe I wasn't studying the right stuff. Maybe I was studying stuff that, that didn't interest me. But when I got into coding and doing this Pluralsight courses, I said, Hey, this is actually fun.

You're building something. And it's challenging. So that might be my interesting motivation.

Zeke: Yeah. Yeah. When I first made the decision, you know, I decided to sign up for this class, but even before that, I switched from reading all the other things and studying my, you know, reading the paper and reading novels to reading computer manuals and stuff.

Like I said, there wasn't something like Pluralsight to go self programming stuff. Instead I was like reading the MS DOS manual or, you [00:16:00] know, like I just go pull out, like, "How do computers work?" kind of book from the used bookstore or something like this? They were, they were also pretty weak sauce.

I, I have to admit that my, like my motivation about being able to support my family was a sustaining one. Until I until I could get to a point where like there was more traction.

Lennart: Didn't you have magazine computer magazines where you could type over some software to get things working.

Zeke: They did have some magazines, but they didn't click with me about where, where I was, right? Like the, challenge is always like, you know, how to meet somebody where they are and how do they find that spot where you're, where you can meet them. Right. So, as I was poking around, I like, so my friends that I knew, cause I did have a few people that I knew who were in the tech industry, in various roles.

And they had all started with computers, like they had one at home, and their [00:17:00] parents were like engineers. And so they had grown up learning about the software from like the way software was built from like the seventies, right? In 1981, their dad is like showing them like, this is how you, you know, write some C code to, you know, finish your homework project.

And I was all like, where do I learn about C code? Like, what is that? You know, there were books about it. Right. But A lot of times, even if you read the book, what do you do with the information that you just read?

Insight: information is not enough without a project

Lennart: True. True. Did you have computer back

Zeke: I did, I did have a computer. My grandpa had given me one when I was 19, I think.

I used it mostly to play video games, you know, like I also did word processing, some typing and things like this. It was not a, it was not a fancy computer.

Lennart: My parents back then, like in the nineties also had a computer and also an Apple. But I don't remember which one, but it was not one of the nice one. It was like just a [00:18:00] corporate Apple computer. They used it only for text processing. That's what I remember. And I use it to play some video games, but that was it.

I was vetted quite heavily for my bootcamp, and I think the other guys as well, and before this podcast, I, I did have a look of how many people were still working in the software engineering. But the ones that I could find they were all still having a solid development career, actually.

So I only know of one guy out of, we were like 20 people in the class or 25. I only know of one guy that didn't actually make it past his first year. So I think they really did a good job in vetting making sure that at least 90% of the people would get a job and be able to pay back the investment they did, right?

Zeke: Interesting, because that says something about their vetting tools. I wonder, like I wonder what their vetting process is. Maybe I should go apply there and see what, whether I would pass.

Lennart: I don't know if they still do it actually, because I was trying to find it. I, I [00:19:00] think they stopped doing it because I knew they had a couple of classes in the time I did it. They had for front end application developer. The one that I did is like, MEAN stack: so Mongo, Express, Node, and Angular. But they also had a C-sharp class and they had a python class, if I remember correctly.

So yeah. Yeah. That was it.

Zeke: Hm. Hm. Well so the class was relatively short, six weeks. Was it like immersive? Like you're there five hours a day or something, and then, for five days a week?

Lennart: Oh, way longer.

But the cool thing is like, everyone is together in the hotel. And, uh, in the morning you go over to the, like, it's like a corporate building with like training rooms. And we sit together in the the training room for eight hours. So we started at 9:00, get, uh, go home around 5:30, but the cool thing was like, everybody was motivated to learn.

Right. So in the end of the hotel, you're sitting in the lobby, with the other developers trying to hack things together [00:20:00] and at the end of those six weeks we...

Zeke: So it's really like a six weeks, hackathon?

Lennart: Yeah, because at the end of the six weeks you had to present a project and we knew this from day one, like, what are you going to build?

And it has to be something fun because that would be presented to the potential, uh, companies that would hire you in the end. So, um, we started by experimenting a bit and hey, this is how JavaScript to works, this is how Angular works, uh, Node and, and Mongo and stuff like that. It was really fun.

Insight: Immersion and motivation matter

Zeke: That's interesting because it follows a similar pattern to what they do for a foreign exchange kind of immersion programs. Even language immersion here in Berlin, I haven't done one of these things, but I know that they're, you know, a month...

Lennart: Yeah. I've heard some of these. Yeah.

Zeke: Hm. Maybe there's still a chance for me to learn German.

Lennart: Go for go and go to a small, uh, city village in the middle of Germany, and you [00:21:00] will also learn German within the month.

Zeke: Well, I was just thinking that maybe I should just go, I should just dive in and do a German immersion class.

Lennart: I heard this very interesting concept, that's um, you pay like 300 euros, uh, and you have 30 days of German. So every day you have two hours intensive German in the evening, but if you don't miss a single class, you get your money back.

Zeke: They're betting that everybody misses at least one.

Lennart: Yeah, yeah. But it is motivational, right? So you, you try to get your money back.

It's gamification of, uh, learning German, I guess.

Zeke: Okay. So I think it's really impressive that so many people have stuck with it. One of the parts that was really interesting to me about what you were talking about here is that they had such a high...

Whatever they did to do the filter, that initial filter was so good that it turned out that those people were not only capable, but motivated enough to stay.[00:22:00]

That's a really challenging part for any schools to do because especially private profit motivated schools are motivated usually by revenue, right? And the revenue is usually by people who pay for the class, so they want to say everybody can be a software developer so they can have everybody get in.

But, um, It also makes a difference who you have in the class, right? So you probably learned more because they selected for people who really care same way that you care.

Insight: peers make a big impact

Lennart: Also something very good that they did is they assigned every, uh, want-to-be-developer, um, to like a recruitment coach. And that coach was then responsible for getting setting up the job interviews and seeing your progress over time. I think, uh, four people got assigned to the same recruitment coach and they would help you through the whole process.

Zeke: Because I also think part of it is getting people to self-select right?

Anybody can teach guitar, [00:23:00] right? And then we can learn guitar, but does that mean you should become a professional musician? Do you know what I mean that you can go, you don't have to learn from the best musicians in order to learn, you know, about playing guitar so that you can clink on a guitar at home and that's that's okay. But it's different. If what you want to do is you're saying like, I want to become a concert musician. You don't have to be a rockstar, but like that you actually want to be good enough that you get paid for it.

That's a different level qualitatively, both from the teacher's side and from the student's side, right. And so I kind of feel like you have to, like, I mean, if I look back on my own past, I just did self-teaching. Um, But I wasn't able to self teach coding. I actually was not able to get up to that point.

What I got to, even though I read I read coding books,

Lennart: why do you think code is so hard to self-teach?

Zeke: Well, I don't know if it's so hard to [00:24:00] self-teach if you know what you're going to do with it. So I, I found out later on that it was easy for me to self teach coding once I was in an environment that kind of, kind of pointed me in directions where code was the right solution.

Like some things code is not actually that it's like easier to just do it yourself than it is to write code, it. But other things are like, oh, it's really hard to do that without writing code. And so by trying to do that thing, I'm going to say goal oriented learning, then you end up like really learning it.

Insight: Code adjacent works

Zeke: And so like, I read the books and I did the little lessons for coding before I got it. And I kind of, I had some, I had some skills there, but I wasn't able enough to get a job as a developer. And that's why I started in tech support. Once I started in tech support, suddenly I was supporting software and I'm around software in another dimension.

And what kinds of things [00:25:00] code needed more of, or less of started to become obvious to me. You know what I mean?

Lennart: Yes. I've, I've heard that path quite often. Like, uh, I have two people who are currently working with me at Forto and they wanted to get into code, uh, already like three years back. Uh, They, they were working at Durstexpress and they were working as a driver and for some way, some, some manner they were able to get into the it operations team.

We have the perspective as someday I'll be a coder, but of course they were doing it a bit to themselves, but yet they can't get a job as junior developer without having some kind of background. So they joined the operations team, uh, doing like more device management or, um, yeah, Internet's cables.

I don't know, stuff like that. Right. some point their idea was always to transition over into coding, which in the end happened. I, I helped them a lot with giving them, uh, like one-to-one lessons, uh, hours one hour or two hours a week, giving them some exercises. One of them also [00:26:00] did a after hours, uh, schooling thing, two hours a week or something. Uh, But he managed about both of them managed to actually start as junior developers within the two or three years, uh, first doing operations then, uh, software.

Zeke: Uh, this, this makes a lot of sense to me because, you know, um, the way that I got started, like I told you, I was working at a gas station and I met this other guy who is like the same age as me and didn't go to university and he was just kind of smart. And he was, you know, he was also in the goth scene.

This is important because people tell you like, oh, as long as you look funny, then they're not going to, you can't get a real job, all your crazy looking. But he worked at Microsoft. So like I'm working at a gas station and he's working at Microsoft. And when you look kind of at our, our templates, like kind of like who, who is this person.

He didn't look more likely to be there except for the fact that he'd had a computer since he was 10 years old. Right. So his first job was not [00:27:00] working at, um, you know, at a gas station or at a coffee shop. His first job was working at Adobe, doing tech support when he was 16. Right. That was where. And so I was like, man, I can, I could get into this part.

Right. Like I could somehow make it in there. And even though the whole time I knew him, I was always like, Hey, could you help me out? He, he did not make any time for me, but not, not really, but he did kind of show just by being there and being present and being a real person that I could just kind of meet out.

Cause I did see him here and there, um, was, was kind of like a, a validation that it's possible, which really helped sustain me, you know? Um, Later on I met other people who I could actually ask questions of and get answers on a reliable basis.

Lennart: But this is, this is like the key points that we're getting into. Right? So you have to believe that it's possible. If you're not in the computer scene, you can order [00:28:00] computer to programming software development. If you're not in it, there's always a way to get there. Even if there's an in-between step of doing tech support or it operations, or maybe just a support role. Um, If you develop further and have that as a goal, you will get there, right?

Zeke: I think these opportunities definitely still exist. Right? Like the, these paths forward still exists. I mean, there's not another career that I can think of that's so, uh, that has so much kind of opportunity out there and is so portable. Um, And so dynamic, like software developers, I just still find it fascinating that, you know, like, you know, practically anybody in the world can get into software development, um, with all you need is, you know, access to the internet.

And that's, that's, that's almost all that you need. However, I do think that there are criteria that are clear differentiators and, you know, it's interesting. Cause you know, um, you know, one of the things you said before [00:29:00] was, you said it's, you know, it's cool. And I think that this part, you know, like once you see code and development, kind of like, I don't know, close up.

You actually have to still think it's cool. Cause coding, you know, it's like they call it code. Cause it doesn't look like real stuff. It's, you know, it's looks like gibberish, right? Um, And you have to, similar to learning foreign language, right? You have to say, oh, I don't know how to say this, or know what this means, but it's not just a foreign language, like English to German.

It's also foreign way of thinking because computers don't know, language is all kind of shared the same fundamentals, but computers don't agree.

Lennart: But yeah, if you, if you abstract as enough, they do, when you're on the machine code, it's kind of looks the same, but when you go high level programming and then it makes a difference, [00:30:00]

Zeke: Yeah. I'm just saying, I think that some, some level you have to kind of a little bit fall in love with that puzzle in order get over the hump of.

Lennart: it's recognizing the patterns and recognizing the challenges. And if you, like, if you like solving these localized problems, that form a bigger solution, then I think programming is something for you, right?

Zeke: Um, All of my hacker friends, I have a bunch of people in the security community and there's a lot of them are not as focused on building software. Some of them are, but a lot of them are not as focused, but they, they share a deep fascination with figuring how things actually work. Right.

Insight: tenacious sense-making

Zeke: So the hackers are all about like, you know like this doesn't really make sense. How can I make it make sense to me? And I'm not going to let go. I'm not going to let go until it makes sense.

Lennart: Do these people also to these people also have like a computer science background or [00:31:00] do they mostly come from, from other backgrounds?

Zeke: It's all over the map. I mean, we call them hackers security researchers. They are fundamentally non-conformist versions in the tech scene, right? Like kind of at the most basic level, you know, hackers are breakers and not builders. Not that they don't build things, but that their goal is often to look for the corners between, uh, and I think this ends up being a different kind of puzzle making.

Right. So you're not saying how do I make it successful? You saying like what happens when things really fail?

Lennart: But it's still about finding like logic and patterns and solving a problem right. In the end, it all boils down to that. That's what we as software engineers do. Uh, I believe at least of course there's a lot of suffer around it, but the core,

Zeke: Hmm-mmm.

Lennart: There was this one quote that I always love this like software engineering is the only place where you can get [00:32:00] somebody that started in a gas station or started doing film school or working together with somebody that has a PhD in physics or in artificial intelligence, in other like, um, sectors, you don't have that as much as we do in software engineering.

And that's what is so fantastic. Right?

Zeke: I agree. Um, here's, here's an interesting kind of question for you. So I personally feel like, uh, my non, my non, CS background has actually been an advantage for many ways in my career. Cause I don't, um, I don't feel bound to follow the systems that I was given because I wasn't given very many of them.

Right. I had to figure out a bunch of stuff by myself. Um, And I actually found out at Amazon that like 30% of the principal engineers or something like this, do not come from a CS background, whereas like 99% of graduate hires do come from like, so new hires. You know, the level of the first entry level hires are most all from a [00:33:00] CS university, but at the principal level that, and that's, you know, the ratio of principals to entry-level engineers is one to a hundred kind of thing.

So, but at that level, 30% of them are not from a comp-sci background. Um, And I, I think that's an interesting kind of takeaway. I'm curious since you just got promoted to staff, um, what do you think in your background actually is an advantage, you know, for your non traditional career history, what's an advantage for being a staff engineer and then also what might be a disadvantage?

Lennart: Sure. Um, like a bit what you said, right? That you think out of the box, right? You don't have the rules, uh, printed into your mind. Like, I think like for me, it's always, we make, uh, we think what university could have taught us. I don't know. I never did it. Right. Uh, But I always assume they will put bounds on what you're learning [00:34:00] and they do it very step by step.

They you you first learned to do, uh, I don't know, uh, variables and functions and, um, what's what's next, like for, I don't know, but when I came in it was like, Hey, let's just hack a solution together. And, uh, we we'll figure it out while it's unstructured learning. Well, university is way more structured and it sets constraints and it says, this is what you should be doing. And this is what you should not be doing. Um, I had to learn it the hard way. Right. I had to think about patterns, myself or read, uh, like very, very big books to understand how does something like the layered architecture work? Why should I not put my database in my API call in the same function? I mean, these are things that you do by experimentation while I assume that they teach you this on, on a university. But also what I also have in my background is I come from a film where you have to work very closely with directors, [00:35:00] producers, and they all want something right. As a film editor, you're doing kind of the technical aspect of the creative, uh, process. And, uh, you can see them a bit, like I like to compare them to stakeholders product managers right?

They are managing a product, a bigger, uh, film, a feature film, and you are there to execute their vision. Of course, you also have some input on the creative thing, but, uh, I see coding is like film editing while you have stakeholders trying to, uh, get stuff from you. But in film, we are always learned that, um, we also have an input.

We're also stakeholders of our movie, uh, like in the products that we're building engineers are also stakeholders. They are not just there to execute. They are also there to think what they're building and build a better product.

Insight: Crossover skills are powerful

Zeke: I actually think the comparison is an interesting one. I also worked film a little bit as a teenager. My family had [00:36:00] has a history and making movies. And so I got to kind of see it and heard a lot about it, heard people talking about it a lot. And, I think it's the, you know, project style thinking.

You're like, when you're making a movie, you know, you kind of have like a vision, you come up with a plan and a script for it, but then you actually, when you get down to it, you need a lot of autonomy from the different elements, like teams that make movies today are huge. Right. And they need to somehow break the movie down into pieces so that they can be given out across many different people in the organization and still retain the coherency of being a final product.

I mean, like the director doesn't do everything. The director says, I, I need things from different people. And those people say, okay, I need teams to help me get those things. And then so on and so forth. And I think that software projects, in the best case, you know, are, are similar. Right. And sometimes I feel. Uh, I'm in a software company, it's like, they think, oh, it's not [00:37:00] possible to get people organized around a vision, you know, that that's too many people, you can never get it organized. And it's like, dude, have you seen the size of some of these movies? I mean, if we're talking about hundreds or thousands of people to get the movie done and the final product is pretty sweet.

Lennart: Yep. I have that experience from working on one of the, the, one of the biggest film sets that I did was I only did two of them, but the biggest one was, uh, Iron Sky 2. And Iron Sky 2 was a big production with at least 100 to 150 people working on that same thing.

And it was fantastic to see that we were working on like five or six different sound stages. While one team was building up a one part, the other team was shooting in another scene and they had to work so nicely together because you only had, I think we had 90 days to do all the shooting and everything ready, uh, for the film.

So you, it is like a software project. You have teams working on fundamental parts, you have other teams working on more critical parts, but in the end they have to [00:38:00] work together to deliver that bigger, bigger product, right? Only in, in, product and development, you iterate more, right? Your product is never done. Film, at some point, you, you finished and you deliver

Zeke: Well, I used to be in big box software. We used to finish. I think one of the things that's different is a lot of times developers have an idea that they like, it's almost like you don't have to worry about other things. Like you could just focus on your code and not worry about, and in a movie or something like that, it's like that doesn't work.

It doesn't work to say, like I'm only just going to worry about my, my piece, because it does, it has to always be part of the continuity. It has to fit into the larger thing. You actually sometimes see it like on TV shows where like one episode it's like, what the heck is this episode, doing in this TV show, right? Like why did the writers go completely off cockamamie or something?

Lennart: Yeah, you have that also like a series that are directed by different directors over [00:39:00] the time. They, they also change in mood and setting. Which is always interesting to see.

Sometimes it could be nice, sometimes it feels nice, but sometimes it also just doesn't work. And I guess in software, most of the time that doesn't work, if you have people pulling in different directions, but maybe for a TV series is fine.

Insight: You can backfill gaps on the job

Zeke: So I, you know, did tech support and then I was worked as a tester and then I worked as a lab manager and then I worked as a dev test. And then I finally became a developer. And when I got to developer, then I started comparing myself to other developers.

This is at Microsoft. And I started hanging out with like interns and new hires to see, like, what is it that they think about? Or what is it that they remember? What was it that they use? And one of the interesting things, you know, like, so first of all, we'd have interns come to Microsoft and they'd be there for six weeks.

And in the six weeks they say, I'm not going back to university. I mean, like, six [00:40:00] weeks of education inside of Microsoft as a developer, completely overwhelmed, anything they had learned or were going to learn. But other ones would tell me about, like, there are all these standards, like the dragon book.

Have you ever heard of the dragon book?

Lennart: Never heard of it.

Zeke: So the dragon book is this book of compilers. And it's, I don't know. It's really old. If you were to take a compiler class, like everybody had the same book, no matter what school they came from. And, and of course, anybody who did copy-sci had to take a compiler class. Like there was no way you're not going to do it.

Now, in your bootcamp. I mean, why don't you take your compiler class?

Lennart: I didn't know what a compiler was for the first year of my development cycle, because it's abstracted, right.

Zeke: You know, it's just, you know, maybe part of the tool chain. Even when I read my first book on programming in C, they talk about the compiler, but it was just an opaque thing. The compiler, compiler is the thing that generates object code. And then the linker is the thing that turns it into executable code.

Right. [00:41:00] And then there's like like big black box here, but that book was supposed to explain it. And I did buy the book along with Sedgwick's algorithms and the Kernhigan and Ritchie C, so these are old, old books that

Lennart: I'm also, yeah, I'm shaking my head too. They also don't know any of them. So.

Zeke: there's also a graphics Bible. There's several books that like everybody I talked to had.

And so I bought these books, looked through them. I understood they were, they were interesting books, but then the chances of you needing them for when you're building most software, even in the nineties was really small. Like they were so focused. Like if you're not on a team that builds a compiler, then you don't need to know that much about how compilers work.

There's some things that were really interesting, um, that you can learn there, but you didn't need it.

Lennart: Um, I did have at a point where I think I was two years or three years in [00:42:00] my development as my first development job. And, uh, at that point in time, I was talking to a lot of people who did university, uh, and had master degrees and whatever. And I did start start looking into, uh, the possibility to get like a computer science master degree.

So I actually went to the school and they gave me like, you have to do these five tests. If you do these five classes, you get two recommendation letters and, uh, you do a project for us. I could have started the master degree program. Um, But I, I talked into more and more people and they all said, yeah, you actually don't learn that much in a masters year.

You write a thesis and you have like, I dunno, two classes a week and that's about it. Um, You learn way more on the job. Which I think I totally agree with afterwards. I would have liked a master's degree, but then again, uh, I still feel that it's, it's nice. I think I learned way more in two years of working than I would have ever learned in two years of doing a master [00:43:00] degree.

Zeke: Ah, I was just going to say, I also looked into the master's program at some point, I admit part of it was like, I skipped my bachelor's would it be cool to have my master's?

Lennart: Yeah, but I did have in bachelor, uh, the degree of my film, so I could do my master based on that. I actually, I don't know how that actually works, but

Going back into like like talking about a compiler and these algorithms and stuff like that during your development career, um, then at some point motivated to step back and learn these things, or do you never wanted to?

Zeke: Well, I, what it is, I actually did kind of skim or dive into things, know, like some things were like, Hey, this thing comes up in conversation, but I don't know what it is. And there wasn't, there weren't a lot of resources online, you know, I'm going to say pre Google, you know, do you find things?

You know, AltaVista wasn't as good at, you know, figuring, you know, finding, getting the answer for you. So, [00:44:00] um, I did have them around so I could just look them up. I couldn't say, oh, somebody talks. You know, what a closure is or something like this. Um, The algorithms book by Sedgewick was , oh, what's Quicksort versus a merged Right. And you know, in school they make you write it. But the truth is, is most of the time you don't need to write it. You just, you might, but you might need to know why one was being used in a certain situation. You say, like somebody says, ah, we have to use Quicksort here. And you're like, why would Quicksort be better than the other kinds of sort? Um, or something like this. And so that's that's why I had them. Um, But did I use them use them? No. Like the source code around me was the thing that was really the most influential.

Lennart: I did have a time, I think, uh, just when I moved to Berlin that I get did get very into algorithms and compilers, and I just wanted to [00:45:00] know more, I want to know what I missed, uh, during that university cycle. Right? So I, I searched, I did some deep dive into searching algorithms like breadth first and depth first. Uh, And actually last week I got to do a conversation about it on how to solve a assess a problem. Should we go breadth first or depth first? And that was really interesting to know because he also had a computer science background and we discussed about it and and that made sense. Uh, But then going into compiler, I got a book called how to write a transpiler in Go, and that was fantastic.

You write a transpiler by doing, um, and for me to that opened up a world, I even went a bit deeper into, um, The soul of a new machine. It's a journalist book in the eighties, I think, where they built a 16 or one of the first 16 bit or 32 bits computers. And I was so impressed that I started building my own eight bit computer on breadboards, uh, based on a YouTube video.[00:46:00]

So now I have like an eight bit computer at home on breadboards that can sum up like binary stuff and subtract. And I have like two registers, uh, a board of Ram. It's really impressive actually, but it made me actually understand what I missed and computer science. I don't think they actually built eight bit computers anymore, but it is really

Zeke: Yeah, I mean, and I first asked people like, what was the core of, their, their comp-sci kind of program. This early on in my career and you know, it's like, it really it's the Knuth books, the, and the Knuth books, if you read them are very dry and the only you use pseudo code, so it's computer science in the completely abstract.

Like how would you make logic puzzles and machine languages type of thing, not how do you write software? Right? Like, you know, Knuth won't will never has, uh, never tells you what loggers are for. Right? Like there's no loggers in [00:47:00] Knuth's world of computer science. And I thought that was interesting because the vast majority of what we did was so practical and applied.

It's like, one of the things you really need to learn, early on, is how to debug things and how to use debuggers and what debuggers are available for. And then, you know, what is tracing for, you know, why do we have, you know, logging and things like this? What does it really ? And almost universally, anybody comes out of comp-sci background is, is completely useless at this.

Like they just don't know, this is not one of the things they teach. They don't have like a, you know, yeah. They don't have a good debugger program, you know, and it's of course, depending what you're debugging and there's lots of different reasons to have debuggers. But that's, you spend a lot more time in that part of software development than you do in the, is my syntax correct?

Or is this the right algorithm? You know, the breadth-first / depth-first thing, every once in a while it really [00:48:00] matters. Usually you can go, okay, let me sit back and go read up on, you know, graph traversal again.

Lennart: But do you think like, uh, if we're talking about like graph traversal problems, at some point in your career, you have to have heard that term to be able to search for it, right. I think like in university you heard you hear these terms because they are solutions to common problems. Well, if you don't have that background, uh, and, and you, you encounter such a problem.

You don't know the term graph traversal. It's very hard to find that, right?

Zeke: I think you're right. Like, um, one of the things that I did was because I knew, because I knew I didn't have the same frame of reference that what I did is I kind of popped every reference that I didn't understand into, you know, uh, a queue, right? So I'd hear dada breadth-first or depth-first search, [00:49:00] and I'm like, mm, okay.

I'm going to go look in to what that is for later. And there's kind of just a constant queue of things. And then the frequency of terms would usually then determine the importance of doing it. And, you know, one place, of course you get the, like interviewing has a much different frequency of some concepts then, you know, working. Um, So when I started interviewing more often then I ended up learning from other people, like based on the questions they were asking of the grad students, like what it is that they were expecting kind of people to know.

Lennart: I also remember, uh, I think in my first interviews that I started doing, I was so intimidated by interviewing people with way more longer tech experience than I was. But the thing that I learned the most was from the other interviewer with me asking [00:50:00] questions, like, um, he asked the question that I remember precisely it was, uh, how many arguments does a static constructor take.

And, uh, I was totally clueless. Um, The other guy as well, so we were discussing this and interview each other and the other guy was looking at me, how come you don't know this? You're you're hiring this person.

Zeke: Um, Let's see, I guess the, maybe the most interesting thing to kind of, um, get into here, I think would, might be, do you have recommendations for other people who are kind of either at the, at the pre part of their software engineering career or they're right over the bootcamp and they're looking for jobs or they're, you know, in their next stages of their career.

Kind of like lessons learned or things that you remember.

Lennart: For me, it was always a [00:51:00] crucial. And I think I got where I am today is by, um, my managers, uh, people who actually believed in me and supported my learning, uh, Without having a computer science background. So they never were, um, yeah, laughing because I didn't know something. I had the time to research it. I had the time to actually look into what I was doing and they always helped me, uh, push me to the next level.

Insight: growth needs supportive manager / allies

Lennart: So it's very important to have a person that you are working with that has time for you and has time for you to, uh, explain what you're doing and seeing the bigger picture, because I feel that. Developers who are just starting think only about the code and think only about I want to solve this small problem while software development is very big.

It's always, you have to think about the bigger products. Um, that was one of my key things that I learned over time. Um, also, uh, one of the things that I keep telling my junior [00:52:00] developers, uh, is like, you have to put in the work now, uh, because, uh, it will come the, the ease of things will come later, right?

You have to learn how to search for things. You have to learn how to find your information that you're looking for. Uh, Because in, in a year or two, when you get to that mid-level or senior level, it will just be automatic and you will know where to find stuff. Um, but now in the beginning is is the moments where you have to put a lot of time. Um, Me as well, like I, I did find some over hours trying to understand how things worked. Um, Not because it was related to the company, but more just related to me having that motivation to learn what I'm doing. And I find that very important.

Zeke: I think that's a really good call out. I mean, specifically about your manager, I kind of would broaden it a little bit because I had a mixed bag of managers in the early part of the first parts of my career. Um, But I did have a network. And [00:53:00] what you're saying is really nice if your manager is part of your network, meaning that they're an ally and an asset for your growth. If you have a network and you grow that network, you invest in that network, um, it makes such a huge difference.

I almost think that your definition of what it was is somebody who supports you on your own journey,

Lennart: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. As far as more that direction,

Zeke: right?

Like, like you have to kind of say kind of support I'm looking for. Is this and who are the kind who are the people in my network and the like this? Because some of them may be very technical minded, other ones may not be technical minded, and maybe you don't need, you need, I don't know, some way to, you know, I'll just say navigate personal problems or, you know, or I'll say manage the priority between your personal, your, you know, like your family life and your work life do work-life balance stuff or something like that.

But, [00:54:00] um, I think it's, uh, I think there's people because it's the focus on kind of self-taught and that there's all these tutorials and all this other stuff. I really think that you need to reach out and have a network and they, and they all have nowadays there's so many kinds of active and passive networks to be a part of.

Lennart: Did you go to a lot of meetups when you were starting your career?

Zeke: I, I didn't even know of one,

Lennart: Uh, because I, I did, but I never got a lot out of it, to be honest. I went mostly for the free beer and pizza. Uh, That was like the only cool thing, because I didn't, I wasn't that social, I got like a bit more social the last couple of years. Uh, like meeting new people, I find that a bit hard sometimes, certainly at these kinds of events because yeah, let's face it. It's, it's just a bunch of nerds sitting together in the room. Um, And the topics were okay-ish, but I always thought I would learn a [00:55:00] lot more there. So, uh, that's something that's just didn't work for me, I guess.

Zeke: I had one friend who, uh. There was a point where I was unemployed and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. And my next job was in fact at Microsoft and he was working as a waiter. And so as an unemployed person, I would go into his restaurant and he would give me free soup and salad, you know, cause, uh, I was super scrappy and um, and then after work we would hang out and we would talk about how we're going to transform the world.

We're going to get out there and we're going to do something. You know, and you know, neither one of us were in a great position to do it, but you know, both of us ended up being software developers. So there is a thing and we, and we learned completely different ways. We did not learn software development together, but what we did do was rah-rah each other at every scenario. And support each other, [00:56:00] even though other people are like, that's not how it works. You have to go to university. We're like, we're not going to university. We go, "hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!". You know, like this and get each other all excited.

But we needed that energy, that support to, to power through some things that were, you know, there's a lot of friction.

Insight: find support to power through friction

Zeke: There's a lot of friction and resistance.

Lennart: I think this also the, the point, I think you just need a very good support network. Be it your manager, be it a good friend, be it a peer, right. That's helping you along the path into becoming a more senior developer. And I think that's where I get a lot of motivation outs. Uh, I lot of people do, and I important to find that person.

I'm not saying you can't do it alone, but I think it will be harder.

Zeke: I almost am ready to say you can't do it. 'cause I'm, I'm kind of a loner myself. And I think I did it pretty close to the bone and disregard, I still look back. And even if somebody was [00:57:00] just, you know, a significant part of my network for a very brief period of time, a lot of times it was at a critical juncture and they did give me something, even if they didn't know it. Let's just say, for example, if somebody just checks out your CV, as the only thing they did was they just looked at your CV and they just said, ah, this is dumb and that's dumb, and, you know, usually this.

So one of my friends, he said, oh, you know what? I have a stack of CVs from my previous job that I probably not supposed to have. You can just flip through them. So I got to look at a hundred CVS.

Lennart: Yeah,

Zeke: and by looking at them, I was all like yeah. Then I was all like, oh, and I very quickly could see, like, some of these things are so terrible.

Lennart: yeah

Zeke: I am definitely not going to do that. Right. Um, anyway, so I, I, but I think that network support network, different dimensions and understanding what it is that you need and appreciating also the people for what they bring to the table.

Lennart: I, agree. Yeah. I I love, [00:58:00] I love, um, also doing this for other people. Like I got a lot of support and you pass that along. Um, I guess people need to keep doing that for our sector to keep growing as it is growing.

Zeke: it is definitely growing. It's crazy. I

Lennart: This is, this be our next podcast. This is, about the growth of, uh, of the IT sector, right?

Zeke: Yeah, well also just like, you know, you're on the front lines of just trying to hire, you know, and you're like, we're growing and we're trying to hire it. Obviously everybody else is growing because everybody else is hiring the people that, you know, we want to hire. Right. Very competitive space. Um, but that's a lot of opportunity, I think also for people to kind of, uh, you know, get, get a foot in the door.

Insight: look for new ways in

Lennart: A lot of companies are thinking about doing this re schooling, right? You, if you're interested in development, maybe the company itself has a learning program to start out with.

Zeke: Uh, I, I haven't looked deeply into this, but before I left [00:59:00] Amazon, that was one of the things that had cropped up. So they had a, um, uh, upskilling program from like the cause they have, you know, It's like 1.2 million people that are working in the United States, but the vast majority of them don't work in software. Right?

But now have these programs that are there to help people. They have a lot of internal resources, of course just self-learn or teach or something like this. But they also have some things where like, I think it's called the Jeff Bezos academy or something like that. And then they also have another thing which is kind of, um, you know, return to work kind of stuff where it's like these programs for specifically focused on, um, people who've been out of work for, for like, if they have kids or something mothers got dropped out of the workforce or I think disability or something like this and that they're wanting to get back in and going to some kind of, uh, re-skilling back into it.

So I think [01:00:00] you're right. I think companies, as, or as they need people, they start exploring, other stuff.

Lennart: I also heard a very nice one. Like, do you have some charities that do like, uh, software boot camps for, like, I know about this town in the states, that was actually a very big coal mine, but yeah, they, they shut that down and all those workers, they, they couldn't do anything else. So, uh, some charities come in and they give development software classes because there are so many software people in need, even for, even for older people. Uh, They can still learn to program. They can still write some HTML, CSS, a buildup, a, a website or something.

Insight: Change your life

Zeke: You know, one of the things that really changed for me, like completely changed my whole life outlook. Once I was over the, the primary hump, I was no [01:01:00] longer afraid of my career being, I was no longer afraid of a rug pull, you know?

Lennart: Do you see this retrospectively or do you ma do you notice at the moment?

Zeke: I noticed right at the moment.

It was really clear because I lived in this world, like from my childhood of a sense of precariousness like that at moment, something can come and yank it out from under me. And because I kind of made the transition in a very non traditional kind of. How did I get here?

And it took me about two years. So I would say from the point where, you know, where I was working at the gas station to the point where I was firmly on my career path, um, is about two years. And I can't, it's not like I have this specific day, but I do remember at the time I was all, like, I am no longer afraid.

I was actually like to the point where if the software industry, like, if Microsoft were to go under or the software industry would just be like shorter, [01:02:00] that would be okay because I just pulled myself up by my bootstraps. And I was like that I can repeat, I can say I did it for software. I can do it somewhere else. Right.

It wasn't a gift. was something I went and achieved on my own. And, and that part, I mean, it's, it's, it has stuck with me, right? Like even when major setbacks in my career or in my personal life, I still have this attitude of like, this is something that I can affect. I can't control. Right, but I have a lot of influence over the results.

Whereas before that, I always felt a little bit like, you know, like it's, it's either choose what they say is, is a choice or be cast on the stones.

Lennart: Yeah. I never had that moment. I I'm, I think because I DJ'd a lot, I was super self confident. Uh, I still am. Right. And, uh, I, I think I never, I always said if I don't make it here, I'll just find something else. And my mom always kept us into me. if, [01:03:00] if Lennart, if you, if you fail in whatever, you still have a place at home.

And, and that is fantastic. Right? Some people don't have that. And that's very, very sad. Uh, But I always got that confidence of, I can try whatever I want. And even if I fail, I will always have a place to go and go back to and recuperate and try again.

Goodbye

Zeke: Well, um, I think that's a pretty good chat for the day. Um, thank you so much for coming on Lennart and you know, talking about this maybe this is, uh, an area that's quite close to my heart because it's part of my history, but it's also because I see, you know, the chances for other people to kind of, you know, become my partner in the future. Um, And I've really enjoyed the ride, you know, meeting you and working with you and now talking with you again, and I look forward to keeping our keeping our network going.

Lennart: Yeah, I really enjoyed this, uh, invite me any other time. Thanks.

Zeke: Okay. That's a wrap for [01:04:00] today.

Thank you so much for listening. I am Zeke Arany-Lucas. Please find show notes and more episodes at my website: blog.introspectivedeveloper.com.