 Can you hear me? All right. I'm going to stand back a little bit. I was wasting my youth and using up my teeth. I might not assume that I practiced that 200 times. Okay. Well, now that I'm dead, I literally died. So the rest of this is going to be easy. Have you ever died before? Some of you might literally be able to say yes. So the metaphor may not stick. Hi. I'm Brandon. Hi. Thanks for bearing with me. That song means a thing, and we'll talk about it. Also, this isn't like a celebration of Back to the Future Day. My whole life was a celebration of Back to the Future Day. I'm Brandon. I work at the front side. We try to make nice software for people. Also, I thought one way to celebrate Keep Ruby Weird is to keep Ruby out of my talk. I love Ruby. It's just not in it. So my app is in EmberJS. So I had a bumpy transition into coding. From the start of 2010 to the end of 2013, I worked at seven different workplaces. So every six months, I get this feeling where I would start regretting my job decision, and after nine months or so, I would peace out. But I'm not here to tell you my story. I'd probably tell it wrong if I was, but I do remember tweeting these lyrics as sort of like an existential howl without getting fired. Why did I keep falling into this trap? Well, we are giving some bad advice to people. Influential people are saying that the most important thing you can possibly do to it is achieve success at a company that achieves success. I'm sorry. My brain won't even let me parse that without exploding. What the heck does it mean to achieve success? Well, I have some really bad news for y'all, like really bad. Achieving success and an achievement is a system of control. Win or lose, you're playing somebody else's game. They set the rules. They define success. They make the trophies, and then you go run the race. But who cares if it makes us feel good to get the trophies, right? Why does that matter? Well, because the other half of it is that the world does not care if you're happy. It just wants your output. They want what they want on time, under budget. They're not evil. They're just practical. Success and achievement are defined by people that want to maximize your output and minimize the cost of getting it out of you, and whether that makes you happy is totally irrelevant. If that makes me sound like a fringe nut job, guilty. I don't blame you. Maybe I can run for president on the fringe nut job party with this cool guy. I think he wants to buy everybody a pony. Bear with me, though. This could get fun. Enough of the heavy stuff. Let's play a game. First, we need to cover one concept, and that's the idea of leading versus trailing metrics. But is anybody here from New York? A couple of people. Okay. Anybody from New York will recognize, he's covering some good territory here pretty quickly. He's probably running about 120 miles an hour. So, training, go. Leading metrics are like a gas pedal, and trailing metrics are like a speedometer. And you want to go fast, but a gas pedal doesn't control how fast you go. It just controls the flow of gasoline or electrons, and then you observe the speed later. Leading metrics are things that you have some control over, things like the number of hours that you work, or conversations that you have, or things that you publish out into the world. Trailing metrics are things that you influence, but indirectly, and they're the things that you actually care about, like income, or titles, or recognition. So, we're going to set up a game, where we set up a baseline, tweak leading metrics, and then observe the trailing metrics, and then we'll fast forward and rewind time to see what happens to those trailing metrics over time. And then we're going to follow these nine paths and use these to highlight similarities and differences between them. So, the stats of your baseline, it's pretty much the way that you're wired. There are three main areas of focus, technical skill, connection, and vision. There are limited number of points to allocate, so we'll have to choose them carefully. Technical skill is a strong desire to achieve some technical goals, solve puzzles, level up, teach others, and generally just do high quality work, like this person who is... This is me playing Mario 3, because this is... I don't want to brag. Connection is the desire to connect new ideas to real-world problems, often relying on efforts of others while you provide some guidance, but mostly it's other people doing the work. Vision is the desire to achieve something that hasn't been done at all. It's the difference between the way the world works now and the way that it could be. So, think of these three stats as layers of abstraction that people like to work at. Technical skill is solving problems at the computer level. Connection is solving them at the people level, and vision is solving them at a societal level. And once we've set up our skills, we'll pick out the inventory, which we have some direct control over. The first item is leverage. That's how well you understand your current value. Basically, somebody needs something that you offer. The future you has capabilities that you might not yet. The third item is education, which is the investment that you plow back into yourself. And the fourth item is the community impact, the impact that you have on the world, the amount of investment you make into people and things outside yourself that aren't going to yield any direct return. Final inventory item is dedication, which is the time and focus that you apply to the previous four items. So, let's boil this down into a formula. Do these things and you'll have a platform. And we'll come back to this and explain it later. So, from here, we can see the results. We don't get to directly turn the knobs to change income, stress levels, amount of free time, satisfaction, or impact on the community, but they can be influenced. And we're going to observe the indirect effect in the game. And then we'll watch those changes to those results as they occur over two, five, ten, or thirty years. All right. You all ready? Yes. Okay. We're going to jump into some scenarios. All right. So, the first scenario just wants to be left alone to code, which is understandable. All right. So, we're going to allocate some stuff. We get ten points and we're going to say, this person is pretty technical. We'll give them a little connection and vision. And then we'll allocate inventory. Let's give them a little bit of leverage. Not a lot. They just want to code. Not a lot of ambition. They're going to call themselves some, but they mostly feel like, hey, I know my framework. They're going to work pretty hard and not a lot of work in the community, but they'll have some. All right. Let's see what happens. Okay. So, they start. We'll call this person the code slinger. They start at two years or so, a junior developer, not a lot of income, moderate amount of stress, free time, and impact. Let's see what happens over time. Let's watch this. Income jumps up quickly as they move into development. Stress goes up. Free time goes up. Satisfaction is good. Impact. Okay. Over ten years. Pretty linear. And then it starts leveling off. Things don't change a ton after that. So, relatively low stress, relatively low risk, relatively low reward, levels off pretty fast. Kind of a nine to five thing, and that's a pretty cool way to live your life. I think that works. You might see them wearing a T-shirt that might fall into the Sarcotype. All right. Moving on. The next scenario says, climb the ladder, wait your turn. It sounds pretty traditional. Let's go back to our homepage here. All right. And we're going to pre-populate the rest of these, because I don't want to do that again, ever. I put in a game genie. So, this person is going to be really connection dominant. And they're going to have a moderate to be pretty ambitious. They want to be in charge and not really interested in educating themselves, but they're going to work really hard. Not a lot of community work. Let's see what happens here. We'll call this person the cat herder. They start as a junior developer. This is going to hit, unfortunately, close to home for some people. So, after five years, they jump out of the dev track into the management track, and you see their stress levels go through the roof. It's going to be steadily free time. It's going to stay pretty low. All right. That doesn't look good. Let's see what happened here. So, it's a world of middle management. Good income, stress levels are completely off the charts. Anybody who's managed a team in a larger company can totally empathize with this person. If you find yourself in a cat herder position, this is probably how you were taught to delegate. All right. The next person just says, hey, I don't want a boss. Can I have that please? Okay. We'll give that to them. We'll grant them that. So, this person says I don't want a boss. They're going to be stronger on vision than skill or connection as far as inventory. It's pretty much the same as the last couple of tracks. Not a lot of leverage, a lot of hard work, a moderate amount of ambition. Let's see what happens. Okay. We'll call this person the harried freelancer. They start as a junior developer like everybody else. At five years, their income jumps up, they have their traditional track into becoming a freelancer. Stress goes way up because managing a freelance business is not the easiest thing for your first couple of years. Over time that goes down, income climbs, free time starts actually creeping up, and then if they can stick that out, income is going to be pretty good. Free time looks good. Let's find out what happened. So, it's slow starting becoming a freelancer, but it picks up well over time income-wise, and it can be a highly satisfying lifestyle. However, you never got. You never get to stop hustling. You're a real life Sonic the Hedgehog. Okay. The next person has something important to share with us. Let's find out what that is. All right. So, this person is highly on the skill side of things, and they're going to have a lot of levers. They understand their value, future, and present very well. Not a lot of education because they probably have a bunch of opinions they believe in, and they'll work really hard and have a strong sense of community. So, it starts as a junior developer like everybody else, but then they jump up to senior developer because they are pretty good at explaining their value. The income jumps up. Stress levels go really high over time. That actually, as you move up and speak and do things that your stress levels can actually go down, income jumps up. That seems good, I guess. Let's take a look. So, having a public persona has a big impact on your income, apparently. Speaking, authoring books, authoring authority, but it's a lot of work. Ask any author how much work it was and why it was worth it. You can build a reputation by telling everybody how they're doing it wrong, or you can become like a total internet celeb and collect lots of hacker news karma, which if you're unfamiliar with hacker news karma, it's basically like tickets at a Chuck E. Cheese's for nerds. Except the Chuck E. Cheese is on Mordor. I think it's next to the Applebee's. All right. Next scenario just wants to pivot the value. So, let's go find that person. So, this is going to be really strong connector type. And like the last one, a lot of understanding of value. A pretty dedicated person. Let's see what happens. We'll call this person a product manager. They start as a junior developer, like everybody else. Jump into project management at the first opportunity because they're like, hey, I can offer more value by connecting people than writing code. But their stress level, oh my gosh. Every time is terrible. Let's go up and watch those transition over time. Income climbs, well, satisfaction actually goes really high. So at VP of product level that sounds like an okay track. Let's take a look. That's going to be pretty much high stress forever. But your income can jump up quickly because you're constantly pivoting to add more value. You likely though will find yourself doing stuff that you don't like. And I hope you like using devices to assist you in holding long, long, long conference calls. I'm going to bullet for your team and handling meetings and conference calls. I say go for it. You can be on your Nordic track. All right. The next person just wants to build their dream workplace. So let's take a look at what they're up to. So this person says let's build the company I always wanted to work at. That's a pretty strong vision. Let's see their inventory. Similar to last time. Strong leverage, ambition, education. Let's take a look what happens. That's a junior developer. Again, understanding their value pops them in the senior developer pretty quickly. And then they jump out and they become a solopreneur and you watch that income actually drop drastically. It's stress jump up and wonder what the heck are you doing? But if they stick it out and survive that seems to get pretty good. That looks like a good setup. They still look like they have a lot of work ahead of them. But let's see. So satisfaction knows dives for this person when they're working for somebody else. The satisfaction goes up but they take this big income hit when transitioning into their own company. There's big risk there but a solid reward at the end. Like freelancing, you're going to spend a lot of time hustling. But unlike freelancing, if you survive and stick it out, it gets really nice later on. That looks really nice. Want to go to that spa. The next area wants to build better software together. So let's do that. Let's build some better software together. Let's collaborate. They're really high on the skill tree. They want to work really hard on the skill side. They're really dedicated to the community and they have a really strong sense of their value. We'll call this person the chief architect track. And you watch them jump into the senior developer quickly, become eventually VP of engineering. And then you watch that stress drop off at chief architect level which is interesting. Let's find out what happened there. All right. So this person is responsible for growing great developers and great code bases. They have met a responsibility. And demand largely only exists in larger companies which are kind of a mess. So for technicians, basically, though, it's about as much fun as you can have in a job. It's really cool when you're the person that can make good engineering happen. You really want one of these people on your team. At the front side, this is Charles. It feels so good when you get that solution right. All right. Let's talk about the next person. Scenario eight, let's solve an important problem together. All right. This person is a strong connector type. Let's look, wow. Maxing out their understanding of their value. Really strong education. They don't really want to work all that hard, but they're really dedicated to community and impact. So we'll call this person the badass CTO. Start as a junior developer. They jump into a team lead position and can guide people and connect people pretty quickly. They move into VP of engineering pretty early. Maybe like a small startup. Their stress levels are bananas. And then finally, the stress levels don't seem to go down, but income jumps way up and satisfaction seems really high. That seems like a good one to have. So let's see what happened. So there's very high income potential here. The stress levels never really let up because you're helping build a company and it's not really super friendly on allowing lots of downtime. Getting a team to pull together is really fun and satisfying for those connector types. You can really achieve an amazing result. So the next one we're going to talk about is the person that wants to change the world. Let's find out what they're up to. This person is... They don't have anything except for their vision. Let's find out what they're up to. Whoa, hang on. So you don't necessarily want to allocate all these points, but apparently somebody went in and just went bananas with the inventory system. Let's take a look. We'll call this person the visionary CEO. They start as a junior developer. They immediately bail. They're like, no, no, I'm going to Y Combinator. They found their first company. Their free time doesn't look so hot. Stress doesn't look so hot. Eventually, through all these experiences, they fail upwards. Awesome. But stress doesn't seem to let up either. Let's see what happened here. This is an extremely high-risk scenario. These are very strong risk-takers. It's high stress. It's low free time. I think we have lost our TV screen. That's okay. We're just going to play video games for free time anyway. Okay. So not a lot of people can pull this off. Balance in your life is going to really be shot, but there's nothing like the feeling of seeing your vision come to fruition through other people. However, it's not all sunshine and roses. You are responsible for payroll, et cetera. This is pretty much what it feels like. Oh, hi. There you are. So those are the nine paths. They all start a junior developer. They all involve learning to communicate, and they can all result in a happy life. Depending on the role, you want work to play in your life. Now, we need to jump into management philosophy. Now, I noticed a pattern a few years back in successful workplaces I've worked in. There are three archetypes that pull against each other and end up creating this productive kind of tension. These types correlate with the skills that we talked about earlier. First is the technician track. I can call this the distinguished developer track. Technicians are skill dominant. They're looking to level up, solve problems. They want to stay close to the code. They want to make sure that stuff that ships is high quality. They focus on how they explore new tools and techniques. You may find them building something just for the fun of it, of learning something new. Manager types are connection dominant. They can still be coders, but they're often social problem solvers. The manager type likes making sure that the right thing is being worked on. They gather information about new things and come up with novel ways of combining ideas. The third track entrepreneur. My dad is an entrepreneur type very much so. He once told me, when someday you will realize you're unemployable and it kind of stung because I worked for him at the time. So that's really true. A couple years later he's like, no, no, no, I meant it as a compliment. Basically you get tired of working for idiots and then at some point you realize they're all idiots. So entrepreneurship is the act of volunteering to be the idiot. And no, with the best of intentions he was taking his values as an entrepreneur to have me measure my own life even though I want different things. The entrepreneur types look for gaps in how the real world works and the way they see it working in the future. Then they try to describe that gap in a way that makes sense to people who can implement it for them. Like this, beautiful future. I worked at a company that did exactly this. We called it the magical taco fairy and they IPO'd for $3 billion so it seems like a good idea. So which one are you? That's a trick question because everybody has aspects of all of them but one of them could be dominant. I'm not much of a problem solver but I like connecting new ideas and people that can help. I think I fall pretty strongly in the manager type. One idea is that what you do when you're stressed can tell you a lot about where you enjoy spending your time. So when I'm stressed I talk to people. When I have a problem I think who can help me solve it? Each dominant type is pretty passionate about their values. My technician friends say do it right. My entrepreneurs say try something new. I always ask what's the problem we're trying to solve here? What's the practical application? When it's rooted in a sense of intrinsic brightness things can break down pretty quickly. Many others notice this pattern. You can read more about this stuff online. It's pretty fascinating. So the difference is all those outcomes is the inventory that we used and some people have more of these to give to others. So it's really important that we don't attach value judgments to that. So what's a platform? Basically your platform is the connection between what you can do, what you want to do and what other people believe you can do. Build your platform every time you create something and put it out into the world, every time you help someone, or do good work worthy of recommendation. As your platform grows, it actually starts finding battles on your behalf. And if you feed it right, it will open doors and create opportunities for you. So back to the formula, understand your present value and future value, invest in yourself and others, and you'll have a platform. And it's so cute. All right. So I'm going to talk to you from a marketing perspective for a moment. So pardon me. You need to know your value in terms of dollars. The absolute minimum is to understand what the market pays people for your kind of work. But the next level up is to use value-based pricing to avoid being priced like a commodity. I recommend you look into value-based pricing. It's essentially the very definition of what leverage is. And in a developer's case, you can often know the amount of profit that you generate, certainly in like a consultancy, but you probably bring a lot more to the table in terms of real dollars. Almost all developers outsource all this understanding to their bosses. That means bosses can pay exactly just enough to stop people from complaining and quitting. If you understand your value, though, you can get creative about adding more value and feeling good about asking to keep more of it. But more than money, knowledge of your value strengthens your platform by making it more portable. I can't know how much time you have to devote to learning, but I can say having a curious mind means that every interaction is an opportunity to learn. And you get to keep that. It goes in your platform. Investing in others is kind of tricky to recommend because it's all extracurricular. And how you do this, how much you do is different for everyone. I'm more of an organizer than a pull request opener. But everything you do in the world to help somebody else goes in your platform. And then effort is just how much you can carve out to focus on this stuff. If you make a few meetups a year or experiment with a new programming language or turn an office conversation into a blog post, you get to keep that stuff for your platform. And you're the only one that can make these decisions for you. You're going to pick the wrong job. You're going to wind up working for a sociopath at some point, in my case six times. And no, it's not going to take your career. All right. So three things to remember, know your preferences. If you feel like you're climbing the walls of your job, maybe ask whether you're, like, chasing your own weaknesses instead of playing through your own strengths. The second is to be intentional about building your platform, which is going to be different for different people. But the most important part of building a platform is that it forces you to be clear about what you really want. Speaking of conferences is a great way to build a platform. But leaving my small children behind to travel breaks their heart and breaks mine. And I'm backing off of that. If my platform was just about my career and what that does to my work, day to day, that would probably not be good. But if my platform is about having a happy life 30 years from now and figuring out what I want my family life to be like, then it's an essential part of my platform. If your platform is barely big enough to shelter you and your loved ones right now, that's totally okay. In fact, if you can, try to find somebody to help support you in this moment. At the minimum, just do the best work you can and be kind to who you can. Lastly, don't worry about achievement. Is achievement what you really want? Money, influence, recognition? Does that make us happy? Is it possible that instead what we actually want is to be the kind of person that we've seen achieve stuff? If you can do that, you can do that. You can do it on your own terms and in your own time. There's no one path to success, because there's no definition of success. But that doesn't stop from making one up every once in a while and maybe beating people upside the head with it. No one, not me, not anybody, has the right or authority to make you feel bad because you aren't following the path they did or that you want different things. To define success on my terms, which you can also do, I define it as the intersection of what you want to do, what you feel capable of doing, and what you actually do. No, I'm not telling you to quit your job. I am asking you to check your compass. Is it pointing toward what you really want? Are you checking it from time to time and following it when two rows diverge? I'm going to level with you. I've done the Whitman Sampler of those career tracks. I'm 36. I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. You might feel like this sometimes. If so, I promise your powers of intuition are stronger than you're giving them credit. You're not computer dog or upside down helicopter dog. You're calculus dog. Lastly, I want to take one moment to tell you how grateful I am and ask something. Anything I have that a person could label success, I owe to people who've reached out for me. From the person who introduced me to programming at work to the people who met me at Utah Ruby Users Group, took me in, mentored me, and gave me the guts to go after my first programming job, every job since has been through the community. If I could travel back six years and meet that sad, frustrated, not developer, marketer, he wouldn't recognize me and all the crazy, he wouldn't believe all the stories of the crazy stuff that's happened in the six years since. I couldn't have done this talk without help. My friend and coworker Lydia stepped in and helped me build that time travel app. A lot of the graphics came from Jen Schiffer's Make a Bit Art. A lot of inspiration and some great advice came from Sarah May. My friends have done the work that has changed my life. Up here on stage is not where that work happens. My most meaningful interactions have been with supportive people who've nudged me and pushed me and challenged me because they know my goals and they wanted to see me succeed. Think of somebody that's done that for you. At some point, you will have an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. You'll recognize it when it arrives. You won't feel ready. You won't feel qualified. My hope is that you'll have a clear enough memory of your experience, that you will be that hand for somebody else. It's going to be cool if these big, unstoppable, Voltron-like platforms we build for ourselves had a heart. Thank you.