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From Tech Sales to Engineering with Shaundai Person

Shaundai, a senior software engineer at Netflix, sits down to discuss their career transition from tech sales to software engineering.

Both Kent and Shaundai emphasize the role of individual strengths, such as communication skills, in career advancement. This is accentuated in an expansive corporate environment like Netflix, where interaction and collaboration with various departments become inevitable.

Netflix's culture is likened to a village that fosters autonomy and emphasizes individual skill sets. The company has recently diversified its senior engineering roles into various levels, offering more avenues for growth.

As the episodes comes to a close, Shaundai and Kent explore the concept of the "T-shaped" engineer, who possesses both depth and breadth in technical skills.

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00:00:00 Speaker 0: What is up everybody? I am joined by 1 of my very dear friends Shonda. Oh my goodness I almost said you're wrong and like I was getting partway through it and like I'm gonna say this wrong and I feel so bad It's a shonda person. Say hi Shonda Hi How embarrassing So cuz

00:00:20 like the thing is that you get, like people say your name wrong all the time and I am not 1 of those people. I say your name wrong.

00:00:26 Speaker 1: I know. I know. We've known each other for a while.

00:00:29 Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah. I actually, I always like to start these conversations by telling people how we met. And so I remember, let's see. Well, we definitely met online first, like the standard met you on Twitter and met you in real life at a conference. I'm trying to remember which conference it was though. So I don't remember.

00:00:49 Speaker 1: The first conference that I ever did in person was RemixConf. So,

00:00:54 Speaker 0: yeah. Did we not meet before RemixConf?

00:00:58 Speaker 1: No, no. Okay, my goodness. Isn't that crazy though? Like when you think about it.

00:01:02 Speaker 0: I feel like I knew you way better.

00:01:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, we did. So, okay. I do remember the first time that we talked, which was, we did a space when Twitter spaces was a big thing.

00:01:14 Speaker 0: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah.

00:01:15 Speaker 1: Yeah. And so that was the, I think the first time that we spoke together, we were just on a panel together. It was me, you, Michael Chan and Ben, I think from, he was at Stitch Fix at the time.

00:01:30 Speaker 0: Oh yeah. Like Badoo.

00:01:32 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And then I forget who was hosting it. I think it was Will Johnson, but definitely.

00:01:39 Speaker 0: I'm actually talking to Will this afternoon. Oh,

00:01:42 Speaker 1: awesome. Yeah, tell him I said, what's up? Like, yeah, that's my, that's my, another long term, long time dear friend of mine.

00:01:50 Speaker 0: Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's been great knowing you for all this time. And I think, like, I have some history with you and I know you pretty well. I think it'd be good for people to get to know you a little bit. So could you intro yourself? And actually, I'll also, before you do that, I'll mention that Shondae was on a episode of the Chats with Kent podcast

00:02:11 that you can find on my website too. And we talked about a lot of great stuff there as well. But yeah, Shondae, who are you?

00:02:20 Speaker 1: Awesome, yeah, I am Shondae person. I am a senior software engineer at Netflix. Just hit my two-year mark last month So about a month ago rats.

00:02:30 Speaker 0: That's awesome. It's it only been 2 years. I feel like it's been longer.

00:02:34 Speaker 1: I know. I know. I've just been like, I've gone through, it feels fast and short at the same time or fast. Yeah. Long and short at the same time. It's like the days are long, but the years are short. And I just look up and I'm like, wow, I can't believe it's been that long, but I still feel in a lot of ways like a newbie at

00:02:54 the same time. But yeah,

00:02:56 Speaker 0: a newbie who works as a senior engineer at Netflix. Yeah. Okay.

00:03:00 Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So my team is the productivity engineering team. So we're concentrated on providing a great experience for other Netflix developers. So other Netflix developers are our customers and doing things that are

00:03:20 in the interest of making them more productive, whatever that means. And I'll talk more about that, but yeah, so my day to day job is I'm in a UI engineer. I, my tech stack is React, TypeScript and GraphQL. And I'm looking to learn more about the backend as

00:03:40 well. Like I caught myself the other day, it was on a Saturday at night, looking up database architecture and like finding that I was fascinated like I was a really...

00:03:52 Speaker 0: Well, who of us hasn't gotten sucked into database architecture on a Saturday night?

00:03:57 Speaker 1: Oh it's true, it's true. No, just like 1 of the regular nerds. Yeah.

00:04:05 Speaker 0: Very cool.

00:04:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. So, that's me. Outside of work, I also, I'm a conference speaker. I love being in front of people and I love teaching. I am working on a course as well on TypeScript, TypeScript for JavaScript developers, so you can find that at ts4js.com, t-s-f-o-r-j-s.com.

00:04:27 And I'm a mom of 1 five-year-old, soon-to-be six-year-old, very fun son.

00:04:35 Speaker 0: Yeah, he's adorable. Well, that is, yeah, thank you for sharing all that I I would like to start with Maybe with the fact that you are a senior engineer at Netflix, which is, like, my understanding of Netflix is they have a very

00:04:55 high bar for the engineers that they hire, and the fact that you've been there for 2 years, yeah, yeah. The fact you've been there for 2 years like says that either they haven't found out in all that time, or you like legit, a legit senior engineer at Netflix, which I think is more likely based on

00:05:15 what I know of you. And this is not your first job. And we kind of talked about this more in depth in our other chat, but I'd like to get a little sense of like, how does 1 get into the place where you're at as quickly as you did?

00:05:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm happy to go through a little bit of the background behind where I am. And then I can talk about kind of how, how to get there. So I'm a career switcher. I spent the majority of my career in sales as

00:05:56 tech sales. Most of it was tech sales, but I also I've sold everything from nail polish to bed sheets, to knives, to, consulting services, to, to CSOs and to CMOs. And then, tech was my favorite. And what III

00:06:16 stayed away from things tech because I thought it was too nerdy. Now, let me caveat that because I love, I've always embraced being a nerd. And I've always embraced being smart, but I've always been a social person. And

00:06:36 the amount of social depends, depends on what I'm going through in life right now. But like, I've always been a social person and so I've looked for positions where I can interact with people. I love psychology. I love soft skills. I love just connecting with other folks, human to human. And I felt like

00:06:57 engineering and careers where you're just looking at a screen or looking at a sheet of paper, like accounting and things like that. I was like, those are too antisocial. Like I wouldn't be happy just being in a silo. So I stayed away from it. I kind of fell into my first job in tech, my sales

00:07:17 job at tech and in tech. And I was selling to engineers and. It was just like 1 of those things where you just find yourself, getting really caught up and passionate about different things. Like I had fun selling, but I found that the thing that I found most interesting

00:07:37 was the things that the engineers were doing with our software. Like the software that I was selling is called MATLAB and Simulink. So a lot of people who went for computer science degrees probably use that in school, but it's mathematical computation software and software for simulating dynamic systems, like all the nerdiest stuff.

00:07:58 So NASA was 1 of my customers, Like NASA was, so I'm selling to literal rocket scientists. And like, so some of my customers are building rovers to bring us to the moon. Other customers are farmers who are trying to calculate the amount of chemicals and combination of chemicals that are gonna grow the biggest oranges

00:08:18 in the soil. And I'm like, wow, this is cool stuff. Like you can do so much with technology. We have robotics competitions and things like that. And I'm like, just tech is, it's such a cool place. But I didn't know if I had a place because I like to speak to people. So that's why I got into sales and,

00:08:38 there were different highlights in my life where I'm like, you know, tech is something that I should figure out, or like learn more about. And the big trigger for me was when I left my sales job to start a business and I went to build my website and I wanted to customize the site.

00:08:59 And so I had to learn Liquid, which is Shopify's Ruby-based language. It was a Shopify site. And I found that I was having so much more fun customizing the site than I was actually like getting these deals. So, So yeah, it was like a natural transition, but all that to say, I

00:09:20 started in engineering through, I'm about, it's about to hit 3 years. Is that right? Yeah, it's, this is 2013. Yeah. So I'm almost at my 3 year anniversary in, it'll be next month, 3 year anniversary in engineering itself. My first job was at a company. My first engineering

00:09:40 job was at a company that built software for salespeople. So it was perfect for me because I knew the customer and I was previously the customer. So, I could not only flex my UI skills and all the things that I learned from courses like Epic web,

00:10:02 but also I was able to leverage skills that I had learned in sales, like my UX skills, my passion for people and understanding what makes them tick and bringing the conversation not about just like tech and which buttons should like be

00:10:22 here or what they should look like, but more of like, how are we going to best serve the customer? And so, I'm having conversations with customers still. I am having conversations with other teams like design. I'm having conversations with the backend team. And I'm like 1, I'm able

00:10:42 to flex those, that muscle of like communication and my passions for having that human to human connection. But I'm also bringing that human, that level of humanity into the tools that I'm building because I care about the user's experience. I also care about the developer experience too, which makes productivity

00:11:03 engineering such a perfect career for me. So, so yeah, I, to answer, to circle back about your question about how do you get to where I'm at so, so, so fast, I, If I had to put it down on 1 thing, cause there's

00:11:23 a combination of a

00:11:24 Speaker 0: ton of

00:11:24 Speaker 1: things that had to fall into place, but I would say play to your strengths. And 1 of my strengths I would say is this ability to connect with other people. And so I've used that as, a way to network and to find jobs. I've used that

00:11:44 as a way to, communicate and also continue to grow in the way that I communicate. Like, I don't feel like anybody is a master communicator that never, like, you know, you, you get to a stopping point and you don't have anything else to learn about how to communicate with people. I'm always looking to grow and like be a better communicator, be more empathetic,

00:12:04 be more understanding, be more articulate and provide people value in the ways that they want to be provided value. So, and what I mean by that is there's a lot of, there's a way that you can provide value that's like, okay, I'm doing something that I think is important,

00:12:25 but have you proved that value with your customers? Like, is that something that your customer thinks is important too. So that's something that I care about is just making sure that the people around me, the stakeholders are happy and I'm providing the type of value that they're looking for from me. So very broad answer, But yes, I

00:12:45 would say that like platypus strengths and human to human connection is my 1 of my strengths. So that's That's what I attribute to why I am where I am.

00:12:56 Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah, I think your care for communication also probably helps you be a little more assertive in like a good way. Not overbearing, but like, you know, like, hey, no, I was a part of this or, hey, I wanna be a part of this or whatever. So yeah, I think that's a lot of really

00:13:17 good pieces of advice, also like caring about the customer or even in the context of work at a big organization, you can almost consider your boss to be the customer of you, you know, like you are providing services for your boss. And yeah, so I think that makes a lot of sense and hopefully

00:13:37 folks listening have get some good takeaways from that.

00:13:41 Speaker 1: Thanks, yeah, yeah. Yes, and to Expound on your point about being assertive. Yes. It's also a work in progress as well. So I found that so in my nature is to be a people pleaser and it's like I care about human human to human connection,

00:14:01 but sometimes to a fault. And it's like, I care so much about you liking me that I'm willing to sacrifice things that make me happy so that you can be happy. So that is something that I'm continuously working on is just like setting boundaries. I'm always like, oh yes, I wanna be in the room, but it's like,

00:14:21 when do you say no? When do you stop? What are the limits and things? And how much are you willing to bend in order to like, you know, keep yourself happy and keep your sanity at the same time.

00:14:35 Speaker 0: Yeah, I think that is, that could be a whole other podcast to talk about, like, how do you manage that without burning out and all that stuff too? Yes, absolutely. So, transitioning a little bit more into the next, so you got your job at Netflix and things have been going super well. And you mentioned

00:14:55 to me that there's a little bit of a reorg and you're looking toward the future of what your opportunities are within Netflix, but like what's the next level after a senior engineer? So what's the situation you're finding yourself in right now?

00:15:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, right now I am a senior and at Netflix we have just introduced this concept of levels. So, previously, this is maybe a year and a half ago or almost, Yeah, a year and a half ago, I would say.

00:15:33 You get hired into Netflix and everybody's a senior engineer, whether you came in as, you know, you were a principal at your last company or whether you were a junior at your last company, you're called senior software engineer. And there's no other leveling than that. It's just like unspoken. This person's been here for a while, so this person probably knows what they're doing. And, so they introduced

00:15:53 this concept of levels. There aren't many levels. I think there's like 5 total levels, but, within the level that I am, There's a huge area where you can grow and I would say Realistically, I'm probably like closer to the the lower level of it lower level

00:16:13 senior because I'm still early career and I'm starting to learn these skills that it takes to kind of get to the next level. So without a title change, there are, there's plenty of learnings to do and,

00:16:33 think like mentorship that, I'm looking for so that I can get to the next mental level. So certain things that I'm, kind of, in, what's the word? Certain things that are like on my radar right now in terms of growth

00:16:54 are architecture. Like how are we architecting good software, strong, hard software, and software that's sustainable for the long term. So like what type of patterns are we adopting? What type of patterns are we building so that we

00:17:14 can consider the needs of not just what we need right now, but like the future needs. Or as we're onboarding more people, like you mentioned, we have gone through kind of a reorg and Netflix is good for a reorg. Like we'll have a reorg once a month, pretty much. But right now we've switched, we split our

00:17:34 UI team and our backend team and our design team into different managers. And we all kind of, we'll work together on a project basis, but our reporting structure is like, you know, UI goes to my manager. And so, now we're trying to figure out how to

00:17:56 communicate effectively, between different groups so that we're not operating in silos.

00:18:02 Speaker 0: Yeah.

00:18:02 Speaker 1: And then also as we're onboarding new people, because we've done a good bit of hiring over the past couple months, how are we building software that is easy to onboard into? And how are we providing the best onboarding experience for new folks? And so we're constantly asking for feedback,

00:18:23 like asking for contributions to the docs and things so that we're learning more, we're challenging our own like processes in the way that we've always done things. And we're also like setting things up so that in the future things just get more and more scalable and stay maintainable in the long term.

00:18:43 So there's, it's a lot. It's, there's been, There's been a lot of challenges and things that I'm learning from. Some things learning before I do it and some things I'm learning the hard way after like, the things I've been paid.

00:19:05 Speaker 0: There's only so much that the book smarts can get you as well. Sometimes you just have to go through it. For some reason I'm thinking of Hermione Granger when she was learning how to fly in on broom. She like read all the books, but she couldn't do it.

00:19:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good, that's a really good analogy.

00:19:23 Speaker 0: Actually, you said something that, surprised me a little bit and also like, and made me feel, more encouraged about the state of things, and that is that Netflix has been hiring quite a bit in the last couple of months. Which is encouraging because, you know, about a year ago is when lots of the layoffs in tech started, and

00:19:43 so I guess maybe at least at Netflix, things are kind of balancing out again and we can start growing in different areas and stuff, which is nice.

00:19:51 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I hope that's the way that, the, the trend stays. And we, like, I, I feel like we have really good leadership. That, I, I trust, I trust. I, yeah, I, I trust my leaders. Sorry to sound so hesitant, but I'm like, yeah, I feel like I

00:20:11 trust them. But yeah, I feel like we have really good leadership and I feel like just overall the company is going in a good direction and I hope that this is a signal that the market in general, like the job market is going to be in a good place because

00:20:32 the last thing, it has been a stressful time since the pandemic, you know, with all of the ups and downs and more downs and things like that.

00:20:44 Speaker 0: Yeah, It's been a wild ride. Hopefully it's over soon. Right. Well, okay, so you've got a lot of opportunity that you're looking for. You've just like split up into these teams that are organizationally, it sounds like they're siloed, but like we, anybody with experience in

00:21:04 this industry knows that those silos can cause a lot of problems from a code perspective. And so my guess is that as you get higher in levels at Netflix, you'll be, like, you'd probably still be on that same team, but you'll be expected to collaborate more with the other

00:21:24 teams around you. Is that the case? Is that what like you're working on yourself?

00:21:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So yes, This is actually a conversation that I had with my manager. So there, yesterday actually. So there are, communication is 1 thing that, again, I continue to lean on. And I feel like, This is my opinion, communication and like

00:21:49 having a good, the ability to communicate well, if I can communicate that way. Having the ability to communicate well can really make or break your ability to succeed at any company, you know, nevermind a big company, but you can get so lost in, a big

00:22:09 company when you're not able to listen and when you're not able to communicate out your point and what your role is in a project. And to give you an idea of the overall culture of Netflix, I feel like it's, I use this analogy all the time. I feel like it's like a village, right? So when I first came

00:22:29 in, sorry, that was a weird thing to say, but I'll explain. So when I first came in, I expected Netflix to kind of be just like a bigger version of any other company that I've been at. And so, I'm expecting like rules and processes and like my role

00:22:50 is gonna be very well defined and I have my box that I'm supposed to stay in and just you know this is just the way that it is it's like you know you stick with what you you know you have like this list of criteria that gets you promoted to the next level, and then you play by the rules, and then you get moved to the next level. No, and Netflix,

00:23:12 like I said, it's like a village. So you just come in and you're like, hey, I know how to grow vegetables. Like I'm going to be a farmer and I'm going to barter like my vegetables for whatever thing you have. And then you meet a cobbler and they're like, well, I got shoes. So I'll trade you. I need vegetables. I'll trade you for this and that. So it's like, when you come into Netflix, everybody.

00:23:32 Assumes that you're smart. And that was different for me. It's like, nobody's challenging me. Nobody's like, you know, where did you come from? Or like looking me up on LinkedIn, like how, well, how, what are your accolades? Everybody's just like, hey, you're smart. Here's the stuff that we have to get done. What can you do? Like, what part of this are you gonna own, really?

00:23:52 And you gather the resources, we have whatever you need. Like, you gather the resources and you figure out how to make it successful and just do it in the best interest of Netflix. And then

00:24:02 Speaker 0: so they treat you like an adult. That's amazing.

00:24:05 Speaker 1: Mind blowing stuff. I'm like, are we for real? Right. Like, no one's going to tell me no, you know? So I'm

00:24:11 Speaker 0: like, yeah.

00:24:13 Speaker 1: And what I love about it is like, So there are personalities that don't thrive under that environment. And it's like, if you need clear boundaries, if you need somebody to tell you, like this is where your work starts and stops, it's hard for you to be successful at a company like Netflix, I found that

00:24:33 I learned so much. I've learned so much in the past 2 years because nobody's putting limits on me. So all I have to do is like grow and grow and grow, and I can grow at the pace that I want to, which is typically fast. Like I, like, I want to absorb as much of this stuff. Like, I love it. So I want to absorb as much of this stuff. Like I love it. So I want to absorb as much of this. I'm like taking courses. I'm learning about database

00:24:54 architecture on a Saturday night. Like, you know, I want to, I care about this stuff. So I want to grow And nobody's putting any limitations on how much I can grow and how fast I can grow. So absolutely great environment. So that said, without communication, like without being able to communicate, you can get

00:25:14 lost in this village. Like if, especially working remote and I work remote. So it's like, people are trusting you to do stuff, but you have to be able to rally a team behind your idea. You have to be able to tell everybody that I'm doing this and this is the reason why I'm doing this. It's because it's in the best interest

00:25:34 of Netflix. This is because it's a priority, not a priority for me. This is a priority for our customers as evident by the things that I've done. And so, and also like, as we talked about with the division of the teams from UI and backend and design, I might have an idea of like, okay, Hey, I'm

00:25:54 a cobbler. I'm going to put together this whole shoe business and we're going to start making like these, these Jordans. And, you know, we're going to put it in this gray color that we've never done before. But like design, has design been bought into that? Has design already done that? Or like when it comes time for me to develop the UI for this

00:26:15 shoe, whatever it is. It's going to be

00:26:17 Speaker 0: a metaphor. So let

00:26:18 Speaker 1: me stop with the analogy. When it comes time for me to develop the UI for this, it has the backend been set up with all of the data, like have they built the data in the way that, or have they structured the data in a way that is going to, make it easy for me to just go ahead

00:26:38 and build this UI. So, and it's, it's especially important at a large company where people can, and like that, where, you know, people can just get absorbed into a whole other project and not know that you need something or you haven't communicated that you're going to need this by this date in order to not be blocked by the,

00:26:58 for the thing that you have to get done. So communication is super important. Then to add to that, when we're onboarding new people, we have to have documented, these are the decisions that we made. This is what's here. Like this is the code structure.

00:27:18 This is why we structured it in the way that we did. So that when people come on board and they're like, hey, you know, I'm new to the village, what can I do? They don't have to go through all of the decision-making things that we went through. They don't have to like figure out who to ask about why we're doing the things that we do or like ask people

00:27:39 where to find the things that they need. They can just get up and running and go really quickly, which saves us a lot of time, a lot of money, human resources, the most important and the most expensive resources, saving them time. So yes, all of that communication is super important.

00:27:56 Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah. That is so, so key to being successful like especially at a big organization, but even at smaller companies too. It's really important. I often say you can be the best engineer in the world, but if nobody knows, then it's not gonna help you much. You won't get the work you want to

00:28:16 do. You won't get the promotions that you want, all of that.

00:28:19 Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely.

00:28:21 Speaker 0: I want you to confirm for me a thesis or idea that I have, or like honestly, it's the entire thing I'm basing Epic Web on, and that is this. At a big company at Netflix, or companies like Netflix,

00:28:42 you typically end up specializing. Rather than like building, you know, taking the whole thing front to back, you're gonna specialize in 1 piece of this and then collaborate. In Epic Web Dev, I'm teaching everybody how to be full stack engineers. And I think teaching them the entire stack will be

00:29:02 helpful to them, even if they end up specializing in a big company. Because I believe that understanding the entire stack, you should be at a level where you're like, I have a pretty good understanding of how to accomplish all tasks at any level of this deck. And if you're

00:29:22 at that level, then you will be able to collaborate much more effectively with people regardless of their level. Is that like been your experience at Netflix?

00:29:30 Speaker 1: 100%. So, and it's funny timing because I just got back last week from, our offsite and it was like a bunch of meetings, our entire org, our platform org, which is where product productivity engineering falls under. Had, an offsite and 1 day

00:29:51 was just full of meetings. And so we're hiring new grads now, which is new to Netflix. And 1 of the new grads got up and asked our directors a question, which was, how do I, like, how do I figure out whether or not to lean toward being a generalist or a specialist? And she was like, as a grad,

00:30:11 a new grad in school, she was taught the full stack, you know, everything. And she, you know, she was taught all of that and she's like how much of that is actually relevant when I get into this role and the response was that This it's something that kind of evolves in your career is like you'll naturally fall into this specialist

00:30:32 role but that said is it's it's not something that you have to kind of decide on. It is essential to be able to have breadth as well as depth. And when I first started at Netflix, and I think in our book, it's called no rules rules.

00:30:52 It's a book that, our founders wrote about the Netflix culture. They talk about this concept of the T-shaped engineer and Netflix isn't the only company that talks about this, but the concept is that you want to structure your, your, skills and experience in a T shape as you go to an engineer. So the, the,

00:31:13 the. Vertical part of, yeah, the vertical part of the T is your depth. And this is where your specialty is. And so that could be whatever your interest is in or whatever you feel like you're the best at and will make you the most money, Like whatever is important to you, that's what you decide

00:31:33 to specialize in. But like you said, in order to effectively communicate, it's best to have, and not just to communicate, also to be able to, if you're encountering a problem, let's say I'm, I'm specializing in UI, which, which I am in order to diagnose a problem. It's, it's never just

00:31:53 a UI problem. There's always some component that has to do with like back end or the middle part, which GraphQL to me is the middle part, or something else. And so in order to diagnose those problems, to debug, to figure out how to resolve it, you need that breadth, which is the horizontal part of the T. So you need to have like

00:32:13 at least a baseline understanding of a number of other domains so that you can be an effective team player, you know, unless you're working for your own company by yourself. And even then, I would say it's, it's essential to be able to have all of these, like a little bit of

00:32:34 skills from other areas. The fun part of that too, not that that part isn't fun, but another fun part of that is like, you get to discover other things that you may not have been interested in, Like for me with engineering in general, like I would have never known that this would be such

00:32:54 a perfect career for me if I hadn't expanded my sales, like the things that I was selling beyond nail polish and stuff like that. So yeah, I say like the more experience, the breadth of experience with different technologies, the better.

00:33:11 Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah, I think that is awesome. We can say that's a T for team. So you can work better with the team. That's awesome. So, and the side benefit of that too, is that you feel so much more empowered to do stuff. So, if the backend team is like, you know, I know this would make your life easier, but we've got all these other priorities.

00:33:32 And you say, well, could I make a pull request? And if you aren't a T-shaped engineer, then like the idea of making a pull request on, you know, an area that you're not comfortable with is very foreign. But if you're T-shaped, then like, yeah, I could probably figure it out. And on top of that too, let's say 1 day you decide, you

00:33:52 know what, I want to do like the startup thing. I want to, I got to throw my own thing together. You'll be way more capable of doing that if you have more breadth of experience. And so, yeah. Good, I'm glad that my whole premise around Epic Web is even works for enterprise level engineers.

00:34:12 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I can't wait to take this course, by the way. I feel like...

00:34:18 Speaker 0: Oh, I hope you love it.

00:34:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's going to be good. It's going to be so good.

00:34:22 Speaker 0: Sweet. Well, Shonda, this has been an awesome chat. I always love chatting with you. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn't get into in our conversation so far?

00:34:32 Speaker 1: No, no. Like if you're wanting to connect with me, hang out, like the place you can always find me on is Twitter. And my Twitter handle, my everything handle is just my first name. So I'll spell it if you are just listening, but S-H-A-U-N-D-A-I. You can find me anywhere.

00:34:53 The beauty of having a unique name is that I'm easily Googleable.

00:34:58 Speaker 0: Yeah, and actually you can find Shandé in the instructions of the exercises as well. Right. Yeah, there's the exercise about managing sessions in the authentication workshop where I give an example of like somebody logs into a computer

00:35:19 in a library and then leaves and forgets to log off What do they do? And Shonda is our example person. So thank you I thought it was perfect. And actually, I think I should look it up and not say it wrong, but I think what I say in there is like Shondae is a

00:35:39 great person or something

00:35:40 Speaker 1: like that. Oh, that's right, yeah.

00:35:43 Speaker 0: I think it's great. Shondae, it's just a pleasure. And thank you so much for giving us some of your time today to chat about your experience at Netflix. I hope folks get a lot out of this. And yeah, we'll see you all on the internet.

00:35:57 Speaker 1: Bye. Thanks for having me.

00:35:58 Speaker 0: Bye everybody.