In this RedMonk conversation, Emily Winck, Staff Engineer at CallRail, and Jess Burns, Engineering Manager at 1Password, join Kate Holterhoff to reflect on their shared experiences working on the engineering team at a digital marketing agency. In addition to trading war stories, they discuss the gender balance in engineering teams, how agency life compares to SaaS companies, the Covid19 pandemic, challenges of remote work, bootcamps, hiring, and the impact of AI on software development.

Links

• LinkedIn: Emily Winck
• LinkedIn: Jess Burns
• Dogstagram: @jett_fast
• Sohail Saifi, Why Remote Work Is Secretly Destroying Junior Developers’ Careers,” Medium, 9 June 2025.

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk conversation. name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. And with me today, I have two guests, Emily Winck, staff engineer at CallRail, and Jess Burns, engineering manager at 1Password. And we have thing in common, which is that Emily, Jess, and I were all part of the engineering team at a digital marketing agency that’s located in Atlanta called Nebo. So I was at Nebo for about three years. Emily was there for a whopping 15 years.

And Jess was there for seven years. And so I’m super excited to dig into our experiences there and talk a little bit about how agency life differs from SaaS companies and many, many other things. So Jess and Emily, thanks so much for joining me on the MonkCast.

Jess Burns (00:58)
Thanks for having us.

Emily Winck (00:59)
Yeah,

this is fun.

Kate Holterhoff (01:01)
All right, so excited to have you both here. And so I do want to address the elephant in the room. And that is the fact that Nebo totally set me on a path of believing that most engineering teams have these wonderfully balanced gender ratios, which I have learned is just not true of most companies. So Jess was the engineering manager at Nebo. Emily was a backend engineer, and I was on the front end.

team. And I guess it really made for an awesome transition for me from academia, where I worked for a decade, to working on an engineering team. so it established some feelings about what an engineering team should look like that I understand are kind of unconventional. I’ve heard that 30 % of most engineering teams are usually women.

So, what was your experience like just in terms of being a woman on an engineering team, starting out at Nebo?

Jess Burns (02:01)
Yeah, well, I can say that when I started at Nebo, so Emily had already been there for some time. And I can’t remember exactly what your title was, Emily, when I started, but you were essentially like the de facto leader. And I remember being like, that’s cool that Nebo has, you know, this woman on the team that’s been there for a really long time. And she, she’s the boss. know, I know that you only worked.

part-time at the time that I joined, but even at those part-time days, you were the woman in charge. And so I remember being, because I was pretty early in my career at that point. I remember feeling, yeah, really excited about that. So yeah, that was really awesome coming into that team.

Emily Winck (02:45)
Yeah, when I started, I started there right out of college and so I didn’t have really any professional, I had worked as like an intern in my college’s IT department. So there’s not a whole lot, like it was very small,

but also like not, there were some women that I interacted with there, but anyway, this was my first like real job out of college when I started at Nebo. And there were two other developers, we called them at the time. There were two other developers when I started there who were both men, but it was so tiny that it didn’t feel like it was, I didn’t feel like the odd person out by any means. And it was just very slow, natural growth. Like by the time Jess started, I think our engineering team was maybe like seven people or something.

still pretty small in terms of all the developers. Since it’s a marketing agency, we had lots of other teams doing other stuff.

I’m trying to think before you started Jess, I don’t know if there were any other women on the team at the time. There had been some that had like come and gone over the years. But I think because I had started there so early and stayed for such a long time, like the bosses really trusted me and knew me. And so it was never like an issue. You know, I didn’t have to like come in and prove myself or like feel like, you know, there was some, like I never really, I never felt there was any bias.

in that regard, like within Nebo, there were a few like client calls that were a little awkward. There was one employee we hired after I think both of you left who didn’t last very long who it was like he had a problem reporting to me which was very interesting to like experience that because it was really the first time that there was any like noticeable issue that I felt being a woman in engineering.

So yeah, but it was, think it wasn’t ever like a super intentional thing to try and hire women at Nebo, but it happened naturally. And maybe part of that was like having established a pattern that like, you know, I was involved in the hiring. And so I don’t know if I subconsciously tried to hire more women or whatnot, but you know, I think it was a good, certainly a good environment to have.

like a good environment that we had there just because there was a track record, like there never was a time when I was there, obviously, that there weren’t other women on the engineering team.

Kate Holterhoff (04:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, that was absolutely the sense that I got. And I’m glad you set that precedent because it should be more universal. I thought it was awesome.

Jess Burns (05:22)
yeah, it’s just, it was just special. It’s just a special place. But yeah, yeah, there wasn’t any time at Nebo that I felt like I was the odd person out. not at all on the teams. did have a couple of clients that, you At first, like I would be in charge of the project, but they would like email and address the person that I was reporting to technically at the time who was a male. so it’s like that process, no, actually I’m the person that is doing all the technical work on your project. Or like, I’m the person you should be asking questions. So there were a couple instances of that. Not that I would say it’s like malicious or anything of that nature, but yeah, I think that that was really the only.

Kate Holterhoff (05:52)
jeez.

Jess Burns (06:06)
time at Nebo that it ever felt like it was a it was a thing you know

Kate Holterhoff (06:13)
Right. And now that you both are at different companies, at SaaS companies, would you say that that has changed your experience there? Is the gender balance as good as it was at Nebo? How have you moved that forward or extended it to your new roles?

Emily Winck (06:29)
I think I feel really lucky that where I am right now at CallRail, we have a similarly, I feel like very healthy gender balance. It’s never gonna be 50-50, I think just because of the nature of who goes into tech for the most part. But when I was interviewing for jobs, when I was thinking about leaving Nebo, one of the things that really impressed me about CallRail is that my technical interview was two women interviewing me. And I was like…

I was very surprised by that and really excited about the potential, just what that meant that like the people they trusted enough to do interviews were like two senior software engineers. And then the team I joined, I think when I joined there were maybe like six engineers and three of us were women. And so I kind of just like moved from one great place to another in the sense of like places that

there’s enough women that there’s another one on the team. I mean, that’s not true of every single team at CallRail, but my experience has been that, again. Although I’m on a team now where I’m the only woman, but there’s only three of us. And so it’s not really big enough for a sample size. But yeah, I think the one thing I have noticed being at a SaaS company that has a lot more engineers, I think we probably have 50 or something like that.

There’s a decent number of women, but there are noticeably fewer in like the staff and principal roles than at the lower levels. And I don’t know like the history of that or, you know, like I haven’t been there long enough to know or to see like who’s getting promoted and not, who’s leaving and not and things like that. But that is one thing I’ve noticed is while there are a lot of female engineers, there’s only, there’s like one of eight.

principals and like two of ten staff are women or something so it’s smaller numbers higher up. That being said we also have female like directors and one of our VPs is a woman so like there’s there are women higher up just not in every single tier.

Jess Burns (08:40)
Yeah, I would say that matches my experience pretty well of like there are still women. and I’ve been on teams with various makeup of the ratio of male to female, and there are definitely leaders higher up. you know, I’ve seen female engineering directors, female engineering VP. but yeah, that like high technical track. Yeah, definitely way fewer.

women there. And so yeah, like there have been women in those positions of like staff engineer architect, but definitely very much outweighed by men at that, especially top tier of the tech track versus like the management track.

Emily Winck (09:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (09:29)
And both of you got into the technical field in a very conventional way, the sense that you went to college and studied, I’m assuming, computer science. Is that right for your degree, CS?

Jess Burns (09:37)
Emily, I have a computer science degree but Emily does not, so yeah.

Emily Winck (09:39)
I do not.

Kate Holterhoff (09:40)
What is your, yeah, what did you study?

Emily Winck (09:42)
I dual majored in Spanish and visual communications. I really thought I wanted to graphic design, which is what the visual communications was. The Spanish was just for fun.

And so I started out doing like web design when I was in like high school and then in college when I was working for the IT department, I was doing more of that. But I was also doing programming stuff. Like I learned ColdFusion in high school and HTML and then I picked up PHP. And by the time I was graduating, I realized I really enjoyed the programming side of web development more than the design side. And I had like built some sites on the side for like a nonprofit and some of

stuff I had done for some professors. So like I had some experience and so I just applied for development jobs out of college and so I don’t have a computer science degree. I think I took like a C class in high school maybe is like the extent of my formal programming education.

Kate Holterhoff (10:41)
Amazing. Okay, yes, I didn’t realize that. Okay, but you started while you were in college. you could, that’s when, okay. And so Jess and Emily, you have been doing this for a long time at this point. As we sort of close out this particular segment of the conversation, I’m curious, in the time that you’ve been in this field, have you seen things change in terms of representation in this?

Emily Winck (10:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (11:07)
field? Are you seeing more women applying? And frankly, in the past like five years, have you seen like maybe post COVID? Have you seen things change at all? I mean, I know the boot camp industry has sort of been gutted after the the recent layoffs. So I’m you know, I’m curious what you know, what does that look like right now?

Jess Burns (11:26)
Yeah, I think I’ve seen some changes in a couple places. So I have like a random story to tell. It’s kind of like a funny sad story, I want to see where go with it. Not sure if I’ve ever actually told either of you this story before, but a number of years ago, I went to a large programming conference hosted here in Atlanta. I won’t say which one it was because that I don’t want to accidentally diss on anyone by accident, but

Kate Holterhoff (11:34)
Let’s hear it.

no.

Jess Burns (11:56)
Like large programming conference in the middle of downtown Atlanta. So this is like a large affair. It was the first day of the conference and they get through the first keynote and then everybody breaks up to like go to their different sessions, right? But of course everybody goes to the bathroom first because they’ve been like drinking coffee and they’ve had breakfast. And so when I was in college, we used to always joke amongst the women in my computer science program. Like there’s never a line for the bathroom.

at like a programming event because there are so few women and So everybody rushes to the bathroom at this program conference. There’s just this gigantic line of men and I’m just like, no, it’s gonna take forever for me to go to the bathroom I’m walking past this huge line of men that’s like spilled out into the main conference area and I get to the women’s bathroom and there’s no line outside of it. So I’m like

Yes, it still holds true. No lying to the women’s bathroom. And then I got into the bathroom and the lights were off. And so there were like so few women at this conference that the lights were off in the bathroom. I had to turn on the lights for the bathroom. And I think over time, and especially since COVID, there’s been a lot more of a push to get folks like women involved in like conferences have taken a sort of different

Kate Holterhoff (13:04)
wow.

Jess Burns (13:20)
perspective of like being more inclusive, especially here in Atlanta, I’ve seen a number of more inclusive conferences. And so the last conference that I went to, I forget which one that must have been like a REFACTR.TECH conference, there was definitely a line to the women’s bathrooms. So that was good. But I also see a lot of like

Women applying for internship positions as well, which is really good to see. Women coming through computer science programs or they have like a dual major and so they’re exploring a couple of different options beyond necessarily like I was straight computer science. I’m going to be a programmer for the rest of my life. And they’re like exploring these alternative paths or they’re coming from different pathways into.

software engineering by whatever means that is. And I have to say some of the best programmers or some of the best software engineers, it’s about more than just programming, are definitely folks that didn’t come from traditional computer science backgrounds. And so I think it’s become more accessible for folks to get into organizations as time goes on. And just like that awareness spreads and you know, there’s more focus on.

software technologies, definitely some of the investment like post COVID, which I got to hope most recent years had helped a lot of tech companies kind of boom. And so we had a lot of hiring and a lot of women like getting into pipelines through that. So I think there’s been an improvement. There’s still a long way to go for sure.

I’m seeing more alternative like paths into software engineering than I used to, which is really good to see.

Kate Holterhoff (15:12)
All right.

Emily Winck (15:12)
Yeah, I’m kind of out of the loop on all that because I don’t hire people anymore. It’s not my job. So it’s been a while since I’ve had to like, I know, right? One of the many reasons I stopped being a manager. Yeah, I think, you you still see a fair amount of boot camp people, I think, but like the people I work with right now, there are very few.

Kate Holterhoff (15:17)
Shoot.

Jess Burns (15:20)
What a shame.

Kate Holterhoff (15:23)
You

Emily Winck (15:37)
And a surprisingly few number who have a computer science degree, maybe 50 % of the people do, but so many people came into it from different avenues. I think boot camps still are a thing to some degree, which I always like 50-50 on boot camps. But yeah, I think there’s definitely like…

would say intentionality about it and just people being more aware of the value of having women in technology and other diversity standards. Obviously your mileage may vary on that given the political climate and things like that, but I think some companies do still emphasize that. At CallRail we just hired a cohort of four people who are all pretty junior with the idea of having a group that

could learn together and grow together. know, people who don’t necessarily have a computer science background or, you know, have not been working in the industry for a long time, which I think also like helps with onboarding. And I don’t know if you guys have seen some of these stories about remote work and the effect on especially more junior people and like mentorship and things like that. So I think there’s definitely like some ideas about how to counteract some of those trends.

Kate Holterhoff (17:02)
I don’t know that I have heard those stories. What are you thinking of in particular?

Emily Winck (17:06)
I read something probably a couple years ago now at this point. You know, all the debates about whether remote work is fine or bad or good or whatever. And some study, I’ll see if I can take it up later, was looking at the effect on more junior…

Kate Holterhoff (17:18)
Yeah.

Emily Winck (17:30)
engineer, I think it was engineers specifically, but just that without the face-to-face interaction, senior people are basically fine. Like they’re pretty much independent already and can do stuff without needing a lot of interaction. But more junior people really kind of missed out on like career opportunities and growth opportunities by not being in person because you know the interactions over slack or whatever are very different than the sort of serendipitous interactions in an office. There’s a little more of

Kate Holterhoff (17:40)
Got it.

Mm-hmm.

Emily Winck (18:00)
barrier there to just be like, hey, can you help me look at this? And it was basically just saying that for more junior people especially, being in the office is really valuable and having.

like mentorship and things like that that sometimes happen informally. I was also talking, I think, about how to kind of replicate that if you are in an all remote environment, about just being more intentional about mentorship and like making sure some of that stuff that used to happen more organically when people were all face to face. How do you like carry that over to a remote environment to make sure that like junior people are getting the support they need and learning the things they need to do and like not kind of getting stuck at the level they are at.

Kate Holterhoff (18:44)
Yeah, I love hearing you talk about this, Emily, because I have only ever known you in a remote capacity when we were, you know, all of us worked at an Atlanta company. And then, you know, you were working three days a week to spend time with your family was my, yes. But you were at that point, we’re at a senior level. so you were not remote when you were junior.

Emily Winck (19:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

No, so I was in person for the first five or six years at Nebo and then moved away for my husband’s job and have been remote ever since. So I’ve been remote now for like 12 years or something. So like pre-COVID, I went remote, which is this whole own weird thing when you were like the only remote one on the team. I’m much happier now where most people are remote instead of just me.

Kate Holterhoff (19:32)
Yeah. That was awesome.

Emily Winck (19:41)
Right, but I already, I was like managing the team at that point, like when I first left Atlanta and was 100 % remote full time, was still, I was managing the development team at that point. And then when I had my first kid and I went part time, that’s when I stepped back from managing just cause that wasn’t, didn’t really make sense to do that part time. but yeah, I was already like in a more senior role, which actually had its own challenges, like doing that remotely, like trying to manage a team remotely. Like, I don’t know how you do this, Jess, like being remote and managing people. I find it very challenging just to

like build the rapport and like get to know people because you don’t tend to have just like casual chit chatty conversations over zoom so much you like have a one-hour meeting and you sign up for the meeting and do your meeting and you say goodbye. Whereas in person you’re more likely to like go grab lunch together and kind of build relationships that way. Yeah so it’s just it’s different.

Kate Holterhoff (20:37)
So Jess hit us. What’s the secret to managing in a remote way?

Jess Burns (20:42)
Yeah, it’s definitely challenging. And I think the most challenging part is that everybody has a different relationship with their work. And so it becomes, you know, even harder to find a good foundation to build from because like previously it was like, well, we’re all stuck here in an office together, you know, 40 hours a week. But, you know, that’s not the way it is anymore. Right. And I do agree with like,

Kate Holterhoff (21:01)
Stuck.

Jess Burns (21:11)
Emily and the move to like most people being remote or at least like a majority of folks being remote during COVID. I think it really helped us at Nebo like be more connected with you Emily because we used to have like all these janky tools and know like conference call people from outside the office so I definitely think the tooling has helped a lot.

Um, even though zoom obviously has its drawbacks, it’s so much better than like trying to get a bunch of people on like a speaker phone in a meeting room and trying to figure out, my gosh, how am going to share my screen? How am going to do all this stuff? Um, but yeah, yeah, I won’t say that I have.

any like super insightful answer here, but I’ve always just found it helpful to try and meet people where they are. And it’s also interesting, depending on the person’s personality, I’ve had folks that I’ve…

forge a deeper manager relationship, it’s gonna sound real weird, but sometimes people are more comfortable being off camera. So I’ve done one-on-ones off camera, and that kind of removes this sort of social barrier. They’ll talk more and let me delve into their thoughts about their work and what’s coming up, and so it can be adaptable in that way. Otherwise, I think it’s just trying to figure out what the personality of the team is.

Kate Holterhoff (22:25)
Hmm.

Jess Burns (22:40)
folks may groan at activities like retras and planning, but it’s a good opportunity, you know, for everybody to come together and like talk about work. And also often like jokes and memes and things come out of those meetings too, right? And so I think it’s important to embrace those. Everybody has some like slack emojis that they’ve created for funsies coming out of like some wild team discuss.

or things like that and so yeah it’s hard to make it super organic but I do think it’s been enough years that like a lot of folks have kind of settled into a rhythm. One interesting thing about 1Password is that it’s always been remote even before

you know, COVID, was remote. And so there are a lot of issues like baked into the company culture at this point. I think that helps a lot to not having to go through that transition period.

And there are things, you know, I think a lot of companies make the effort to have folks meet up a couple of times a year to have off sites or at least set aside some time for like virtual off sites. And I think that helps a lot as well. So yeah, I don’t have a, I have a magic bullet for it. It’s just kind of, yeah, it’s just that process of being adaptable and there really is no.

Kate Holterhoff (24:03)
Hehehehe

Jess Burns (24:08)
for it but yeah there are lots of things that like folks can do based off of you know even cheesy stuff like you say book club that’s so lame and cheesy or whatever whatever but it really does help I think as long as like folks are willing to participate in the activity you shouldn’t force it but it can help. And I think remote is also nice because it allows you to have more diverse teams too. So like I work with a bunch of folks like.

On the West Coast, for instance, I work with a bunch of folks in Canada that I would never get the opportunity to work with because they’re all over the place. And so I do think that there are some upsides to it as well. Not just for team activities, but also for hiring. You can get a more diverse candidate pool that way as well. So I don’t think I really answered your question, but I don’t have a good answer for it either. So.

Kate Holterhoff (25:06)
No, I think it’s great.

And Emily, so you mentioned doing like offsite. So what does CallRail do in order to make the remote teams, feel like, you know, of the culture?

Emily Winck (25:19)
Yeah, so it’s still kind of a work in progress, I think. So I’ve been there almost three years. I started in 2022, which was still like COVID times. They have offices in Atlanta and downtown Atlanta, and they used to be all in person. And then when COVID started, they all went home. And so then they started hiring people remotely. And when I started, there wasn’t any formal like mandate to be in the office. There weren’t any official like times to come together for remote people.

But maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago, they started doing four in-person weeks a year where they strongly encourage all the remote people to come in for basically three days, like Monday and Friday travel days, and then be in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then Atlanta-based people are officially supposed to go into the office every Tuesday and Thursday, and then in-person week also, Wednesday. And some weeks they plan

a lot of stuff, some of those in-person weeks there’s a lot of stuff. Sometimes there’s a company party or like our department will have an event or there’s a special training or like some of the weeks are jam-packed with meetings and like scheduled things. Some of them are a little more low-key but regardless the emphasis is really just like be in the office and just like talk to people and there’s not an expectation that you really get much work done in those weeks. It’s really just a about

having FaceTime, maybe meeting people that otherwise you don’t ever see because it’s a big enough company. I think it’s almost 300 people that I really only work with, maybe 10 people on a weekly basis. But when you’re in the office, you walk by someone that you used to work with and you say, hey, and you chat with them or you sit next to someone at lunch that you haven’t met before but someone else knows. So trying to use those weeks to foster connection and have more of this like organic getting to know people. It is a little bit…

like in flux because CallRail is shifting to hiring Atlanta first. So their current policy is you first have to try and hire someone who’s in Atlanta and only if you cannot find like a qualified person then you can look remote. So it’ll be interesting to see how that shifts. I think maybe only like a quarter of employees are outside of Atlanta right now but that’s probably going to shift as people leave and they rehire people that are Atlanta based. So we’ll see what that looks like.

You know, I think it’s really hard to get data on in-person versus remote productivity, not just productivity, but just how well your business does based on whether people are remote or in-person. And so there’s a little bit of tension of like…

executive leadership wants people to be there and have FaceTime. A lot of engineers don’t want to. Like the Atlanta-based engineers who are supposed to go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the whole day, ostensibly, don’t love it because it’s harder to focus. don’t have, like they have desks there and stuff, but it’s, you know, not as comfortable perhaps as their home office setup and they get more distracted by everything else going on and just doesn’t feel as productive in terms of like writing code.

But there is value in those relationships that you don’t have over Slack. And so I think CallRail is still kind of trying to figure out how to have a remote team and an Atlanta-based team and have them all work together and make good products and stuff like that. So I don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer on the right way to do that.

Kate Holterhoff (29:07)
Yeah. Well, I always, when I talk about my time at Nebo, I always point to you both as models for me. And so I think it’s great that, now I work 100 % remote. RedMonk is fully remote as well. And so it felt very normal to me, not only because of the pandemic, but because the great Emily Winck has been remote ever since I met her. And, you know, she showed me that it can be done with, great éclat you know, it’s

done well and has been successful from the beginning. So I knew it was possible. I just want to be a little nostalgic too about the fact that we were all at Nebo when the pandemic hit. We saw it firsthand. I have great memories of our, of the head of the company saying that everybody had to be on camera and some people just wouldn’t do it. Just straight up were like, power move, just kept that camera off. And I feel like that’s still a…

Jess Burns (29:55)
you

Kate Holterhoff (30:02)
That’s still it’s still a power move, you know? Yeah, and I also remember very well when Nebo was in the process of moving offices as a pandemic hit. And my first time visiting the office in person was when they had the vaccine. And so I went into the office and got vaccinated there at work. mean, now that just seems outrageous. Like, you know, you go to CVS and.

Emily Winck (30:05)
Mm-hmm.

you

Kate Holterhoff (30:28)
Actually the last time I tried to the vaccine, they wouldn’t give me a booster because of my age or something, I don’t know. But, you know, I mean, it was just such a bizarre time. And it was kind of great for me because I had a little kid and so I just was able to like stay home with them. And it was like, well, I guess I get to see my kids’ first steps and things. so that was kind of nice. I wasn’t going out much anyways. I feel like…

Nebo did a pretty good job with the pandemic. Everybody was panicked at that time. It’s hard to go back in my mind, but I don’t know. What was your experience like there?

Jess Burns (30:59)
not.

It was crazy because I thought, think everybody at Nebo thought, Oh no, where are we going to get all of our work from? Because Nebo is a client services agency. So we depend on clients coming to us asking for services. And I just remember thinking, wow, we’re not going to have like any work to do. And then everybody was like, this is a great time to like redo my website. This is a great time for me to set up a web app. And we had so much work during that.

that time period. just remember being flooded with so many contracts and everything. Everybody wanted their stuff redone because they felt like it was a great time. And like, hey, everybody’s at home. We don’t have anything else to do. Let’s just redo all of our stuff. So yeah, I remember being very busy during those times, which I’m grateful for because we had a lot of work. We had a lot of good work during that time, too. So that was fun.

Emily Winck (31:59)
was trying remember why I didn’t have strong memories of this and then I realized it’s because my youngest child was born three weeks into lockdown. So then I went away for three months. Yeah, I remember the last couple weeks before she was born.

Kate Holterhoff (32:07)
Yup.

Jess Burns (32:09)
I don’t remember that. just remember really early what he was supposed to do.

Emily Winck (32:18)
Like my husband was working from home, he’s a professor, so he was like trying to suddenly teach all his classes online. And you guys who had been in the office were suddenly remote. For me, like I was still remote, but it was kind of funny to figure out like, okay, now we all have to get on Zoom together instead of just the remote people. Like, we’ve maxed out how many people can be on this, like.

Kate Holterhoff (32:27)
Right.

Emily Winck (32:38)
Zoom call or this hangout or whatever. But then I went on leave for three months and then when I came back I feel like things were a little more settled and like we had come to terms with the fact that things were going to be like shut down for a long time and this was just like the new status quo was like work from home and there’s this empty office but we’re just all working from home.

Jess Burns (32:58)
Yeah, yeah, and then Nebo moving offices during that time was, that was crazy timing. Yeah.

Emily Winck (33:02)
Yeah, I didn’t

Kate Holterhoff (33:04)
my gosh.

Emily Winck (33:04)
ever go back. So when I worked for Nebo, when I first went remote, I came back more often, like maybe once every couple months. But then once my kids were born, I didn’t come in very often. I never saw the new office for Nebo. I never, yeah, like those last two years I didn’t ever go to Atlanta. Because Nebo didn’t have, maybe they do now, I don’t know, but at least when I was there.

Kate Holterhoff (33:18)
Wow.

Emily Winck (33:27)
There was no real plan for remote people, like this in-person, this sense of like, get everyone together, do an offsite, whatever. I like there was one, like we tried it once, like a Nebo day or something, where they tried to like, get people together to like…

talk about bigger ideas or something. But you know, that was still relatively early in the remote work phase of just trying to figure out like how do you keep this feeling of a team when you’re just looking at your computer all day and you don’t actually like have to interact with anybody.

Kate Holterhoff (33:58)
So I mentioned that you both mentored me so well. when I reflect on my own experiences as part of an engineering team, I often refer to these tidbits that you have shared with me over the years. So I want to start with, Jess, I told you this when I invited you on the podcast.

Jess Burns (34:17)
Hahaha

Kate Holterhoff (34:19)
and I’m ready for this. Okay, so one of my favorite things that Jess has said on multiple occasions while she was the head of the engineering team is that there’s no such thing as a front-end emergency. And I…

Jess Burns (34:33)
And I know I’ve indirectly caught some fire from the universe on this one.

Kate Holterhoff (34:36)
yeah. yeah. And it is—I have

no better quote from Jess. And I just want you—I want you to defend that. Do you still hold by that? Is there no such thing as a front-end emergency?

Jess Burns (34:49)
Yeah, so I would say it’s definitely context-dependent, so I hope you’re just watching this. No panic, I’m not a complete maniac. But yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (34:57)
Hahaha

Jess Burns (34:57)
context of the work that we would do at Nebo. So we were like a bespoke agency and so we had you know really good relationships with our clients so we did a lot of stuff for our clients. And yeah sometimes we would just have like clients call us at like 5 30 and be like the like photos on my home page carousel aren’t correct which needs to be fixed immediately and I’d be like I don’t think it needs to be fixed like immediately. It’s gonna be okay. But it’s really like a prioritization thing, right? Like, you know, we…

Kate Holterhoff (35:27)
Yeah.

Jess Burns (35:34)
had very interesting jobs in the sense that client services work is very ad hoc, I think. So my day in SaaS is way more structured than any day I ever had at the agency. And so you have to defend and put boundaries in place for that stuff, right? And so I’m not going to call somebody up, nor am I going to subject myself to this after work hours.

on a random Thursday night to do something that’s not an emergency. And so the context of the work that we used to do, front end in this case doesn’t usually mean front end client server. It means like, the UI of my website or my web app that customers of the client use. so yeah, minor things like that.

Yeah, I’m not calling any of my engineers like special to do that. Yeah, we’ll prioritize it like first thing, but tomorrow. And yeah, and any like true emergencies that we had were usually handled by like the back end folks or like I would jump on and deal with it and at least get it like triaged so that it would be stable until we could get to it like during work hours. But yeah.

I’ve always been pretty careful in managing folks, just to be careful about priorities and setting the right level of urgency for things. I had an IC once that said something that affected me. was like, if you ask for something twice in one day, I know it’s important because you’re usually pretty good about like, say it, put it on the to-do list for later. And then, you know.

go like schedule it out and go from there. But if I like bring it up twice and it’s like, yeah, we’re actually kind of, we gotta do something about this. So yeah. So I just want to say for everyone who disagrees that front-end stuff can be emergency is just like a priority thing. And you guys about the context of the whole situation. So, but I stand by it in terms of the work that.

Kate Holterhoff (37:37)
Yeah.

Jess Burns (37:47)
we used to do. There’s no front end emergency that’s going to take down the whole system.

Kate Holterhoff (37:47)
It was so…

Emily, did you ever hear Jess say that?

Emily Winck (37:59)
I don’t recall that, but my corollary is, it’s just a website. No one’s gonna die.

Kate Holterhoff (38:04)
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jess Burns (38:05)
Yeah, it’s just one site.

It’s just software. So one thing that I say often to the folks that reports me is like, listen, we’re all just imperfect people trying to build imperfect software here. It’s like not that serious. And obviously the things that we do have like monetary consequences and that is serious. But at the end of the day, like, yeah, it’s just a website. It’s just

Emily Winck (38:10)
Yeah.

Jess Burns (38:32)
an app that people use, it’s just all of this stuff on top of things that really matter, which are the people in this whole situation, right? And so, yeah, it’s just a website. The thing that matters is the people involved. All the sticky problems in software engineering are. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective people problems, so people challenges. Let’s say that

Emily Winck (39:04)
huh. huh.

Kate Holterhoff (39:07)
I love it. That goes so well. All right. And then Emily, to pick on you a little bit, one of the first things I did when I got the job at RedMonk was to learn more about databases. I always said, I was like, if ever I had a database problem, I would just reach out to Emily, and she’d either send me a new one, or she would get into phpMyAdmin and she’d be moving columns around, just doing it.

You were like a database whisperer and I was like, I don’t have to do this. I’m a front-end engineer. Clearly there’s some magic going on here. So the whole thing was you were quite the wizard and it made me very complacent and I regret it deeply. I’d like to think that I would have gotten there eventually, but it didn’t happen. So I had to really get on it afterwards and learn all this stuff because…

I was like, you know, lulled into this sense of complacency around databases because I saw you work your magic so many times. So I guess thank you, but also like, do you continue to be the database whisperer where you’re like moving columns around just like doing it?

Emily Winck (40:18)
I’m sorry.

No, I think thinking back on how we did some things at Nebo, being a marketing agency where we’re building one-off websites, compared to how things at a SaaS company run, there are some things that I look back on. I can’t believe we were just doing that, modifying production databases just by running commands in phpMyAdmin

Kate Holterhoff (40:42)
you

Emily Winck (40:49)
You know, it wasn’t, we often didn’t do code reviews at all. Like we did use Git for version control, like database changes were not generally, I think we did have like, there was something we were using to do like migration files for PHP, but a lot of that was sort of like ad hoc. And yeah, we just like dump a database, copied over here. Like we were very,

Kate Holterhoff (40:55)
Yes.

Emily Winck (41:14)
laissez faire about a lot of that stuff that looking back on it makes me very nervous just knowing like I mean, it’s a different scale, right? Like a single company’s website database, which mostly is like their leads who filled out their contact form versus like your SaaS application, which has all your customer’s stuff in there, millions of rows. Like it’s a whole different scale. That was one of the things that was like my biggest learning going from a marketing agency to a SaaS company is just the scale of things is different. And like you could get away with database things on the scale we were doing them that you can’t get away with when you’re

talking about like millions and millions of records in terms of like database optimization and stuff like that. And I’m definitely not a database expert where I am now. Like there are other people, many other people who I turn to. like, Hey, is this query okay? Do we need to index this column? Cause I just, I still don’t like that’s not my specialty. And I don’t do it enough to have like a really high level of confidence in terms of what I’m doing for that kind of stuff. Like talking about the scale, like production scale.

data. But there was a lot of stuff at Nebo that we’re like, yeah, sure, let’s do that. Which also reminds me of the time early in my career, like in the first couple years, that I accidentally dropped a production database of one of our customers.

huh. Whoops. That one actually had a lot of data and I like was just using phpMyAdmin and thought I was on our dev site and like dropped it because I was gonna I don’t remember even what I was doing but I definitely had a little panic attack there of like no what have I done and thankfully we had database backups for them which we don’t for like we didn’t for every site but we did for them and so we could restore it from like a couple hours before and it was fine but That was maybe where my mantra came in of it’s just a website, nobody’s dying.

Jess Burns (43:12)
Yeah, that cold dread of dropping the production database. So it really builds character. So everybody needs like, yeah, cause I’ve done that before for one of Nebo’s clients. So was like a real business that processed real money. And yeah, the production. I can still remember the feeling of sitting at my desk. I just feel like, but yeah. Yeah.

Emily Winck (43:18)
Right? Like…

Good. huh. Yep. Yep.

Oh, it’s terrible. Because you’re like, what have I done? They’re going to fire us as a guy. You’re like, oh no.

Jess Burns (43:39)
But honestly, that’s one of the things that I’m really thankful for in regards to agency work. This is probably gonna make me sound like a maniac, but we were often just like, it’s you, it’s you against this application, whatever it is. And so yeah, you have to deal with the consequences. You have to make the decisions. You’ve got to, you know, have the like motivation, the gumption to just go for it. And I think that’s really helped me

Emily Winck (43:52)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (43:56)
you

Jess Burns (44:09)
learn how to do work and how to like move through work effectively because folks that have only worked

in like SaaS or at like one company, I’ve noticed sometimes have trouble with like greenfield projects and like knowing where to start and taking risks and being able to handle those risks. Like I’ve had a number of like junior folks who really struggle to do things because they’re just like, if I break it? And it’s like, well, you, you know how to fix it. We have, we have, you know, safety guards in place to fix it.

And so yeah, definitely agency work taught me how to like get out of a lot of like, that makes it sound bad, like, but just like fix mistakes and just be more confident about like, well, if I mess this up, you know, I know how to roll back and like undo the thing that I’ve done or even starting in on something and being like,

actually this thing that the client asked me to do doesn’t make any sense. Like I need to call them up and like actually ask the person on the other end of the phone, like what exactly was your goal here? And so I think it’s really honed those skills in like my work.

you will make fun of me on my current job in a loving way of like, I’m always asking, so what is the next step? What is the next step? What are you gonna do next? What’s the point of doing this work? And I think that that was really cemented by Nebo, because it’s like, yeah, it’s you and the clients. In order to get paid, you have to figure out like, what is it you’re going to do? And you can’t sit there.

and just like wait for like somebody else to handle the work for you. You have to drive it forward. So yeah, it is quite spicy sometimes. But hey, once you drop one production database, you never make that mistake again.

Emily Winck (46:14)
It builds character.

Kate Holterhoff (46:20)
Yeah, I get that swashbuckling feeling too. I think I took that away as well. I mean, typically we improved these websites more than left them in shambles. would like to think. I mean, Emily, didn’t you have a story about receiving a project? Like, you know, we would always get these sort of Frankenstein projects either from other agencies or that hadn’t been looked at in 10 years. So, you know, I’d like to think improvement is the rule. But also, didn’t you say that we received all of these unencrypted credit card numbers in a spreadsheet one time?

Emily Winck (46:51)
It was, I think it was an API that we were building a website for a company that shall not be named and they wanted to add like user management to it so that you could have an account, you could store your credit cards and you could use it to make reservations with your stored credit card. And so they were building the API on their side to send us the data for like their customers and stuff. And they were just sending us the full 16 digit credit

Kate Holterhoff (46:56)
Okay.

Emily Winck (47:23)
card number when we requested like send us the stored credit cards for this customer. Okay, here you go. You can’t I don’t want to see that don’t send me that and we had to like convince them that they needed to change their API and only send us the last four digits because we weren’t doing the credit card processing they were so like we did not need a full credit card number for any reason and it really made me mad that they were just like what’s the problem? You can just hide like you can just show the

Kate Holterhoff (47:30)
no.

Emily Winck (47:53)
ask for. I’m I do not want our systems seeing this data because I also didn’t have a super high trust in like my ability to set up a server because at this point we didn’t have like DevOps or platform team or anybody who was setting up servers for us. Like the backend engineers would just go set up a server for a new website. I didn’t have a high confidence in my own ability to like make it secure. Like I don’t, we do not need to be looking at credit card numbers.

Kate Holterhoff (48:22)
That was, that is a classic incident. Again, it just, the horror stories, you know?

Emily Winck (48:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

you

Jess Burns (48:31)
Yeah, yeah, but it’s like, yeah, when you’re in that situation, you have no one to turn to. You become the expert. So, yeah.

Emily Winck (48:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no one else saying, no, we shouldn’t do this. It was just me saying, no, no, we shouldn’t do this. And I think, Jess, what you were saying earlier about like really having to take ownership of like asking questions and challenge things and like dig into like, why do we want to do this has been really valuable transition to a SaaS company where we do have product managers who do more of that, who own the product, who like make more of those decisions. But

It’s still… I think really valuable for an engineer to be able to question those things at times and like dig into like, why are we doing that? Like, is there a smarter way to do that? Like, do we really, you know, need to do that instead of, I think our former CEO at Nebo used to say, um, malicious obedience, uh, a lot of that, like we shouldn’t just be maliciously obedient to like what clients asked us to do because sure, like we could probably do just about anything they ask us to, but is that really like what we should be doing for their best interest or now at a SaaS company? for

our customers’ best interests. I think it’s fun to use my brain and think about the problem and not just how to build a solution to what someone handed me and said, go build this thing. I think it’s more fun. And yeah, I think a lot of that was learned out of necessity at Nebo because there sometimes was not a whole lot of direction about why we were doing what we doing and things like that.

Kate Holterhoff (50:07)
Yeah, I love the critical thinking angle of it. Usually when I describe why I was attracted to an interactive team, which is how we characterize the UX, the designers, and the engineers, is that I could always see what we were creating relatively quickly. Within a couple months, the website was live or the app was out there. And when I would talk to folks who worked at SaaS companies or

other banks, insurance companies, they would spend months, a year on an internal project that never saw the light of day. It just seems so demoralizing because every once in a while that internal project that they’d been working on for six months was just scrapped, New management. And so it’s like, what is my time worth? What am I even doing here? And I never had that sense at a marketing agency.

Emily Winck (50:53)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Holterhoff (51:04)
Everything that we built saw the light of day. It always did. It just, I mean, maybe some don’t that I don’t know about, but for me, I always saw it live. And so I actually feel like it was really good for my mental health. Like I never felt like what I was doing had no meaning. I always felt like there was a real purpose and the cycles were quick. Like we would build out a project, you know, within a matter of months usually.

Jess Burns (51:27)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it comes down to as well, something that I’m really grateful to Nebo for is that I was involved in like the sales part of it. And so you get an exposure to, yeah, like why is, why does that difference exist? And it comes down to like the way that the business operates and how the contracts work. And you get like a peek behind the curtain of capitalism a little bit and you get to see into the nitty gritty. And you’re just so far.

Kate Holterhoff (51:53)
You

Jess Burns (51:57)
abstracted from that in like a SaaS company, usually. And I think even in like companies where you build an internal tool and it gets scrapped, like, yeah, that, that definitely like can be really, really demoralizing, but it’s just like such a different situation from what we were doing at the agency. Cause yeah, it’s like these short bursts of, well, it to get paid. And so, you know, you’re churning out these projects.

and you’re watching them manifest into the real world. yeah, yeah, I’m glad that I’ve also had the experience of seeing like how a couple of different businesses are run. And that gives me a really helpful perspective on how projects like proceed even in a SaaS context.

Kate Holterhoff (52:45)
All right, so we’re about out of time, but I would love to wrap up by hearing from you what you think is some of the most exciting things going on in our field. Like, what are you following and why is it AI? I’m kidding, but, I mean, just, I’m interested to hear what’s on your mind. So maybe, Emily, would you go first? Like, what do you think is super interesting in our discipline right now?

Emily Winck (53:02)
But it is AI, so.

Jess Burns (53:03)
you

Emily Winck (53:08)
Sir.

I mean, AI, honestly, and just like how it is going to be incorporated into the workflow of engineers. I’ve been playing with Cursor for a couple of months now, like using it sometimes, then I get annoyed with it, so I don’t use it, and back and forth, and…

Kate Holterhoff (53:14)
Okay.

Hahaha

Emily Winck (53:29)
I I don’t want to become a prompt engineer. There are some people who formerly were software engineers who now basically… are just spending all their effort crafting prompts to get AI to write the code, which, like, fine, if you want to do that, fine. I don’t want to do that because I think writing code is fun and I want to keep writing code. I don’t think writing Jest tests is fun. And so I’m happy to outsource that to Cursor and say, hey, I added this method, write some specs for me, and at least gets me like 80 % of the way there. I think.

It’s just really hard for me to predict what is software engineering going to look like in six months or a year in terms of the expectations about how AI is used. Because some companies are maybe pushing it, and some companies are more hesitant, and some are kind of the middle. CallRail is kind of in the middle. Use it if you want to.

But I don’t know where that’s going to go long term. think CallRail at least, is still very much in the exploratory phase of what does this do for our productivity and the code we create.

also like very cautious about it for more junior developers because it writes all this code for you that then you have to be able to read and understand what it’s doing. Like sometimes I’ll have Cursor write specs and then I look at them and I’m like that doesn’t actually test what like all the lines are covered but that doesn’t test what this method does. Like these are bad tests and unless you have some level of experience reading code and understanding it it’s going to be really hard to assess

output of AI coding tools. So I think like really in the last year and maybe even the last six months like AI has just been at the forefront of like conversations about coding and like…

Do you even need to study software engineering anymore? Is computer science still a valid field? I don’t know. And so I’m just really curious to see where that goes and how companies, but also individuals, figure out how to use it in a helpful way.

Because, for example, I’ve found AI helpful for writing tests that are pretty straightforward, or doing boilerplate things. It’s very bad at trying to debug bugs. Like, hey, on this page, x is not happening. And it just goes way off over here and has no idea what the problem is. It goes in circles. And like, not good. So I think.

you know, like just how do we use it in a way where it’s helpful and doesn’t like waste our time and how do more junior people use that in their workflows where they can still like have the critical thinking skills to understand like what is it doing but also like

you know, some of the stuff we were talking about, making good decisions about like what product are you building here? Like, hey, AI can’t really tell you if this is like a good architectural, maybe architectural, but like if this is a good thing to add to your product, like that’s not something that it’s going to have an opinion about that you should trust at least. So I don’t know. We’ll see where it goes.

Kate Holterhoff (56:39)
And just, let me just ask one clarifying question. So is CallRail paying for your Cursor subscription or, okay, cool. And so they’re all for it. They’re like, let’s do the AI thing, we’re all in.

Emily Winck (56:44)
Yes, they are.

Yeah, so they pay for a couple different, depending on people’s preferences, like some people are using Copilot, some people are using Cursor. We also have like a corporate Gemini business plan, something. So they’re very like open to it. I think in six months they may clamp down a little bit just because of cost. I honestly have no idea how much it’s even costing for us to really like me to use AI. But yeah, it’s fully sanctioned at this point. We do have to like sign.

Kate Holterhoff (56:56)
Okay.

Huh. Yeah.

Okay, okay.

Emily Winck (57:19)
agreements that we will use it well and not put customer data in there and all that kind of stuff. like, you know, they’re being thoughtful about it, but it’s not mandated, but also not, you know, banned or anything.

Kate Holterhoff (57:23)
Hmm.

interesting. okay that helps. all right jess, i want to hear it. where are at?

Jess Burns (57:36)
Yeah, think there are a couple of things other AI is… the predominant one. It’s interesting, Emily, that you mentioned testing because I feel like there’s a little bit of a trend right now where like manual QA is kind of less popular and more automated QA or QA served by AI tooling is getting more popular. So I’m interested to see where that goes because I feel like that pendulum kind of swings back and forth. So manual QA is a little out of fashion at the moment and we’ll see if it stays that way.

or if we switch back to it eventually. yeah, AI tools in general are really interesting and for basically all of the reasons that Emily lists them. I’m to steal your answer, Emily. I’m sorry.

But yeah, as far as like the way that I use them as an engineering manager, think AI is pretty bad at, least from what I’ve seen, like generating new content. And so I use it mostly to pretend like, Hey, pretend you’re my boss. and take a look at this, like, you know, strategy I’ve proposed and poke holes into it. kind of going along those lines. I, was doing hiring earlier this year. and I was hiring an.

intern and I was overseeing a bunch of like applications and so just to let sure everyone my real human eyes looked at these applications but definitely my eyes look at these applications but on as part of like my screening questions for my position I asked this like really softball question like hey what excites you about

Kate Holterhoff (59:07)
Sure, Jess.

Jess Burns (59:23)
front end development, because I oversee a primarily front end team. And I got so much AI back. Like, I started reading the same answer again and again. I was like, no college student talks like this. Also, everybody’s answer is the same. And it really did, like, I think, influence the way that I thought about those applications, because it’s like, is the problem that

Is a problem me for asking like a foolish question that was supposed to, which I promised was asked with good intentions of like trying to make sure we’re doing a good match here for the type of work that the team does, which is platform work versus feature work. Or is it like, should I expect that.

you know, these folks don’t use AI to reply to this question. so like, yeah, digging through these resumes was really the first time that I felt like I was confronted with an AI situation that I didn’t really know how to handle or like how to work through it. And so I think a lot more of that stuff will come up in the future of like, yeah, like

Kate Holterhoff (1:00:15)
Huh.

Jess Burns (1:00:35)
How do you get to know the person that you might be hiring when you’ve got a layer of AI potentially between you? So I think that will be interesting to see. I said this earlier, a lot of the problems in software engineering are people challenges. Yeah, just like talking to people, trying to figure out like, what did you actually want product manager when you asked me to do this thing? And I think AI is not currently well equipped to

deal with those types of challenges and so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes and if it gets better at that because yeah I can just think back to especially some of the work that we used to do at Nebo and like

some clients had just like such complicated like configurations of how they wanted things set up and just trying to I don’t even know how to write a prompt at this moment to even like begin to sort through that so I think there will always be a place for like humans in this process at least for

you know, the time being because it’s like, yeah, somebody needs to identify that, hey, asked ChatGPT to evaluate like this test went completely off the rails. So I think our relationship to work that we do will change a little bit, but I don’t see it like overtaking

Kate Holterhoff (1:02:07)
Yeah.

Jess Burns (1:02:08)
software engineering anytime soon. They always say like, ah somebody needs to be able to program the AI as well. And so I think there’s still a lot of like potential and a lot of growth in software engineering because more people than ever use software. Software is everywhere in our lives and I don’t see that, you know.

going away anytime soon. mean, even the phone that you carry in your pocket is like this amalgamation of so many different pieces of software that they that we’re talking on right now is a piece of software that has to be, you know, managed by folks. And so yeah, there’s like a place I think for like vibe coding and stuff just in the sense of like rapidly prototyping. But yeah, to go the extra steps beyond that, I think still requires a

But it will be interesting to see. My goal is to always manage myself out of a job, if ChatGPT can do that, that’d be fabulous. But at this point, it’s not able to effectively carry out an engineering manager’s day-to-day activities. Thank you. I’m hoping.

Kate Holterhoff (1:03:09)
Ha ha ha.

I want this for you, Jess, fingers crossed.

I know. one little aside here, you’re reminding me that some of the other great, I guess, advice that you gave me was about when you were doing hiring pre-AI, that you said you could often tell boot camp applicants because all their portfolios looked the same. And I feel like now we’re in the same situation, except now they’re all bots. It’s worse. my God.

Jess Burns (1:03:46)
They’re all the same projects.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s not like, and again, not to dunk on boot camps or anything, but it’s like what you do with the boot camp, right? And I think that’s probably part of the reason that boot camps have fallen out of fashion a bit is just like going to the boot camp is not enough. Like it’s going to set you up with a base level of skills, but you, gotta like do something with it, which sounds like, I know like

Kate Holterhoff (1:04:00)
Yeah.

Jess Burns (1:04:23)
But yeah, like if you rock up with the same portfolio as like the 30 other people that you attend a boot camp with that doesn’t make you like a bad person or a bad hire but like me on the other side so like when I review resumes usually I have about like 120 to 130 to look at to narrow down to a group of like maybe 10 to 15 that I can actually like

interview for the first round. But it’s like I need a way to differentiate you from the other resumes. And so if you give me like an AI answer to something, I have no idea like who you are as a person, which sounds cheesy. I need I need something else or like, yeah, if you have the same GitHub portfolio, again, that everybody else in your like graduating class from whatever the hot bootcamp is these days.

days, like it doesn’t tell me anything about your capabilities, unfortunately. So even just like the smallest effort applied in those areas, you’d be surprised at how much information that gives me. And so it helps me like say, okay, yeah, this person’s goals are aligned with what we do. This person likes the type of project that we do here. And then that allows me to make like a good decision.

going forward of like, this person a fit or not? So yeah, but yeah, yeah, just, yeah, I can always tell like which camp you went to based off of the projects in your portfolio, because they’re all the same, same set of projects.

Kate Holterhoff (1:05:58)
Hahaha

These are hard truths, but we need to hear them. So I appreciate that. I did some write-ups earlier on at my time at RedMonk talking about that, talking about how contributing to open source can be good way to differentiate. And yeah, just trying to expand on the portfolio that you created at your boot camp, like do some new projects, like at the minimum.

Jess Burns (1:06:25)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, I’m not asking that like, I don’t know you contributed to Linux or something like, like literally just anything is helpful at that stage, even if it’s just like a silly little, like random project, it helps me like better understand like, because yeah, I guess that’s like the interesting thing, right? I know that we’re running out of time, but like AI

Kate Holterhoff (1:06:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jess Burns (1:06:51)
and boot camps are sort of like an average-er. It just like makes everything average. And then it’s like, yeah, what does that mean when everything is kind of the same? How do you like sort through that? So it’s really difficult.

Kate Holterhoff (1:07:07)
Yeah.

No, that’s so good. No, this is great. I love that this conversation has combined some light nostalgia with future-looking lessons and advice. This is perfect. This has exceeded my expectations tremendously. So before I do close this out, though, for folks who want to follow your musings, what would be the best way for our listeners to continue?

know, hearing your excellent thoughts on the subject, you have a social media presence, how could folks keep up with you?

Jess Burns (1:07:44)
You can follow my dog’s Instagram if you want. I have LinkedIn, but like, I’m just here.

Kate Holterhoff (1:07:52)
Jess Burns is on LinkedIn. Yeah, I like it. Add your dogstagram I’m including a link to that Jess, so get ready for it. Okay, how about you Emily?

Jess Burns (1:07:56)
Thank you. Thank you.

Emily Winck (1:07:58)
I have no

links for you, I don’t have a dog, so I have no dogstagram But yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. I don’t really do social media anymore for lots of reasons, but yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (1:08:07)
Fair enough. There’s a lot of good reasons to not be on social media. you know, kudos to you. We’ll keep it with the the LinkedIn presence. Good enough. Okay. Amazing. All right. Well, on that note, I have really enjoyed speaking with you both. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. And if you are watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.