Building an empowered career w/ Jean Hsu & Cate Huston #261

**Cate Huston** (0:00)
Yeah, I think it's kind of darkly funny that ICs are like, I would be better as a manager, and the managers are like, I would be better as an IC, and part of that is just these worlds are being completely squashed. You know, like a lot of the kind of AI-based dev I do feels more than ever than being a manager. It's like, did you test that? How do you know it works? Why did this incident happen, and how do we make it not happen again? Like I used to ask these questions to developers on a much longer timeframe, and now I ask them to my terminal, but they're fundamentally the same. Like one of the things that we are seeing with the like, let's call it AI productivity, individual gains do not translate to team gains. That is fundamentally a management problem. If you as a manager think that you're not responsible for that bit because you're not writing code, then you're not doing your job. But then similarly as an IC, if you think your job is to generate the code and you haven't figured out how to transform that output into impact, then you're also not doing a good job.

**Patrick Gallagher** (0:56)
Hello and welcome to The Engineering Leadership Podcast, brought to you by ELC, the engineering leadership community. I'm Jerry Li, founder of ELC. I'm Patrick Gallagher and we're your hosts. Our show shares the most critical perspectives, habits, and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
One of the most powerful quotes that came from our conversation today is, work-life balance isn't about doing less work, it's about doing more life. In this episode, we're joined by Jean Hsu and Cate Huston to talk about how to build an empowered career. Jean and Cate are both engineering leaders who've transitioned into building a career portfolio of really interesting projects that, to me, represent the biggest opportunity and shift for engineering leaders right now.
In our conversation, we talk about this identity crisis and tension that engineering leaders are facing with their careers right now, and how to get clarity and build an empowered career. And so with us, they share the questions, the prompts, and the experiences that have been instrumental to them as they've built out their own career portfolios. Let me introduce you to Jean and Cate. Cate is the author of The Engineering Leader, Fractional CTO at Twill and Engineering Leadership Coach. Formerly, Cate was an engineering leader at DuckDuckGo and Automattic. Jean is a builder, writer, coach, and fractional engineering leader at Early Stage Startups. She was previously in leadership roles at Pulse, Medium, and Range, and also built out a leadership development company focused on engineers. Amidst their portfolio of different projects they're working on right now, they co-founded DRI Your Career, a series of async courses to help you take control of your career with clarity and intention. For listeners, they also offered a special discount code. So, if you're interested in exploring DRI Your Career, you can use the code ELCPODCAST for 15% off any of their three courses, and we've got a link to DRI Your Career in the show notes as well. Enjoy our conversation with Jean Hsu and Cate Huston.
Jean, Cate, I just want to say welcome. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. I wanted to frame our conversation a little bit and why I've been really excited. So, I have this hypothesis that AI is fundamentally shifting what a career looks like, and the way that you two are working right now, to me, represents a lot of what the future for engineering leaders may look like. My bet is that in the next 12 to 18 months, there's going to be a lot more people that can explore more options like this, more creative career pathways in this kind of way, or may be driven to because of some of the other more macro forces that are shifting things around in terms of what careers look like. And, I mean, like to summarize it, I also just think that the projects you both are working on are really cool, and I think they also represent the future skills and capabilities that engineering leaders need to have. So, there's sort of like these meta layers of like trends, and I think what you two are doing also represent what it means to be an engineering leader now and into the future. What's your gut reaction to sort of that synthesis?

**Cate Huston** (3:49)
My panic, Jean. I think he's saying we're trendy.

**Jean Hsu** (3:52)
We're trendsetters.

**Cate Huston** (3:54)
Yeah, exactly.

**Jean Hsu** (3:54)