Getting Unstuck in Your Career | Charles Max Wood

**Charles Max Wood** (0:00)
You know, just helping people see, hey, there is a possibility here for you to be happy and to get paid what you need to get paid and do what you need to do and be happy in the work you're doing. I can't express how disempowering it is to feel stuck and how empowering it is to all of a sudden see the opportunities that are out there for you.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:20)
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm delighted to be joined by a fellow podcast host, and that is Charles Max Wood, CEO of Top End Devs. Chuck, welcome to the show.

**Charles Max Wood** (1:35)
Hey, thanks.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:37)
Great to have you here. As I noted, you're a podcaster yourself, and not just for one show like us, you are part of several. Through Top End Devs, you host podcasts reaching over 70,000 developers each week. So I'm excited to get some of the benefit of your input since you talked with so many engineering leaders.
Many of your shows focus on the ins and outs of a particular programming language, like JavaScript Jabber or Angular or the specifics of iOS development. And you've been at it for over a decade now. So you've interviewed, what, hundreds, maybe thousands of engineers and engineering leaders at that time?

**Charles Max Wood** (2:09)
Yeah, we've produced, what, like 4,000, 4,500 podcast episodes over the last 13 years, 14 years, something like that.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:18)
So to say you've done a few would be an understatement. And you said something really interesting before the show started that I wanna start off with. You said people are looking at the broad scope of tech today and with so much new tech coming out, they're kind of struggling how to know how to stay current.
What's your advice as someone who, you've been around for a decade, you've seen these changes happening, you've talked to so many folks, how would you suggest developers apply a framework to help them make that decision?

**Charles Max Wood** (2:48)
Right, so I do have a framework for this, but just in kind of broad terms, yeah, I talk to people and they're seeing, just to name a few things in the current space, right? In web development, they're looking at Core Web Vitals from Google, or they're looking at just performance in general. Core Web Vitals is a set of performance metrics, but you also got new frameworks or new versions of frameworks or new tools, or I think the latest hype thing was the stuff that came out of, what's the name of the stack?
Ryan Carniato put it out, Solid Stack, right? Where you had the different ways of updating state on your web pages and things like that. And so, yeah, it's all of these things, right? And then you've got tools and new tools are coming out, new ways of hosting things.
Anyway, it gets pretty overwhelming pretty fast because you feel like you have to be an expert in all of the things. And even if you're just focused on one stack, there's still stuff coming your way all the time. And so it's tricky, it's really tricky to know what to do. So what I recommend people do just to stay current, there are a couple of things. One is that if you can go to a local meetup, a lot of times just talking to other people will help you be able to prioritize the things that you need to learn.
And I give people the advice that you don't have to know everything, right? You don't have to learn everything. You just have to learn the relevant things for the next thing that matters, right? And then you can continue to do that. And so it's kind of a blend of what am I working on now and where is my career going to take me or where do I want my career to take me and what do I have to learn in order there, right? So some of the stuff you're going to keep current on is going to be tech stacks, tech tools, things like that. But maybe you want to go management track someday. So some of it's also going to be like leadership, communication, stuff like that. And I recommend that people blend it. But yeah, the framework effectively comes from, I read a book by Russell Bronson called.com Secrets. I think it's in that one. And he talks about the Dream 100