Season 3 Finale: Best of 2023, a Glimpse into Season 4, and Holiday Cheer

**Conor Bronson** (0:00)
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**Dan Lines** (0:46)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Dev Interrupted.
This is Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO, and today I'm with my fellow DI co-hosts, Conor Bronson and Ben Lloyd Pearson. Guys, thanks for joining me today.

**Conor Bronson** (1:05)
Yeah, always a pleasure, Dan. Good chat with you.

**Dan Lines** (1:09)
Awesome to be doing this show all together. It's becoming a little bit of a tradition. This is our season-ending holiday episode, and I think it's a really good chance for the audience to get to know us a little better, keep it a little light-hearted, reflect on our favorite moments from season three of the pod. I actually was thinking before we came onto this episode, how much the pod has evolved from season one, season two. Season three was an awesome year. We're gonna talk about season four. I can just talk, personally, there's maybe two episodes or two to three episodes that jumped to mind for me that I really like.
I had some really good conversations with Tiago, and the reason that I'm, I mean, he's an awesome dude, but the reason that I'm picking those out, we talked a lot about career development, and I just feel like over the last three to five years or so, the standard of engineering manager, director, I wanna be a VP, I wanna grow my career, I gotta lead people, I gotta know technology, I gotta use metrics, all of that, like the bar is rising.
And that episode, I think we actually did two of them, but those episodes, I think are really, really nice if you're into career development, and I always like to, I guess, help the community be better leaders, because no one wants a shitty boss.

**Conor Bronson** (2:41)
Yeah, the first one you did with Tiago was on that topic of like, not just being a great leader, but also like the interviewing and getting hired part, and I really loved that you did kind of both those sections. I would actually, if I'm looking at the category, I would almost say that might be my favorite as well, because between those two episodes, you both shared like getting the job landing and preparing for it, and then also like, how do you maintain and build excellence once you're in there? And I thought that was a really fascinating approach.
Ben, how about you?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:09)
So yeah, the one that really caught my attention was the whole debate that McKinsey started around developer productivity, because I used to work on an engineering team that we were actually measured by the number of commits that we made and the number of lines of code that we changed. And I saw firsthand, A, how easy it is to game those metrics and to just paint whatever picture you want using some automation and scripts.
But B, just how it really didn't create a culture where we were cultivating high quality engineering. You know, we were solving problems because it helped us paint this picture of effort even more easily rather than like we were helping, you know, teams at the company deliver products more quickly. So, you know, as somebody who has now kind of been on both sides of that sort of debate in terms of the companies that I work for, it's really refreshing to see more perspective that is similar to what we share here at Linear B around looking for things that measure output and value and productivity rather than things that measure the amount of effort that you're putting into something.

**Conor Bronson** (4:15)
Another one that I really enjoyed on the statistical end, because you bring up that kind of idea of like diving into the data, understanding it, and I think that is one of the pieces of value we've got this podcast is, is talking to people about these deep topics, you know.
I loved both the episodes we did focused on hiring trends this year. I was really lucky to get to interview Miriam earlier this year about kind of the trends and strategies that were happening for companies as they were evaluating success in hiring with devs and data people had some fantastic data on that. And Scott Carey from Lead Dev joined us recently and talked through what is happening with laid off software developers. And I think those trends are so fascinating to look at in corollary to the platform engineering data, the dev productivity data that we're also seeing because there is a lot of change happening in the industry right now as you point out, Ben.