The art of letting go as a manager | Transcend’s Minh Nguyen

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
I'm your host, Andrew Zigler, and as you know, our co-host Ben, he's out right now, but I have an amazing guest co-host with me for our news segment today. Today we're joined by Jen Riggins, freelance tech journalist. You've read much of Jen's work, actually. We've talked quite a few times about Jen's articles here on Dev Interrupted, and so we're really excited to have her here. We're gonna look closer at one of her most recent articles in this news segment as well. But first and foremost, as you know, here on Dev Interrupted, we gotta look at the news that's happening in the tech world, and Jen's gonna help us do that. So we're looking at a few interesting news stories, but before we go there, Jen, do you have anything else you want to add or say hello?

**Jennifer Riggins** (0:44)
Hi, y'all, and thank you for promoting my work when I forget you sometimes, so thank you for that.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:49)
And we got a really great one today. So we're gonna go ahead and jump in to some of our news stories. Some of the stuff we're looking at includes Figma's IPO, how it shattered expectations, and what that might mean for the future of tech companies that will go public.
We're looking at a continuation in the story of the AI vs. Search wars. As you know, last time we talked about Cloudflare and some of the changes they were making to Crawlers. Well, there's been an interesting development in that story from Perplexity that we're gonna take a closer look at, as well as some fun practices for teams that are working remotely, ways that they can create a culture and otherwise stay in sync with each other. And the last but not least, we're also covering a really great article from Kelly Vaughn, a many-time contributor on our podcast. She's on our news segment a few weeks ago. She talks about burnout, or rather in this case specifically AI and how it's fueling that scenario by eating up all of our time instead of saving it. So really interesting collection of news. The last thing we're gonna do of course is dive deeper into Jen's article, which is kind of the centerpiece for today, article entitled Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck. And you can find this on LinkedIn, as well as on our newsletter that drops. So starting at the top, Jen, let's talk about Figma for a minute. I'm not huge on following general stocks and public stories, but this one was everywhere and was really kind of standing out as a signal for other tech companies that might be considering the same. So let me set the scene here. Figma went public and this is after they attempted a $20 billion sale, remember, to Adobe. It was an interesting move from Adobe. Many saw it as monopolizing the space that was already eating and using all of their creative software. Many folks saw it as their last respite away from Adobe software was getting consumed. And ultimately, that was blocked by a judge, if you'll remember, that acquisition did not happen. So Figma went back to the drawing board and they just went public and they priced their IPO at $33. The stock opened at $85 and the highest intraday trade of that stock was $148. And now it's hovering around $133 as of the time that I pulled the news story. And that's a pretty crazy valuation considering what had just happened to its deal years before and really what it signals for investment interest in these kinds of tech companies. This is the biggest first day pop for a billion dollar US tech IPO in decades, literally decades. So really interesting development. What do you think about this kind of story and how it ended up for Figma?

**Jennifer Riggins** (3:19)
When it comes down to it, it could be a sign of people really excited about the products, about Figma. In every way and the suite of it. And it could be that it's valid. People look at it as that valuable. It could be based on strictly that Adobe being the biggest in the space wanted to buy it. So like, oh, it must be that good.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:47)
I like how you framed it.
You know, is it a UX love driven story? Is it Adobe wanted to buy them so they must be a big deal kind of story? I would be curious to know from our listeners, if you have a deeper dive on this, ways that we can learn more, because I think it does mean something for tech companies considering this move for themselves. And we're talking about a really interesting development that Cloudware caught and wrote a detailed blog post about actions from perplexity to evade website, no crawl directives, protections against scraping and otherwise camouflaging their bots that intended to download that data as real users. In an attempt to obfuscate and obviously get around Cloudflare's recent changes that restrict web crawlers, which we talked about just last week. So I really recommend folks check out this deeper dive. I have an article from Cloudflare where they do a technical analysis on how they caught perplexity doing it and what exactly perplexity was doing to get around it. I think this is a developing story in terms of seeing what happens next and how folks respond to this both from perplexity and in the larger SEO world. But it's a really great and proactive story from Cloudflare taking methods and active actions to protect their customers and to keep their data safe, which is what Cloudflare's mission is. I'm really excited to always follow Cloudflare story. They've been doing some really cool stuff this year. But Jen, wondering if you have any thoughts on the AI scrapers and how they're attacking the web.