Where Did All The Focus Time Go? Dissecting 1.5 Million Meetings w/ Clockwise's VP of Engineering, Dan Kador

**Dan Kador** (0:00)
At the heart of what we do is an acknowledgement that time is a network resource, right? So it's a kind of fancy way of saying something that anybody who's worked on a team knows is true. You don't have full control over your calendar. You get invited to meetings, someone cancels at the last minute, whatever it is.
So individuals are actually pretty good at managing their own calendars, but managing, like for example, a small team's calendar is hard, and managing a department's calendar is much harder, and managing calendars across a whole company is almost impossible.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
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**Dan Lines** (1:11)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Dan Kador, VP of Engineering at Clockwise. Dan, welcome to the show.

**Dan Kador** (1:25)
Super glad to be here, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:27)
Awesome to have you. Clockwise, very cool company. I think lots and lots of people know it.
And what's even more exciting about this episode is we're gonna talk about data a little bit, and we're gonna talk about metrics, which is near and dear to our hearts and my heart, for myself and at LinearB.
There was a report that you all came up with, it's called the 2022 Software Engineering Meeting Benchmark Report. You know, it covers 1.5 million meetings, so a lot of meetings, 80,000 engineers, 5,000 companies. Really excited to jump into that report with you. As I was saying even before the show, I took a look at some of those numbers, definitely there's a few in there that are intuitive. If you've been a software engineer, I looked in, I'm like, yeah, okay, this totally makes sense. Also, I think a few that you know are interesting and we'll dive into all of that. And I'm also really excited because you all are going to join us at Interact, which we have coming up soon.

**Dan Kador** (2:38)
Yeah, super excited to be there, it's gonna be fun.

**Dan Lines** (2:40)
So that will be a great time. Before we get into the report and into the data, I always like to hear a little bit about you and your background, how you built your career and how you got to Clockwise.

**Dan Kador** (2:58)
Sure, yeah, it was great to be here. As you've said, I have the pleasure of leading engineering here at Clockwise. I've been here for about a year. Before this, I've helped lead engineering teams at a bunch of different places, Salesforce, Lyft, Handshake most recently.
This is across the last 16 years or so.
I've also co-founded, operated and sold a venture-backed company in that time. So I've had a bunch of great opportunities. I've been really lucky so far in my career. And then school-wise, I've studied computer science at University of Illinois and grew up in the Midwest. So that's where my roots are. But yeah, I'm happy to talk a little bit about Clockwise and what it is we're up to, if that'd be interesting.

**Dan Lines** (3:42)
Yeah, absolutely. One question that I have for you because I didn't realize that you said that you started your own company and went through, tell me about that for a minute. Like, what made you do that? How did that go for you? That's super cool.

**Dan Kador** (3:57)
Yeah, yeah. So I started a company back in, I guess it was 2011 actually, but we founded it officially in 2012 with two of my best friends who I went to high school and college with and worked together a little bit with actually as well. And we had always said to ourselves, said to each other, you know, we want to start a company someday, but really tried to wait until we had an idea that seemed actually worth going after. And so if you remember back, you know, this was over a decade ago now showing my age, but in 2011, 2010, we really saw kind of the rise of the API ecosystem. And at the time, myself and one of my co-founders, we were working at Salesforce on the API platform there, or I was on the API side. He was on what Salesforce calls Apex, which is their programming language. So we were working sort of at the forefront of like the world's biggest enterprise developer platform and learned a lot of important lessons around scale and go to market there.