#039 - Get promoted by being lazy feat. Dax Raad

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Feb 5, 2024

Dax Raad, a well rounded engineer, discusses personal opinions on industry practices, scale, financial decisions, infrastructure mistakes, reflections on long-term company commitments, and more!

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Choosing Existing Technologies vs. New and Exciting Technologies

02:21 • 21min

The Power of Saying No and Addressing Conflicts as a Leader

23:18 • 2min

Making a Decisive Commitment

25:16 • 13min

Understanding Scale, Team Size, and Leveraging Automation for Growth

37:58 • 4min

The Benefits of Outsourcing Tasks

41:50 • 7min

Debates on Tech Twitter

48:40 • 17min

In this episode, Lane talks to Dax Raad, a well rounded engineer that is currently a developer for SST, a framework that helps people build Full-Stack applications on AWS with ease. Today, they talk about personal opinions on industry practices, scale, financial decisions, infrastructure mistakes, reflections on long-term company commitments and many more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Dax's Twitter: https://twitter.com/thdxr

(00:00) - Introduction
(00:51) - Dax's Tweets and Personal Branding
(01:31) - You have to learn to be yourself
(02:56) - Intrusive thoughts
(03:33) - When did Dax become active in the Tech Twitter scene
(06:30) - What was the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon (ZIRP) in the tech scene
(09:33) - Should people choose fun early in their career?
(12:22) - Lane's take on the expertise when abstracting
(14:15) - SST's Philosophy in regards to abstractions
(16:35) - Merging roles
(19:28) - People don't want to care about the cloud
(21:31) - Less stressed about work = better results
(24:10) - Managers vs leaders
(25:20) - Dax shares stories about managing vs leading
(29:36) - Did Dax ever have users?
(31:24) - Most Startups Fail
(32:09) - Dax's reason for joining startups
(33:25) - Staying at a company for decades
(35:53) - Main downside of staying at an established company for a long time
(36:34) - The World changes, so don't look at how already established companies do things
(37:57) - Scale has a different meaning for different companies
(40:07) - So much goes away when you have less people at the company
(41:51) - Sometimes not saving money is a better option
(43:35) - Moving off Stripe
(46:54) - Rolling your own payment processor
(49:05) - Which debate on Tech Twitter annoys Dax the most
(50:52) - Stored Procedure debate
(53:31) - What's a BIG mistake in the infrastructure space?
(57:31) - Kubernetes
(01:02:58) - What Dax misses from Google Cloud
(01:03:19) - Is Sundar Pichai a bad CEO?
(01:04:51) - Where to find Dax