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In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Sean Goedecke, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub. Sean is widely known for his viral blog post, “How I ship projects at big tech companies.” In our conversation, he shares how to successfully deliver projects in large tech companies.

Drawing from his experiences at GitHub and Zendesk, Sean reflects on key lessons learned, and we discuss the following topics:

• Why shipping cannot exclude keeping management happy

• How to work on stuff the company actually values

• Why you should take on extra responsibility to get projects done

• Why technical skills are still more important than soft skills

• Soft skills you should learn: including learning the “management lingo”

• First-hand remote work learnings: advantages, disadvantages, and how to thrive in this setup

• … and much more!

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:50) An explanation of shipping

(05:35) Reasons management may choose to ship something customers don’t love

(09:20) A humbling learning from Sean’s time at Zendesk

(13:27) The importance of learning which rules need to be broken for good business outcomes

(15:28) Common obstacles to shipping

(18:13) DRI: Directly responsible individual

(23:06) The value of strong technical skills and why moving fast is imperative

(28:44) How to leverage your technical skills the right way

(32:16) Advice on earning the trust of leadership

(36:10) A time Gergely shipped a product for a political reason

(38:30) What GenAI helps software engineers do more easily

(41:08) Sean’s thoughts on GenAI making engineers more ambitious

(43:20) The difficulty of building AI tools

(46:10) Advantages of working remotely and strategies for making it work

(52:34) Who is best suited to remote work

(54:48) How the pandemic provided a remote work trial for Sean

(56:45) Rapid fire round

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Software Engineers Leading Projects ⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects⁠

• Shipping to production ⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shipping-to-production⁠

• Paying down tech debt ⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt⁠

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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