In this month's episode, Steve Carroll, the director of development for the .NET team, interviews Scott Hanselman the Community Program Manager Lead for the .NET team about his career. Scott is a big believer in using the power of empathy and in this conversation he uses that power across the various skills necessary to be a successful programmer and program manager.
[00:00] - Scott's role at MS
[02:30] - Scott career overview -
[05:25] - Finishing his degree while working while teaching
[08:26] - Learning to be a consultant and what a CTO does
[11:00] - meeting the early dot net team and coming on board
[12:00] - the "warm" intro - the transitive property of friendship and opening doors for others
[14:35] - being non-denominational in tech religions and strong fundamentals of scale
[16:20] - knowing one layer deeper in the stack than your neighbors and sharing knowledge
[18:00] - learning uncool tech, what's in common across stacks, and appreciating the history of [computer science
[22:40] - difference between a mentor and a sponsor and finding one, being intentional
[25:03] - being shown the ropes by a CTO sponsor, learning to navigate the room
[26:43] - learning to navigate one layer down from his non-technical parents
[29:10] - learning how to be a PM - building extreme empathy
[31:53] - how did Scott learn to do empathy? Moving across worlds and practice
[35:45] - Learning to do technical communication well -
[37:17] - Using comedy, comedy as empathy, the value of improv
[40:17]- "rubber duck" programming
[42:31] - being the person who admits they don't know, helping junior people in meetings by asking their questions
[45:14] - Scott's most valuable career advice - "don't waste your keystrokes"