Developer Career Growth and Asymmetric Bets with Dax Raad

[00:00] Hey Dax, hey Joel got to finally chat. Yeah, no doubt so Twitter right like we're both aficionados of that particular service we both like to post And one of the things that strikes me in terms of the way you post is there's a lot of, you know, this is the wrong way to do it. This is the stuff that I don't like. This is like y'all are dummies for doing it this way. And I appreciate that kind of, like, I like the shtick.

[00:33] I like the, I think that it's a, I take it as a bit and, and, you know, I think that's probably the appropriate way to take it. Just if you don't want to feel bad in your heart, you can take it as a bit. But like what, what makes me curious though, cause you have that and you obviously have strong opinions is like, how do we take that, that constructive criticism where you're, you're letting us know that we're doing it wrong? But what do you like? What would you suggest to the modern web developer that is building apps and needs to deploy, needs to come into the office on Monday and, and have something teed up.

[01:09] That's a, that's a good decision. Like it's either a thought process or if there's not like a specific thing you recommend, but like what, what's your go-to what, how do you, how do you build an app? Yeah, it's, it's. It's funny to hear that. The like an interpretation of how I speak about things is I'm talking about, like people are doing things wrong.

[01:32] Because in my memory, when I'm talking about that stuff, it is just like, it's like, it's not coming from a place of logic. Usually I'm just like, just making fun of stuff without giving any explanation as to, like any technical argument or whatever. So for me, when I say that stuff, it's actually because, and I, you know, obviously I'm always, you know, hitting on some of like the most popular things like next JS punch, as they say, Right. Sometimes I also make fun of indie hackers a lot. And that's, and that's definitely, you know, punching down, but, but so I think for me, when I talk about that stuff, just for like a little bit of context, like the work I do.

[02:20] So I have working, been working on open source full-time for about three years. I spend all of my time helping companies deploy stuff. And I have this really fortunate position of being able to see like thousands of, like little thousands of companies deploying applications in all different kinds of ways, to all different places, to all different approaches, different team sizes, like just every possible combination of things, you know, we get to see, and we get to like learn a lot about different technologies that we don't use in a wide range of things. We also get frustrated because in our role of helping people build stuff, there are certain technologies and certain problems that cause, it's not necessarily that people are doing things wrong, it's that there are these common recurring problems that come up and confuse people, and they start asking us about questions. And the reason I make fun of next year is a lot is because I actually help people deploy next year as all the time to all kinds of places, whether it's to their database account with us or sell whatever.

[03:17] Like I, like we generally don't really have an opinion on what you've chose those or where you want to deploy it. We try to help you with whatever problem you're having, where you're going. Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's like a pure, like from a business point of view, we want to be as wide ranging scope as possible.

[03:32] So we like don't really, even though I'm always making fun of this stuff, I actually don't in my work really coach people on, hey, like use this thing or use this other thing. The reason we make fun of certain things is because we noticed the extreme support burden that some of these tools have. And Next.js particularly, it's like, and again, a lot of this is because it is really popular, it is really big. Just these constant problems that people come up to, like the constant confusion people run into, the difficulty of deploying is like 10 times more difficult when you go anywhere, even a little bit outside the zone. And I think we see like a little bit of a different population than what's like the very online population.

[04:14] We talked to people that are using Next.js and they're like, wait, what's Verzel? Or like, they don't really understand that Next.js and React are different things. So these aren't like deeply opinionated choices people are making, it's just Next.js has achieved default status, which is great. It's like an amazing position that I would probably try to get to where you're the default choice. But because you're the default choice, people are choosing it without really thinking about it.

[04:38] And they kind of run into problems a year later down the road. So when I make fun of Next.js, it's just because they are the default thing. So I just want to like provide some kind of counterbalance and it's never going to cover my technical angle. It's just going to be, you know, just saying that you're lame if you use it. And that's just me having fun and getting a little bit of my frustration out from the amount of time that we spend trying to support people using it.

[05:04] And it's quite an old project, it's been around for a long time. So the reality is, is everything gets old and everything starts to look outdated and have like years of weights of decisions kind of weighing it down. And it just happens. I feel that. My very first Rails app is AKEtIO.

[05:22] And I built it using a tutorial. And I built it 10 years ago. And that Rails app still exists. And I literally, just this week, was dealing with week one decisions when I built the app right like you deal with that for a long time and you don't think about it because you're adding new stuff and you're like I something I said is like I really relate to the hubris of Thinking you're you're extremely clever and then having the resources to continue doubling down on that going forward. And that's just something that happens to all of us.

[05:54] You build something and it expands. And with Next or anything that's popular, like it's a SEO sort by new kind of problem where this is the default and this is, you know, like, I'm not, you know, this is the logical choice because this is what everybody's using and what everybody's talking about. So we should probably use it to feels like, that just, you know, kind of, That's how people fall into a mode when they're picking something new or, or, you know, started a new project or whatever. And that's, that's totally fine. Like that's, that's not going to break you necessarily.

[06:28] It's just, I think there's the part of it that I will say, if I do wanna get into like actual details about it, there is just an approach to how the Next team likes to solve problems that I don't particularly drive with. I think they love the idea of having crazy power as a default. So they want to make it so when you start a new Next.js app, it is like the most rocket performance thing ever with all the bells and whistles turned on. But this stuff really doesn't make sense at scale. So you're going in there, turning off stuff or like stuff that should be straightforward is like underneath like very heavy abstraction.

[07:09] And it's always enable like a very powerful like thing you can show off demo by default. And there's some upsides to that. And there's some cases where that makes a lot of sense. It's just, that's just one approach. There's other approaches where it's, we really believe in like kind of progressive disclosure where you start off very simple And it's very straightforward.

[07:31] And when you want to get more advanced, there is like a very nice path to getting more advanced and adding power and adding more control. We find this from an educational point of view, this also works really well. Cause you start to, as you use a framework, you start to get smarter. And we try to stick to things that are like a little more standardized, like things that are not very specific to our framework. We don't like try to invent too many concepts.

[07:55] We try to make it so if you're learning a thing through our stuff, it's a thing that you're going to carry, whether you use our stuff or not. Whereas Next.js tends to have a lot of very Next.js specific quirks and things that you learn that is not really portable anywhere else. And if you're coming in very experienced, you can't really use a lot of that knowledge. Like if you know how cache control headers work and you've been using them for a decade, you know, it's not really something that you can use there. So it's just an approach that I think for me, it just doesn't, doesn't really click and there are some downsides with it.

[08:28] And I think there's, There's a general understanding of like, no, like, you know, there's like an objective way to build a framework. And the most popular one is doing that. There's a lot of ways to make a successful tool. And they're just one of them. So what's your go-to, like, if you're going to sit down and write something?

[08:46] Yeah, it's hard for me to answer this question because like somebody tells me a solid start I don't know if that's a I've actually never used solid start okay they were just lying to me well they were close in that I haven't used react in probably three years now I switched over to Solid JS for a while. That's what I use when I build web stuff, but I don't really use meta frameworks really. So like Solid Star has been out for, I mean, it's been out for a long time, but they kind of restructured it and like, it's more officially out in the past six months or so. I've played with it, still haven't used it. I'm just not someone that really needs a meta framework.

[09:27] I tend to build long session productivity apps that people use like the whole day to get their work done. A lot of the benefits of these meta frameworks are more around like SSR experiences. That makes sense where people, you have a lot of visitors and they come in for very brief sessions, very, very different way, very, very different types of products that fit that Single page application you're saying you build a single page application dashboard and stuff pulling and Yeah, I'm doing all that fun stuff. Yeah So a lot of my initial kind of like pushback against like this world of next is that it represents actually a very narrow type of product. You know, technically can do everything, but no, that's not really true.

[10:13] Like you can't just do everything. You know, You can technically do everything, but some things are easier and some things are harder. You kind of a natural reality of building any kind of framework. And they're very oriented around e-commerce type experiences. And people hate it when I say that, because they're like, no, you can do whatever you can build out.

[10:30] Yes, you can, you can do, you can build whatever with anything. I can build anything you want with jQuery. It doesn't mean that, you know, it's particularly good at certain things. So I think it's very oriented around that use case. And it's very aligned with wherever sales customers are.

[10:43] And you can see that natural, they push more and more in that direction because that's where the customers are pulling in. Those are the features that they can kind of show off to their customers. But it's treated as like, that's like a big swath of what people work on. I've actually almost never worked on anything in that category. Pretty much everything I've ever built in my career on the web has been these like productivity apps where it's in some industry where someone is trying to do their work.

[11:08] We're introducing software to a process and they are working on a set of data. It's not a large set of data. It's like their company's data. And they kind of use it to do their work. So they don't care about things like how fast is this page load from cold, like from my first visit.

[11:25] We're not getting a lot of milliseconds. Or whatever, the time to first paint and all that fun stuff. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I care a lot about performance, but for those types of apps, the types I'm talking about building, that performance means something totally different from what like the next world looks at. It's all about interactions.

[11:42] Like when I go to do a workflow, when I click to a new screen, how fast is it load? Is there, if there's any spinners that kind of sucks, if I'm searching through a list of records, like how fast did those come up? And the approach there is actually the opposite of the direction Next is going in, which is like do more on the server. The apps that I work on, it's all about doing more on the client. How can we get the web feeling more and more native?

[12:05] How can we store data locally in the browser? How can we sync that actively? And for a long time, I was like, looking around, like nobody is talking about this stuff. This has like been my entire career working on this, but all of web is obsessed with, the joke I made was the entire web industry is obsessed with building websites where people visit and leave as fast as possible. Cause that's kind of what these frameworks are optimized for.

[12:30] And that was kind of my initial thing of being like, there's some weird asymmetry here with, this does not reflect me or anyone I know, like people aren't building these. I'm sure there's a segment of people that are, but it was very under talked about. And I would say in the past year or so, I'm starting to see that shift a lot more. People are like, hey, like, yeah, how can we do cooler stuff on the client? How can we store data on the client?

[12:55] And I'm seeing people look at stuff like linear and build similar architecture around that. So for me, for the stuff that I build on, have built in the past couple of years, yeah, I'm like a very client heavy, SPA type person. It's funny that one time I did e-commerce, we don't have a website, we built it in the terminal. So it's just, I didn't even get to do that in that case. So what did y'all call it?

[13:18] A TUI is that terminal? You had a terminal user interface. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool.

[13:24] Like, and I wouldn't even considered building an e-commerce business in the terminal. So like, that's wild. And that's a coffee shop, right? Yeah, yeah, so it's a terminal. We sell coffee and potentially other things.

[13:36] Oh, nice. I like that. I mean, it's funny to take such a radical approach. And then I also think it's funny because you basically put together like a team of five principal engineers or so, right? To, to, is that must be wild.

[13:52] That's how I looked at it. Like the entire team is principal engineers across the board. And the actual reality is more like, it's a team of a bunch of streamers that are very easily distracted and very, like just crazy energy. Plus Adam, who's quiet and never says anything and does a lot of the tedious work. So that's kind of how it's done.

[14:15] Yeah. So, I mean, going back to, and I think linear is such a great example of like, it's an app that I actually enjoy using. Like, like there's a lot of these kind of productivity apps where it's not great. I actually enjoy Slack also, but that's kind of a controversial opinion sometimes. I mean, I like, yeah, it's, I enjoy it too.

[14:35] Yeah. Like it just works really like for work, right? Like it's not great for community stuff. And I think that's where people get the line mixed up. And like lately, a lot of people have been talking about local first and, and, you know, like this, this concept or, or putting, a category defining name on the concept of bringing data into your local, you know, on your local machine.

[14:55] And I feel like that was like what SPAS were, you know, that was the joy of it. I did flash and flex before that. And this idea that we can use processing power on the client to do work and then improve that latency and give people a feel. Because it's all about feel to me at that point when you're in productivity style. How does this feel versus, they don't care if it's on the server, it's locally.

[15:17] It's just, how does this feel? And like, I don't know, what do you think about the whole local first movement and what they're doing or the, like RepliCash and auto merge and these different kinds of technologies that are coming up out of that? Yeah, so we were actually one of the earliest adopters of RepliCache. So me and my wife built a product on it two or three years ago. And that was after probably, we did like, I would say, almost a year of research of various, I knew I wanted to do local first, like what this bubble category, local first, idea of saving data, syncing, sync engine, right?

[15:52] I guess maybe the more accurate category. We want to sync stuff to the browser. We probably spent a year trying three different approaches of doing that, kind of getting progressively more all in with each try. I think we like tried to do it entirely on GraphQL at one point with Urql, which actually you can do. I think that was our last attempt before we found what RepliCache.

[16:15] And they were like pretty, like very, very early at that time. And having spent a year of trying to do it, like we have a very clear sense of here's exactly the set of problems we keep running into with doing that. And Replcache was impressive because it very specifically addressed each one of those things. And it's just not stuff that a lot of people are talking about. It's when you like see someone knowing exactly your problem and building it, like you know that like that's definitely it.

[16:44] And the other thing that was really funny is I'd spent the year just like obsessively inspect element linear for like every little thing that they do like entire, like just obsessing over how they built everything. And I landed on the RepliCache homepage and it's a demo of a linear clone. So I was like, okay, these people are on like the exact same path just, you know a little ahead of me. So Built one thing on there. I'm on my third application where I put cash now, I think they are I've tried like the wide set of things out there I think I still believe that they're the ones that are thinking about the problem, right?

[17:19] And I think so many more applications should be built this way not all applications, but a lot more Than are today and it's one of those things where when you start to use an app that is built this way you just start to hate every other app that's not built this way. Everything just starts to feel horrible. And having spent so much time just like, again, zooming in on linear and like face one inch from the screen and like understanding all the little details, I think I like broke something in myself where I just hate using software now. Cause if it's not at that level, I just like feel right. Right.

[17:51] Like it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's beating you down instead of helping you out at the end of the day. Yeah.

[17:57] Like you want to feel at the end of the day, like you were really empowered by your work, not that you're like drained. I mean, I've had, Lord knows I've had like applications I've worked on where you wake up and the first thing in the morning is you think about the code that you're about to go have to wrestle. Just wish you could go back to sleep and quit. I think I've quit a job over that actually. No, of course, yeah.

[18:18] Yeah, just like a bad code base that isn't going anywhere. It's like, okay, well, I think time to move on. So I like the juxtaposition of my story where I found a tutorial on how to build Stripe subscription app with Rails and followed that tutorial and within a week had a business versus your approach where you dissected and researched for a full year before making a decision about what it is you would use. And like both approaches are interesting to me, right? Like I feel like, you know, like I'm just like going in there and throwing it and doing it.

[18:55] And like now, later on in my life, I'm more interested in like that approach where you think about this and you're actually analyzing the problem and deciding what you're gonna build because you're gonna have to live with it for a while and you know this, right? So you were doing the research to save your future self, sadness and aggravation, I assume. And maybe you just enjoy the research part. But what's the process when you sit down and you're about to solve some sort of software puzzle? Like, how do you, how do you think about that and kind of decide what informs what you decide?

[19:25] And yeah, research. I think our mantra, especially SST is, we always say just do both. So yes, I did spend, so I described it as I spent a year, like failing to kind of build architecture till I found something that worked. But we literally had a customer the whole time. We had customers the whole time that were using it.

[19:45] We were shipping stuff. So yeah, we ultimately did both. Like we were actually building a product and a business and we were constantly like rebuilding the system because we weren't able to achieve the level of like fidelity that we wanted with what we were doing. So ultimately we do both. I think that, like, yes, you can definitely just shut that part of your brain entirely off and just use something off the shelf and go and you can build massive successful business with that.

[20:16] And there's infinite examples of that. So it's hard for me to say that, like you can't do that. Cause of course you can, but there's plenty of examples, but with this stuff, it's just like, it's very personal to how you want to, like what you're actually trying to do. That product that I'm talking about, the first product, it ultimately didn't work. We had some customers and we were making actually a decent amount of money from it, but there was no growth, there was no path to grow beyond without it being like massively difficult.

[20:49] So we decided to not work on that anymore. We're actually like, we haven't even like fully off boarded those customers. Like we said, we still have them. But what survived from there is all that research and that way of building. And that got rolled into the next two products that, that we've, we've built.

[21:06] So I think for me, I just want to be able to walk away. Cause I've been building my, I've been like building my own products for a very long time. I am very often wrong about the product. So I like to be able to walk away from it with something I can take. And for me, I S Y with every new thing, I always like take some bets, take some risks on the technology.

[21:27] I'm not purely like there, There is a valid approach of being like, I don't want any execution risk. I'm going to pick something safe and focus entirely on the business and the product. But for me, I take a lot of. It's against all judgment call. I take some amount of risk on there, trying stuff that is not really proven experimental So that I not only get a business learning when it fails, I also get technology learning.

[21:50] And you get to push your own skills forward, right? Like, so through the process, if the business doesn't work out, you are going to benefit personally and push your career forward. Yeah, exactly. Like, so the outcome is technically good for you. Yeah.

[22:03] And it's where I draw a lot of motivation from like when I ship something I want people to be like to see it and then start to feel like well now I can't ship anything worse than that cuz I knows exists cuz that's how it's been for me Like when I saw linear I was like, okay, they just at the bar, which means I can never ship anything that's like drastically below this. So I want to make sure- The linear bar? Linear, yeah, exactly. Yeah, nice. When I saw it, I was just like, everything I've ever built sucks and I haven't even tried.

[22:31] Like they just showed that I wasn't even trying, you know? That's kind of how I interpret their stuff. Is that challenging? Like to set that high of a bar for yourself and then have to leap over it. I'm like, my bar is fairly low to be honest.

[22:42] I'm comfortable with like a level of jank that is different than that. So it's like, it's, it's interesting to me, like standards and having like that level of quality bar, like it's, it's a constraint, right. At the end of the day. Yeah. And I'm always failing it.

[22:56] Like I'm like, I've like never really felt like, okay, I like met the thing that I said, but it just comes down to where you draw your motivation from. For me, like I'm very drawn to the idea of proving something. I'm very drawn to the idea of a lot of people saying something doesn't matter or like what you're doing can't work and showing that it can. That's a lot of where like my motivation comes from so despite I tend to align my business that way. Yeah So, what are people sleeping on then like if you know, like what what's what's like the Best things that aren't aren't getting enough attention in the in the broader like web development spectrum.

[23:35] Yeah. I mean, the local first thing is huge. Like, I think I'm finally seeing it turn over where I'm like seeing people talk about it that I don't recognize, like for a very long time, it was just like this year, there's the podcast that's doing really well, I think. Yeah. And I was on that episode.

[23:47] I was on that podcast too. And it was great. Yeah. So I'm seeing people talk about it. I think the key for me is I see people I don't recognize talk about it or I see a product that I never heard of built with this way.

[23:57] I'm like, okay, it's like going outside of my, my little bubble. Not the same dozen nerds that are just super stoked on it for the last five years or whatever, right? Yeah. So it's definitely reaching a threshold. And I think there's, it's so fascinating because I was drawn to it purely from, I want to deliver better UX for people, but there's this weird, crazy side effect of it where all of your data is just in the browser, which means your application is stupid easy to build.

[24:26] So my wife is not a software engineer. She's basically, It's been encroaching in that zone. She's like done product and design and now she's like she's like, you know actually getting hands-on and building stuff and Just not having to talk about like data fetching or rest at points or like graph QL Like the data is just there locally. Like if you want to build a screen that shows a new thing, you can just do it. It's stupid easy to build stuff cause all the data is just there.

[24:53] So much of web development is like, well, like we have to fetch the data but it needs to be load on SSR, But then it needs to be invalidated in this way. And how do you invalidate just this part when this part is green? All of that stuff is just not an issue. And it's very simple way of building stuff again, right? So that was like a surprise side effect.

[25:12] I hadn't really thought about that. Like a step up from having like a flat JSON file, which gives you some of that flavor, right? Like that's how I start a lot of stuff. I want the data to be first, and then once we have the data, we can drive it, but this gives you your data there, so you're not having to fetch it or deal with a server or stand up some sort of API or whatever. Like you just get in there and you can have data and go to town.

[25:34] Yeah, exactly. All the race conditions, all the loading states, like as long as the, like I work on the backend and I make sure that the data model is defined and it makes sense. And if that's the case, it's just now available on the front end. So it is a very productive way to work with some trade-off, of course, there's always there. So I would say that's probably the biggest thing in web that I still feel like is underutilized.

[25:57] Like it's this weird dynamic of in the overall space of websites, a very small percentage of them should probably be local first. I would say like, I don't know, I'll make up a number. Like I'd say like 2% of them should be local first. But right now it's like 0.2% of them are. So it's like, so like a hundred X should be like a hundred X bigger.

[26:19] But yeah, there's like this weird dynamic there where sometimes when I talk about it, a lot of people are like, like, what do you mean? Like, this doesn't make sense for all this stuff. And yeah, it doesn't, but. Yeah, like your blog or whatever, probably doesn't need to be local first. But it doesn't need… You know, like the authoring experience, the back end of it, the back office of these things, like my store.

[26:40] You know, if I'm… I mean, we do video blogs. It's paywall video blogs. It's basically our… So, it's a little bit of e-commerce. And the front of that, you know, we statically generate and that's great But the authoring experience behind the scenes like that's where you know I start to think of things like people want to use a local editor or they want to you know Like have the data so they can manipulate it and then push it back and not be forced to deal with it all in the browser if they don't want to. That's another manifestation of this.

[27:10] I've been thinking about it a lot lately too in terms of just the content production that we do and how that goes in. And not the presentation, it's the production. And that's the difference, right? Like, I think there's like the, the presentation of an e-commerce store is different than, you know, like what you need to like produce and, and manipulate the data behind the scenes. Like that's a totally different, like the paradigms are different.

[27:33] Like the, the kind of front and back offices is how I think about it. Just from. Yeah. And I think that's why, I think a lot of people saw the remix Shopify acquisition and they're like, oh yeah, this proves that, you know, it's just, they're just focused on e-commerce, but no, building Shopify means you're building the back office too. So you get like the full exposure.

[27:55] Observationally, that's like a big use case of Remix for them is like, what is going on? What like drives Shopify? And even if you like log into the Shopify dashboard, which is not a piece of software that's ever made me go, man, this is fun. Like it's, it's complex and then, you know, it's like it has to be something for everybody and they're like, like the entire world of e-commerce, but the, the backend of that and the, like the, you know, when you log in and you're in the admin UI or whatever, like that's a tough problem. And that's where it, like the spas and local first starts to make sense to even, you know, like behind the scenes of e-commerce, I suppose.

[28:29] Yeah, then I think the other thing, and so if you ask a question like, what are people sleeping on web development? I think my answer is like, the stuff that's not web development. I do talk about this stuff, but this is a subset of really what I work on. I mostly work on infrastructure stuff, which is kind of in a very different zone than like this local first, like how do we make web apps feel better type of stuff. And I don't even remember one.

[28:54] Feel better emotionally or feel better? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's just, I don't know. I think it's, I think that web development is actually a very narrow realm. And if you start to feel negative about it, I think it's because you're trying to live entirely in this like very, very narrow space.

[29:19] If I think about my career, I don't even know when I started doing web development. Like it's like, yeah, it started becoming a category and it started to dominate a lot more of the space of programming. But I never like thought of myself as a web developer. I never like got a role that was like a web developer role. It was just a responsibility of my role of being a building software.

[29:42] And I think a lot of the reason why I'm really happy and I'm really have fun building stuff where I think a lot of people feel like jaded or just kind of negative over time about or burnt out is because yeah, that's a part of my job. When I find that these nitty gritty things about web to ever like annoying, then I'll go work on infrastructure stuff for a while. Like I said, for terminal, like then I go work on this Go app that, you know, renders stuff to a terminal. And there's just so much in the world outside of web, other languages too. There's so much we learn from other languages that you bring back to web.

[30:16] There's problems that you can now solve in the infrastructure layer, which have historically been, felt like application layer problems. So just there's like a wide world software and tech and programming out there that, I think there's just been this obsession over productivity and efficiency. It's like, I mastered my one stack and like, all I care about is shipping. And I ship really fast with this one stack. You don't like someone that has like a wide range of experience is going to kind of beat you on that.

[30:46] And it's more fun to have a wide range. So I think I would just encourage web devs to like, not see themselves as web devs. Like you're just a programmer and you can do literally anything. You can build embedded software if you want. It's all roughly the same.

[31:01] So yeah, I think that's like where I feel like the conversation is a little stale. I think, I mean, I can't agree with you anymore and the autonomy that you get from being able to like cycle through stuff. And they say now that I think some 80% of people that used to identify as front end developers now call themselves full stack developers. And that's good. I guess, you know, like, It's fine.

[31:21] I feel like it's kind of a product of the meta-frameworks that's giving people that. And then it's career marketing, is a lot of it. And it's like, what do we call ourselves so that we can get hired? And maybe what's interesting and a separation there is if you're really not trying to get hired, what does that mean, right? Like, I think you're in a situation where that's, you know, you probably keep that in your back pocket.

[31:45] If I needed to get hired, I could use this, but that's not like your goal and what you do. You're trying to build a business. And, you know, does that color your, your, yeah, what you choose to work on or how do you, how you think about it? Right. Like, cause not everybody gets to wake up every day and choose to, you know, like today I'm gonna work on this.

[32:02] It's kind of like you get told. And I'm wondering, you know, like how do you, how would you, what advice would you give to people if they wanted to kind of set themselves up for a career that allowed them to have that freedom to move around? Is that something that people can think about or even do? Yeah, I struggle with this, especially lately. I would say in the past, like two years, I realized that I don't really have good career advice for people.

[32:27] I feel like the more experience I've gotten, the less career advice I've been giving out. And I think it's because personally, my career has gotten like super weird. Like I do a lot of weird stuff that like I spent last night and if you saw a video, editing a video of me throwing a bag of coffee at someone's face, and that was like my job, I had to do that as my job and I wouldn't have expected any of that. Tax deductions happening. Yeah, exactly.

[32:52] I feel like a rental Lamborghini and like that was part of my job. So it's, it's just gotten weirder. And the weirdness just starts to escalate exponentially. And I think that's just what happens when you go down like a more undefined path. So my perspective on what it's like out there in the job market now, if I like take my older self that was doing a little bit, doing stuff a little bit more traditionally and drop that person into the world today, like I don't even know what I would be doing, but I can talk about like my mindset that led me to this zone How do you get weird I guess is the yeah again this goes back to just my Innate drive comes from a lot of people telling me that something is wrong and trying to trying to prove it differently When I was very early in my career, it's so hard to imagine this because the world's so different now I realized that I realized that if I'm an employee somewhere, there is a very fast ceiling, in terms of what I can get out of it, because the reality is, is some engineers are a lot better than others.

[33:58] People don't like to hear that, but the thing I tell them is, well, you can probably imagine someone that's like three times as worse as you. Right. And they're like, yeah, I can, but the last one, three times is So I, I, once like that kind of clicked for me, I was like, yeah, the way companies are set up, they're never going to pay one person three times more than the person sitting next to them, right? Just just foundationally not how they're how they're built. So I understood that if there is a cap and and You know that that that's tough to break through that And I really wanted to break through that.

[34:35] So I went freelance. Everyone told me it was a bad idea that you need to be like trying to get into like Fang Company, try to have like these big names on your resume. And I really wanted to prove them wrong. The second dimension is, I didn't want to work in an office. I wanted to work primarily remote going to the office here and there, which again, back in like 2014, when I was doing this, it was like, that's ridiculous.

[35:02] And it was kind of, I would say like 2% of companies were willing to do that, so that narrowed my pool drastically and I'd do all kinds of weird stuff where I applied for a thing and then when they're really excited about me, then I would drop the fact that, hey, I actually wanna be remote and a lot of them will be pissed But then someone be like, okay fine, like how about four days and one or something like that? So it was a lot of consultants and freelancers back then right like you would even they would even want their consultants and freelancers To be in the office. Yeah, and that was totally normal So I was playing this really weird zone where it was like, so many things had to line up for me to even get an opportunity. So I think I got very used to early on when the idea of the front door is not an option, you gotta find some weird ass side door to go through. So whenever I see like a straightforward path, my brain just like kind of rejects it.

[35:59] And over the years, I've always just been looking at, okay, what are the places that people aren't looking? What's like a weird hack to get into something? And I think that's kind of translated into me ending up working on businesses that are like quite weird and don't have a comp That don't like follow a certain path and it is tough because you're usually wrong with these But it's one of those things where the one time you're right. It ends up being massively Beneficial so if you look at the remote situation Again totally out of sheer randomness of the world, a pandemic happened and forced the whole world to go remote. I've been working remote for 10 years and I ended up getting a job as a director of engineering for a company that was going remote.

[36:43] And it was really beneficial for me to be like, oh, this isn't new for me. Like, I know how to. I've seen a bunch of companies that do this. I know what breaks. I know what works well.

[36:52] And suddenly I had like I was used to playing this tiny sliver of the market. And suddenly the whole market opened up for me because everyone was accepting remote stuff. And that year as a consultant, I made like just a ridiculous amount of money. So it was one of those things where like, you're just wrong in a lot of things, but the moment you're right, it, you're, you're, you're very, very right. And the amount of money I made from that, like funded, like many, many years of working on other businesses, working on stuff that, you know, didn't have a direct, like didn't have like an immediate reward.

[37:27] It funded, it funded freedom at the end of the day. Right. Like that funded autonomy and freedom. And one of the things that I saw you mention recently was this idea of asymmetric bets, which I thought was pretty fascinating where you're doing that with business, right? Like with SST and your business, that is something that you're intentionally doing.

[37:46] But it also sounds to me like you've done it with your personal career and made some asymmetric bets that eventually pay off, but often don't, right? Like you're making bets that have long odds and when they pay off, they pay off really well. But otherwise you take it as a learning experience. Yeah, and I would say even when they, the reason they're asymmetric is when they don't work, it's actually not they're harming you, it's just that they're like, they're actually still helping you. Like if you take a look at SST, if it literally fails tomorrow, I'm in like an infinitely better position than I was like, you know, three years ago before all this.

[38:18] So literally it could fail and it's fine. But if it is, if the narrow chance, if we are right, it's going to be, you know, massively correct. So it's not even like you're going to lose something. It's just so like when you like kind of start to see these opportunities, It's one of those things we have to go for. And to be honest, I would say I didn't really understand this till probably even after I started working at SST, I would say like one year in is when I really understood this, I think historically I've been pretty conservative when it comes to business.

[38:44] Like I think for like, when I did the consulting stuff, I was willing to like, kind of go more risky. But when it came to business, I had this mentality that a lot of people have, which actually the trick with this mentality is it works. So I'm not going to say it's wrong. It actually does work. There's just a different thing that you could also do instead which is a You know be really conservative Find a business that has like a really high likelihood of working like maybe it's like looks a lot like something else That's already out there and you're either gonna rerun it or you're gonna like, you know there's like a lot of people look at the business and be like, Oh, totally.

[39:19] That's going to make sense. And you're going to have this like conservative approach to it. I think what clicked for me is no matter how much it seems that way, doing your own business is always going to be hard. Like it's always going to be the world not giving a shit about what you're doing and you like begging the world to pay attention And like just make something happen because there's no one out there helping you on it So given that's always going to be that hard something clicked for me of being like yeah, why work on? The obvious thing I guess this is a personal like I said Working on the simpler straightforward thing it does work for a lot of people.

[39:54] And most businesses, as I would say, fall in that category. But I realized like some of these like crazier companies that exist. I mean, people always say this, like, yeah, they were started by people that were no different than you or me. And I, what I realized was the thing that they were different was it was totally different relationship to risk where they are just like, I'm just going to try to do the biggest thing possible. And I'm going to avoid the temptation of all the small exits that show up on the path to this bigger thing.

[40:23] And if you look at the people that like got to like the biggest, like the highest point of that trajectory. Like if you look at like, like an Amazon, for example, when you start becoming successful, there are a million things that start showing up in your life, trying to tell you, take you out of the game. Basically you get acquisition opportunities. You get like, sorry, it starts with acqui-hire opportunities. You get offered these, here's a bunch of money up front.

[40:49] And here's like the, your cushiest dream job ever. And that's like now a temptation. And the next thing that shows up is an acquisition of, Hey, here's some, even more money and you get to join our company and have all these new resources. All of these like super fortunate to even have one of these opportunities to have a show up in your life. And these people just managed to say no for like a very, very, very long time and continue to just risk it all.

[41:11] Just like that tunnel vision like that. I see where this is going and We're either gonna get there or we're gonna, you know. I have behind me, it says the, I have a bumper sticker that says the exit strategy is death. I like quite a bit. Yeah, exactly.

[41:26] It's like their relationship with the risk is so different from how I had been seeing things. And at some point it just clicked for me. Like, yeah, if I had to sell SST and go work at a bigger company, that would be really sad. And like, yeah, it would be sad. Like all the things that I imagined that we would do one day, we were not gonna be able to do.

[41:47] It's kind of the end of a story. And even if it was just like we exited and we knew enough to go over the company, well, then now what I got to go start from zero again, I'm just gonna go build the same company, you know, it's just, so at some point I'm sure this like threshold will cross and I'll be like, okay, like I'm gonna take the exit or whatever But the longer you can resist that I think that's how you start to do these Like wilder things and be more eventually the exit catches up to all of us. Yeah, there's that I think what's interesting too is like what you talk about and this idea, you know, like we're relating that to business. And, and to me, there's, there's some merit in that with career also, right? Like you can go be a React developer and you can take the safe choice, the mainstream, what shows up first when you search, like what do web developers do?

[42:37] React. Or like you can, you know, like there is some risk and there's some asymmetry to choosing something different or choosing, you know, like outside of what is just the absolute strongest firehose thing at the time and learning that. And not that you wouldn't also be able to consume and learn and could do react if you need to, but identifying more broadly and taking risks and choices in terms of what you learn and spend your time on and finding that thing that makes you happy and that you really truly enjoy and then figuring out how you can do that like as your day-to-day and you know like building on that idea versus just playing it safe. And there's no, you know, the play it safe is great, but what's interesting to me there also is that you end up being, you know, like the field of competition ends up being much wider when you're doing the safe thing. Like, oh, I want to open a franchise.

[43:32] I want to open a subway. And, you know, there's a lot of subways. You know, so do you, you know, like, how do you want to approach that? And I think it's, philosophically, it's something you have to analyze and think about at least. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[43:46] And I think I can totally relate to that because I think a good portion, when I was like just kind of working on career stuff, I picked up languages that were just not really, they weren't really jobs for them. Like Lisp? Not that weird. Not quite. I would say, I mean, yes, definitely some in that, in that like zone, but I think one that sticks out to me was, I started using Elixir very early And I had a good reason to, like I was working on a real-time database, in this role that I was in.

[44:22] And it actually is like, that's like the place where you definitely want to like try something like that. Yeah. But you know, There weren't like a bunch of jobs. And I was also in a position where I was like, this is again, more open, more on the entrepreneurial side. So the problem wasn't that I wouldn't get a job with it.

[44:38] It was more of that. How do I find other people that can work with me on a lecture that was hiring or collaborators in general, right? Yeah, exactly. And there's just, again, this weird thing that happens where the trade-off is, yeah, you can't do this straightforward thing and just post a job posting and have like a million people show up. Like that's not an option.

[44:58] What you end up doing is like having these weird personal interactions with people on like a random GitHub issue. I think they've had a relationship over months and then there's an opportunity to work with them or there's an opportunity to go work at their place. Very not straightforward, not planned. I can't tell you what exactly to do, where exactly to look. You can't replicate what worked for me.

[45:18] So that's what's scary about it. But when it does work, you get like the most amazing people ever to work with you on this stuff because yeah, like you're not there if you're not like probably like a very special person. And it turned out Elixir got very popular in the next like several years. Again, not like huge, like React, but big enough where there are multi-billion dollar companies built with Elixir. So given enough time, you now were early to something.

[45:49] And when you're early to something, there's always like a disproportionate reward for that. You get to have way more experience with Elixir than other people. You probably were interacting with individuals that are now quite influential. They're like- A bunch of new weird friends. Yeah, exactly.

[46:04] The people that like, were working on Elixir directly or now have these like really tenured roles at these companies that you now have a, you know, you have like a very early relationship with them. So I do encourage people to like dabble in that stuff. I think that happened again with Solid. Was messing with that early on. So at a point where like Ryan was like responding to every single message in the Discord.

[46:27] So like we'd personally be talking. And now like years later, like, you know, he just joined century. And like, that was, I was like very involved in, not very involved, but like, that was like a situation that I was like, like somewhat involved in. And you know, That's not something that like, it just wouldn't have happened if I just wasn't there early when there was nobody else. It's not like I was particularly like amazing and like, you know, a great person or like really good at something.

[46:55] It just was, a lucky early pads. Yeah. I mean, I'm picking something that, that you like your taste says is good early and that you're getting in and solve the use case for you. And, and you join that community. And, and again, it's one thing where there's no downside to that.

[47:12] Like if you enjoy it and the community is good and you're meeting people, and then this doesn't blow up and it's not the new big thing down the road that actually doesn't Matter so much because you win Yeah, I mean like you win because you've learned and you you've made friends And you've you've done the thing that you needed to do anyway, so there is no like downside downside to that yeah Yeah, exactly so I think just there's a little bit of an obsession with this. I think I was talking about this other day. It's like this, I would say there's an obsession with this like productivity category of thing where every single thing you do is supposed to be hyper rational and you're like not wasting time on stuff that's like, you know, on your to-do list. Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's like, there's like less meandering.

[47:57] There's less like, I'm just going to go mess around with this for a month and like, you know, maybe nothing comes of it. I think it kind of screws you. It actually makes you less, less productive. So there's needs to be some set, like some amount of balance to that. And it's like a false version of productivity, I think, where it's like, I just learned the bare minimum and I ship and I ship and I ship and I ship and I don't do anything else.

[48:19] You know, it's, it's not going to ship 100 apps in the next 100 days or something of that nature. Right. Okay, cool. A bunch of, a bunch of new garbage for the internet. That's what I'm going to do.

[48:28] Yeah, that, that actually, So going back to what I was saying earlier, I generally punch up, but I do punch down indie hackers because I actually feel that a lot of the friction that exists in like just the tech community online is this like, Just this interaction between people in the indie hacking space and people are not in the indie hacking space because it's just Completely different mindsets on life and there's not compatible with what these two groups are doing and all the fights tend to like fall on those lines and I feel like the the indie hacking way of doing things I think is a little overrepresented in my opinion because they have a little bit more time than everyone else. Yeah, there's a high volume. To engage. Well, and it's because they're not dealing with users and user issues, so they're just trying to engage online. Yeah.

[49:17] Cool, Well, Dax, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me about this stuff. I think it's endlessly interesting. So, thanks. Yeah, it was fun. Appreciate it.