How would you parse a million podcast feeds? My guest today, Dane Miller, has done exactly that. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. And I'm very excited to interview Dane. Dane is the director of tech at Stitcher and Mid-Roll. You may be listening to today's episode on Stitcher. And Dane is working at Stitcher with tons of podcast feeds. We're going to talk a little bit about that. He also is the host of Start Here FM, a podcast for beginner developers. And he is formerly, he worked on tech innovation at the White House. We're going to talk about a lot of this stuff in today's episode. I'm really excited to have Dane Miller on the podcast. Testing. Okay. Cool. Recording mind. So, sure. I was just going to ask, though. So, you're a director of tech over at Whiteboard? I am. Yeah, that is the official title. You're the only other director of tech that I know. Everybody else seems to be just a director of engineering. And I'm always like trying to look up online. What is the difference? Like, is there anything different? And it's absolutely, it seems that it's just a random word. It's clear. Yeah, it's clear. I like to think that we're going to include this in the podcast. We didn't have the official welcome. So that's fine. I like to think that the title director of technology implies that it's more than engineering. Right? So, part of my job is looking into the future or at least trying to attempt to look into the future and predict what's coming next. And it may be that engineering is not the next wave for us. Right? It could be that we're going to re-mead to adapt to a different thing. And understanding tech is really my job. It's not just understanding code, but also understanding how that code affects culture and how it affects the people around me and how developers engage with that. I think that's very well said. And I've never heard anybody say it that well. But I think also director of engineering is such a, you're backing yourself into a corner already. Because what if one day a solution is a third party piece of software that you need to leverage? Well, if you really are over-engineering everything, that's never ideal. But director of tech, we have that ability to kind of step back from the business and look forward and say, OK, I'm going to acquire this third party software. Right? Yeah, we have to build necessarily. Right. And that's kind of why these titles, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit. So I'm glad you brought it up. But titles are going to become kind of elusive as we move into the future anyway. If you ask the people that are closest to you, and particularly the ones that you think are, don't be mean about it. But the ones that you kind of respect are a little bit smarter than the average Apple. If you ask them what they want to do in 20 years, very few are going to give you a job title. Most are probably going to give you a softer answer about who they would like to be in 20 years. These job titles are shifting so rapidly. Software developer is going to look very different even in two years from now than it does today. Do you think everybody is going to be a consultant? Because what you're referring to, it seems like is this broadening of interest, right? People want to do so many different things. So it seems like this rise of the consultant is going to continue the independent consultant. Right? Even more so than freelance or freelancer was a popular term back in the day. Not so much anymore, right? If you want to be credible. I think that that's a really good insight. I do think that, you know, if you compare the shape of the movement from, let's say, the 1970s to now, in the 1970s, if you said you were a computer programmer, that meant maybe one or two things, right? Like, you're very unlikely to be way outside of this relatively narrow group of people who are writing assembly code or doing punch card code, right? Very unlikely that you're going to be doing something wildly different from that. But today, if you say you're, you are a computer programmer, you could be writing in one of thousands of languages, or you could be doing something totally different that people, you could even be designing your own language. And then on the, on the far flip side, you could be doing like database query, big, big data, you know, what is what is the name of big SQL or whatever's right on the total opposite into the spectrum or meta programming, or maybe you're teaching people about programming theory and you consider yourself a computer programmer. These are all wildly different from each other. And it's partially because, you know, that job title is no longer, it's no, it's too large to really narrow down what a person does. And I do think that we're going to see the same type of thing happen to that wide term of consultant, right? We have consulting in all different areas, obviously, but we may have something very specific in technology consulting that can't really be captured just by the way, consultant. And while things are broadening, 100% agree, while things are broadening, interests are broadening, and all the education that we have access to or educate education material, I guess, that we have access to is broadening the need for specialists is increasing in some ways. It's broadening and deepening. It's very strange. Yeah, exactly. And I totally am on board with you, that job title aspect. I'm curious like when people ask you, what do you do? Do you, for me, as a director of technology, sort of director level at a company for more than three or four years, I still say programmer or some weeks, I'll say manager. You know, if I'm feeling particularly good, it's funny, I don't necessarily say what my job title is, and do you do that as well? Yeah, I would say 90% of the time I will answer with, because most of the time they are not looking to have a deep discussion when they ask me what I do. And so I'll tell them, well, usually I write code and I help other people write code, right? That's like a simplified way of saying, I do write code, but I also oversee other people who write code. But the reality of what I do is significantly different than that, right? You know, everybody has a different thing that they really want to be known for. I want to be known for teaching. And that's, again, that is quite a broad thing, but I do kind of a teacher at heart. And so if I go a day or if I go a week or especially if I go a year without teaching, then something's wrong, right? Part of the reason I started to develop a T. So when somebody really wants to have this discussion like you are asking me right now, that's where I start going with my discussion. Yeah, I'm the same way. I have such a passion for teaching as well. That's why I started my thing. I'm curious though, like when we're talking about your job title, there are so many different aspects that it encompasses. And we can transition to questions that you want to ask in a minute. But I'm just curious, like what is it that you find the most challenging being a director of technology and engineering? Is it dealing with stakeholders or is it looking into the future and making strategic technology decisions? Or is it just the day to day? What aspect is super challenging? I would say people, and that again, a very broad answer to a very specific question, but the hardest thing that I deal with is managing the misconceptions or the natural biases that people have, both on my team and in the client world, as well as users, broad user spectrum, dealing with the dissonance between the way I'm thinking and the way someone else is thinking or the dissonance between the way I think something should be in the way that the client is requesting for it to be. That really is kind of the big problem, right? It's never going to be actually solved. It's only going to be dealt with. And it's kind of a, we had a guest come to Whiteboard recently and do kind of a guest speaking session with our team. And he mentioned this quote, I don't know if he, if it's his quote or not, but he said there's no future without conflict. And I thought that was so profound and so true. Yeah. Really, the personal conflict, and it's not just interpersonal like me to you, it's conflict like in large, right? Oh, yeah. Conflict between the way I think something should be in the way a large number of other people think it should be. And conflict between my team members and managing that is far harder than deciding what new language to learn. Yeah, for sure. Today's episode is sponsored by pusher. If you don't have live features in your application, meaning real time, things that are happening where the user is interacting with something like push notifications or a chat messaging system. If you don't have that in your application, then you probably are missing out on a lot of value that you can provide to your users. Pusher makes this easy, incredibly simple. No matter what language you're using, pusher's hosted API makes it simple to add these real-time features to your web and your mobile applications in just minutes. You can scale it up massively. Pusher has the simple methodology of working on top of web sockets to send messages between your client and your server. What this means is insanely fast and responsive applications for your users. Of course, pusher is built to grow. You can start with a free plan today, but you can scale up to a massively large plan if you'd like. For example, other companies that are using pusher, GitHub, Intercom, MailChimp, and the New York Times. They all use pusher to build their real-time features. Don't check it out. Spec.fm slash pusher. What would you say your biggest challenge is both, and maybe we ask or answer this question in twofold, what is the biggest technical challenge that you're facing as of late? What is the biggest challenge overall for you? Well, I think overall, I'll start there. What you mentioned about conflict, that's huge to me, and that's something I'm passionate about because dealing with so many different stakeholders as a director of technology, you kind of sit at the intersection of a bunch of teams. That's kind of your job is to sit on that intersection correctly. That means communication and everything else. In the book Creativity Inc by the Pixar Guys, they actually talk about one of their favorite days at work is uncovering deep conflict in the team. Fantastic. Love that idea. The most creativity in the world comes from this deep conflict. I don't know if that's true, but that's what the book said. I thought that just resonated with me so much. At work, I see that all the time. It's always the best technology decisions are hashed out over a whiteboard with some conflict. It's just always the way it is. The best one on ones are where I'm being super blunt. I've gotten to this point in my career where everything I say now, most of the time, it's a little bit conflict. It's a little bit too blunt. I find that to be just so powerful for the team. The important thing there to note is that you're not shying away from conflict, which actually creates unhealthy scenarios. When you shy away from conflict, it doesn't remove the conflict. The interesting part of this, to me, I'm also reading creativity, by the way, is a fantastic book. I've got it sitting on my shelf. It's actually the CEO at whiteboard, actually, bought everybody a copy at whiteboard because it was so transformative in the way he was thinking at the time. Another book that I'm reading, and I've already mentioned it on the podcast, and I'm kind of a super fan at this point, but thinking fast and slow. They talk about this cognitive dissonance between your system one and system two thinking, et cetera, et cetera. The ability to reason through, I'm going to ignore this conflict in my thinking brain. I'm going to actively suppress on purpose. I'm going to actively suppress this conflict, but your intuition or your fast thinking brain, as they talk about in the book, still knows that it's there, and you still feel the looks around the room. You still feel that dissonance, and it doesn't really go away. In fact, it can become worse, and it becomes ingrained into your brain in a lot of ways. That's a fantastic insight. That's a great thing to cue off of, too. I love being in person. I work remotely. I've worked remotely for the past four or five years now, and I love being in person because I can cue off that feeling of awkwardness with a tube blunt. And stuff like that, because I find that that's a huge challenge is, I like to lead by inspiration, not by fear. So for me, being blunt is inspiring to people, because in a corporate environment, it's typically the opposite. So when you can inspire people in that way, but then you have to walk the line of like, am I being too forward, am I saying a little bit too much, because you want to lead people, you don't want to slam them into a wall. Just with information, that's not leading them. You want to kind of lead, you don't necessarily want to hold their hand, but you want to parcel out information that helps them over time. So it's not overwhelming, so that they can kind of take it and take action on it and continue and take action on the next piece. Yeah, it's a really good point. A sign of a healthy, or, well, let's say, a sign of an unhealthy culture is when somebody tries to hide bad information, bad news. It's a good point. One of my early days at Whiteboard, I was personally in a client meeting where I was fired. And this client, I have a perfectly fine relationship with them at this point, and all is good. We no longer work together, but one of the most compelling moments of my career up until now was that day because the very first thing that I, like my gut instinct, was to call my boss and let him know. This is a sign of a healthy culture, right? Because if you are afraid to tell your boss something, then you're afraid of some kind of negative punishment of your situation. And this isn't to say that you won't ever have consequences or unhealthy. That's not the point. But instead that you view your boss as someone who is on your side, right? Or if you don't want to use the word boss, you view your co-workers as people who are on your side. And you share that vulnerability. You share that loss with them. Perhaps just as much as you share a win with them. Yeah, totally. That's a fascinating aspect. And that is the ultimate sign of a healthy culture. I feel free to talk to my boss almost like a friend, but you know, not to perhaps get too friendly across that line as well. I'm curious for you, have you done a lot of stuff where your company has satellite offices and you have to interface with teams and a bunch of different satellite offices? Is that how whiteboard is set up? That's a good question. We actually have one main office and then we have a couple of remote workers. The interesting thing is that our remote workers, actually, we have two remote workers at the moment. We're still a relatively small firm. We have about 25 people at the moment. Those two people started out in full time on site. So we don't really have a lot of remote work. We do a lot of work. In fact, I would say the vast majority of our work is done for remote clients rather than local clients. So in a way, you have a lot of experience with that. In a way. Yeah. In a way, if you view them as a collaborator, which we do, then that kind of has that feel. It is extremely difficult to maintain the same level of clarity and relational intuition with people who are physically distant from you. Right? Yeah. I was just going to just a circle back around to your original question. What are some difficulties? The satellite office thing is huge. That's why I was so curious to hear your answer. We grew. I started with mid-year-old. We were like 14 people. Now we're 150 or something like that. We purchased by a company that's much bigger. As you go through those transitions from one office to the other, it's funny how you watch complexity get exponentially harder to deal with. Human to human interaction specifically. And I think that's what you were talking about. People are the hardest. I totally agree. The technology from one satellite office to another is the easiest thing to set up. The motivation for an individual in that satellite office to over communicate to the others, that's way harder. Yeah. How do you even do that? And I found that to be that's pretty challenging. So I have a question about theory. I'm going to present this theory to you. You tell me if it hits your ears right. As someone who is dealing with this problem that you're talking about. Recently, our CEO, he went to a conference. And Andy Crouch was at this conference. I don't know if you're familiar. Andy's a cultural thinker writer. And Andy mentioned this idea of bandwidth, of information. So if we were to quantify the information that we take in our natural environment, say, in a face-to-face conversation, it's going to be a massive amount of information. We have a lot of visual cues. We have true 3D to the highest degree of quality. Something that's incredibly hard to replicate. In fact, perhaps impossible or close to impossible to replicate perfectly in a digital space. And so the idea of communicating through 140 characters or through a low-quality audio stream like you and I are doing right now, that idea is effectively compressing that communication stream. And so what you could be receiving through, like you were saying earlier, the face-to-face cues and the intuition that you can build just being in the same room as someone, that is significantly harder, quite simply because the number or the amount of information that you're getting is massively compressed. Most, most when it is text only, right? And then progressively better as we can see people's faces and see their expressions and hear the tonality and their voice, but significantly different from sitting in a room still. Yeah. That's what's, when the days where I feel super unmotivated about being a manager at a tech company, I think of reading Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene. He reminds us about these amazing facts like our brain was built for thousands and thousands of years ago. And all of this stuff that me and you were talking about, the reason it is so hard is because it's so new and it were literally on the forefront and the days when I feel super unmotivated I remember that and I'm like, okay, it is hard. That's straight up hard. And I step up to the plate because we're still kind of exploring and figuring all this out and it's cool for people like you and I to be given the privilege to be able to do that and not taking that for granted is awesome. Yeah, 100%. Something you said actually reminded me, so we have these kind of primitive brains that are primed for something entirely different from what we do regularly. And our bodies can't really even cope. We're doing pretty bad at the coping side of this. We're trying our best and we're getting better at it. That's at least that's the hopeful perspective of this situation. Eventually our brains will catch up, but that's in terms of scientific proof at least seems like it's a pretty far way away well beyond our lifetime. So it's unlikely that we're going to evolve fast enough to really understand how to do this perfectly or significantly better. I'm interested to know this is kind of, this is related. So it's going to seem like a jump. But have you ever taken the anyogram test? It's a personality quiz. No, I have not. I love personality tests and figuring out what type of person I am, but I've never heard of this. Yeah. So this one is a very good one. I haven't taken like the official one with the book. I've taken the online free version, which is still surprisingly insightful. I thought, but I read some of this stuff about my personality and my personality for anybody who's wondering, I am a five on the anyogram, which effectively means that I'm kind of in my head a lot and I'm kind of withdrawn and really appreciate academic pursuit and that kind of stuff. One of the things that the anyogram talks about is connecting with your growing the growth version of yourself. So in other words, what are you doing when you are progressing and what are you doing with when you are digressing? When I am progressing, I'm rejecting some of my natural desires to live in my head. And instead, I do something that is more like a full body. So something as simple as full body exercise can massively affect the way my brain is working for the next 24 hours. And I've seen this anecdotally, of course, but I've seen this at play in my own life and it's pretty amazing actually. But like how many years, just like me, probably as a technologist, it took me so many years to get that through my thick skull that you need to do full body exercises. I finally got it a couple of years ago or whatever and especially recently, the stress that comes from being in your head all the time. It can be totally dampening on creativity and everything. So I've had to get that lesson quite a few times. We trust ourselves too much. I actually recently bought tickets to go skydiving and I'm really excited about it. So this is kind of an interesting statistic exercise for you. If I were to tell you that you have a choice, you can either go skydiving, drive in a car or go swimming, which of those is the most dangerous thing you can do. What would the intuitive response be for most people? And I'm already kind of giving it away by framing it this way. Most people would say that the intuitive response or that immediately their thought of that would be, oh, of course skydiving. Because our brains are substituting the out of control nature or at least the seemingly out of control nature of skydiving. They're using that as some malformed heuristic for safety. Statistically speaking, you're 26 more times likely to die in a car wreck than you are to die skydiving. It's amazing to think about it that way because we think we're more in, when we are in control, things are safer, right? Like I like to think that as long as I am the one who is authoring my car, that I can control my risk. And statistically, it's overwhelmingly the opposite. Yeah, what an incredible insight. I mean, that insight on just for pushing your comfort zone, I think in and of itself is inside enough. There's this great book that I love called Mindset, the new psychology of success. And it talks all about this like growth mindset versus fixed mindset that I found really useful, which is basically this idea that anytime you're in a situation, most people that succeed, they tend to be in all the same situations that the people that fail are. Everybody's kind of given the same opportunity. And I know that's not politically correct and it's not actually true. But typically throughout your life, you'll get about the same opportunities as everybody else. In the book, they go on to say like the people that succeed, when they fail, they just take that next step that pushes their comfort zone even more and even more and even more. And I'm sure for you, that's how you got into your career, that's how you got at this level in your career, whereas a bunch of other people perhaps aren't at that level that you even started with. And it's because of your ability to constantly push that boundary. And I think we so often take that for granted. Or we think about it and we know it, but we don't take action on it. You know, I know a lot of people that say they know that, but they aren't doing the actions that sort of reflect that knowledge. That wraps up the first part of my interview with Dane Miller. I'm so excited I got to talk with Dane. This interview is a three-part interview. Please come back and check it out. Check out the second part of the interview with Dane Miller. You can always subscribe in whatever podcasting app if you don't want to miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea, including the remainder of this interview. Highly encourage you to do that. And also, I challenge you to share this with one person that you believe will be challenged by the conversation that Dane and I are having. And I also challenge you to start a conversation. Start your own conversations around this content. That is the reason I'm creating this show three times a week. Thank you so much for listening. 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