What was the last time that you interviewed? That you interviewed for a job? Maybe a job that you didn't even think you could get, but you interviewed anyway. Have you interviewed recently, even though you were happy with your current job? My name is Jonathan Cottrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. In today's episode, I want to talk to you about making these kinds of decisions, these seemingly irrational decisions or ways of spending your time as bets, based on the simple principle of upside. If you haven't interviewed recently, I encourage you to make it a common habit, even when you're happy with your job. There are a lot of reasons why I recommend this practice, and of course, it comes with some caveats. The first caveat is that there is risk involved if either you tell your employer or your employer finds out through some other means. It makes sense to be open about this practice, because not only does it help you be prepared for the job market, should you need to be, but it also helps you understand the risks, understand what other engineers are looking for. If you're a part of the hiring efforts for a given company, if you've been interviewing recently with other companies, then you know what the tone of those interviews elsewhere has been. So at the very least, you going and interviewing is going to help you become a better interviewer because you will be honing your empathy for the people who are going through the interviewing process. But it doesn't stop there. Interviewing is on my personal list of activities that has almost only upside. In other words, there's very little negative that can come from interviewing. Now, this episode isn't just about interviewing. It's about identifying the profile, specifically the risk reward profile of various activities that you might be avoiding or haven't even thought about doing and trying to incorporate those high reward, low risk activities. more often into your life. Think about these as simple bets. Often they are low investment. An interview, for example, might only take 30 minutes of your time, but the potential upside could be enormous. Imagine that you interview for a job that you think is out of your reach, or maybe it's your dream job. The worst that can happen, the worst downside is worth considering. In fact, take a moment, pause this episode, imagine what your dream job is going to be like. If you're a part of a company that's going to be a little bit more imagine that you're presented with the opportunity to interview for it. Do you take that opportunity? Think about the worst thing that could happen in that process. Pause the episode, think about what that worst thing can be. So if you've thought about that worst possible outcome, the worst thing that I can imagine happening is that I go and I succeed at the interview. Maybe I spend a lot of time interviewing. I get some kind of offer. I put in my notice at my current role or something like that. And then something catastrophic happens. The offer is pulled off of the table, or maybe the company just goes under right in front of my face. Or potentially, I change into this role and it turns out that what I thought was my dream job wasn't my dream job to begin with. Now, if you were considering this worst possible outcome, you should also assign some level of probability. This is how we determine the risk profile. In other words, what is the downside? Well, the downside is not just how bad could it get, but also how bad is it likely to get? So here you should also imagine things that are only mildly bad, but maybe higher probability. For example, maybe you go through the interview process, you do spend a lot of time and only at the last minute, your hopes are crushed and you don't get any offer. You would probably classify this as a much more likely outcome than you getting an offer and then the other way around. So if you're considering this worst possible outcome, the company vanishing in front of your face. But here's the trick. The upside is exactly the opposite. If the downside is both the intensity and the likelihood of the negative, then the upside is the intensity and the likelihood of the good. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then we're going to come back and talk about the upside. This episode of Developer Tea is brought to you by the developer team at developer.com. by Split, the feature management and experimentation platform. What if a release was exactly that, a moment of relief, an escape from slow, painful deployments that hold back product engineers? You can free your teams and your features with Split. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split helps you quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release, which means you can turn up what works, turn off what doesn't, and give software innovation the room to run wild. Now you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and finally exhale. Split feature management and experimentation. What a release. Reimagine software delivery and start your free trial to create your first feature flag today at split.io slash developer tea. That's split.io slash developer tea. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. The truth about interviewing is that very rarely do the extremely negative parts happen. If we can get over the fear of failing the interview, then we can likely experience a lot of the benefits of the interview. Interestingly, even the failures tend to have more of a negative upside than downside. When you fail an interview, you typically learn something. Maybe you learn a little bit about why you failed, or maybe you learn about what you care about in a job. Maybe it's clear why you failed to you because you decided that this role wasn't exactly a fit. This will help clarify what you do want in the future. And so when the time does come, if it's not now, then you have more clarity, but you're not sure what you're going to shoot for. This means you can spend your time better when you actually do want to make a move. Choosing to spend your time on high upside activities, things like interviewing, but also things like publishing content, hence why I published this podcast. The upside outweighs the downside. If you do enough things that have more upside than downside, then you're going to be able to do more. So if you're going to do enough things that have a positive risk profile, in other words, I'm taking very low risk with very high likelihood of a positive outcome by recording this episode, and there's very low likelihood of a negative outcome, really the only risk that I'm taking is the time that I spend to research and record these episodes. But the potential upside is enormous. This is exactly what is meant by investing your time. When you do something that has a positive outcome, you're going to be able to invest your time in things that have upside and specifically that have asymmetrical upside. In other words, you have more upside than downside. You begin to experience compounding gains. If you only invested in things that had an equal potential for upside and downside, then you might experience a very slow growth. But by focusing on things that have high upside and reducing your time on things that are either high risk or high upside, you're going to be able to have a very low growth. So if you're going to invest your time in things that have a high upside, which means the downside is more than the upside, or simply just not enough upside, right? It may have more upside than downside, but it's not a lot of upside. You're creating a statistical portfolio of potential. You're giving yourself the opportunity to succeed. So here's what I want you to do. Like many things that we talk about on this show, this comes down to how you spend your time. Think about what you're getting ready to do, in this very moment. Think about listening to this podcast. Do you think that this podcast is higher upside than downside? Is the risk of spending 10 minutes, 15 minutes listening to this episode, is that a risk, a downside? Because spending time is always a downside, right? Is that a risk that is worth the upside? If it's not, I encourage you with this podcast and everything else that you're doing, to listen to this podcast. If it's not, I encourage you to listen to this podcast. If it's not, I encourage you to listen to this podcast. If it's not, I encourage you to focus only on things that provide an asymmetrical upside when possible. In other words, turn this off. Turn it off as soon as you can and refocus on things that have higher upside. Look at your calendar for today or look back at your calendar. Try to identify two things when you're looking back at your calendar. The first is what level of risk versus reward would you assign to those past events? Was it a high risk but also a high reward situation? Was it a high upside, low downside situation, which is what we're saying to focus on? Focus on doing things that have less risk and more upside. So predict what that picture looks like and then identify what was the actual outcome. Now, there are latent effects. You may not necessarily be able to know what the outcome is of some of these things, but for the things that you can, identify, where you landed on that risk profile. Do you tend to make the most out of situations that have very little upside, right? This will tell you something about how you view the world, but it may also tell you what opportunities you have. Maybe you've made the most out of those situations, but you can make even more out of a situation that has less downside. Maybe you could spend your time, instead of spending your time trying to reduce the risk, you could change the activities that you're doing. Maybe you could change the activities that you're participating in fundamentally so that the risk is reduced on day one. This is a different lens on the same concept of ROI. Think about your time as your investment, but also think about risk profiles as an investment. You are investing yourself in terms of vulnerability. By investing in something that is risky, you are creating a potential leverage against yourself. But if you invest in something that is not very risky, but has a lot of upside, you are leveraging the situation. Now, when you look forward in your calendar, try to identify, like we did in previous episodes where we were looking for high leverage activities, what we're looking for here is a risk profile, right? An easy way to think about this is scale of one to five, what level of upside do you expect this event to have? And scale of one to five, what level of downside do you expect this event to have? Now, it's important to notice that I'm not talking about just one metric. I'm talking about the risk profile. I'm talking about the upside. For example, I'm not saying how much money is involved. That might be and probably should be one of the metrics that you consider when you're identifying upside. But for me, as an example, one of the things that has very high upside and almost no downside at all is spending time with family. I know that I can invest time and spending time with family, and it has almost always been upside. Now, it's important to do this, not in isolation. And this is why I like focusing on things like a calendar, a schedule, a list of tasks, because it's necessary to look at risk profiles as it relates to other things. This is because time is fungible. In other words, choosing how to spend your time on one thing in isolation may have high upside and low downside, but when combined with the other things you need to do, may have high upside and very high downside. An example of this is if you're choosing to do a task in isolation, that simple task might be all upside. There's very little lost. The only risk is the time you spend. But let's imagine that you do this task in the context of having already worked 55 hours this week. Well, now you are risking burnout. You're risking a tendency to rush. You're risking the potential for low quality work. And that's why you're doing this task in isolation. And that's why you're doing this task in isolation. That could actually be a very high risk. And the upside hasn't changed. That's the important thing to note. Similarly, if you were to look at the upside of a task that's right before a deadline, doing that task now versus doing it in isolation, the upside might be significantly more, right? Because you're actually affecting something outside of that isolated task. So it's important to do this kind of evaluation in context. Ultimately, if you can focus, on doing things that have an asymmetrical preference for higher upside and lower downside, you're going to be investing your time more wisely. 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