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Software engineering is getting weirder by the week. AI is reshaping how teams work, processes are breaking, and org tension is real - and the best lessons aren't coming from keynote stages or polished LinkedIn posts.
The Hallway Track is a podcast for engineering leaders who are building teams, navigating complexity, and looking for ideas that sound like the world they actually live in. Real stories from real teams. No recycled FAANG playbooks. Just honest conversations with the people in the trenches - about what's changing, what's breaking, and what's actually working today.
Hosted by Chris Vannoy, founder of Axiomatic Consulting and a 20-year veteran of software teams at startups, agencies, and B2B SaaS companies. New episodes every other week.
Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvannoy/
Learn more about Axiomatic: https://getaxiomatic.com/
CHRIS VANNOY
(00:19) Welcome to The Hallway Track. I'm Chris Vannoy. This week I'm talking with Matt Brown, who's about to step in as the CTO of OpenDate here in Indianapolis. Matt's career
[00:00:30] is a tour of the whole spectrum. He's gone from 50 person startups to Salesforce, where he's one of 10,000 or so engineers it seems like. And now he's heading back to a small team on purpose. We get into what actually changes as you move between org sizes, how influence and political capital work in inverse proportion to headcount. Why constraints make you a better engineer, not a more limited one, and what your job even becomes once the machine is writing the code. If you've spent your career bouncing between
[00:01:00] scrappy startups and giant orgs, or are you about to make that jump in either direction? This one's for you. Hi, Matt. How are you doing today?
MATT BROWN
(01:08) I'm doing well. Chris, about yourself?
CHRIS VANNOY
(01:10) Not too shabby. You and I know each other for quite some time now, but why don't you let everybody else know in who you are and what you do and all that fun sort
MATT BROWN
(01:18) Of stuff. Yeah. I'm Matt Brown. I am about to start here in the next couple of weeks as the CTO of OpenDate. Yeah, local Indianapolis startup doing venue ticketing,
[00:01:30] marketing, all of the things for small independent to venue. So I'll be starting there in a couple of weeks. I'm pretty excited about that.
CHRIS VANNOY
(01:36) Oh, that's very exciting. Actually, I know the folks over at OpenDate pretty well. I might talk to Adam a little bit later.
MATT BROWN
(01:43)Yeah. I've just gotten to know him a little bit over the last couple of weeks and I'm really impressed with him and what he's built over there.
CHRIS VANNOY
(01:50) Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. That's great news.That's been an update since last time we
MATT BROWN
(01:53) Did. Yeah. That's hot off the presses.
CHRIS VANNOY
(01:56) Oh, that's fantastic. Cool. But this is just one step. [00:02:00] Like I mentioned, we know each other a litle bit. We're practically neighbors. I think you were on the school board where my kids go to school at one point. But you've bounced around quite a bit just like I have. Can you talk a little bit about other places you've worked and what this sort of environments might look like.
MATT BROWN
(02:15) Yeah. I've been in the indie tech community for quite some time. Started doing some just small engineering jobs and then I helped start and found a local company AgoDigital that grew to maybe 50 or so folks and
[00:02:30] was then acquired by ExactTarget and was there for about 18 months before they got acquired by Salesforce. So I went from a company of 50 to a company of, I don't know, approximately nine billion people. It was so big by comparison. And then I stayed there for a little while and I started another startup called, well, we called it Quantify, got a cease and desist, and then it turned into pattern 89. Those are always fun things. So yeah, I started that from ground zero and grew up
[00:03:00] to about 10 or so employees. And then my last two stints were at Lessonly. I have a very common theme here at Lessonly for about two years and it was acquired by a larger company called Seismic.
(03:12) And then from there I went to Bloomerang and was there about two and a half years. So I've done everything from engineer one all the way up to Salesforce. I was a senior director there. I probably had 50 to seven ... I don't know. I might've had a hundred people in my org at that time, but we were one of, I don't
[00:03:30] know, 10,000 engineers, maybe more. I don't even really know then, but have been in that sort of 100 to 500 engineer capacity for the last five or so years and getting back to a much smaller org, which I'm really excited about.
CHRIS VANNOY
(03:45) Yeah. Is there anything you need to change with your approach when you're going between these larger organizations down to smaller ones?
MATT BROWN
(03:52) Yeah, I think there's a lot of things. So for me personally, I enjoy being, let's call it more influential. I
[00:04:00] like to have a lot of more of influence and how things are going and you have to tailor that the larger the org, sort of the smaller the influence, or at least the comparative influence, right? Because you might be able to affect your group, but as a whatever, a director at Salesforce, you're not going to change the ship because it's so big. You're a cog of some size, but the machine is always bigger than you. And so you have to take that into account and be aware of what you can change and what you can't.
[00:04:30] I think being aware of the norms of the place, like at the smaller place in many ways you can kind of set the norm and make adjustments along the way.
(04:41) It's much harder in the larger organization to be a part of that and to adjust working styles. Even things like if you think about deploy frequencies or any of those sort of things that go into that, those are so much harder to shape and mold at the larger organization and you have to be [00:05:00] like super intentional and some way careful in what you choose to battle because some of those battles are, they're not impossible to win, but they take a lot, a lot of work to make. A
CHRIS VANNOY
(05:14) Lot of time and effort and a lot of
MATT BROWN
(05:16) Political
CHRIS VANNOY
(05:17) Capital in
MATT BROWN
(05:17) Some ways. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that probably, if I think about those places, the amount of political capital you have, how slowly you gather it and how mindful you have to be in spending it.
[00:05:30] When there's five of you, the capital between each of you is either really a lot or really small depending on how you think about it. And so you use that all the time because people are comfortable with that. But if you have different groups and you're one group or not the other in a bigger org, it's much harder to get that other group to move along with you.
CHRIS VANNOY
(05:49) Yeah. I think even some of this is in my coaching practice. I help engineering leaders that are starting to level up in these organizations. And so the difference between everybody is on a
[00:06:00] similar level or there's one tier to like suddenly you have like siblings, right? Essentially across an organization, you have multiple people that are at the same rank as you are, and then you have several layers above and below you. And it's like that sort of like cross communication and being able to look around corners almost and see when stuff's coming and then realizing like you kind of hinted at like you're a passenger on a cruise ship, right? And so it's like you might be able to change the menu in the food hall, but like-
MATT BROWN
(06:30) Exactly. But the boats where are going where the boat's
CHRIS VANNOY
(06:32) Going. Yeah. You're going where the boat's going, man. Yes.
MATT BROWN
(06:35) Yeah. I have a lot of problem with that as an early engineer. I'm a relatively, I don't know, I'm oblivious to titles in many ways. I like to think of it as an egalitarian approach where everybody's just another person on the team where in some organizations that's not really true. Not all of the people have the same role, the same influence, but I kind of treated some people that way, which
[00:07:00] endeared some people to me and probably others it didn't. So like learning that, oh wait, the fact that their title is whatever is important and
MATT BROWN
(07:11) Need to have a little deference to that was a slow, hard learned lesson.
CHRIS VANNOY
(07:18) In my case, I've intentionally ... It's weird that I coach people on this now because like my own career, I've avoided large companies. The company size I've worked for has gradually gotten smaller and smaller and smaller because it's
[00:07:30] gone along to where at this point it's just me right now.
MATT BROWN
(07:34) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I have all the people around me that I can handle, which is
CHRIS VANNOY
(07:40) Just me. Sometimes not even that.
MATT BROWN
(07:42) Exactly. Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(07:44) But now you're getting back into startup land and I know the folks, like I said, I was going to talk to Adam here soon anyway, because I know they've been doing a lot of interesting stuff with AI tooling in software engineering generally. How are you coming into this role kind of thinking about that world?
MATT BROWN
(08:00) Yeah. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that lately. It's funny, just as I think the time horizons on my thoughts in this area are dramatically less than they have been over it. A lot of my opinions I've gathered are sort of slow going and mostly still hold. My AI opinions seem to change every couple of weeks just as things change. Early in the year, I was like, "Man, I think I can automate
[00:08:30] all kinds of things and the language of the future is going to be English because it's all about describing things to the machine so that it can do it appropriately." I still think that's mostly true. I still have some thoughts in there that are percolating around whether or not that's always going to be the truth and what language I can't decide whether or not it's important what language the machine uses.
(08:59) It seems to be better
[00:09:00] at some than others, but a couple of things lately though is I think people are going to start to be a little more cautious in when and where and how they use the tooling because the subsidies are going to stop
(09:16):
And the cost is going to become a real thing. It's funny, right? The early promise of AI is it's going to be so much cheaper and engineering cost is going to go to zero and now it's all- Oh, that
CHRIS VANNOY
(09:29) Didn't [00:09:30] happen.
MATT BROWN
(09:30) Yeah. Yes. Now you're like, "Hey, we need these cheap humans to mitigate the cost of that expensive machine."
CHRIS VANNOY
(09:37) I think it's actually been kind of funny, like you and I have both been in this career long enough to watch these cycles come and go, right? And like everyone was like, "If I put on business hat for a minute, software as a service, SaaS is dead or something like that because all these AI companies are doing these individual tokenized pricing sort of things." And it's like I've seen this happen long enough and seen this cycle go through where it's like the incumbents are always like metered pricing
[00:10:00] until at some point they hit the inflection point we've hit now where people are like, "What do you mean I spent $40,000 on one engineer blowing through this? " So then companies will say, "No, no, what if we just pay you a certain amount per month and then we just get an amount of stuff?" And then it turns out that's better unit economics for both ends and it makes businesses more comfortable.
(10:20) So it's like that you're just watching the same cycles go over and over and over again.
MATT BROWN
(10:27) And I think that's another thing that I've come to learn is that finance
[00:10:30] matters. The finance team is super important and they're going to drive some percentage of the decisions that you're making and they probably should, right? You create a business to make money and you don't want to lose it and they're the one who is tracking it. So you should probably listen to them when you're starting to do things.
CHRIS VANNOY
(10:50) And that's actually one of the keys to as you get higher in engineering leadership is being able to connect the work engineering is doing to what the business is doing
[00:11:00] and being able to connect technology decisions to business outcomes, right?
MATT BROWN
(11:05) Yeah.
CHRIS VANNOY
(11:05) That's when you start unlocking like a whole lot of political capital to go back to the earlier thing
MATT BROWN
(11:12) A lot further. That's one of the things that the big company for me became much like it highlighted for me because in the smaller company you're so focused just on trying to make the sales that like the efficiency of the sale is not always the
[00:11:30] most important, right? Generally you're searching revenue, not EBITDA. And so like what you're looking at changes and then the last two places, both Bloomerang and Lessonly Seismic were very sophisticated really in how they thought about software as a whole and from very different spectrums, right? So I think when I started at Bloomerang, like average contract value was let's say $1,000 and at Seismic, it seemed like average contract value was $200,000.
[00:12:00] And so then you start like the way you think about CAC differs dramatically, right? So
CHRIS VANNOY
(12:08) Just to think like that. And it is one of those things where you start thinking in terms of what sort of business is this, right? Even is it product led growth or is it like sales led, right? Yes. And that actually like what you realize when you do this long enough is like that affects technology decisions, right? Yes.
[00:12:30] It affects like staffing. If you're product led growth and somebody can just sign up for this thing in the middle of the night, you might need to have people on call for when they can't sign up at 3:00 AM in the morning for whatever reason.
MATT BROWN
(12:41) For sure. Yeah.
CHRIS VANNOY
(12:42) If it's sales led and you're going to send them an invoice and they're going to get a whole onboarding thing and it's going to be high touch and will luxury onboarding like white glove service, it's like you don't have to invest as much time into that sort of
MATT BROWN
(12:53) Thing. Right, right, right. And those things, like I never thought about that, but those things affect pricing, right? If I can just [00:13:00] as a user come and give you a credit card, well, I can charge $50. But if I have to have a sales guy who has to send out an invoice and I got to talk to legal, well, I'm probably, that's 25 grand. That's the low end of that sale, right? And so it makes a difference.
CHRIS VANNOY
(13:15) And like I said, it makes a difference in like how as an engineering leader, you end up architecting the team, right? Yeah,
MATT BROWN
(13:21) Yeah.
CHRIS VANNOY
(13:21) Sometimes I don't know that it goes all the way to technology decisions, but it can affect a lot of team makeup.
MATT BROWN
(13:27) Oh, I think it can go all the way to stack choices [00:13:30] and like all of those kinds of things. There's another variable I would put in there, which is funding model, at least from the startup. Are you bootstrapped? Are you VC funded? Are you piggybacked? Those all have ramifications in those choices as well. Are you bringing on contractors because your cost mix
MATT BROWN
(13:48) Not what the group wants it? Or do you bring on contractors because you're worried about long-term sustainability and it's easier to let that contractor go than enough? All of those things play into the complexity [00:14:00] and at different sizes you get a whole different view on those
CHRIS VANNOY
(14:03) Kinds
MATT BROWN
(14:03) Of things.
CHRIS VANNOY
(14:04)Yeah. That's actually whenever I would start a new software engineering job or engineering leadership job, one of the first questions I'd ask founders is, why are we here? What is the ultimate goal for this company? Are you going to be around for 10 years or are you trying to sell this in two?
MATT BROWN
(14:17) Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(14:17) Because I will make very different technical decisions in these two scenarios. If I got two years and then this becomes somebody else's problem, I could cut a lot more corners.
MATT BROWN
(14:27) Yes. Then
CHRIS VANNOY
(14:30) If I got to live with this thing for the next 10 years.
MATT BROWN
(14:32) And if you think about that, it's similar to the PLG versus the sales growth, right? You're making different choices in the same mechanism because of how long or what or why you're doing the thing. Yeah.
CHRIS VANNOY
(14:45) Which is one way like the engineers I sometimes have the most difficulty managing or working with are the very dogmatic ones of this is the right technical decision all the time. And I'm like, maybe not in this case.
[00:15:00] I always appreciated the folks who are a little bit more pragmatic about it, right? They could connect it to, "Oh, well, okay, this isn't the right thing to do all the time, but this specific case probably works." Yeah.
MATT BROWN
(15:15) There's the flip side of that where there are people who make notes like, "Oh, everything depends." There is no, I can't give you a short answer. I have to tell you the 47 caveats.
CHRIS VANNOY
(15:25) Yeah, there's that too. I suppose, yes. When you get to that extreme, that becomes a problem as well.
[00:15:30] Going back to new role sort of thing, when we talked a little bit before this, we talked a little bit about how with AI sometimes it can actually go faster if you box it in and constrain it a little
CHRIS VANNOY
(15:44) Which is actually really difficult to do. And a lot of AI tools, because I struggle with this all the time, right? It's like I try to give it the full context of the ultimate thing we're trying to build and I tell it, "But just build the first phase of this thing and then it barfs
[00:16:00] out the whole damn thing." And I'm like, "No, no, that's not what I wanted."
MATT BROWN
(16:04) Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(16:04) But it even gets into, like we were talking earlier, like technology choices and that sort of thing, like giving it a smaller toolbox to sort of play around with.
MATT BROWN
(16:14) I think there's two things here, right? I think there's context and then there's constraints, right? And so it's how do you mix the two together and I'm not sure that all of the things that are good for a person are the same things that are good for
[00:16:30] the computer. I would contend you always want to give the person more context because there's lots of threads going there, you need to repeat things, adult learners need seven, like all of that stuff in the context world. And I agree the machine, the more context you give it, it gets confused more easily. It can't keep track of all the things. It wants to do more than what you tell it. And so
MATT BROWN
(16:56) You have to give it more constraints the more context [00:17:00] you give it. While I think being clear on the constraints to a human is important also, but sometimes you
(17:08) Bring that up. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you want people who are like, maybe not oblivious but who challenge your constraints because there's a lot of things that come from, "Oh, we can't do that. " The constraint is we can't do it. Then it's, well, I think we can actually. I'm doing some consulting now and we just had an issue the
[00:17:30] other day where we were talking about this bigger feature. We were thinking it was probably an eight to 10 week. We're going to chop it up in some bits. And hey, I think the first saleable thing is probably eight to 10 weeks out. And I'm kind of one of those constraint checkers and I was like, "Really? I think you can build it in two weeks." You really got to reorder your thoughts and decide what the must haves really are. I think we get in that nice to have is a must have.
[00:18:00] But if I put that time constraint on you, now it actually opens up my thinking because I know I have to shed all these other things, whatever. In two weeks, I can probably sell it, but whatever, my compliance is going to be maybe a little lower. It's going to be right at the bar, not where our rest of our compliance is. And so then I have new thoughts that I can do because that constraint changes my abilities.
CHRIS VANNOY
(18:25) Which was the original sort of I think thesis behind a lot of like scrum
[00:18:30] and agile sort of stuff, right? If it's running right dogmatically, there's that one again. Right. The two weeks is intended to be that constraint. It's like, what if we just, what could we actually get done in two weeks? Let's just do that. In real world, that never works that way.
MATT BROWN
(18:47) Yeah. It's funny how that becomes like the pattern and not the constraint. It's just a names two week period. It's not like a-
CHRIS VANNOY
(18:57) It's an every other week check in on progress, right? Yes,
MATT BROWN
(19:00) Exactly, exactly. Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(19:04) I found at work, we did longer cycles. We were doing eight weeks. So essentially every other month we'd sit down with the business and we'd ask, "Hey, two months from now, what do you want to announce?" And it's, "Okay, cool." And they would bring us Figma's or whatever was before Figma back in the day. And they'd land on engineering desk and I'd sit there and gradually tear it all apart. "Do you need this? Do you need this? Do you need this? Do you need that? "Until they said,"
[00:19:30] Stop. No, that hurts.
(19:32) "It's like, " Okay, cool. "And then I'd look at it and go, " All right, we could probably get you that in about six weeks. We could do other stuff along the side, all that sort of stuff. And then we got two weeks at the end for you to review it, do enablement materials, all that sort of stuff, and then we'll push it live at the very end of it. "That constraint tended to work really well and it works not just in engineering. If you're always operating in the same constraint, like the first couple of times we did it, we didn't know what fit inside of six weeks. It went long.
[00:20:00] We bled all the way through, but the third time we did that, we knew exactly what fit in there. It's not in a typical engineering estimation where you're estimating each individual piece all the time and they're all different numbers.
(20:16) I found it really useful and more accurate to flip it around and say," Does this fit in six weeks? Is this this? "Yes. And you learn very quickly whether ... It's like you learn the size of the box and then you know what fits in the box and it's a lot quicker [00:20:30] than saying, what size box do I need? It's more like, " Well, it fit in there.
MATT BROWN
(20:33) "One of the best Scrum teams I was ever a part of, we'd be doing refinement and we would refine a whole bunch of stories and we'd be like, " Okay, we're ready to plan. "And we'd pick a couple stories out and it would be like, " Hey, can we do this? Yeah, can we do more? Yeah, let's put another one in. Let's put another one in. "And then it's not, " Hey, here is the ... We're just putting stuff in a two week period because we normally do 17 story points or whatever it might be.
[00:21:00] We were thinking every time, do we think we can do all of this?
(21:06) I think size of team matters. It's much easier for me to estimate that for three engineers than it is for eight engineers. And so how do I get used to all of those pieces and think about ... I really want sprints to have a goal, whether it's a six week or a two week or one week, right? I want a goal and this is the main thing we're working on. We get some other stuff great
[00:21:30] too, but this is what we're going to focus on. I think that really helps as well. Again, it's constraints in another way. We've declared what most important is and we want to work from there.
CHRIS VANNOY
(21:41) Some of the other constraints I found useful lots of times were like technology decisions. And again, they're not hard constraints. Like you pointed out sometimes you give a constraint to an engineer and they're going to be like, "No, I don't agree with that. We'll go do something else." So I usually had an escape hatch. One of the ones we had was like, when it comes to technology..
[00:22:00] these are the approved ones. If you want to adopt something else, someone else on the team has to know it. And this is a relatively small team. This is like a dozen people or so. So we're not picking up some new toy language just because you think it's fun, right? Yeah. Right. You got to convince somebody else on the team that this is a good idea. And then we'll talk about it.
MATT BROWN
(22:19) Yeah. We had similar ones where we were like, "Hey, someone on the team has to have production experience with it and you have to have a clear thing
[00:22:30] that the new thing is, it has to be better than an existing technology." You can't be like, "Hey, I hate Rabbit so we're going to switch to Kafka." Nope, immediate failure. You got to tell me, "This is why I need Kafka instead of Rabbit." That kind of stuff in order to justify yourself, there's a little bit of friction, which is great. I
CHRIS VANNOY
(22:50) Actually wonder if those constraints are actually more difficult at a larger company than it is at a small one, right? Because you end up with a little bit of the left hand doesn't know
[00:23:00] what the right hand is doing, I think. This is theories. Again, my own career is smaller and smaller and smaller.
MATT BROWN
(23:06) Yeah. I think that's an interesting thought because what ... So there's competing forces there. If you're in the ops perspective, hey, you better have a really good reason because if I know if I stand it up for you, I have to support it forever. And so you have this friction of it's hard to get new pieces in. On the flip side, and you're a part of this big org and I'm
[00:23:30] off in my little corner, I can do some weird stuff because no one's really going to know about it for a while and
(23:36) As long as it's in the box, no one really cares and maybe I'm like gone in six months and it's not my problem anymore. So you end up with some rogue things. I think that's where that shadow IT shadow software development comes in where the mainline path is hard to build in because it's rigid and so you end up doing some other stuff and it causes both. [00:24:00] Everything's a trade off, but you get some good things, but you get some pain with it.
CHRIS VANNOY
(24:05) And then interestingly, going back to the political capital sort of talk, right? In that scenario, sometimes the leader that can in that difficult to make progress org can go rogue a little bit and do something weird and suddenly you get a burst of progress because it's new stuff and you're outside the paradigm. And so you can actually earn political capital in that sort of environment by breaking the rules slightly.
MATT BROWN
(24:31) Yes. And
CHRIS VANNOY
(24:32) Then they get promoted and leap behind a mess.
MATT BROWN
(24:34) Exactly, exactly. Because you don't tell anyone you broke the rules. You're just like, look at all this really great stuff I was able to build. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Marketing yourself is a bigger deal than I ever realized before.That's a big company thing also where the ability to get to others to see what it is you did, why it's important, all of those kinds of things are critical.
CHRIS VANNOY
(24:59) Even at small companies, again, we're talking about marketing to engineers at this point, right? But some of this is I worked in MarTech for five years, but that bit, being able to explain what you do to the rest of the business
(25:14) Is super helpful in lots of lots of ways. Being able to, like we talked about earlier, connect it to the business outcomes, right? Connect it to a customer, connect it to a sale, connect it to ... One of my favorite things was like, because
[00:25:30] in any software engineering org, you have maintenance and security stuff you have to do all the time, right? You have to go and update stuff. And so it's sometimes difficult in engineering orgs to carve out time for that. Some of that is you're a professional, fine time. But the other bit is like when you figure out how to sell it to the business as, hey, you wanted to get SOC two type two so you could go close more deals. In order for us to keep that, we have to update stuff, right?
MATT BROWN
(25:58) There's a tax with that, yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(26:00)So that being skilled over time at how to communicate over to the business in terms that they understand also again, it builds that relationship over time, which I've found that gives engineering orgs the ability to then go tackle technical debt and do a bunch of other stuff because you can explain it better and you've built up enough capital that you can go and do some fairly, I don't know, engineering [00:26:30] neck beardy
MATT BROWN
(26:31) Things
CHRIS VANNOY
(26:32) If you want to.
MATT BROWN
(26:33) Yeah. I mean, I think that I've been saying probably more frequently than I ever have in the past is your job is not actually to write software, your job is to provide value and your ability to convey the value is as important as the software that you write. And so if you can make that mental switch, I think that also helps with the AI portion. If all of your value comes in writing software and now you
[00:27:00] have something that writes software, you could squint, it's as good, but it's definitely faster, then you have this existential crisis. But if you've been about providing value for the customer and it's usually through software, then you're like opening up a whole new gateway. I mean, there are other ramifications, don't get me wrong, but understanding what you're getting paid to do is critical and it drives these other things and allows you to have the freedom to later come back
[00:27:30] and do the neck beard stuff that most engineers want to go do.
CHRIS VANNOY
(27:32) Yeah.
That was actually one of the things I would try and hire for lots of times are like people that were interested in customers and interesting in actually delivering value and things like that because I could always ... Some of this is like I used to teach at a coding bootcamp, right? Yeah. So I knew I could teach them the code, I'll teach that to you when you get here. It's fine. As long as you care, we can make all this work. It's great. And in AI land, I think
[00:28:00] I've said this multiple times, it's been my theory that writing code has always been the easy part of this job. It's been the thing you have to do to deliver value, but it's the typey typey part. And it's all AI today does is it accelerates that. It takes what was already the base relatively easy, relatively commodity part of the job and just makes it even easier, makes it even more commodity, right?
(28:31)
Yes, code quality matters, but only to a point and it is rapidly reaching the point where it crosses that threshold, whereas it's good enough.
MATT BROWN
(28:44) I think it's good enough most of the time, right? I think as the person brings value when you're able to sniff out the times when it's not, which is I think really hard, really hard to do.
CHRIS VANNOY
(28:57) And that's the interesting, like for early career folks, this is, if I put on another hat, I'm also the board president of Indie Hackers, which is a social and advocacy organization for software engineers here in Indianapolis. One of the things we're worried about there and trying to make better is like early career software engineers are like, it's very difficult to find employers for a lot of those folks compared to the old days, right? And the thing is what you're describing requires experience, right? You have to have ... Frankly, I used to say the difference between a junior engineer and a senior engineer is how many bugs you've fixed, right?
MATT BROWN
(29:36) Or maybe even how many bugs you created, but that's a whole day. Yeah, how many bugs
CHRIS VANNOY
(29:39) You ... Yeah. But it's like you don't get to make those mistakes unless you're doing it, right?
MATT BROWN
(29:46) Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(29:47) And so how do we get it so that companies hire juniors? Because you and I are, we're getting a little old, like your kids are probably out of the house at this point. Mine are both in high school just as an indication of ages here. Yeah.
MATT BROWN
(30:00) Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(30:01) Yes. We're not going to be doing this forever. And we have to bring that generation through.
MATT BROWN
(30:05) How do you build a team with long-term sustainability where you have ... We used to kind of have, oh, I want three seniors to four mids to two, some kind of ratio because of all cost value. I think the easiest place to get super high value engineers is at the low end of the market because they're cheap, right? Yeah. If you find one who's
[00:30:30] 50% more productive than a normal, then you got some real gold there. And if you can find that and shape it, but it's just so much harder now because the experience is, it's hard to come by and it's a different way of spotting when that stuff matters than maybe it used to.
CHRIS VANNOY
(30:52) Yeah. I keep waiting. My theory is at some point in the next year or two, some company
[00:31:00] or companies will realize there is a glut of junior talent available that is actually really skilled that in the old days would have been snapped up immediately. If some company can build the infrastructure to be able to support that person, you can get a tremendous amount of value out of them. Again, putting on business hat for them. It's almost like arbitrage of ... It's like you've got undervalued talent in the market that if you can build the infrastructure to
[00:31:30] be able to support them, you as a business can get really far. And because you're going to be giving them their first job or their first opportunity, if you can build a good environment, you can actually grow your own senior engineers that you'll probably, frankly, probably still be paying under market by the time they get to that point.
(31:49) Somebody will realize this. I can't be the only one that's looking at this and thinking
MATT BROWN
(31:52) About this. I also think there's a good chance in the next year or two school cycle, there's going to be programs that are AI coding native that
CHRIS VANNOY
(32:05) They'll
MATT BROWN
(32:07) Have skills that an on the job is slower to uptake. I mean, we're probably on the much closer to the leading edge of AI usage, but most places there's a lot of places where the marketing department uses it more than the software engineering department. And so you're going to need people who are willing to try and fail
[00:32:30] who have experiences through school who do that, who can jump in an environment and accelerate your existing workflow because they understand the tool better than the other people because there'll be people who are like, "Yeah, I've never written software in an artisan way. I've only ever talked to the machine to do it. " And so I think there's a whole new value chain coming too.
CHRIS VANNOY
(32:52) Oh yeah. Well, it reminds me a litle bit. I don't think it's quite the same, but again, I'm old. I remember I was working at the Indianapolis Star a long, long time ago. We were hiring, right? So we had people coming in and one of my favorite questions to ask them back in the day was like, "What do you actually write your code in? " And then if they said Dreamweaver, I'd be like, "Okay, cool." Do you have any questions for me? Yes, exactly. Yes. I don't think AI will get to that point because I think kind of like we're talking about here, it is a tool that if you use it, it can be an accelerant of everything else that you're doing, but you have to be able to do that other sort of work to be able to explain why this work actually matters.
(33:36) If you can do that, however you did it doesn't actually matter all that.
MATT BROWN
(33:39) Quality aspect is a new vector for importance where sometimes you get where I'm just writing code and I kind of test it, but I'm pushing it because our QA team is going to handle that. So I just keep pushing. And now we're like, well, you need to be thinking les about the actual software you're writing and more about, again, the value, the quality, the reusability of the things you're doing. And you need to be able to drive to ... Not everyone knows how to test their own software. It is a supply-
CHRIS VANNOY
(34:13) Everybody will need to soon.
MATT BROWN
(34:14) Yes. Yes. I agree. I mean, I think the mantra for quite some time has sort of been that shift quality left, right? Take your quality and move it out of the gate and into the process throughout. And I think it just becomes more and more important because if you're just a developer, all you do is write software. Those jobs are going to be harder and harder to come by. And so you need the whole engineering suite there.
CHRIS VANNOY
(34:41) Yeah. And the thing is, I think the total number of engineering jobs won't go down. I think we're in a little bit of a dip or correction where folks don't know what to do yet and they're still figuring it out. I don't think the overall population of software engineering jobs will actually die long term, but the job is going to change, right? It's the arguing over syntax in pull requests days probably over. I hope so.
MATT BROWN
(35:11) I hope so.
CHRIS VANNOY
(35:12) Yeah. I'm not complaining about that too much. And that is always like stuff that the machines are good at anyway, right?
MATT BROWN
(35:21) Yes, yes. That's been my dynamic versus static type language all along is why do I have to make it all pretty for the compiler? I'm going to write it for me and the computer can figure it out. Yes.
CHRIS VANNOY
(35:35) Yeah, exactly. Yes. And it's just getting even more that way now.
MATT BROWN
(35:39) Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree.
CHRIS VANNOY
(35:41) Thanks so much for talking to me today. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks. That was Matt Brown, incoming CTO of OpenDate. Three things stuck with me from this conversation. Your influence shrinks as the horde grows. So the skill that travels with you is connecting engineering work to business outcomes. That's how you earn the capital to do anything at all. Constraints aren't limits. They're a creative tool. Put a two week deadline on something and you suddenly find out which features were never must haves to begin with. And as AI turns writing code into a commodity, the value moves to judgment, knowing when the machine's output isn't actually good enough. If this was useful, follow the hallway track wherever you're listening so the next one shows up. I also write a weekly newsletter called Expedite over at getaxiomatic.com. More of this kind of thing on a fairly regular cadence.
(36:32) And if you run a small independent music venue, go look up Opendate. Matt's joining a sharp team solving a real problem here in Indianapolis. Thanks, Matt. See you next time.