S25:E6 - Big Tech: What They Say vs. What They Mean (Rachel Lee Nabors)

Saron sits down with Rachel Nabors again. They talk about what Rachel has been up to since they were last on the show in 2017, the inside scoop of Big Tech, and Rachel’s experience working for organizations such as Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. You’ll also hear why Rachel has decided their next chapter will be at a startup and what they are hoping for in their future. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) See Rachel at React Brussels (Oct 13) See Rachel at React JS Day, Verona (Oct 27) See Rachel at City JS Berlin (Nov 3) See Rachel at React Summit NYC (Nov 13 - 15) Animation at Work Wiggly Goose Club Rachel's 2017 CodeNewbie Episode Rachel's 2014 CodeNewbie Episode Rachel's Instagram Rachel's Twitter Rachel's GitHub Rachel's Website Web Animations API React

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about the difference between performance-based firing and layoffs with Rachel Nabors.

[00:00:18] RN: React was where the money was, so all these people were investing their valuable lifespans learning technologies that wouldn’t get them those intergenerational wealth accumulating fancy corp jobs. I saw that and I was like, “Well, that is a bad pattern. And if you can disrupt that pattern, you can have an outsized impact.” So how might you do that?

[00:00:42] SY: Rachel and I explore what they’ve been up to since we last spoke and the learnings they gain from their time with organizations like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:57] SY: First of all, welcome back, Rachel. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. It’s been a while since we’ve connected. Welcome back on the show. We’ve had you on, on 2014 and in 2017, and now we’re back in 2023.

[00:01:09] RN: It’s so good to be back. However, I’m wondering if we want to introduce with performance-based firings. It sounds so negative. I’d love to know more about just big tech careers, period, just sort of covering big tech careers, what people think they mean and what they actually mean.

[00:01:25] SY: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. We can totally dig into that. So what have you been up to since we last spoke? Last, we were talking about you being a cartoonist, transitioning into coding. That was kind of the big theme of our last conversation. What have you been up to since then?

[00:01:39] RN: Well, I released a book with A Book Apart about UI animation. And since then, I actually began my big tech career journey. That book, by the way, is Animation at Work. You can get it at abookapart.com. I have to give a plug for all of my historical work. It may be six years old, but it’s timeless classic animation principles. Surprisingly though, I’m not doing animation anymore. In the past six years, I started working as a program manager at Microsoft on the Edge browser. Then I pivoted to go abroad, working in Amsterdam at Booking for a year. And then I wanted to work with engineers, really amazing engineers and open source again. And I joined the React core team at Meta London and worked with Dan Abramov to launch React.Dev. And I was also responsible for ReactNative.Dev as well.

[00:02:32] SY: Wow!

[00:02:32] RN: So dove deep with the frameworks community. And then I swung back to the US to do a stint at AWS. And now I’m heading back to London to begin my startup journey!

[00:02:43] SY: Oh my goodness! Wow! Okay. There’s a lot to unpack there. So I guess my first question is it feels like in the last six years, you’ve done a lot of different technologies. You’ve worked in a lot of different technologies. I mean, when I think of the Edge browser, that’s browser land, right? And you mentioned React Native, that’s front end or Reactland. And I’m wondering, how did you do that? How did you learn about all these technologies and work in all these different spaces? Was it learning on the job? Or are you a secret browser expert that I just didn’t know about?

[00:03:19] RN: Well, I actually knew a lot about browsers from my work on web animation APIs with the W3C.

[00:03:25] SY: That makes sense. Yeah.

[00:03:27] RN: And I also documented the web animation API on MDN as a bit of a thing that I was doing with Mozilla. I contributed to their dev tools, et cetera. So it was really exciting to get the opportunity to work on Edge as part of their community team. However, browsers, they move at a different pace and working on a browser is a lot different from working with front-end developers. You’re building things for front-end developers, and that is a very different sort of work that you do. Rather than building apps and making delightful experiences, you’re wrangling different engineering teams and product managers inside a gigantic super structure of people with competing goals and needs. And for instance, you might be asking, “Gosh, why haven’t we added many new HTML elements since HTML5?” The reason is it is actually super complex to add a new element to a browser.

[00:04:23] SY: Is it?

[00:04:24] RN: Oh, yeah. So there’s a lot of pushback when you want to arbitrarily add new super divs, et cetera, which is why you see new elements advancing in browsers very slowly. And in that regard, working on browsers is a little unique because every browser has to build to a unified specification so that everyone has the same experience. This is one of the few roles where you’re going to work at one company, but work with many people at other companies. And that’s kind of what’s magical about standards work.

[00:04:57] SY: So this was at Microsoft. Is that your first kind of big mega company to work at in your tech career?

[00:05:05] RN: It sure was.

[00:05:06] SY: Yeah, how was that?

[00:05:09] RN: Well, I definitely learned a lot about big companies. It’s not like working for a smaller company or being a front-end developer, where you wake up, you write some code, and the client is appeased, and thumbs up it or thumbs down it, and then you get to go to bed. That’s too easy. The challenge with working in a big company like Microsoft is that a lot of it is networking, the same way you might network with people on dev.to or you might go to conferences, you’re doing that inside a large company. And you’re also, of course, doing it with people at other companies that have a vested interest in what your company is developing. But you have to understand them as well as you might understand, for instance, your developer community. And you also have to understand the users just as well and you have to understand all the conflicting priorities for what’s going to ship this year. So it’s a little bit like being a flight traffic controller, a little challenging in that regard. And I learned that I had to be okay with stepping away from the engineering and teaching side of things to do that work, which was a little bit more hands off than I wanted to be, which is why I struck out on a different adventure.

[00:06:18] SY: So before we get to that adventure, your title at Microsoft was Program Manager. And my understanding of a PM at Microsoft is very different from what most people might think of as a program manager in other jobs and other industries. What were some of the responsibilities that defined your role there?

[00:06:37] RN: That’s an incredibly good question. And I got to tell you, this particular team I was on, I think defining the responsibilities and roles was one of our jobs. It was sort of like get in there, find something you were passionate about, and then make that your job. That was one of the challenges with Microsoft is that there’s a bit of a joke in the industry, which is, “I worked at Microsoft as a PM and I’m still not sure what we do.” Microsoft has officially changed the title to product manager now, but I got to tell you, program management at Microsoft is unlike product management at other companies. I like to say that the challenges with these “P” titles, program, product, and project, is that often they do a little bit of all, and depending which company you’re at, it’s going to have a different definition.

[00:07:24] SY: So after you were at Microsoft for a bit, what was your reaction to working at a big company? Were you like, “Give me more,” or were you like, “Okay, I got to size it down a little bit”?

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