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SE Radio 555: On Freund on Upskilling
On Freund, founder of Wilco and former VP of Engineering at WeWork, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about "upskilling" – going deeper or increasing the breadth of your skills. On has years of experience in helping developers master the skills needed to advance in their careers. This episode explores the importance of upskilling in a constantly evolving tech landscape. They focus particularly on how and why senior and expert developers should keep learning, upskilling, and reskilling throughout their careers. Freund offers suggestions on how to face some common challenges, especially for remote or distributed workers, and how and why engineering managers can help enable upskilling for their teams.
On Freund, founder of Wilco and former VP of Engineering at WeWork, speaks with SE Radio’s Brijesh Ammanath about “upskilling” – going deeper or increasing the breadth of your skills. On has years of experience in helping developers master the skills needed to advance in their careers. This episode explores the importance of upskilling in a constantly evolving tech landscape. They focus particularly on how and why senior and expert developers should keep learning, upskilling, and reskilling throughout their careers. Freund offers suggestions on how to face some common challenges, especially for remote or distributed workers, and how and why engineering managers can help enable upskilling for their teams.
Show Notes
- Twitter: @onfreund
Past Episodes
- SE Radio 543: Jon Smart on Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Successful Software Delivery in Enterprises
- SE Radio 529: Jeff Perry on Career Management for Software Engineers
- SE Radio 524: Abi Noda on Developer Experience
- SE Radio 515: Swizec Teller on Becoming a Senior Engineer
- SE Radio 491: Chase Kocher on The Recruiting LifeCycle
- SE Radio 265: Pat Kua on Becoming a Tech Lead
- SE Radio 258: Cody Voellinger on Recruiting Software Engineer
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.
This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:16 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Brijesh Ammanath, and today my guest is On Freund. On has years of experience in helping developers master the skills needed to advance in their career. On is passionate about creating new ways for developers to level up. He’s co-founder and CEO of Wilco, a free upskilling platform for developers. Prior to that, he was VP product and VP engineering at WeWork and VP Engineering at Handy. On is also an angel investor and advisor to startups. On, welcome to Software Engineering Radio. Is there anything I missed in your bio that you’d like to add?
On Freund 00:00:50 Thanks so much. No, I think you pretty much covered all of the professional aspects. I’d say I’m also an amateur drummer.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:58 Excellent, thank you. As the field of technologies constantly evolving, it’s crucial for engineers to stay current with the latest tools and technologies. We’ll be talking today about “upskilling,” on how developers need to keep learning, upskilling, and reskilling throughout their career. We have covered learning previously in episodes 543, episode 529, 524, 515, and 491. I’ll make sure we link to these in the show notes. Let’s start with the basics. So, from my perspective when I look at upskilling, or the closest other term that comes to mind is “reskilling,” which is, I have an employee or team member that I’m going to train to teach him or her to do something else. What is upskilling in that context? Is it same?
On Freund 00:01:43 Well, it is very similar. Those two terms do have a relation with each other. But for me, reskilling is the act of taking someone who’s skilled at one thing and making them skilled at something else. And those two things could be completely independent. So, for example, maybe I’m a salesperson and I’m going through a re-skilling program to make me a good marketer, for example. So that would be re-skilling. Upskilling is I have a specific skill set and I’m taking the steps needed to ensure that I become better in that skillset. So, for example, I could be a marketer, but I have some gaps in my knowledge in various areas. Maybe I’m only focused on PPC, but I haven’t learned anything having to do with brand marketing. So, I pick up brand marketing and to me that is a sort of upskilling. So, these were the examples outside of engineering. When we talk about engineering, the terms could be a bit more blurry because if I’m a full stack developer and I’m going through a process that turns me into a mobile developer, is that considered reskilling or upskilling? I can’t say that I have a good answer for that, but I would say that as long as you’re within the realm of software engineering, I would call it upskilling.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:03:02 Yep, that makes sense. So, if you are going deeper or increasing the breadth of your skills, that would be upskilling, whereas learning something completely new would be reskilling.
On Freund 00:03:12 Exactly.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:03:13 Right. You’ve also mentioned or talked previously about leveling up. What does that term mean?
On Freund 00:03:20 Yeah, so leveling up, unlike upskilling and reskilling, that sort of became industry terms, leveling up is a bit more informal. And to me, leveling up is if you are at a certain level — and I don’t want to put names some people might say junior engineer, senior engineer, if you have a career ladder, you might add titles such as staff engineer or principal engineer. And you could say that switching from one of these levels to another is leveling up. But I like to look at it as more holistic. You’re at a certain level, it doesn’t have to have a very clear and concise definition, but you’re at a certain level and you’ve picked up skills and you feel like you’re ready for more advanced stuff. So, you might, from a title perspective, level up every few years, but if you encountered something challenging — let’s say that for the first time you had to deal with something in production — to me that experience becomes a step function in your growth. And once you’ve completed that, in a way, you’ve leveled up.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:04:22 Right. So, it’s basically gaining experience and as you gain experience, you become more confident in dealing with that problem. You are almost transitioned to the next level.
On Freund 00:04:32 Exactly. And it’s not just confidence, by the way, to me it’s a combination of throughout this experience you’ve gained confidence, you’ve also gained more training for your data set, I would say. So, your pattern matching becomes better next time around. And you’ve also perhaps developed intuition as part of this. Eventually the experience, to me, is the combination of confidence, intuition, and pattern matching.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:04:56 Right. Related to that around professional development, do you have any suggestions on how an engineer should approach professional development? You’ve got to look at learning new skills, new abilities, as you want to progress in your career. But is there a mindful way one can approach professional development?
On Freund 00:05:15 It’s a great question. And I think that, first and foremost, I think it should absolutely be the goal for every engineer in their career. We are, most of the engineers I’ve met are very curious. And using that curiosity to gain further skills, I think, is one of the best ways we can do for both for our career and I would say also for our well-being, because most of the developers I know love development, and it’s not just a day job to them. They actually care about the profession and want to become better at what they do. The thing is, to become better it’s not necessarily just about writing better code, which is where I think a lot of the people are getting it wrong. Becoming a better engineer is a combination of many soft and hard skills that you need to pick up, and you need to find good ways to acquire them.
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