Web Design, Technology

Developer Tea

Jonathan Cutrell

Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence. With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: developertea@gmail.com

5.5

17 min

0.5%

10 episodes

Forced and Unforced Errors

15 min

311/18/2025

In this episode, we introduce a simple yet powerful mental model from the world of sports: forced vs. unforced errors. By understanding this concept, you can shift your focus from things outside your control to the simple, foundational behaviours that truly define a successful career.Understand the Difference: Learn the distinction between forced errors—mistakes caused by chance, situation, or randomness that are hard to prevent—and unforced errors, which are avoidable blunders resulting from a lack of attention or care.Focus on What You Control: Discover why the most successful engineers prioritise reducing their unforced errors. While most people worry about hard-to-predict "forced errors," top performers concentrate on the fundamentals they can directly influence.Identify Your Unforced Errors: Recognise common unforced errors in your career, such as not testing your work, being late for meetings, erratic communication, or posting unprofessional content online. These simple mistakes can significantly impact your career over time.Conduct a Self-Audit: Learn the value of regularly performing a "self-audit" to identify and correct the simple, common-sense things you may be failing at. By improving in these areas, you can dramatically increase your reliability and competitiveness.🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Wix StudioDevs, if you think website builders mean limited control—think again. With Wix Studio’s developer-first ecosystem you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionalities that matters most:Develop online in a VS Code-based IDE or locally via GitHub.Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions.And ship faster with Wix Studio’s AI code assistant. All of that, wrapped up in auto-maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Go to wixstudio.com📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

View Your Productivity Through the Lens of Values and Priorities

13 min

311/18/2025

In this episode, we introduce two fundamental thought experiments to help you uncover your true priorities and core values. By exploring scenarios of scarcity and abundance, you'll learn to align your daily actions with what truly matters, leading to a more satisfied career and life.Uncover Your Priorities: Engage in a "5% exercise" where you imagine only being able to complete a tiny fraction of your to-do list. This thought experiment leverages a scarcity mindset to reveal your genuine priorities, helping you distinguish between what you perceive as important and what truly is.Discover Your Values: Participate in an "abundance exercise" by imagining all your obligations are met and you have complete autonomy. What you choose to do next in this state reflects your core values and helps you move beyond aspirational or culturally normative answers.Go Deeper: Learn to challenge superficial answers when identifying your values, pushing beyond the obvious to find unique and potentially surprising insights that genuinely guide your decision-making.Unify for Satisfaction: Explore the profound insight that the most likely path to a satisfied career and life comes from unifying your priorities and values, thereby avoiding actions that don't align with what truly matters to you.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Getting to Senior - Taking Ownership Without Leading Projects

15 min

311/18/2025

If you're an engineer looking to move into a senior role, you have likely heard that you need to demonstrate "ownership". Unfortunately, this crucial term is often poorly defined and leads to a major misconception: that ownership means being assigned a full project or a Tech Lead role. I want to dispel that myth and explain why ownership is actually a necessary behavior and mindset shift, applicable in almost every action you take, regardless of whether you’re leading a project.Understand why ownership is a critical aspect of moving along your career track, especially for engineers moving from the associate or mid-level engineer role up to senior.Uncover the misconception that ownership requires a specific scope of responsibility, such as owning a project or a deliverable.Discover the crucial phrase that defines the ownership mindset: "What now?" or "What next?" which should guide you through every situation you encounter.Learn why true ownership is not about inherently knowing every technical detail or executing every step, but about being willing to take responsibility and accountability for figuring out what happens next.Explore how a senior engineer's ownership behavior means translating identified problems (like those found in a retro) into action or decisions, thereby ensuring things continue moving forward and don't stall out.I explain that engineers show ownership by choosing to opt in to be held accountable for outcomes, rather than waiting for a manager to intervene or ask for a status update.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Part Two - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between

36 min

311/18/2025

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into how you can think about relating to and integrating the massive changes that AI is bringing to your job, whether you are a software engineer, manager, director, or product professional. Bryan and I discuss his interests beyond research, including art and organizational design.Explore the two primary paths for developers in the long run: specializing as managers of AI tools (like a product manager with engineering insight) or striving to be better than AI at building better versions of AI itself (the "neurosurgeon" type).Understand why refining your intuitions about what should be built becomes increasingly crucial as automation makes execution easier.Examine how conceptual biases often become the bottleneck when interacting with powerful AI tools, such as focusing on very narrow tasks for a broad tool.Learn how to approach AI failures: treat a failed output as an opportunity to dig in and figure out why, perhaps by asking the AI to write a better prompt or identifying a fundamental missing capability that could become a great startup idea.Conceptualize AI as the earliest versions of magic, where the manipulation of symbols (like embeddings) allows us to extend our influence into the world in a flexible and powerful way.Discover principles of organizational design by studying how neural networks learn, focusing on strong information flow, skip connections, and aligning with the objective.Consider the idea that the next phase of human development might involve emulating AI’s learning mechanisms (rather than expecting AI to become more human-like) to unlock the next phase of humanity and continue our search for meaning.Hear Bryan’s final piece of advice for listeners: focus on learning and working on things you are passionate about that will have the highest possible impact.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Part One - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between

34 min

311/18/2025

Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. It's been quite a while since I've had a guest on the show. Today, I'm joined by Bryan McCann, CTO at you.com. We dive into a wide-ranging discussion, exploring the philosophical origins of his career—from studying meaning and language to working in very early AI research. This discussion is less advice-heavy and more focused on kind of theory and discussion. I hope this is insightful for you and helpful as you crystallize your own philosophies on these subjects.Explore the philosophical journey that led Bryan McCann from being a philosophy major interested in meaning to pioneering early AI research. Bryan views his current work as an extension of those original philosophical questions.Discover how Bryan shifted from hitting a dead end in "armchair philosophy" to using computational tools to study language and try to make machines that could create meaning.Understand why Bryan believes that meaning, in the sense he originally sought it, is an innately human thing, tied to purpose and the narratives we use to shape our sense of reality.Discuss the profound realization that AI breakthroughs might be akin to discovering electricity, suggesting we are tapping into a fundamental framework of meaning or connection that has always existed.Examine the concept of super intelligence and the "flywheel effect," where AI accelerates research and development, building better versions of itself and potentially surpassing the classic anthropomorphic vision of machine intelligence.Explore Bryan’s other interests, including organizations, people, and art, which he sees as continuing the uniquely human search for meaning.Consider the idea that humanity's constant need to differentiate itself from machines may simply be a mechanism for survival, enabling our continued dominance.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Going to War with Burnout - Less Hours Isn't Your Only Option

18 min

311/18/2025

I'm tackling a massive challenge today: burnout. While the standard advice usually involves working less, I want to show you a practical dimension of burnout you have more control over, focusing on increasing your agency and autonomy to manage chronic workplace stress more effectively. Burnout is classified by the ICD-11 as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.This episode includes practical advice for understanding and addressing burnout by shifting focus from reducing work volume to increasing control and resources.Understand the three dimensions of burnout as classified by the ICD-11: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance/negativity toward the job, and reduced professional efficacy.Discover why the amount of time you work is not a direct input to burnout, meaning working less is often impractical and may not solve the underlying issue.Learn the core philosophy for addressing burnout: In order to control stress, provide control (meaning agency and autonomy).Explore why stress is directly correlated to the ratio of demands placed on you versus the resources (including decision-making power, training, and tooling) you have to meet those demands.I’ll give you practical ways to approach your manager to secure necessary resources, training, or mentoring to improve your professional efficacy and reduce job negativity.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

The Good and Bad of Choosing Measurements - Traps and Opportunities of Measuring What Matters

15 min

311/18/2025

In this episode, I dive into the management mantra that "what is measured is managed" and explain why this simple assertion often leads to a complex trap. We discuss why the act of measuring team productivity is never neutral—it's an intervention that immediately changes behavior, often resulting in unintended consequences like gaming the metrics. We'll explore how to collaborate with your team to find measurements that truly drive desired behaviors.Understand why the phrase "what is measured is managed" means that measuring something triggers management of that thing, in varying degrees.Learn why the act of measuring something is an intervention, especially when done with the intent of turning it into a target (e.g., increasing PRs or decreasing bugs), and how this action is shown to change behaviors around the thing being measured.Discover how measurement can lead to unintended consequences, such as when tracking velocity via story points causes team members to inflate or deflate their estimates, making the measurement itself less meaningful.Explore why giving ownership of metrics to the people acting to improve them makes sense, and how you can collaborate with your team to determine what kinds of measurements should be taken.Recognize that if you want something to survive—such as paying down tech debt—you must feed it with time, resources, and attention, ensuring your actions line up with what you claim to care about.Understand that since your calendar and dashboards will get crowded if you measure everything, the exercise of choosing metrics is as much about accepting that you have to choose what you will actively manage and invest in.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Engage in Deliberate Practice to Level Up Your Engineering Leadership Skills

18 min

311/18/2025

I want to dive into the concept of Deliberate Practice, which sets the greatest apart in fields ranging from sports to writing to engineering. I’ll explain why it’s much more than just repetition or experience, and why applying it to your career can lead to rapid improvement. Most importantly, I will provide concrete ways you can apply deliberate practice to level up your engineering and leadership skills, especially in areas that are traditionally difficult to practice, such as communication and strategic decision-making.Differentiate Practice from Deliberate Practice: Understand that while repetition is part of practice, deliberate practice specifically involves engaging in a very narrow set of activities with the intentional goal of improvement, requiring very quick feedback for continuous incorporation.Identify Opportunities for Rapid Improvement: Learn why deliberate practice is much more effective at achieving rapid improvement than simply engaging in repetition.Apply DP to Leadership Skills: Discover how to incorporate deliberate practice into roles like engineering manager, tech lead, or IC (Individual Contributor) leader, where the activity of practice is often harder to pinpoint.Leverage Existing Work for Practice: I suggest a mindset shift where you begin looking at existing responsibilities, such as one-on-ones, as opportunities for practice. For example, you can focus on improving your clarity when providing constructive criticism and ask for specific feedback on that aspect.Generate Novel Value Through Practice: Explore how engaging in deliberate practice activities—like recording a video to communicate a technical concept or creating documentation—serves the primary goal of practice, while almost certainly creating unexpected value for your team (often net neutral or positive).Use Backwards Training for Strategy: Find out how to practice strategic decision-making and forecasting by using "backwards training". This involves reviewing past decisions or work scopes, creating your own rationale or estimate, and then calibrating it against the known reality.Simulate Difficult Conversations: Consider leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to engage in deliberate practice around language-heavy skills, such as modelling sensitive or difficult topics, or practicing receiving harsh feedback.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Shift Your Locus of Control to Take Charge of Your Engineering Career

20 min

311/18/2025

This episode explores the concept of Locus of Control and why developing a more internal locus of control is beneficial for your career and life. You'll learn the difference between internal and external perspectives, why one is more useful than the other, and practical exercises to shift your mindset to believe you have more influence over the outcomes you care about.Understand Locus of Control: Discover what psychologists mean by locus of control—whether you believe outcomes are determined by your own actions (internal) or by external forces like luck and chance (external).Adopt a More Useful Mindset: Learn why an internal locus of control, while not a perfect reflection of reality, is a more useful and effective mindset for your career, as it prevents you from missing opportunities to influence outcomes.Recognise Your Influence: Find encouragement in the idea that you almost certainly have more influence and control over situations in your life and career than you currently believe.Shift Your Perspective with Practical Exercises: Engage in two research-based exercises to help you recalibrate your default beliefs and intentionally develop a more internal locus of control.Leverage Your Strengths: See how focusing on your strengths can create a positive feedback loop, reinforcing the belief that your efforts directly impact outcomes and helping you build a stronger sense of agency.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Resumé Driven Development - Your Career is In Your Hands

12 min

311/18/2025

In this episode we'll discuss why "Résumé Driven Development" is a powerful mental model for building a thriving career. Instead of seeing your résumé as just a job-hunting tool, you'll learn to use it as a guide for setting measurable, impactful goals that benefit you, your manager, and your company.Focus on Impact, Not Just Tasks: Discover why a great résumé is built on proof of impact, not just a list of completed projects. The best way to improve your career is to focus on achieving measurable goals that demonstrate real value.Have the Goals Conversation: Learn how to initiate a critical conversation with your manager to define measurable goals for your role. If your manager can only provide project deadlines, take the initiative to propose your own impact-oriented goals.Connect Goals to Business Value: Understand the importance of linking your work to business metrics. While there's a risk that a project might not meet its business goals, you can also measure impact through clever technical solutions or process improvements, like reducing team cycle time.Take Control of Your Career: Realise that your career success is ultimately dependent on your own actions. By proactively setting and tracking goals, you take control and can clearly tell the story of the value you bring to the table.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.