#TheTechHustle Podcast 🎙
...where Tech, Engineering, and The Culture intersects.
#TheTechHustle Podcast 🎙
Backstage with BobbyD featuring Patrick Newman
Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when your favorite social media platform suddenly crashes? In this illuminating conversation with Patrick Newman, a veteran software engineering manager with over 20 years of experience at Google, Twitter, and Amazon, we pull back the curtain on the invisible infrastructure that powers the digital world we rely on daily.
Patrick shares the high-stakes responsibility of managing Twitter's Core Infrastructure team—work he describes as "the bottom of the car, the underneath the car... it holds everything up, but you don't see it." His team created innovative solutions that prevented dozens of potential global outages, demonstrating how critical these unseen systems are to our online experiences. The conversation reveals the fascinating tension between moving quickly and maintaining stability in platforms used by millions.
Beyond technical insights, Patrick offers a refreshingly honest perspective on career development in the AI era. While embracing AI as a powerful tool for coding, he emphasizes that "AI can be a great accelerant, but it's not going to fix a fundamental gap in knowledge." This wisdom comes from a career that's spanned multiple technological revolutions—from the early internet to mobile to cloud computing and now AI.
Perhaps most compelling is Patrick's unexpected journey—from teaching English in Japan to becoming a baseball blogger with 45,000 daily readers to managing engineering teams at tech giants. His story demonstrates how diverse experiences can shape leadership approaches and how maintaining professional relationships opens doors to new opportunities. The genuine mentorship dynamic between Patrick and host Bobby shines throughout their conversation, offering listeners a model for supportive professional relationships.
Whether you're a seasoned tech professional navigating industry changes or just beginning your journey, this episode provides valuable perspective on staying adaptable, continuing to learn, and finding your unique path in technology. As Patrick advises, "Have a goal, stick with it... If coding isn't working for you, maybe SRE will, maybe product management will... those dots connect, no matter how far along they go."
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If you were a Twitter user, you never would have seen anything that we did Basically think about like a car, like the bottom of the car, the underneath the car. It holds everything up, but you don't see it. I'm not really a big AI guy, but I started messing with Google's internal AI on like writing code, and it's really good. I think that the trick, though, is that it's good because I still kind of know what I'm doing technically.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I know when it makes mistakes, I know what to look for. Basically I understand the key concepts. It's just an accelerant. So I think still know the fundamentals, know what you're looking for, know the difference between depth-first search and breadth-first and all the other stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Know when something is memory-constrained and CPU-constrained, know all that stuff. Ai can be a great accelerant, but it's not going to fix kind of a fundamental gap in knowledge.
Speaker 4:Welcome welcome, welcome. What up D-Hustle hustle. What is going on today? Yo guess where we at player? I don't know, but the weather's real great.
Speaker 2:You love this weather, bro, every time we come out to the city, you always be talking about the weather top of mind.
Speaker 4:Yeah, tell them where we at we'll be in san francisco two times. This is the second time. Second season, san freaking Cisco, there we go. That's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but also we got to see the Giants last night too.
Speaker 4:Yes, we did Shout out. Was it the Giants? Or you saw the Mets Shout out to the Mets Doing great things out there.
Speaker 2:Juan Soto was a bust, yeah, yeah, but Francisco, you know he's the one that knocked it out of the park right knocked out the home run. Yes, I know you do. I can't wait this, this guy, he loves, loves baseball patrick loves baseball too. Yeah, yeah, you gotta catch a game together, for sure, for sure we got a really beautiful view of, uh, the ferry building down downtown san francisco off the market. Um, I want to say welcome you all to another episode of backstage with bobby. I got a special guest for us who?
Speaker 4:we got, who we got.
Speaker 2:And let me tell you, when you work in the industry and you get a chance to work with or for somebody like Patrick Newman, our guest, Say it again, say his name again. They're automatically invited to the podcast when we pull up, so let's have a big round of applause for Patrick Newman. What's going?
Speaker 4:on Patrick. Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 2:Oh for sure, man. Patrick, thank you so much for pulling up Just a little bit in there. But Patrick and I and I'm going to drop it for everybody to know used to work together at this really cool social media company.
Speaker 4:Darwin loves it. I did this one.
Speaker 2:It's the one that used to be the little blue bird.
Speaker 4:You ever heard of that one before? No't you never heard it before come on, bro.
Speaker 3:So yes, patrick, you don't know, what you missed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly right uh, patrick and I worked at twitter for a number of years, um, and let me tell you, out of all the managers I've ever had a chance to work for or work with, um, you're definitely a one that, um, I really, really appreciate what you've done for me and supporting endeavors and things that we've done over there.
Speaker 2:That's even a gem right there too, For sure man and definitely want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself. But definitely wanted to first of all give you some roses and let you know we really appreciate you pulling up and, for over the years, support me on all these endeavors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me Give us a quick introduction, bobby. I'm a software engineering manager in the tech industry in the Bay Area for about 20 years. Yeah, yeah, I had the good fortune to work at some great companies Google, twitter, amazon. I've worked with some great people like Bobby.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'm on that list. You see, you see D.
Speaker 1:I was waiting for him. If I had a podcast, you'd be the first guest.
Speaker 4:Ah round of applause.
Speaker 1:Just want to give you guys a heads up.
Speaker 4:ladies and gentlemen, I am not paying Patrick to see none of this good stuff.
Speaker 1:Every time you probably said you were yeah, you know.
Speaker 4:Okay, that's after the show.
Speaker 2:After the show but, patrick, thank you so much for pulling up and, yeah, you've been in the industry for 20 plus years um running at working at some of the most well-known, notable companies, um in our industry, um, and one of the things that I just want to, you know, kick it off with is how did you get into tech? How did tech end up being, uh, the place you landed?
Speaker 1:it's a long story oh let's go um. I or maybe it's a short story I moved to san francisco on new year's day in 2004 and I just kind of hustled until I found a job.
Speaker 1:My first job in the Bay Area was at the Japanese government building websites and stuff, and did that for like a year and a half and kind of got tired of it and wound up in a startup and just kind of ran with it. I was at that startup for eight years and started in a very junior position and then kind of worked my way up and got all the way to senior director and then move on to another startup and then they laid me off because that's how it goes sometimes yeah, wound up at google and you know, sometimes life throws you a curveball and you hit it.
Speaker 2:Listen how he just said it. I just wound it up at google, I just ended up like I don't even know, I just they. They start signing and writing me checks. I just ended up there, but Google was one of your first what would you say big tech company that you worked at? Google was the first big one.
Speaker 1:And so that startup that I worked at from 2006 to 2015 had a lot of people come and go.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like lots and a lot of really great people and they wound up all over the place. A lot of them wound up at Google. So I kind of wound up, just like by doing a good job and having a good reputation with that yeah that company, kind of having this big network.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when, when the second startup that I was at kind of started to go sideways, I kind of worked in the network and kind of you know, put out feelers here and there and Google is the first one to hit and I knew several people there, so they all gave me recommendations.
Speaker 3:So that's what's up.
Speaker 1:You know, um, it's always, it's always good advice to kind of keep the network going. You know, keep in touch with people, let them know how you feel, help them out that kind of stuff. It paid off for me for sure, roger, that shout out to patrick keeping up the hustle and let's give him a gym sound too.
Speaker 2:Uh, for those that subscribe and follow along, y'all know about the gym sound. If you hear that sound, that means rewind to that spot, because there was a gym that's dropped. Um, and I heard patrick talk about how valuable the network is, because your network is how you get access to opportunities, referrals and ultimately, you know, landing really cool opportunities those people that know you and they know what's going on at their company and they know what you can do and they can line it up basically yeah, yeah, and you know here, you and I work together.
Speaker 1:What starting in 2019, I think. Yeah, yeah, here it is 2025 and you know we're here on a podcast. Facts facts you know, it's keeping in touch, building relationships, and you know see where it goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, and I appreciate the insights that you give into our audience, because our audience is definitely either rising seniors about to get into the industry, transitioning into the industry, and one thing I always like to emphasize with my mentees is the value of having a network and connecting and maintaining those relationships over the years. Because I mean, patrick, thank you so much for being you right, thank you. So, after Google, where did you end up after that?
Speaker 1:So I went to Twitter. Twitter was the next stop after Google in 2019.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's what's up. And then you ran into Bobby D and yes, so, ah, come on, I was waiting for him.
Speaker 4:I was waiting for him you haven't even received the money yet, Patrick.
Speaker 2:Tell us the truth. By that time we, in terms of just organizational-wise SRE, was the pillar and, like practice that you more or less was providing management services to, were you also doing SRE at Google? Yeah, oh okay, awesome.
Speaker 1:And I think that led directly to the opportunity at Twitter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Google kind of is the benchmark for SRE site reliability engineering.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, it's a little bit different at every different company, and Twitters and Googles are similar, or were?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they were.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it was a really good fit and it kind of carried directly over.
Speaker 2:That's what's up. And this is the cool part of the story for me is when Patrick got to Twitter. During that time I was actually transitioning from like a systems engineering role into site reliability engineering, but also kind of shutting down a team, because we used to manage a fleet management. Fleet management was one of those organizations that manage computers, going into the data center and kind of managing the full life cycle of bare metal machines and then obviously developing and designing software around that. But the cool thing that Patrick actually got access to is to manage the core infrastructure team. So tell us a little bit about that team.
Speaker 1:Core infrastructure. So if you were a Twitter user, you never would have seen anything that we did Basically think about like a car, like the bottom of the car, the underneath the car. It holds everything up but you don't see it. If it breaks you certainly notice, but if everything's working perfectly, you never notice. And that was kind of like what core infrastructure was. It was configuration for systems, it was addressing, it was DNS, it was access to machines, it was identity for very low level, very basic level machine access, that sort of stuff yeah um, there were, like I think, 30, 35 different services that we, that we worked on yeah, and and like you said, these are, these are core services, like uh, failure on them.
Speaker 1:Services everybody else sees yeah, it's just like under the car.
Speaker 3:Global twitter is down globally. Yeah, because of my stuff yeah yeah, once or twice.
Speaker 2:But hey, we all live and learn in the process.
Speaker 1:It's a different vibe when, like you, wake up and something you did is in the news oh, it's like it's different exactly. Bobby knows what it's like, oh for sure actually, uh, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Sidebar that I told you I'm working on a book, uh, called breaking barriers my journey to the top in tech, and one of the chapters in the book is called my Journey to the Top. I'm sorry the world knows me, but y'all don't know me yet, meaning that there was a time when Twitter went down, but nobody knows that. I was a part of the team that was supporting and bringing it back up and definitely have had the opportunity to experience that firefighting, but also being in the news, yeah.
Speaker 2:I feel so real Right in the news, right, because that that's used to be the thing I used to tell a lot of mentees of mine is like, hey, um, your, your responsibility is, uh, to make sure that what we're doing, we're trying our best not to bring this thing down because the world's going to know about it. Like a one line configuration can bring this whole thing down and it's happened to us.
Speaker 1:That's what's up out of the news. Yeah, for sure, that was a good day for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the cool thing about my journey with Patrick is that this is the time that I was also transitioning out of the core infrastructure team, moving to more of a platform SRE, managing the compute platform, and I wanted to say, first of all, thank you so much for supporting me and paving the way for that, because you didn't know all of the challenges I had getting to where that point was. But then Patrick recognized game, you know, he understood right, the skill set, what I brought to the table and the opportunity and he definitely opened doors for me.
Speaker 1:So Dee's going to get mad at me and say you know that Bobby didn't pay for this. But I really don't say things I don't mean. And I first noticed Bobby like probably three weeks after I joined in one of these incident calls and just noticed the insight and just picked up on the ability right away. So it was very, very clear to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, you know, I don't shy from it. The same way that I am now is the same way that I was at work, right? Is that mindset or, more or less, the environment that was created for me to be myself and something I always talk about. What was so special about Twitter, I mean, when you said it's not the same, it's that culture, it's that dynamic and or the space that was given to, you know, underrepresented individuals like myself to really excel and really step into our abilities, because this was, for me, the major leagues. Right, I'm not just playing around, but I'm really, really you know, making impact into the world.
Speaker 2:So, uh, definitely appreciate you recognizing and seeing it and supporting me well, you earned it, you know, you can say thank you, but you earned it yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:And then patrick's the one that helped, uh, you know, usher me into promotion cycles too. So a big shout out to you congratulations. You know, when you get promoted you get that bread too. So you know he's helping out the family, you know generational. So I never, never, had a chance to say this face to face, and I definitely have, but in in this type of setting. Thank you so much for supporting me on that. Um, it was definitely, uh, something that was impactful to my journey, because another thing patrick remind me is that, even when I used to send out like company-wide emails, I always used to send out different types of emails, right, I used to always have some music playing or a theme song behind it, and when I got promoted, I actually had a video that I sent out to the whole company.
Speaker 4:What kind of video was this?
Speaker 1:It was like this Exactly right. It had some music and Bobby was very gracious. You know you earned your promotion.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:I worked on a document and I went to the committee and I did all that stuff and your skip level helped too. It wasn't just me and there were like 16 people who supported on the feedback section, so you had broad support. Yeah, it was a very easy thing to do, yeah, he was like it's Pat Bagg. Usher him in, bring him in.
Speaker 2:But for me, that promotion really just opened up the opportunity for me to influence the organization even broader, right? Because it's like, especially at that tables that we sat at, sometimes you don't really get access unless you have a certain title or you're considered a team lead or really bring that value, and I was really missing out on those conversations. But as soon as that promotion came and Patrick is like, hey, y'all need to talk to Bobby, bobby needs to be in here, that's when it was like, yeah, it was like, uh, you know stamping where, where I was at my, my journey, and I really appreciate that for sure, yeah, well, you earned it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much another.
Speaker 2:The cool thing about Patrick, especially at Twitter, is that, uh, patrick really did wholeheartedly support, you know, underrepresented communities and ERGs and being one of, in my opinion, the forward thinking leadership or being a part of leadership and embracing and being an ally for our ERG called Blackbirds. So tell me a little bit about Blackbirds and more or less like what was kind of like your first impression and what really helped drive you to make your contribution Blackbirds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Blackbirds is an amazing community.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I told you this story. I don't know how much time we want to spend.
Speaker 2:Let's go, let's go.
Speaker 1:So it was my last day at Google and I was having lunch with an African-American friend literally Nigerian-American friend. Yeah, so a black friend and we were talking about inclusion and diversity and you know these types of topics and Google had like names of rooms, like Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers, and I'm like, does everybody get it?
Speaker 1:Like does that work for everybody. And so this friend was telling me about, you know, the black experience at Google, which wasn't always positive. And so I remember driving home and thinking, okay, I wasn't aware of this, like I didn't know, it was just something that wasn't on my radar.
Speaker 1:And so I thought, okay, what can I do better at the next stop, at Twitter? You know how can I involve myself? And so I thought, okay, he told me there's an ERG at Google for black people and for the black community, and I'm sure Twitter will have one too too. So I'll just join and start from there. And so I got to twitter and on the very first day, like within the first two hours of orientation, they tell you about ergs yeah yeah, and they put it all up in a slide and I'm saying it like they still do this, you know, um, so, uh.
Speaker 1:So blackbirds is on there. I was like, okay, perfect, I'm gonna join that one. So I signed up for the email list and I was all like ready to go. I was like I'm gonna like introduce myself and I'm gonna be part of this.
Speaker 1:And then I saw all these emails like michael jordan and whitney houston and all this stuff and I thought I'm gonna stop I'm just gonna wait for a while and I'm just gonna read these emails and I'm gonna like see what people are talking about, I'm gonna see, like, where I fit in before just jumping in with both feet.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I didn't really want to like interrupt or like or like disrupt and I wanted to learn about the community. It wasn't really till I got to know you well that I felt comfortable, kind of saying you know, I'm here to engage and learn with this community and kind of be part of it in my own way. Yeah, and it kind of went from there. So I think it was probably a good. I don't know, maybe a year after I joined that I kind of had the guts to ask you like Bobby, how do I step in here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then I remember you introduced me to Babatunde and we had a thing going with him for a while and a couple of others and I don't think I did much. I just showed up and listened mostly and you know I gave some people some advice from a management perspective about handling certain situations, stuff like that. Mostly I just learned a lot. I mean, sounds weird to say I don't think I contributed much.
Speaker 2:I think I got much more out of it myself than I contributed back yeah um.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it was um. And you know I'll say I've been at other companies since leaving Twitter. I've never seen any energy quite like the Blackbirds community the way it was at Twitter. For sure it was just so vibrant.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And valuable too. I remember Nick Caldwell coming in and giving some talks to Blackbird and it was this Blackbirds, and it was stuff that I wasn't hearing other executives do. Yeah, it was just very unique and very special. So, yeah, I'm glad we got to experience it.
Speaker 2:I wish it was still there, so yeah for sure, and give patrick a round of applause, because I think, uh, from an ally's uh perspective, sometime, it is uh challenging to to find the right groove to slide into in terms of, you know, providing support. Um, and, and I will say uh, especially when we had that conversation, I was like, oh snap, patrick wants to chill with us. Huh, what's going on, patrick? And then Patrick's like hey, this, that and this, you told me that story and I was like, oh, patrick got some beautiful spirit and I was like you know what, just hang out, pull up and I'll introduce you to the crew.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, we found where you would provide the most support, and definitely having a resource or having an ally that sits at a different table, especially on the management side from the ERG's perspective, was so valuable to us, because we started off in terms of just engineering, with only a handful of black engineers, and by the time you got there, we were like the door was open, right, but even with the door was open, it's like we didn't have a reception team, right, because there was only five of us. So we definitely needed support from other allies and other ergs and and at twitter to to really help us create a space that allowed for development and growth, but also a space to ask questions, because we just never really have had that opportunity to make those type of connections. So, uh, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Um, and definitely uh thank you because, like I don't think I would have felt comfortable stepping in in that way without your guidance, so I got you.
Speaker 2:You know it goes both ways yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm like a tour guide. Yeah, what'd you say?
Speaker 4:shout out to who shout out to to uh my name patrick and uh palatunde, oh okay, I thought you were shouting me out, bro shout out to my man, patrick yeah, yeah, no big shout out to baba tunday baba tunday was a guest here.
Speaker 1:I watched that one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's a true gentleman, oh my gosh tunday is a brilliant, brilliant engineer and he was one of the first uh um black uh interns that we brought in um and he, he just helped us redefine what it looked like, uh, to come out of school, have this whole challenge of meeting the bar, and he exceeds the bar every time. So big shout-outs to Babitu.
Speaker 1:You had Meryl on too, and she was involved with that as well, so let's not forget Meryl, yeah big shout-outs to Meryl, a little bit Shout-outs, a little bit.
Speaker 2:Had a chance to come on the podcast too. But yeah, in general, blackbirds, ergs and I know it's kind of like a tough subject in the time that we're living with DEI has really just, in my opinion, given access and opportunities for everybody to contribute and see the value of it, especially with diverse perspective. That's one question I have. So how did it feel to well, I don't know how I feel to be a manager of me, because I'm a little bit much to carry too, even though I do come with good spirit but how did it feel to have like that different type of perspective in conversations? Um, during our time working together?
Speaker 1:you mean like, uh, from a dei perspective, or I don't know um he treated like the red team and the blue team, huh it was somebody from beats who had reached out for help with a management situation. Like it was an engineer who was having some trouble with with their manager and I remember like just not knowing quite how to navigate it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You want to be supportive but then I don't know the other side of the conversation, like I don't know. I know how how that person was perceiving the situation they were in, but I didn't know the other side of it. So you have to provide guidance that's supportive, but not kind of over-promising and taking everything into account. So, it can be a little tricky when you don't have all the information, when you're not directly involved.
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 1:You know it's good because you're neutral and you're unbiased in a way, but it's also, it's also tricky because you don't want to kind of be, you know, over promising or saying no, you're, you know you're being treated unfairly. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. They perceived a situation and they were dealing with a situation. That was difficult, for sure. Yeah, Um, so, you know, being supportive and being reasonable, without sort of like over-indexing on what you think the situation might be, I don't know if that answers the question.
Speaker 1:No, no, I definitely know it can be tricky, but I think in the end, the key thing is like letting people know that you're there for them. You're listening, someone does care and someone will make their best effort to help. I think that's always the best starting point.
Speaker 2:For sure, 100%. Thank you so much for that because I definitely felt like you cared and you know what? The other thing about Patrick and I is that this was almost low key. I was already working remotely or I started working remotely and COVID kind of hit and it was like almost I was reporting to Patrick. I never met him in person, I never met him face to face until I actually came to the office and it was like one of my trips and I think I had already been cycled out to another manager or something happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I managed Bobby for about a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was managing two teams for a while. For sure I was managing Bobby's team for like on an interim basis for a while. And then I think, yeah, I think the first time you visited the office was after that, like the interim period was over and the permanent manager For sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:I think that was right. And I was like yo, that's Patrick. And I was like, oh, and in my mind I'm like yo, I've been talking to you through this computer for a year and a half and I'm like this is what being in person. You don't know how tall people are, you know? And I didn't have the same hair at that time I was shorter.
Speaker 1:It was a lot shorter. Your height has increased.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly right, it's just the hair Patrick.
Speaker 1:I got shorter.
Speaker 2:That's funny, that's funny. So another cool thing that I learned about Patrick and we were talking about this actually before we even got the show started was about your time in Japan. So last time we tried to pull up and have a conversation with Patrick when we met up with Tunde and Miro, but you were out of the country. But I mean, in terms of story-wise, you lived in Japan for a while. So tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:So I was a student in Japan for a semester and I had a good time there. So I went back and lived there as an English teacher for two years.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, shout out to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it wasn't a very good job, but it was a great experience. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:That's what's up. Did you learn how to speak the language? Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I mean, he worked for the Japanese consulate. Man, he was the guy right Stop the press. And then also you got into blogging and sports. Baseball is obviously the big sport over there, so tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, going way back, I wanted to be a writer. That was my dream and my wife when she sees this, will laugh at me because you know, it's one of those things. So I wanted to be a writer and I've always been a huge baseball fan and I can speak and read Japanese. And then, around 2007, 2008, I noticed there was a lot of media about Japanese players. Around 2007, 2008, I noticed there was a lot of media about Japanese players. Most of it was wrong and so I thought, okay, I know these things, I've seen these guys, I know who they are, I can just start a blog and tell people. And, to my surprise, it really took off. I think my biggest day I had 45,000 page views.
Speaker 3:Oh, big shout-outs to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've done over 100 newspaper and magazine interviews and, I think, 25 radio interviews. Yeah, and one TV.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's what's up. So yeah, just totally took off. We're sitting next to a star If we go to Japan they're going to know him more than they know me. That's fine, that's fine, I'll take that.
Speaker 1:I'm retired now. I'm retired.
Speaker 4:Now, he was retired this was like 2008 to 2012. This was a long time ago. You put another blog out there in the whole yard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we'll see. Play that laughing sound there he goes, that's funny, that's funny.
Speaker 2:Oh man. But you know what the cool thing about this part of Patrick's journey is that a lot of people feel like, especially in tech, that tech is the only thing that you expose yourself to, or you may only pursue in terms of pathway. But there's other things that you can do on your journey that will obviously help you in the long run. But allow those things to happen, like what we're doing right now, podcasting around the country, right, and Patrick you know being, you know a sports writer in Japan, which is wild. You know, I didn't even know that. And then I went to his page, I was looking it up and I was like wow, my guy was out here holding it down and we didn't even know. But in general, that that openness or that experience definitely helped influence. So how did that experience help influence your journey in tech?
Speaker 1:so I think the biggest thing I was thinking about this question because, uh, um, earlier, I think the biggest thing was when I was teaching english there. You're in there's rules where you have to speak english to the to the student and, um, sometimes you're speaking with somebody who can't really communicate in english, but you still have to use english and kind of get by to them get through to them with something very basic and you sort of learn how to sort of build from that and I think I've used that skill a lot in communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
Speaker 1:You know, like you're talking to a salesperson about, it's got to be this, this is how it works, this is what you should demo, this is what you should avoid. That kind of stuff. I think just learning how to talk to different people where they're at with their understanding, I think is the biggest thing.
Speaker 1:And the English teaching in Japan was a very extreme example of that, you know. But there's always times in engineering where we're talking to somebody we might assume that they know some technical detail, that's you know, natural to us, or like just you know, we're fully fluent in that detail, but we might not, might not remember that Whoever we're talking to might not be aware of it, might not be super familiar.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so learning how to kind of meet people where they're at, so to speak. I think that was probably the biggest thing.
Speaker 2:Big shout-outs to you. That's definitely a gem. Put a mark there for him. Very much appreciate that, because this is the part where you're not always aware of how past experiences could help influence your journey that you're experiencing now. But that's why you have to go through those journeys and go through those experiences. Yeah, and the dots do connect.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know I mean I you've told me about your time, different jobs. You know things you picked up along the way I'm sure it's the same way. But you know the dots connect. And when you're 22 or 23 and you're thinking why am I wasting my time on this? You know, yeah you know it might feel pointless, but you never know when something's going to come back and be useful you know when you're like 32, like I am if he's 32, I'm 31.
Speaker 4:Come on D you can see just a few grades Maybe 56. Damn bro, you sound like my son now.
Speaker 2:Wow, jeez.
Speaker 2:Well, big shout-outs to everybody, 56 and above.
Speaker 2:Oh, man, and Patrick and I had a and we're going back to jumping back into Twitter and tech but Patrick and I had some really cool time working on some really cool system software. And one of the ones that come to mind and actually I didn't put here in the notes and I just thought about it is we had a team that was working on basically helping us mitigate some of the challenges we had with Puppet basically helping us mitigate some of the challenges we had with Puppet, puppet being a configuration management that basically allows you to consistently configure groups of machines with the same configuration and they came in and they came out with this really cool way for us to roll out changes and by far one of the coolest things that I've ever seen in my field, especially to mitigate the challenges that we had. But how did that project come about and like? How did that like in terms of the outcome, because I believe it might have been right when I left, when it was just about done, but in terms of rollout and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So what Bobby is talking about is a tool called Puppet, which is this open source thing, and basically the way to think about it is you've got a bunch of machines and they all need to have some setting, some memory setting or some permission or something. They all need to be consistent, they all need to work the same way. So how are you going to do it? You're not going to log into every machine and manually set it and change all this stuff you need a way to do it automatically across a big group of machines, and so Puppet lets you do that.
Speaker 1:The problem with Puppet lets you do that. The problem with Puppet at Twitter scales. You have hundreds of thousands of machines and if you get one of those settings wrong, then boom.
Speaker 2:You could wind up with a bad situation. It wasn't funny for us. That was a womp, womp, womp. That can be all of them.
Speaker 1:Exactly the laughing, the glory of fixing those things.
Speaker 4:That's why I put the fixing those things. Oh, you need a button for sheer panic yeah, you know, or pager duty sound.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go, there we go, that's the, that's the right yeah, yeah yeah, so, um, we came up with a way of applying, uh, puppet changes incrementally. So you're gonna, you're gonna, um, make your change to part of the group of machines that you have to change and then, if it works, you move on to the next one and the next one, and eventually it's all completely done, and so it's basically just a way to mitigate the risk of some unwanted change blowing up everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this is going back about three, four years now. So the way I measured the success of that was how many, how many of those rollouts did we intervene with and stop something bad happening? And I think at one point we had stopped 27, wow, so, um, so, yeah, that was good, I mean so yeah, I stopped counting at some point. I mean, I moved on yeah, yeah, he's like problem solved well, the other thing is that the engineers told us that when they were making changes involving Puppet previously, they were really scared and nervous and you know, trying to test everything for weeks and weeks and weeks, make sure everything's perfect.
Speaker 1:But then we gave them a safety rail, a guardrail. They could move a lot quicker and say, okay, if I roll this out and it has a problem, I can catch it and stop it, it's not going to blow me up. So you can move a little bit more aggressively, move a little bit more with higher velocity it's sort of an unplanned benefit, but it turns out that making changes safer to do makes people feel less stress in their jobs, which is really nice. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Big shout-outs to that and that whole team, the whole squad. It's so great that we had that type of challenge and that problem, because that problem space you don't find it in a lot of organizations, and also the impact that it has for a change in our environment. Like you said, it was massive if something went wrong, but then the side effect of it which is always the cool thing of the results of a problem is now the side effect of it is people felt more safe, and more safe meaning they feel more innovative and now we can iterate and go faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So that was actually a great side effect of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it wasn't the plan. We were just trying to take care of the risk.
Speaker 2:But it turns out that fixing the risks and leads to those other benefits yeah okay for sure. Big shout out to the whole team. Uh, ciss, uh, and I know that we had a a few uh off of uh consultant services helping us out with that. So big shout out to the whole team over there. Amazing, amazing job, uh. So by that time I would say that, uh, it was, it was you're done with Twitter and then you moved on. Did you go through the Elon Musk cabal thingy?
Speaker 1:Well, I left because of him. But I mean Amazon had been coming after me for a while.
Speaker 2:You see that You're like Amazon was knocking at the door.
Speaker 1:So I do this thing, I do this thing where I shouldn't say this, but I'll say it anyway.
Speaker 3:Don't say it, we don't get you in trouble here. No, no, no it's okay, my current employer.
Speaker 1:I may not want to hear this, but I usually interview for jobs every April, whether I'm looking or not. Just to kind of stay sharp. It's a gem right there, for sure.
Speaker 4:My wife is the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead, let me push it then. So Amazon recruited me and I was like I don't really want to work there, but I want to see what the interview is like. So I went and did the interview and they made me an offer and I said, well, that's great, thank you, but I'm going to decline.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so they kept calling me. It was like your interview result is still good. We can make you, can make you a different offer now. Are you interested now? And then I kept saying now I'm happy at twitter. Thank you, but you know, I appreciate it, but no yeah and um, it was about april or may of 2022 and elon's rolling in and uh, amazon calls me and they're like this is literally the last day we can use your interview results yeah so I was yeah sounds pretty good.
Speaker 3:I think the timing is perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, this will work, and so it turned out to just be lucky. I had kind of this escape hatch built in. I didn't plan it that way. Okay, it was just to go have the experience of seeing what it's like at Amazon, to interview there, yeah, and it turned out to really be a good thing for me during that time, yeah, I mean I didn't want to work for you on this. We don't need to get into that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That guy was bad news.
Speaker 4:I'm just amazed how they still call you after a year has passed by.
Speaker 1:I didn't know they right away either. I kind of sat on it for a while. And Google will still hire you if you pass an interview a year and a half after your interview if you pass. And so I got through and I think I wound up joining about a year after the interview.
Speaker 3:Yeah, something like that Imagine that yeah.
Speaker 1:So you never know, yeah something like that.
Speaker 4:Imagine that. Yeah, so you never know. Yeah for sure. Congratulations on that. Yeah, so you went from.
Speaker 2:Google to Twitter, to Amazon, back to Google. Yeah, how is it being back at Google?
Speaker 1:It's different.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Google in 2025 is not the same as Google in 2017, 2018.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Still a great company to work for. I know, I've seen enough and you know, having been at Google and seeing how other things work, it was definitely my choice to go back to Google, For sure.
Speaker 2:Now with limitations on how much you can talk about it, but what type of projects are you working on and doing at Google?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I can't go into much detail, but I work in the Google Payments Org and my specific role is helping Google accept and process new forms of payment globally. Oh, that's what's up. So you know we have Venmo or whatever in the US and credit cards and all of that that we have. A payment in Japan or Korea might be different. It might be a QR code.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Payments in India are different. Payments in Africa are different. There's more usage of cash, there's more usage of direct bank transfers, peer-to-peer payments, all that kind of stuff, and they all have different risk profiles and different technical limitations and technical advantages.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we deal with all that stuff, so it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:That's what's up. That's what's up. And you're still in a leadership role over there, right? Yeah, oh, that's what's up. And this is the cool thing about leadership and reflection is like well, one question I have written down here is what would make the great mentor or manager in 2025 and beyond?
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I don't know. I think, at the big tech companies, management in 2025 has a lot more to do with getting people through specific performance processes and performance milestones and performance procedures and stuff. So being really well-versed in how is performance assessed and evaluated, and keeping your team prepared and helping them understand how they're being graded, how they're being judged, how they're being compared to their peers.
Speaker 1:I think, that's something that's really important. It's difficult too. Mentoring and management is different. Anybody can be a mentor. Management has a lot of responsibility that comes with it that I don't recommend for everybody. A lot of people would find it stressful. I wish I was a better engineer. You want to be back at the keyboard, like that, yeah. There's times when I wouldn't mind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, being a mentor, I think I don't really like to consider myself a mentor, because everybody that I try to like help. I'm getting something from them too. We talked about Blackbirds earlier.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Bobby feels like I contributed to Blackbirds. I think that I got way more from Blackbirds than I ever gave. And mentoring is similar in a way. If I'm mentoring somebody and I'm sort of making my experience available, they're also telling me what they're experiencing, what they're going through, and it's helping me kind of adapt and be a better leader, be a better community member, whatever. So I think the first thing that I try to do when I'm trying to mentor someone is just simply listen and then make my experience available to them, whatever it might be in a relevant way. Sometimes old man Patrick tells his stories.
Speaker 2:What are you talking about Old man? You're 32, bro, when I was your age, when I was your age, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:We had blackberries, and there you put it on your belt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know the good old days, right, when you actually had a keyboard on your rather than touchscreen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you know, try to keep it relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And the reason why I bring this up is because I know that during your journey you were also providing services on LinkedIn for people to reach out to you and have coffee chats. And for me on the sidelines, seeing that I was so grateful that people had had opportunities to speak to you and schedule those times and really just knowing the value that a conversation with you in terms of any challenges they would have, I knew that it was definitely like gold, right.
Speaker 1:I hope there's definitely some people that I definitely feel like I helped.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, big shout-outs to you on that. So the other thing that I want to talk about is like what would you say it would be? You know messages to rising engineers trying to find their footing right, especially with the era of AI. So I've got to find a way to throw AI in here. What messaging would you have for them?
Speaker 1:So you know, on the AI point, I'm not really a big AI guy, but I started messing with Google's internal AI and like writing code and it's, it's really good. Yeah, isn't it? It's good, yeah, so I think that the trick, though, is that it's good, because I still kind of know what I'm doing technically.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I know when it makes mistakes, I know what to look for. Basically, I understand the key concepts. It's just an accelerant. So I think still know the fundamentals. Know what you're looking for. Know the difference between depth-first search and breadth-first and all the other stuff. Know when something is memory-constrained and CPU-constrained. Know all that stuff. Ai can be a great accelerant but it's not going to fix kind of a fundamental gap in knowledge. That's probably the first thing. Navigating that that's probably the one that jumps out at me the most In terms of just general stuff. I think one thing I see from a lot of earlier career engineers is that they're a little afraid of asking questions, and it's a natural thing to like be afraid of how it looks to not know something, and so I would say find a situation where you're comfortable not knowing. You know. Maybe you don't want to put your hand up at a meeting and say what does that mean? Maybe you want to find somebody that you can ask privately.
Speaker 1:You know somebody that you know is not going to judge you and not going to, like you know, think any differently of you if you don't know. I mean you know, we've been at this for however many years there's stuff we don't know, facts we're never going. So I think that's the key thing is to kind of find a way to build your network, find some people who can guide you through and get comfortable absorbing all that information.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And one other thing that comes to mind when you were talking about that is a mentoring skill that I introduced at Twitter called the red and blue exercise. You remember that exercise? Yeah, that I introduced at Twitter called the Red and Blue Exercise. You remember that?
Speaker 3:exercise. I remember, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that exercise and just to fill D-Hustle in the audience allowed us to basically turn the fire alarm on and basically practice when the system fails or different components of the infrastructure goes down. And our main goal was to have engineers go through that process so that they know what it feels like before the real fire alarm turns on, so that you can have a safe space to ask questions and really like feel like, hey, that overwhelming feeling but also understanding the team that you have that you can lean on in those situations. Because me even me didn't know all the answers. And then during those exercises I even got the chance to kind of like I used to put myself in situations where I knew the answer but I just made it seem like I didn't know the answer. So I can force that type of interaction.
Speaker 2:And then after the red and blue exercise, everybody on the team, confidence you know they're walking the next day with a different posture, right, they just feeling more confident. And that space that we created is basically being able to uh, sharpen the engineer's skill set but also bring to light like, hey, we're a team, we're here to communicate, we're here to create a safe space that, if it's 2 o'clock in the morning and the thing goes down. Don't be afraid to give me a call, right, yeah, so tell me a little bit about your view from a management perspective and value around red and blue exercises.
Speaker 4:Red and blue exercises I love it.
Speaker 1:Red and blue. Red and blue exercise. I love it.
Speaker 4:I mean, it's just, what you said, I don't have that much to add to it.
Speaker 1:I think it's about creating the safe space where it's safe to fail and safe to get things wrong. Also, in the site reliability engineering role, you have to think about how are things going to fail and how gracefully can a system fail. And injecting failures into a system and thinking through things that way is unnatural. We don't think about failure that much, but it's inevitable to happen, especially on the scale of a global tech company. And so by simulating it, injecting those failures, testing your processes, testing your people, testing yourselves, I think it's one of those things everybody should do.
Speaker 1:It takes actually a special level of discipline to do that.
Speaker 4:Most places.
Speaker 1:Don't do it Google. When I was at Google in Essary previously, Google did that every February, basically Ah, had these drills.
Speaker 2:Wheel of Misfortune, I believe they called it.
Speaker 1:Well, there was one that I was thinking of that was called Dirt Week.
Speaker 2:Oh, Dirt Week.
Speaker 1:It was like basically, you would intentionally break systems and see what would happen and Netflix did this for years too. They would have this automated job that would go in and deliberately turn things off, just to make sure that everything could sustain something being down suddenly.
Speaker 4:Is that the error message that always comes up, that it's going to reload like in?
Speaker 3:60 seconds or something like that.
Speaker 4:Maybe they don't run it enough. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's when they're running their tests. Right, they're running their tests.
Speaker 4:It's like okay, I got it. I understand, oh man.
Speaker 2:But, those exercises.
Speaker 1:oh my gosh, some great times, though that's what separates the companies that really make it from the ones that don't. It's an investment right. That's time you're taking for your engineers to not be shipping, be building for customers you know, whatever else they could be doing. It's opportunity cost. But what you get from that is better, because if your stuff isn't available then it's useless Facts.
Speaker 2:Facts, Facts. If your stuff isn't available, it's useless. I used to say that same line with metrics If there ain't no metrics and data around it it's broken.
Speaker 2:For sure, for sure. One other side story, before we get close to wrapping up, uh, here is is that, uh, one thing I don't know if the audience remember me telling y'all and d definitely heard this saying is that these streets are small, like the streets are always watching. Uh, I remember I was traveling, um and I'm obviously from florida, south florida, big shout outs to south florida and when my wife and I were going to San Diego for a conference, um, and remember I only seen Patrick in person maybe two or three times by this time, but you know, I've been video chatting with you all day and all of a sudden we're in the airport in San Diego.
Speaker 2:We just get off at off the plane. My wife is wearing a tech hustle shirt and I'm over there, you know, ushering her, trying to get her to you know where the Uber is for us to get picked up, and then all of a sudden she kind of let my hand go and she was talking to somebody and I was still moving and I turn around and I'm like hold on a second, is that Patrick? And I was like Patrick Newman, what are you doing in San Diego? What?
Speaker 1:were you doing there? I'm at least in California, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:And I'm all the way from Florida. I didn't even see you at first.
Speaker 1:I saw the Tech Hustle t-shirt and I was going to say, you know, I know the guy that started that thing.
Speaker 3:Oh, look at that, you know I had no idea.
Speaker 1:It was your wife.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So yeah, how about that? That was such the universe, right there that years ago? Yeah, for sure, yeah my son was in eighth grade, I think yeah, and I believe you you were traveling with your daughter for uh going to the museum, or I was the zoos my son was on a trip to the east coast with his school.
Speaker 1:They were going to like new york and washington gotcha, gotcha and so spring break we had our daughter alone and, uh, just the three of us, and we said, what do you want to do? And she said she wants to go to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. So we said, okay.
Speaker 4:Let's make it happen. Is that a big park?
Speaker 1:Safari Park is like 15,000 acres, so yeah, pretty big we skipped SeaWorld and we put a little bit more money into Safari Park because there's all this other stuff you can do. You can like go on tours behind the scenes and stuff. They've got all the animals together. It's like an african savannah. Basically, it's pretty cool. It's. It's pretty far outside of san diego. It's like a good 40, 40, 60 minute drive something from the airport from wherever we were staying.
Speaker 4:The airport in san diego is right downtown yes, okay so, um.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the zoo is also right downtown. The zoo is like right next to the airport.
Speaker 2:But Safari.
Speaker 1:Park is a long drive. It's not even in San Diego. It's in San Diego. Oh okay, but it's a cool place and she wanted to go there, so we said yeah sure, and we did. And then we're going to stop by and see Bobby.
Speaker 2:You know how, when I'm at the airport, you know I'm just walking like I'm a guy, you know, like yo what up? You know just what up do you? Also wait, just wait until the audience, the crowds are gonna be like bobby, bobby, you're gonna be, you're gonna be providing security again.
Speaker 3:Go ahead, go ahead the audience.
Speaker 2:No, no no, no no I'm just messing but I tell you that that right there, uh afterwards, me and my wife jump in the uber and I was talking, I was like yo, can you believe? We just ran into patrick newman. She was like no way. And I was like yo, how in the world did that happen? Uh, and definitely it was like one of those moments. Like man, the universe has definitely put us in the right position. Yeah, and I really appreciate this quick little second that we had to dap each other up and I got to meet your wife, you got to meet my wife. Definitely, it was definitely one of those moments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you were forever the guy from the airport.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, awesome. So, as we're coming close to the end, one thing that I definitely want to give you an opportunity to do is any like last words, some advice for our audience members. Remember, these are individuals that are either getting into the tech have you know, think about transition or they're just about to graduate college. And AI is this big topic that everybody's you know, a little bit hesitant and afraid of. But just some words of advice and wisdom for our audience.
Speaker 1:I just say stick with it. Have a goal, stick with it. There's going to be ups and downs. You know there were ups and downs for me. I'm sure for you too. Thanks, darwin. You know ups and downs for all of us, it's just part of life. And you know, now the big thing is AI, but you know, 25 years ago it was this thing called the Internet. You know, that was we remember when that was new. Yeah, exactly. Then it was iPhones, and what else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, iphones and what else there's always going to be something.
Speaker 1:Cloud computing Remember when AWS was new, so disruptive, you know people coming up now. Yeah, free CDs in the mail Right.
Speaker 2:Now you're showing your age. I am yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's always going to be new things to adapt to. You've got to kind of stay agile. You've got to keep learning. You can't stay static in this industry.
Speaker 3:That's what's up.
Speaker 1:So I would just say, stick with it. Have a goal, stick with it. If coding isn't working for you, maybe SRE will, maybe product management will, maybe sales will. Having a core set of technical skills that you can apply to those other areas will work. And remember, those dots connect right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those dots connect, no matter how far along they go. It'll be like oh I remember yeah, those dots connect.
Speaker 1:It'll come back. Dots will connect, for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, d cue up the music, patrick. Let me tell you.
Speaker 4:I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for pulling up man.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. It was such a great conversation.
Speaker 2:D H D-Hustle always in the cut holding it down. He's doing like two or three jobs for us right now.
Speaker 3:Y'all can't really see it.
Speaker 2:The utility guy, right, but I want to say first of all thank you all for tuning in. This is my guy, patrick Newman, dropping Gems. Give them that sound again what they should be listening for. So if y'all hear this sound, make sure y'all rewind to that spot, because Patrick was Dropping Gems. As you know, I'm out on these streets traveling the country, speaking to peers of mine that I've had a pleasure of working with, interacting with, being on the internet with for a few years and then finally run into you in person. Right, the streets are always watching, but, as I always mention to you all, thank you all so much for tuning in. Holla at your boy. It's Bobby D.