Ryan Peterman

The job changes and you do different work.

For someone who's structuring their career, would you say it's better to be overrated or underrated?

Here's the full episode.

At some point when I was a very junior engineer, I looked at the more senior engineers.

So what is the difference between you and I?

I'm working more hours than you.

I'm landing more code than you.

Why is it that you're so much more impactful than I am?

And then I realized that kind of the direction of your work, like what is the thing that you're actually shipping matters more than the volume of your work and your contributions.

What would be your advice on how do you find problems that matter?

I saw something that you wrote.

You mentioned that you were on call for 15 years somewhere in there.

And I've heard many stories of more senior engineers negotiating out of on-call because per unit time, it could be perceived as not that impactful.

And so why did you stay on call for so long?

Yeah, it's interesting because I think if you ask most engineers, they really avoid on-call.

But it sounds like you kind of go towards it and you've learned a lot from it because it's a major source of customer problems.

Yeah, that was my next question, actually.

I looked at the slides from that internal presentation, and it said, I've read approximately 3,000 cloud system postmortems from across the industry.

And my immediate thought was, I wanted to ask you, what makes a good postmortem?

Out of curiosity, in practice, what percent overhead would you expect for keeping copies of old roles for the sake of those stale reads?