Ryan Peterman

I saw in your career journey, it said that you're an occasional manager.

And you seem like someone who really enjoys the technical aspects of things.

So how did you decide to occasionally dip into management?

Yeah, there's another piece that you wrote I thought was really good about leading by example.

And you actually say it's bad to lead by example, but there's a quote in there.

It says, modern tech workers can be an anti-authoritarian bunch at the best of times.

Let's say you're a tech lead or tech lead manager or manager.

How do you strike that balance so you don't lose credibility as a tech lead?

Influence without authority is huge.

And I think there's, I mean, even big companies like Meta, they technically don't have titles.

Everyone's just a software engineer.

Is that also how Convex is run?

On the topic of tech leadership, I mean, in that article, I mentioned, you know, the title was don't lead by example.

And I think that kind of might be confusing for people.

Can you explain why you think you shouldn't lead by example?

That slider you mentioned, what if you give someone accountability and they blow it?

Do they go back down the slider to where you start micromanaging?

You mentioned, because you were the most senior engineer at Dropbox at some point, that you had to mentor other very senior engineers.

And when I think about mentoring a junior engineer, it's relatively straightforward patterns.

But when I think about, let's say I need to mentor a senior staff engineer, maybe even a principal engineer,