Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer ~ What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech.
This week, we sit down with Dan Moore — author of "Letters to a New Developer", startup founder, DevRel leader, and all-round tech veteran — to talk about how careers really unfold when things don't go to plan.
In this episode, we cover:
- The IC ceiling: when to pivot, when to manage, and why leverage matters
- Why opinionated engineers stand out (and fence-sitters fade away)
- How AI shifts the game: product sense vs raw coding
- Why writing a book can change your career (even if no one reads it)
- Crashing a national TV website — and what failure really teaches
Whether you're applying for your next engineering role or hiring your next dev, this one's got real talk, practical advice, and a few rants.
🎧 40 minutes. Zero fluff. Tune in now.
⏱️ Chapters
- 0:00 Intro: the "yeah, nah" Aussie Man Reviews t-shirt
- 0:56 Meet Dan Moore: engineer, founder, DevRel lead and FusionAuth exec
- 3:10 The magic telephone: write a book sooner, for introspection not money
- 5:42 Writing a book with Claude: vacuous prose, but great for structure
- 7:28 LeanPub, Cordova CLI and 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know
- 8:10 From mail merge to management: falling into leadership, pivoting to DevRel
- 11:18 Leverage: scale your knowledge, your effort or your visibility
- 12:36 Management is a career change, not a promotion: the IC ceiling
- 14:35 Contractors are super ICs, and ownership is what makes the leap
- 15:44 Failure teaches more than success: the direct report who asked to move
- 17:38 Patterns in failure: moving fast vs stopping to ask the second question
- 19:24 "The world didn't collapse": fail more, and the reward for pie is more pie
- 20:43 Safe to fail: know your boss's priorities, share failures in public Slack
- 23:04 Solve an undifferentiated, scary problem in a unique way: FusionAuth
- 24:54 Don't be fungible: JVM tuning travels, the scary in-house code doesn't
- 26:20 Hired to solve problems, not write code: AI is just another tool
- 27:53 When code gets easy, distribution and building the right thing get harder
- 29:10 The end of product managers? No: good PMs and good engineers in more demand
- 30:55 Why opinionated engineers stand out: product sense and fence-sitters
- 32:06 Middle of the road doesn't stand out: opinions are scary but win alignment
- 34:40 Respectful disagreement is a skill, and so is knowing when to use it
- 36:08 Crashing a national TV website: skipped load test, blamed the wrong person
- 38:43 Wrap-up: no such thing as teaching, only learning, and where to find Dan
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