Building Careers with Empathy with Scott Hanselman

In this month's episode, Steve Carroll, the director of development for the .NET team, interviews Scott Hanselman the Community Program Manager Lead for the .NET team about his career. Scott is a big believer in using the power of empathy and in this conversation he uses that power across the various skills necessary to be a successful programmer and program manager.

[00:00] - Scott's role at MS

[02:30] - Scott career overview -

[05:25] - Finishing his degree while working while teaching

[08:26] - Learning to be a consultant and what a CTO does

[11:00] - meeting the early dot net team and coming on board

[12:00] - the "warm" intro - the transitive property of friendship and opening doors for others

[14:35] - being non-denominational in tech religions and strong fundamentals of scale

[16:20] - knowing one layer deeper in the stack than your neighbors and sharing knowledge

[18:00] - learning uncool tech, what's in common across stacks, and appreciating the history of [computer science

[22:40] - difference between a mentor and a sponsor and finding one, being intentional

[25:03] - being shown the ropes by a CTO sponsor, learning to navigate the room

[26:43] - learning to navigate one layer down from his non-technical parents

[29:10] - learning how to be a PM - building extreme empathy

[31:53] - how did Scott learn to do empathy? Moving across worlds and practice

[35:45] - Learning to do technical communication well -

[37:17] - Using comedy, comedy as empathy, the value of improv

[40:17]- "rubber duck" programming

[42:31] - being the person who admits they don't know, helping junior people in meetings by asking their questions

[45:14] - Scott's most valuable career advice - "don't waste your keystrokes"