In today’s episode, we welcome John Crickett, veteran software engineer, having worked at Staff, VP, and C-Suite positions over the years, and now focusing on helping thousands of engineers worldwide, through his coding challenges that have you building real applications, as well as helping with the soft skills through his articles and posts about software development.

Today we cover a LOT of ground where we explain exactly what a Software Architect is, discuss different leadership types, advice to get a software job, remote work, unpopular opinions on programming languages, performance and scale, and a couple other things, so stay tuned because this episode is a true fountain of knowledge.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

John Crickett's Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/johncrickett

John Crickett's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett/

Coding Challenges: https://codingchallenges.fyi/

Coding Challenges on Substack: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/

Research mentioned at 27:33 : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232514133_Effect_of_self-differentiation_and_anonymity_in_group_on_deindividuation

More on the topic of Deindividuation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation#Major_empirical_discoveries

Timestamps:

00:12 Who is John Crickett
01:13 What is a Software Architect
03:04 People vs Technical Leadership
03:53 What kind of decisions does a software architect make?
04:43 Is there a lot of "Thought Leadership" involved?
05:23 Do you prefer Technical or People leadership?
07:47 How did John start his coding career?
11:39 Most people don't start working at "sexy" companies
13:58 Juggling off-topic
14:32 What are the Coding Challenges?
19:03 Remote work and downtime
22:56 The wrong culture might spoil the remote environment and people care less about the work
27:05 Anonymity turns people into assholes
29:58 Why did we have a phone call when this could've been an e-mail?
33:42 Doing LeetCode vs Building Projects
36:54 Most of the time you'll be using already existing solutions
40:05 Is there too much abstraction nowadays?
41:56 Using the Command Line is cool again!
43:44 When talking about scale, what matters most is the architecture, not the language or framework
51:30 Why just switching to a "faster" language isn't enough
53:48 Go vs Rust performance comparison
54:44 Learning how to write performant code is more important than the programming language itself
55:25 The importance of benchmarking
58:33 Where to find John