Mohak Shroff - VP of Engineering at Linkedin

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Mohak, the VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, and we discuss the biggest unspoken secret about developers, the evolution of the CIO role, and one single change you can make to achieve exactly what you want in life. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:00:34) Hello? Hello, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) Hey, how are you?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:00:38) I'm doing well. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Fantastic. Where are you calling in from?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:00:43) Sunnyvale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Sunnyvale?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:00:45) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) I saw a video on LinkedIn yesterday of a Wookie's first day at LinkedIn. Have you seen that video?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:00:52) Yeah, I just saw it. It's great. We opened a new building on our campus, and it's all out Star Wars themed. And so they just went all out with this opening theme. I thought everyone did such a fantastic job acting too.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:01:05) I know the Wookiee was great. I thought Princess Leia was fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) It shows a lot about the culture and that it looks like a cool place to work, a lot of great people over there.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:01:14) Oh, for sure. Totally. Our facilities team, honestly, is just unbelievably amazing. They go all out. And it feels like there's this level of care. It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Hey, I had a question, though. Did you work at LinkedIn when Kevin Scott was there?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:01:29) I did. Yeah, I worked for Kevin Scott.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Oh, isn't he fantastic?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:01:34) He's amazing. I actually listened to your podcast with him. That was great. I love the way you started. I think you mentioned something about Kevin. I read something you wrote online. I feel like I want to hear you explain more things. And that's sort of Kevin's superpower. You sit down with Kevin, you're just like, none of this makes sense, Kevin. Your head is exploding. And then Kevin explains it, and you're like, oh, thank you, Kevin. That makes sense now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Yeah, he has a superpower of consolidating and simplifying information.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:02:02) No doubt. Yeah, it's extraordinary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) So were you born in Sunnyvale?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:02:07) No, I was born in India. I actually grew up—I did all through high school in the Middle East, a tiny country called Bahrain. Moved to the US for college, did my undergrad at UT in Austin, Texas. And then I've been in the Bay Area basically since then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) So what was your first love with technology? Did you play some video games?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:02:33) Yeah. So it's funny. Does everyone play video games? Is that how everyone starts? Is that why you asked that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) Well, yeah, I don't know.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:02:41) That's a lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) A lot of people fall in love with it and then they're like—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:02:44) Totally. So actually, it's funny. My first computer was an MSX, which was this rip-off Microsoft BASIC-powered gaming computer. And so you boot the thing on, it actually boots up in Microsoft BASIC. And I remember getting the thing and there were cartridges, cartridge gaming. And so obviously my parents bought it for me for gaming. This was in the '80s. They bought it for me for gaming, but I was actually like, take that cartridge out, let me at that command line. And it boots up into BASIC, and I just wanted to start programming. It was actually really funny. And they'd always be like—my brother would be buying new games and he'd be like, hey, let me have the computer so I can play some games on it. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm still programming. And I was programming games, for what it's worth. But that's how I fell in love with computing. That's how I fell in love with programming. And I remember, actually, funny story. Because I had learned to program in BASIC, at some point in high school I ended up taking a formal programming class and they taught us Pascal. And that was the first time I learned that go-to statements were bad and broke my heart. Because when you program in BASIC, go-to is your thing. And I was like, oh man, this is terrible. I can't do this anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:55) Oh, there's so many people right now listening. They get it. It's your first introduction to best practices, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:04:03) Yeah, exactly. It's like no go-tos, and it's like, what do you mean no go-tos? Go-tos are just my jam.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:08) That's how I felt for six months after I found the author Martin Fowler. I realized that everything I knew about programming was wrong. There's some really smart people out there. When you have that passion and you're kind of exploring it, but then you find your first book on best practices and how to organize, and then you realize, oh, there's so many different ways. Did you have a specific book that impacted you at all?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:04:39) Not so much a book. So it's funny, I've never been able to be the sort of person who picks up programming from books. It's actually best for me to learn from watching people. That's why people like Kevin Scott—just through my career, I've been really fortunate to have mentors and people who I can just sort of soak up knowledge from. But my first—it was really funny. My formal education into programming started in high school with Pascal. And Pascal, I would say, still sort of relatively uniquely structured language. I hit college, and literally the first class on the first day of college is functional programming in Haskell. And my mind is blown because I'm just like, wait a minute. Everything I knew about programming, everything I knew about computing is wrong. And I don't know if you've ever played around with Haskell, but it is a seriously structured functional language and incredibly pure in its intent. This was before it had the ability to have any kind of side effects. You couldn't have side effects as you were working on data structures. You had to do it in the flow of your program. And it was just this incredibly powerful thing which completely reset my brain about how to program and how to manage data structures and how to manage program flow. It's a big deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) So what cool programming stuff do you guys have going on at LinkedIn that you can talk about?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:06:00) What cool programming stuff do we have going on? What do you mean by programming stuff? In terms of programming language stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) But what are you excited about right now in engineering?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:06:07) Oh, in engineering. Tons of things, man. So I think at our scale, we operate—I think it's got to be one of the biggest Java sites in the world. And we're really excited about some of the work we're doing in terms of working on the Java VM, really tuning it to our needs. Really thinking hard about what kind of garbage collection patterns are right for us. For this incredible real-time scale going through Java, pauses inside of a GC are essentially disastrous for us. So really thinking long and hard about how we want to tune the JVM and make it work efficiently for us. Beyond that, broadly, things that are sort of really cool right now—two things I'll call out. One, you may have seen the announcement that we're moving to the public cloud. That's a big deal, a really big deal. We've invested just tons of effort and infrastructure into scaling ourselves organically, natively. Now as we think about going to the public cloud, ton of benefits, but a lot of stuff that we have to start to rethink. How we leverage elasticity at massive scale. The ability to spin up thousands of computers all at once to be able to handle offline workloads or burst mode with online traffic. It's just sort of unique new challenges. And then the second thing that we haven't really talked about much, but I'm really kind of excited about, is I feel like the classic sort of CIO role in the industry gets a bad rep. People think of CIOs as people who are gatekeepers and hold back. Their job is, what can you use and what can't you use inside of the enterprise? And I actually think that when you think about the new landscape of technology, the CIO role is very much, how do I empower employees to be part of the solution I offer the world? And you think about companies where the task of the company isn't just to put software up on a website, but it's to deliver a full service. You think about the new sort of demand economy, and even companies like ours, our sales force is part of our solution. Our support team is part of our solution. It's part of our experience that our members and our customers have. And so I'm really excited about essentially leaning way into making every individual across the company more productive through the application of technology. And I think this ends up being something that gets super under-applied in most organizations. You spend all of your AI and technology smarts in delivering product to your customers and your members, and you essentially ignore the needs of your own employees. And in essence, you sub-optimize your solution. And so we're actually really excited about the ability to take all of our smarts, all of our AI machine learning smarts, all of our technology smarts, give them to our employees, empower them, and essentially really think about our solution completely holistically as how can our members and customers have the best experience possible through that empowerment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:00) And so how do you do that? Do you just find people for that role? You have someone thinking about that full-time? How do you actually execute that? How do you make that transition from outward to caring about both?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:09:12) I think it's less about finding somebody new to do that job and more about actually recognizing that the job is all of the above. And it's, you know, when people come to a company, I think as engineers you always want to work on kind of the most glam thing, right? And glam is always the thing that delivers business line impact outside. And the reality is you can deliver substantial, if at times even greater impact, by focusing internally on tools and things of that sort. And so we've been able to do this over the years with engineering productivity, where essentially we start to focus on engineering productivity. Finding people to build tools, internal tools, often in the industry used to be hard. But the way we talk about it is, look, you are part of the solution. What you're doing is you're helping our engineers ultimately build a solution for our members and our customers. And therefore, if you don't do your job well, they can't do their job well. And it just all starts to look very glam. And so instead of going and finding someone who is uniquely interested in this, you actually just recognize that part of delivering value to our members and our customers is building these tools, is making employees more productive. And ultimately, one of the big shifts we've made is moving past the idea of just productivity. I think productivity can be kind of a dual-edged sword, right? So on one hand, everyone wants to be productive. But on the other hand, productivity feels like, well, somebody's going to be hitting you over the head with a stick until I code more. What's going on? And we actually made a shift years ago away from talking about just productivity and actually recognizing that our goal is actually delivering happiness. So we want our developers to be happy and satisfied with the experience here at LinkedIn. And we want the same now for every employee. We want our sales force to be happy and satisfied. We want our support team to be happy and satisfied. And when you start to focus on making people happy, you start to do things like you actually have an NPS for your technology. You start doing CSAT measurement. And you find that as happiness and satisfaction go up, productivity sort of keeps pace, which is really powerful. And it's really easy to convince people to work on happiness over working on just productivity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:33) It sounds better. I'm sold. I'd rather go to work to work on optimizing for happiness rather than optimizing for productivity.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:11:39) Totally. And can you imagine, when people have this perspective of I want to work on something that has immediate impact—literally, the person next to you is going, yes, thank you. We were just at our large sales kickoff. Essentially we launched the year with all of our sales teams. We bring all of our sales individuals together and talk about the plan for the year. And there are a few engineers there. One of the engineers who works on sales productivity, she told me as she's walking through the halls, salespeople kept coming by and hugging her, thanking her for the work that she does. She's like, I've never felt this love in my life. My family doesn't hug me this much. And it's, you know, that's what you get when you work on productivity. You get people literally sitting next to you going, thank you so much. It's a level of gratification that I think is frankly rare in the industry otherwise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:28) It's arguably more rewarding because your customers are outside of your building when you're delivering that value on the most glam thing, right, for the house. But when you're delivering internal solutions, that person can high five you interdepartmentally.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:12:44) Totally. And it's a double-edged sword because if you aren't doing it, then you're doing the exact opposite. But that's the point. That's what motivates you to work hard on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Well, it's just short feedback loops, and that goes either way.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:12:56) Totally. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) So you've been at LinkedIn for a little bit, and you've grown and have gone up essentially within the organization. What have you learned while doing that?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:13:09) Probably the biggest lesson I've had at LinkedIn, frankly through my career, has been the importance of mentorship. I reflect back on my career, and it's like, you know, fantastic mentor after fantastic mentor, either through sheer dumb luck or divine providence. I've been very open to going out and finding mentors and finding people to learn from. I've just been really, really fortunate.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:13:37) And, you know, if I can share kind of the story of that growth, I feel like when I first came to LinkedIn, I actually stumbled upon something that many of us in the engineering community know as kind of the secret of great engineers. But it really coalesced for me and became really concrete for me through my experience. And so this is sort of an inside secret that I'm going to share now with your listening audience. Let's just make sure that, hopefully, this is all just engineers and nobody else finds out our secret. But it turns out what I've realized is really good engineers are good at lots of things, but really good engineers are really great at complaining.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:14:17) We are so good at complaining. I remember when I first started at LinkedIn, my orientation, it was like me and one other person. My orientation, you know, the person doing the orientation, the woman in HR comes in, and she's asking us what we're excited about on our first day. And the other individual, he had this incredible answer, how he was excited about the vision and being part of this team and delivering all this value in the world. And I said I was really excited about the free food.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:14:46) And she goes, you know, because that's all that came to mind. And she goes, "That's fantastic." You see that. But just like every other engineer, I'm going to give you about a month or two, and you're going to be complaining just like everyone else. And my mind was like, that's impossible, man. Those are my two favorite things, free and food. There's no way I'm going to be complaining about this. But sure enough, you know, a few months later, I was complaining. I'm like, this food isn't free enough, and there's not enough of it. And I want, like—and it's, you know, but this is sort of the classic thing, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:15:16) And so I remember coming into LinkedIn, and essentially my first few months was a lot of complaining, which I think really happens all over the place in our industry. People come from one company or one experience, and you've seen all the things that worked. And when you apply it to your new experience, you're like, everything's broken. Literally, everything here is wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that, like, this is an amazing company that's been built on what I think is completely wrong. But there's a power to that, I think. The power to the complaining, which is not settling for good enough. And I think a lot of people enter companies, and they sort of end up settling for good enough.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:15:57) You sort of end up being apathetic. It's okay. Yeah, you know, that's broken. That could be better, and this process doesn't work, and that's just okay. But it's really not okay. And it's never okay to be just okay with the state of affairs. Literally, all innovation in the world would stop if people were just okay, right? I could imagine Reid Hoffman and Allen Blue years ago founding LinkedIn going, you know what? Networking is fine. Yeah, it could be better, but it's okay. And LinkedIn wouldn't exist, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:16:27) And it's not okay. And so I remember being a very frequent complainer. And part of what happened as a result of being a complainer was I found people to complain to. And those people ended up essentially becoming mentors because they got really tired of me complaining and said, "Alright, look, man. Let's sit down. We're going to have to talk about the way you complain because it's both a little unconstructive and a bit much." And so, you know, Jeff Weiner, our CEO, sat me down after he started here. I ended up complaining at him for hours every month. And then he started coaching me and mentoring me and telling me how to be more constructive.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:17:05) Then one day, I suspect he got tired of me complaining at him, went out and hired a head of engineering, who is David Henke, an incredible technology personality, one of the greatest technical leaders I've ever worked with. And he became my mentor, and I was complaining at him now. But he had a very different style. You know, his style was, he was one of these people who, like, classic, you know, he has the logical book. He walks in, and he's like, "Let me see what's broken here. Alright. Page one. Here's what I'm going to change. Page two. Here's what I'm going to change."

(Mohak Shroff at 00:17:36) So I made the mistake of complaining at him, and he had this distinctive personality. He goes, you know, sticks a finger in my face, and he goes, comes right up against me. "Mohak. Yeah. There's two types of people in the world. You're either part of the problem or part of the solution. Which is it?" I think to myself, man, one of those seems like the right answer. Problem bad. Solution good.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:18:01) Alright, man. I'll be part of the solution. Tell me what that means. And he's like, "Great. Stop complaining and go be part of the solution. Go fix it." I'm like, "Look, David. That's your problem. That's your job. I complain. You fix. You're head of engineering. I'm an engineer. That's how this stuff works." And he goes, "No, no, no. Let me explain that. Page five." Right? Page five of his book is, like, no. The person who complains most is the person who goes and fixes the problem.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:18:19) And so that's when I got pulled out of my role and stuck into this job of going and fixing our infrastructure. And we had very specific problems with our service infrastructure, essentially how our services communicate with each other, how fault tolerant they were, the programming model at that level. And we started to make a pretty drastic change, which ultimately resulted in a project in 2011, which was an all-out replatforming effort. We went from a many-branch model to a single trunk, a CI/CD-based approach, tons of automation, removed essentially every process, every human-driven process, all driven off of automation. You know, gave every engineer the keys to the kingdom. Any individual could push a button and release software to the site instead of having to go through a centralized committee-driven approach to what we had before. And that entire transformation ended up being something that I was part of driving with a couple of individuals here. And as I think about my path at LinkedIn, it really—you know, my rise in sort of leadership started with embracing the fact that I couldn't just complain and I had to be part of that solution. So that's sort of the second big thing I've learned is truly great engineers.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:19:43) They recognize problems. They sort of watch for here's areas of optimization, and they're not afraid to get their hands dirty. You roll up your sleeves and you just dive in and say, "Look. Let's fix it." And you don't worry about, is this my domain or not? Can I? It's just, should I? If I should, I'm going to. And great cultures, truly great company cultures empower people who have strong opinions and a desire to fix rather than drawing sort of artificial boundaries. And so that's been sort of a really powerful takeaway for me from, you know, my time at LinkedIn, kind of my growth and leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:17) No. That's amazing because it's very much like this concept of individual ownership, right? Rather than complaining, just go take action and make it happen. It's very entrepreneurial as an engineer, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:20:29) Totally. And it's actually one of the things I tell junior engineers who talk about, you know, I'm at a big company, but I want to be an entrepreneur. I'm like, "Look, you know, as long as the culture is supportive of people taking ownership"—we have a core cultural tenet of being an owner, acting like an owner. And as long as you sort of have a culture that supports that, you can be an entrepreneur anywhere. It just requires having the flame inside that says, "I see a problem that I want to go fix and I will take ownership of fixing it," which by the way can be super uncomfortable.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:20:59) I reflect on my journey. I was working on, you know, advertising and other revenue-generating products on subscriptions and online jobs at LinkedIn. And someone asked me to go work on infrastructure, and I'd never done that before. And it didn't feel as sexy. It didn't feel as fun for me, as glamorous. But in the end, it made all the difference. And it was glamorous. It had—you know, that was the thing I had to do to have the greatest possible impact at that time at the company. And that actually is where the real glamour is. That's what needed to be done.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:21:32) And so I think that when you take that level of ownership, there's always this aspect of you can be entrepreneurial, and you can work on something and make it extremely glamorous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) So recently, we were talking about gray areas. It's like you have an area of mastery, area of your craft, but then you can't go deep into everything because then you would learn everything in the world, right? You'd branch infinitely. But these gray areas are areas that we kind of know exist, but we don't actually dive into them. And then recently, we were talking about, you know, spending ten, fifteen minutes every other week just diving into an area that you know exists, you know could probably benefit you, but just spending that time improving. Do you have any thoughts on that? Have you created a habit or have done anything like that in your career?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:22:12) Yeah. So I think of it as—so, again, you know, I think it's really important that people sort of optimize learning to the way they best learn. Like I said, I don't find myself learning well by just reading things. I have to either experience them, work in them, throw myself into the middle of things, the thick of things, or I learn from other people, watching other people, engaging with them, learning from them, from their wisdom. And so what I've really done is I've attempted, you know, any areas that I found that I have weakness in, I seek to find individuals who have mastery in those areas. And I surround myself with those people.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:22:46) As I took on this role from Kevin Scott, you know, Kevin is a remarkable engineering leader who, frankly, I wonder whether there's any gray there. And I sort of had this moment of imposter syndrome stepping into the role feeling like, you know, am I going to be able to do all these things? Yeah. Look. There's things that I do really, really well, but there are things that I know nothing about relatively speaking. And I sat down with one of the people, one of my peers at the time who ended up now being one of my reports, talking about one of those areas of weakness. And it was great because his answer was, "Well, that's why you have me." And it felt so awesome, first of all, to be in a team that feels that way, that is as supportive as, you know, you don't need to know about this. I've got it.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:23:34) But also then to know that here's an individual who I can learn from. And so I've set up, you know, we do quarterly reviews of all of our deep technical areas, even the ones that I know nothing about, where I recognize that, you know, I provide some value to the people presenting in terms of understanding the quarterly road map, helping guide things. But there's also a ton of value I gain in terms of learning about things that I honestly don't know as well. And so these individuals who are deep experts in these fields come in and talk about AI and machine learning or talk about deep infrastructure and operations and data centers, and it's fantastic. And, you know, I'm just soaking it all in as much as I can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:16) Yes. So for definitely for areas of weakness, but for areas of strength—you're obviously an excellent communicator because I can just tell because I speak to a lot of people. Now do you ever dive deep into an area to improve your strengths?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:24:32) That's a great point. Yeah. I think the answer is yes. I don't know that I do it consciously with an intent to focus on my strengths. I think one of the things that I optimize for is I invest in the areas that I most enjoy, that I sort of have a passion for. And those areas then, I think, naturally tend to—I balance, you know, you have this balance of what do you love, what's important, and what are you good at. And I think people frequently forget two out of three of those. And it's like, everyone's like, "Oh, go do this thing. I love it." And it's like, are you any good at it?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:25:06) Well, no. Is it important? Maybe. But I love it. It's like, you've got to sort of balance all three. And when you balance all three, I find that, you know, there's these things that I'm good at, but I'm also really, really passionate about. And there are things I'm really passionate about that I'm not very good at. And so I try to find the healthiest balance of those. And because I'm passionate about these things that I'm really good at, I invest in them constantly because I love it.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:25:37) You know, people, engineers, I think, frequently talk about, like, I don't know. Why should I take these management development classes? That's boring. I love them. I think that there's, when, you know, when they're delivered well with the right content, they're powerful and they sort of change your perspective in your psyche. And so I will find every opportunity I can to find learning in those domains to seek out mentors, to go attend classes. I do the same with technology. You know, I spend a lot of time working on front-end tech, front-end infrastructure, at previous companies. Actually, all through my experience, starting with my first internship. And so it's an area that I try and keep in touch with, and I spent a lot of time with the engineers who have worked on that, just learning about what's cutting edge, how are they thinking about things, what's going on in the industry, because it's an area of passion, and as a result, an area of strength.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) Yeah. I kind of think of it as if you're a knife and you could choose to either be a really sharp knife or try to be a spork, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:26:37) Or—what is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) Yeah. There's—I don't think there's a word for a knife that's also a spork, but you could use a spork as a knife. It just wouldn't work very well. But you just kind of want the reputation for being the sharpest knife. So when anyone needs a knife, you go to that person. Not like, well, he's kind of a knife. He's kind of a spoon. He's kind of a fork. You know? It's good to be really, really good at something.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:27:03) Totally. You know, I would expand that analogy. I think it's less that you are a knife so much as you have a set of tools. And you could go and do things that are completely outside that tool set or you could hone your skill with the tools you have. Because, you know, I don't very much like the idea that people are one thing, right? This idea, you are a knife. Oh, no. You actually, you have a knife. You also happen to have a spatula. Now, you know, you don't have tongs, so you probably want to work with the tools you've got.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) You know what's funny is I actually have a talk that I give in person. I go around and give it at conferences, and it talks about tools in the toolbox. And one of the biggest issues people have is they'll identify themselves as the screwdriver, and it's like, no, no, no. You're the person that has a set of tools available. And they'll say, "Well, I can't go be that person."

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) I can't go lead that team because I'm not that thing. And it's like, no, the skill you have right now, you can build other tools and you can make yourself more valuable.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:27:59) Totally. And actually, one of the big learnings for me as I've navigated my career, my own imposter syndrome in roles that I've taken, as well as that I've helped other people, is I think people underappreciate how valuable the tools they have are in a given context. It's like, yes, you may not be an expert at this, but you've got all of this other stuff that has extreme value in that context, and you can still deliver value there as long as you recognize your gaps and find ways to actively fill them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) Yeah. I've met some programmers that are okay programmers, but they're amazing at architecting the product and spend your time there. We need you there. Right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:28:42) Totally. And people will compose teams like this too. Right? Where they're like, oh, I want nothing but badass programmers who write thousands of lines of code a minute or something. But it's like AI. And it's like, yeah.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:28:55) Exactly. But then you're like, wait a minute. You know, great teams—I think this is actually, when you talk about the whole conversation around diversity in technology, I think this is the real point. It's like what you really want is you want to compose great teams, and great teams are composed of people with truly diverse sets of tools. They bring truly diverse sets of assets into the environment where you want the individual who thinks about architecture at a level that, like a systematics, you know, sort of system composer. And you want the individual who can take that system composition and turn it into code. And you want the person who's all about, let me break the thing you built. And you want to put all these people together because that's when you get truly great software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) You know, yesterday I was talking with Ashley Goodall. Have you come across Ashley before?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:29:45) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:46) I highly recommend. He's got a new book called Nine Lies About Work. And he's the head of leadership and technology development at Cisco. Right? So he gets to play in his sandbox of 73,000 people in teams, and he's obsessed with it. But one of the interesting exercises he shared on the show was one of his favorite exercises he runs with teams is they sit down and they have two stickies, and they'll put the team in a circle. And one sticky will say, "come to me when," and then they finish the sentence. So they say, come to me when this, come to me when that. And then they say, "don't come to me when," and so they have this exercise that they do and they go around the room. And what's interesting is you'll find out who's the person that wants you to come to them when you're having a people problem. Right? Who's good at that? Or who loathes it? Who doesn't like it? Or who wants you to come to them when you have a problem writing a test, right, or a problem debugging something in production? So what you end up doing is you find out the areas that the people really love and accelerate in through this exercise.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:30:48) That's cool. What was the book again?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) This exercise was not in the book, but so you can only get it on the Modern CTO podcast. But—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:30:56) Cool. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) It's called Nine Lies About Work, and they talk about giving feedback and how it doesn't work and how to make it work properly. And so it and they used it. It was all very Malcolm Gladwell scientific. Yeah. So it's all counterintuitive things that the science just doesn't match what most people do.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:20) That's very cool. Yeah. Check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:22) It's a good read. And I think it just came out in April.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:25) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) Yeah. So as we wrap up today, are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:31) Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) Have you seen what he's doing with Neuralink, by the way?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:34) Dude, it's amazing. It's—yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) I'm so excited about it because did you watch the shortened version of the Neuralink announcement?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:44) No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) Dude, you are going to love it. So they've been working secretly for two years, right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:31:50) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:51) Well, they just released what they've been working on for two years. And they've got this little computer and these little strains that get weaved into the brain, and then it's just—it's amazing. So I'll—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:32:03) I will have to go check that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Yes. You will absolutely love it. But let's say that you're driving home from work today. Right? And up next to you pulls Elon Musk. Right? Rolls his window down. He's in the brand new 2020. Right? It's not even out yet, so you're real excited. You go follow him back to his SpaceX facility, right, where he's working on—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:32:24) Really creepy, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Yeah. I know. It is what it is. Sometimes you just have to go with it. So you're like, yeah, I definitely want to see the Starhopper. I want to see the next rocket engine.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:32:34) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) So you go back and he's like, I've got a secret for you, Mohak. He's got a time machine. You get to go in the time machine and go back. Yeah. I go through a lot to get—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:32:46) These questions. This is a huge setup. Huge setup. You could have literally just started with, like, imagine you had a time machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Alright. So you go in the time machine. You get to go back to your past self. Right?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:32:58) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) Right when you're in college, right when you're first learning, and give yourself some piece of advice for your career. What would that be?

(Mohak Shroff at 00:33:08) So it's funny. My answer to this question has traditionally been change nothing because it worked out, man. Chaos theory. If I say anything, who knows what happens? Let's just be clear. You know? Here I am, head of engineering at LinkedIn. My life is good. I've got two beautiful daughters, loving wife, fantastic family. I've got my health. Please don't change anything. But all that being said, there's probably one thing I would tell myself in—or I wish I knew in college. You know, it's sort of an interesting thing. I think a lot of people who end up at companies like LinkedIn in technology are some of the smartest people they've ever known. Right? And that was what I remember of myself. When I was in high school, I used to think I was something else. Right? And I'm like, oh, you know, I'm pretty—I'm smart. I got this. And when I went to college, I was like, I'm pretty smart. I got this. Right? And I remember feeling like I was coasting through college. And then I hit the workplace, and I realized I was nothing. And it took me a while actually to come to that realization. It took a—again, a mentor, one of my managers one time—okay, I'm going to tell a quick story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) Okay. Yeah.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:34:23) Alright. So at my last company, we used to—it was in the early 2000—I started in 2000. So in the early 2000s, it was still sort of right before the dot-com bubble burst. And, you know, company cultures were still sort of a little bit—core tech company culture was still a little bit of the silliness that you hear about sometimes. And we used to have these tricycles, like these industrial strength tricycles that we'd ride. And the edges of our cubes had removable sort of end caps that were plasticky that we'd use as a lance. And essentially, we'd have jousting tournaments on tricycles. And one time, I was bored. I'd been asked to work on this really important thing. I was bored. And I was kind of, had hit this mental block. And so I was on my tricycle just riding around in a figure eight in the middle of a hallway. And my manager comes to me and she pulls me aside, and she's like, hey, can I talk to you for a second? And I'm like, sure. I'm going to her office and she says, Mohak, what are you doing? And I was like, is this a trick question? It's pretty obvious. I was riding my tricycle. She's like, no. No. No. What are you doing? And I'm like, what do you mean? She said, look, you've got this really important thing you're working on. What's going on with it? I'm like, look, I kind of hit a mental block. I need a break. And she's like, you can't be doing that. I'm like, why? She said, look outside. Everybody out there is smarter than you. Everybody out there is working harder than you. Everybody out there has the same education or better, and they're hungry. You've got this thing that's the most important project we're working on, and you're goofing around. That's just not going to cut it. That's not how you succeed. You can't coast through on smarts anymore. And it was just a mind-blowing realization for me where I was like, oh, yeah. Good point. And I feel like, you know, early in my career, I sort of started with the assumption that smarts were enough, and they just aren't. They never were. And to your point about Elon, like, it isn't enough that he just has these brainstorm ideas. Like, dude, it's just—I mean, honestly, when does he sleep? Like, he's CEO of two companies. And in the background, he's trying to disrupt human intelligence. Like, it's amazing. Right? And that takes incredibly hard work. Anything worth doing, it takes a ton of effort and dedication and passion. And I would tell myself that. I would tell myself that story of, like, this is going to happen to you. If you don't want that to happen to you, you better start working your ass off right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) Well, now you're the CEO of Hyperloop because you messed up the future. On today's podcast, the CEO of Hyperloop, Mohak.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:37:08) But it's a Modern CTO. Wait. What happened? Yeah. It's a new podcast. The Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Yeah. The Modern CTO. Modern CXO. We'll figure it out. Jake will edit it up, so it sounds good. Well, thank you so much, Mohak, for coming on and sharing this amazing advice. It's absolutely fantastic to get to meet you. The next time I'm out in your neck of the woods, I'll let you know and maybe you'll come by and say hello.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:37:29) Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's been a blast chatting with you. I am a huge fan of your podcast. I've listened to many of them, and it's just such great stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) The Nas episode's pretty good if you haven't caught that one. It's one of my personal—

(Mohak Shroff at 00:37:41) I will get to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:42) And then if you ever need anything, like, if you ever need an introduction to a past guest, you're like, oh, that person's really cool. I want to talk with them. Do not hesitate. My Rolodex is your Rolodex. Whatever you need, just let me know.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:37:52) Perfect. Absolutely. Thank you. Definitely hit me up if you're in the area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) I will. Have a fantastic day.

(Mohak Shroff at 00:37:57) Alright. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:58) See you, bud. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer.