Today's guest is Austen McDonald, former hiring committee chair at Meta, and author of the book, "Mastering Behavioral Interviews."

Austen, in his career, conducted more than 1,000 interviews and coached more than 200 engineers, and is here today to tell us everything about why behavioral interviews are more important than ever and how to run them right, as a candidate and as a recruiter.

(00:00) Preview

(01:02) Introduction

(01:37) Austen' interest in behavioral interviews

(06:25) Sponsor break

(07:31) Behavioral interviews as a senior or a junior engineer

(09:55) The question behind a question: signal areas

(13:09) Fails in behavioral interviews

(16:38) Decode, select, deliver

(17:15) The eight areas

(19:02) How company culture reflects in hiring

(21:59) Assessing company's culture as a candidate

(23:49) The big three questions

(29:26) Preparing for the big three questions

(37:37) Deliver a story

(40:28) Good preparation process

(43:15) Do not lie

(46:14) Recruiter side: biases

(51:42) Candidate experience with AI: value questions

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Paige Bailey, Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind. And before that, Principal Product Manager at GitHub, where she launched Copilot and several other AI products.With Paige, we went through a quick demo of how to build and deploy a fully functioning application just with your voice, one that includes accessing your camera, manipulating pictures, and having AI doing a live interview with you to fill out your profile. So this is a bit different episode than usual, so I encourage you to check out the full video, where Paige shares her screen and goes through all the steps.And we also talked about what's coming about AI, how engineers should think about their work, and how the Google DeepMind team is changing with all roles, basically converging to one. So let's dive right into the action.(00:00) Preview(01:32) Introduction(02:12) The best era for software engineers(05:36) Navigating AI tools(06:22) AI Studio Build demo(13:53) Choosing the right AI model(17:34) Prompts and intuition(19:13) Antigravity demo(23:43) Delegating and working with AI(26:00) AI at team level(28:38) Changes in product development teams(30:45) Next stages in working with AI(37:54) Rethink software engineering—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Gonçalo Silva, CTO of Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist.

This interview is an incredible behind the scenes about one of the most peculiar companies in tech.

Because Doist is bootstrapped, profitable, has no office and has about 100 employees that are spread across about 40 countries. Yet, or maybe for this reason, they created one of the world's most beloved productivity tools, used by more than 25 million users and they're up against billion-dollar companies with hundreds of millions of funding.

So how do they pull this off? Let's find out.

(00:00) Preview

(01:15) Introduction

(04:26) What does Doist looks like?

(06:48) The perfect number of people

(09:44) Remote and async-first

(15:59) Asynchronous threats

(18:34) Todoist engineering teams

(21:06) Continuity or chaos

(28:18) A team for every platform

(29:21) Product management

(31:37) Product development process

(34:03) Merging top-down strategies and bottom-up feedbacks

(38:16) AI in product engineering

(46:34) Team level AI practices

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi!Thiago is former director of engineering at Nubank and with a long and successful tech career in companies like ThoughtWorks, Apple and more. But right now, he's on a sabbatical and he's been for more than six months.So get ready for an incredible chat where we talked about your identity as an engineering leader, psychology, Claude Code and more.(00:00) Preview(01:01) Introduction(03:25) Quitting the job(10:32) Planning during a sabbatical(14:03) Detaching from your work identity(20:31) Measuring progress(26:03) Finding yourself: Claude Code and second brain(33:34) The biggest revelations(45:22) Thiago's next chapter—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Matt McClernan, CEO of Augment Code!

With Matt, we went through the findings of our own research that we developed together with Augment, surveying more than 400 engineering teams about how they're using AI.

And we went through many topics, from the differences between personal and team adoption, challenges, how documentation looks like a secret weapon, how to manage context in AI coding, and much more. And then we talked about the future, how the UX of AI coding is changing with IDEs, CLI tools and agents, and what the future might bring.

(00:00) Preview

(01:26) Introduction

(02:16) Personal vs Team AI Adoption

(09:25) The journey of AI adoption

(13:06) The role of documentation

(18:13) AI and Context: the Augment secret sauce

(25:44) Helping AI with context

(28:17) Quality control in AI coding

(36:30) Companies and AI in the near future

(45:54) The state of UX in writing code

(51:54) The scope of Augment

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This episode is brought to you by Snyk! Join a live session with Vandana Verma Sehgal, OWASP Leader and Staff Developer Advocate at Snyk, on Thursday, December 11, at 11am ET

Register at https://go.snyk.io/12-11-owasp-top-10-isc2.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=so-sp&utm_campaign=dm_im-refactoring_wbn_251211_owasp-top-10&utm_term=refactoring&utm_content=ad&ref=plug.dev

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You can also find this at:

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• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI!With Rob, we talked about software delivery, the impact of AI, and how to build great product engineering teams. And next, we discuss trade-offs between standardization versus flexibility in software organizations, and lessons learned from our respective past mistakes.(00:00) Preview(01:22) Introduction(03:33) Industry Changes and AI's Impact on Development(08:59) The Bell Curve of Metrics and Team Performance(12:09) From Engineering Metrics to Business Outcomes(14:31) Building Effective Small Teams(25:35) Experience vs. Curiosity(37:18) Scaling Challenges and Technology Decisions(49:26) Organizational Standards and Leadership Philosophy—This episode is brought to you by Codacy! Codacy helps developers save time in code reviews, so developers can focus on other things.Start your free trial and get 20% off your first 3 months at codacy.com/refactoring—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Hywel Carver! Hywel is co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, which provides live team coaching for software engineering teams. With Hywel, we got deep into what makes traditional developer training awful, what engineers truly learn and what they should learn. Then we explored how to measure the impact of learning and how AI may possibly change both how learning works and our own skills.(00:00) Preview(01:15) Introduction(02:22) Hywel's journey in tech(06:20) Spreading good learning(07:55) Training as a compliance(09:34) The effectiveness of learning(12:42) Training with an expert(18:02) Knowledge, Skill and Wisdom(24:16) How Skiller Whale works?(30:26) The outcomes(34:53) Finding the proper learning method(40:12) Measuring learning value(46:54) AI, humans and code bases—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Darragh Curran!

Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users.

With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team resources to it.

Then we discussed how AI is being adopted inside Intercom itself to achieve Darragh's ambitious goal of doubling the team's productivity.

And finally, we explored Darragh's own role as CTO and what he believes he needs to get right to make all of this happen.

(00:00) Preview

(01:31) Introduction

(02:19) How Intercom changed with AI

(07:02) Intercom and Fin

(11:37) AI productivity gains

(16:36) Measuring productivity increase

(25:06) Experience and AI

(31:02) AI in large and legacy systems

(32:47) The CTO role in an AI framework

(38:56) Good for human = Good for AI

(42:03) Improving AI models: Fin's case

(45:03) How Fin improved so fast

(49:08) One big challenge

—

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club