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Erik: At this point in your life, where are you seeking advice and coaching?
Joe: A number of areas. I continue to leverage my Jedi Council. I have a number of mentors.
I find that you can't -- I mean look, long term, I have to be a good businessman, I have
to be a good programmer, I have to be a good boyfriend, partner, husband to my lady, and
I have to be a good son and brother. And those each take different skill sets. And so, the
mentoring that I seek out tends to be a little bit more domain-specific. I also try to cycle
new opinions into the Jedi Council. So, what I seek out now, like it's changed a lot. I
used to lean heavily on a lot of programming mentors. I'm not programming as much anymore
so I don't really lean on them so much. I've actually been leaning a lot more on my dad
when it comes to management. My dad's a great manager. He's done great things where he's
at and I like talking to him about that because he gives me an outside perspective from a
completely different industry on how to interact and build employees up. I have a friend of
mine who is also kind of an engineering manager similar to me and he has this saying about
employees. He treats employees, he thinks of employees like campsites and that you should
leave them better than you found them. So, getting that outside perspective, I think
is really important. I think it's been a really great bonding experience. My dad now calls
me and will ask me questions about management, which I think is kind of funny. So yeah, so
what I look for in a mentor has definitely evolved over time because my career has evolved.
Like, I'm no longer -- I'm not sitting and banging out 10,000 lines of code a day. I'm
managing, I got to do accounting now, I got to do -- like I'm management benefits, I got
to talk to lawyers, I have to read contracts. So yes, seeking out different advice now from
different people has been pretty important.