Integration Love Story med Taylor Poindexter

Introduktion

Taylor Poindexter, thank you so much for coming to the Integration Love Story podcast. We are very thankful, really glad that you could make it and give us the time today. We have been trying for a while, but now we made it.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I’m excited. We’ve had a good pre-episode conversation and I’m excited to dig in with you guys.

Could you please just introduce yourself to our listeners and the ones watching?

My name is Taylor Poindexter. I’m based out of the Washington DC area. I got a computer science degree from the University of Virginia many moons ago. I started out in consulting — let consulting rob my soul for a little bit, but it was great because I got to try a lot of different tech to figure out what I wanted to do. Then I went into a startup for a while, had a good time with some really good people, and now I’m at Spotify. I’ve been here officially four years and I’m officially an engineering manager, having moved away from being an IC as of right now.

How long ago was the degree?

13 years ago.

We got the introduction of your IT background, but who is Taylor Poindexter outside of it?

Probably the one thing most of my friends love about me is that I’m a whiskey connoisseur — self-pronounced — but I have a very extensive whiskey collection. I like digging into the science of whiskey and doing whiskey tastings with my friends at home. Something my husband and I have started this past year is hosting dinner parties — very intimate ones, just four to six people. We both like to cook, have some of our favorite people over, have some good whiskey, and just good conversation over the night. I also really love working out and traveling. I’m from a very small town in Virginia, so I’m a country girl at heart, but I really like seeing the world.

Whisky, resor och middagsbjudningar

What’s your favorite whiskey?

It depends on my mood. Some people are like “I only like bourbon” or “I only like scotch.” I actually have at least one bottle in every category that I really like. If I just wanted a nice pour on a weekday, I’d probably go with Oban 18 — that’s one I really like — or Glenmorangie Signet, another one I keep in the house a lot.

I would love to go to Scotland to visit. Not yet, but we want to do it.

Take the whiskey tour. I think people who like whiskey are a certain type of personality. It’s more chill. It’s about sitting down, having a conversation. Wine has too many details around it — you have to hold the glass a certain way. Whiskey is just: let’s sit and have this glass.

If I were a complete amateur on a whiskey tour with you, how much would you take over?

I try to shut up. I try to be very quiet. I don’t want to be that person who says “oh, when this and that” — this isn’t my tour. I hate those people. Just drink your whiskey and be quiet.

Vägen in i tech — från liten stad till University of Virginia

We got your name from Scott Hanselman, who mentioned that you were both keynote speakers at Strange Loop in 2023. He sent two questions he wanted us to ask: how did you get started in IT, and what was your first computer?

For how I got started — when I went to college, I was from a small town and had never even thought about or heard about being a software engineer. I was always academically driven and thought I was going to be a doctor or some business lady in New York in a suit with a glass office. When I started college I tried to figure out which path it would be. Then in my third year, a family friend — my brother’s friend, my brother is 10 years older than me — said I should try a computer science class. I said: “That’s not really for people like me.” He said: “Just take one class. If you hate it, you never have to do it again.” So I begrudgingly did it, and to my surprise I really liked it.

I was really bad at it, because many of my classmates had been programming since they were 10 or 12 years old and had parents who were software engineers. I was starting from ground zero. A lot of people would be frustrated when I asked questions, because these were things they already knew. But I was truly a beginner. I fell in love with it in my third year, changed my major to computer science, took winter and summer classes to still graduate on time, and was lucky enough to land a consulting job to continue on that path.

And the first computer?

I think I was six. My mom got it for me for Christmas. I remember it being this big secret — my brother was 10 years older than me and was allowed in the guest room while I wasn’t. I felt super left out. But it was my big brother setting up the computer so that on Christmas morning I could go in and see it.

How many hours a day did you spend on it then versus now?

Actually not that much when I was younger. I did my homework on it, but we had dial-up and very slow internet, so I didn’t spend a ton of time on it. Now it’s very different — I have two laptops on my desk as we speak and spend the majority of my day on some type of device.

Från IC till engineering manager — och att hitta sin plats

I can recognize that story of starting from behind in a program and seeing the gap between yourself and others. And then you figure out you don’t need to be the best.

For me it was the loop of feeling like I’m never going to figure this out, and then figuring it out and feeling like queen of the world. And coupled with that, I found a computer science partner. In my classes I was often the only woman. I had just worked out and went to a lecture in a tank top, and this guy walks in — probably 6’3″, also in a tank top, clearly just finished working out. He came to the front of the class looking for a seat, we locked eyes, and he sat next to me. That just became my partner. He had started a bit late too, coming from a philosophy major, so we kind of went through the whole process together. Having someone to bounce ideas off who wasn’t judgmental made it a lot more bearable.

You mentioned earlier that you fought to learn all of this and then ultimately gave up the IC role to become a manager. Was that a natural step, or does it feel like a different person making that decision?

Kind of like a different person. I did want to conquer software engineering, to feel like: okay, this is now a topic I know. I got to senior software engineer and felt really accomplished. But then, similar to what you were describing, there were people around me who truly love software engineering — they spend their weekends on it, they know the documentation inside out. And I realized: that’s never going to be me. I was getting my tickets done and done well, but that deep passion just wasn’t there in the same way.

And then there’s the manager piece. My first job out of college, I had an awful manager. He actually wanted me to shift from software engineer to business analyst, and I almost did it — until another manager at the job convinced me to stick with it. I was really discouraged when I left that job after four years. At the startup I joined after, I thought: if this doesn’t go well, I’ll just move to another career entirely.

But I happened to join a team of some of the most amazing engineers. Not only were they the ones reading the documentation and explaining it to me 20 layers deep, they were very kind and very supportive. The startup went through a lot of changes — acquisition, layoffs, a lot of craziness — and my manager ended up with around 40 direct reports and couldn’t manage them all. Since I’d been a tech lead at my first job, he asked if I wanted to take a subset of the team. That’s where it started.

When I was ready to leave that company — burnt out, working from my condo during COVID — I took an eight-month sabbatical. When I reflected on what actually poured into my soul, it was helping to build an environment where people felt psychologically safe and supported. I could still be close to the tech, maybe pick up a ticket here or there, but making room for the people who want to go 20 layers deep — that’s what really brought me pleasure.

Ledarskap, psykologisk trygghet och att koppla ihop människor

What would you say is your superpower?

I can almost always find the positive out of any situation. Terrible things could happen and I’m like: “Oh, but that one good speck right there — that’s pretty cool.” And then I try to focus on that until we can hopefully turn that speck into something bigger.

As a leader — or even just as part of a team — I do a really good job of connecting people and helping them find their happy place. I feel like that makes for really awesome teams.

Psychological safety keeps coming up as something central for you.

It is. And I will say, even with these things being something I deeply care about, it can be really exhausting. Humans are complex. Everybody needs something a little different, and it takes genuine care to keep showing up for that.

More complex than computers.

People are nondeterministic.

Strange Loop och meningsfulla karriärer

We watched your keynote from Strange Loop 2023 — you talked about meaningful careers. Has your view on that changed?

Still the same. Though something I haven’t been doing as well is just pausing to check in on what actually fills my cup. Life gets chaotic, work gets busy, and it’s easy to slip into “just get through the day” mode. Something I’ve been trying to do at the close of each year is sit with myself and think: what do I want things to look like for the next one, three, five years — and does that align with what’s actually bringing me the most joy?

How do you do that practically?

I try to stay really present in my day-to-day and take notes on the side — things that charged me up, things I didn’t love doing. Not every day is going to be purely energizing, but I keep a running sense of what those things are. And then: what career moves could I make to get closer to more of that?

Senior, expert och livslångt lärande

What’s your take on words like “senior” and “expert”?

They really depend on the company. People get hung up on this — “I was a senior engineer at this company, why doesn’t Spotify want to hire me as one?” There’s a difference between being a senior engineer at a 10-person startup versus a 15,000-person company. Each company has its own definition and its own standards.

What I took from your talk was the emphasis on continuous learning and staying humble about what you know and don’t know.

Something I genuinely believe is that no matter what level you are, you never know everything. Some people want to act like they know everything because they’re a staff engineer at Google. But there’s likely something a junior associate engineer knows that they don’t. Approaching life with that kind of humility — about what I can learn from the next person even if I feel like an expert in my own right — really makes things more well-rounded. And it creates more psychological safety in the teams you’re in.

I actually sent a staff engineer a note of appreciation a couple of weeks ago. We needed to talk because his team was involved in a launch we were preparing for. Some staff engineers can be a bit off-putting, not very engaging. But I was impressed because not only was he helpful — there were so many moments in the conversation where he said: “You know what, I actually don’t know. I’m not sure about that. Let me dig into it.” He would engage with genuine curiosity, and it made the seniors around him feel comfortable to say the same. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

And even in a year where MCP went from unknown to assumed knowledge — nobody can know everything.

So funny you say that. I was at a conference when somebody brought up MCP, and I quietly pulled out my phone to look it up on the side.

Råd till dem som börjar sin karriär nu

If you were to give advice to someone starting their IT career right now — with AI and everything that’s coming — what would you say?

First, and this is even before AI: find a place that has psychological safety. When you’re starting out, there’s so much you don’t know. If you start somewhere that discourages questions, it’s really going to slow your ability to learn.

Second: I’ve actually noticed that more junior people tend to be more willing to adopt artificial intelligence. So lean into that — but as you lean into it, make sure you understand what you’re actually doing. Some people are prompting it, getting code out, and doing a quick glance over. Do you genuinely understand what’s going on? If not, don’t accept the code blindly. Ask questions — of the AI, of a senior engineer on your team. Don’t just push code you don’t understand, because that’s how you create a serious incident.

AI på jobbet — verktyg, inte magi

There’s sometimes a kind of shame around using AI, like people don’t want to admit they used it. But from your perspective as an engineering manager at Spotify, if someone sends you a document that was partly AI-generated — do you care?

It’s nuanced. I want to know that you actually thought about it yourself. I don’t want you to take what ChatGPT generated and plop it into a doc unchanged. I like when people use it as the tool that it is. With code, what I like about how most senior engineers do it is they don’t give it one large prompt and let it run — they do it step by step, as if they were doing it themselves, and check it along the way. Same with docs. The ones I like most are when someone writes a loose outline of what they want, and then uses AI to clean it up, point out things they missed, enhance it. Not generate 100% of it without much thought going into the prompt.

How has AI helped you personally as an engineering manager at Spotify?

Two main ways. First, Spotify is large and there are a lot of team names I might not immediately know. We have an internal tool where I can ask questions about what teams do, instead of having to go around and piece it together manually. That’s really helpful.

Second: I changed teams about three or four months ago, and we had a very tight deadline. I didn’t have time to dig through the codebases myself to get up to speed. So I used Claude and asked it pointed questions to help me understand the repos, used it to think through the tickets the engineers were implementing — okay, this is how I would approach it, this is where I’d need to update things. It really helped me get up to speed quickly without pulling in the engineers to do it. The ability to break down repositories like that is genuinely useful.

Integration Love Story

This podcast is called Integration Love Story. We usually ask guests about integration background — is there a moment where you fell in love with your work?

I honestly feel like it happened in college. During those projects, I really enjoyed myself — tackling such tough problems with classmates. They were hard, but I genuinely enjoyed it.

With my career specifically, I feel like I fell in love with it when I found a place where I could work with psychological safety, make good money, and learn. That trifecta — which started at my last company and continues into Spotify — has genuinely made me fall in love with the career I have. I know I’m lucky because a lot of people are genuinely surprised when I say I actually like my job.

Avslutning och vidare

We close the podcast by asking the same question Scott asked us: who should we talk to next, and what should we ask them?

I would say Shanté Persons. She’s an engineer at Netflix and she’s amazing. The questions I’d want you to ask her: one, if she could change anything about her career, what would she change? And two, what has been her favorite piece of tech in her life — whether software engineering tech or something outside of work?

That’s a great set of questions. We hope she’ll want to join us. Taylor, it’s been wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Absolutely. Anytime. Really nice talking to you. And if you guys are ever in DC, let me know and I’ll take you out for some whiskey.

And if you’re ever in Sweden, look up Gothenburg. We’ll be waiting.

I’ll be there.