Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer, What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech.

This week we're joined by Sean Hederman, CTO of Zilch, one of the UK's biggest fintechs. Sean was the second hire at Zilch. Before that he built bi-temporal reference data systems at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, transformed DevOps at Stanlib and Direct Line, and somewhere along the way worked out that being the best individual engineer in the room is a ceiling, not a career.

In this episode, we cover:

-Why "being right doesn't scale" and what to engineer instead

-The multiplier effect: lifting a team by 20% beats doubling your own output

-Conway's law and the reverse Conway manoeuvre at Zilch

-Queuing theory applied to engineering teams (and why Sean mandates 20 to 30% tech debt work)

-Humans as chaos monkeys, and why half of software engineering practice exists because we're unreliable

-Hiring engineers in the agentic era and the AI usage patterns Sean actually looks for

-Adversarial agentic coding, spec-driven development, and getting the model to review its own work

-The myth of the 10x programmer and what real force multipliers look like on a team

Guest:

Sean Hederman

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-hederman/

🎙 Hosts

Matt: https://matthewsinclair.com

James: linkedin.com/in/james-wilson-92170656

🌐 More from us:

https://whatnext.dev/

https://quantumfaxmachine.com/

This week on I'm a Software Engineer ~ What Next? James and Matt are joined by Richard Bown, DevOps engineer and author of Human Software, a novel that captures the messy, human side of engineering work.We get into:Richard’s winding journey from IC to manager and back again — and why that detour made him a better engineerWhy burnout, bad management, and “culture fit” aren’t bugs — they’re design flawsHow writing a novel helped Richard reflect on decades in tech — and why fiction can be a powerful tool for changeYou might enoy this if:-You're a senior engineer debating the jump to management-You’ve felt stuck in your tech career and wondered: is this it?-You’re curious how AI, team structure, and empathy are reshaping how we build software🎧 Listen now on Spotify | iTunes | YouTube📘 Check out Richard’s book: Human Software

Welcome back to I’m a Software Engineer: What Next?

This week we are joined by Kate Catlin, Senior Product Manager at GitHub, where she works on Copilot and the future of AI-powered developer experience.

In this episode, we cover:
• How Kate reinvented her career multiple times on the path to GitHub
• What “good product intuition” really means for PMs and engineers
• How AI is reshaping product work, and why evals matter for building trustworthy AI features

🗒️ Show Notes
• Venture For America
• Le Wagon Bootcamp
• CircleCI
• GitHub Copilot
• Find My Flock (Kate’s former startup)
• Joseph Campbell – The Hero’s Journey
• Philosophy of Technology (from Kate’s studies)

🎙 Guest
Kate Catlin, Senior PM, GitHub Copilot
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-catlin/

🎙 Hosts
Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewsinclair
James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-wilson-92170656

🌐 More from us
https://whatnext.dev/
https://quantumfaxmachine.com/