"Jokes For Jokers" with Jesse Alford

About this episode

Nikhil Suresh interviews Jesse Alford about job seriousness, management, and learning from failures.

This episode's guest is Jesse Alford, a former staff engineer at Pivotal Software, and the host of Radio Free XP. I've been corresponding with Jesse daily for a month or two now, and am consistently blown away by his insight into any topic I dredge up. We discuss a whole bunch of things, ranging from seriousness in job, whether entering management to drive organizational change is wise, to what you should learn from crashing prod. I have also used a compressor for the audio this time, so we move ever closer to respectability. Enjoy!

People in this episode

Host: Nikhil Suresh

Guest: Jesse Alford

Topics covered

• job seriousness
• management
• organizational change
• learning from failure
• audio quality

Keywords

• Jesse Alford
• Pivotal Software
• management
• organizational change
• audio quality

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pivotal Software

Books & works: Radio Free XP

More episodes of Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature?

• "This Episode Is A Cognitohazard" with Efron Licht · April 18, 2026 · 2h 14m
• "Security's Fuckin' Weird" with Dan Tentler · March 16, 2026 · 1h 12m
• "Hunky Sales Dudes" with Dan Tentler · March 16, 2026 · 1h 12m
• "Damn Chatbots" with Demetrios Brinkmann · June 17, 2025 · 1h 36m
• "Improvisation" with Felipe Velez · October 21, 2024 · 1h 31m
• "The Million Dollar Curtain Pull" with Simon Swords · June 21, 2024 · 1h 57m