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Jonathan Cutrell

Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.

With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: developertea@gmail.com

Developer Tea

Do you remember the early days of your career? You likely spent hours coding late into the night, fueled not by a paycheck, but by the sheer joy of building. But somewhere along the way, that intrinsic fire faded, replaced by the extrinsic motivators of Jira tickets, performance reviews, and ultimately the almighty dollar.

In this episode of the Career Growth Accelerator, I explore why this shift happens and how it might be the very thing keeping you stuck. We discuss the "Overjustification Effect"—how getting paid for your passion can actually degrade your performance—and how to reclaim the autotelic personality required to enter a flow state and accelerate your career.

• The Overjustification Effect: Learn why introducing extrinsic rewards (like a salary) for a task you inherently enjoy can weaken or completely replace your intrinsic motivation, eventually making the work feel like a chore.

• The Loss of Flow: Discover how moving from hobbyist to professional changes your relationship with the work, often stripping away the conditions necessary for "flow state," such as risk-taking and immediate feedback.

• Autotelic Personality: Understand the concept of being "autotelic"—doing something for its own sake—and why this trait is critical for high-quality, creative work that pushes your career forward.

• The Stagnation Trap: Recognize that if your only motivation is doing what is required to get paid, you are unlikely to take on the voluntary challenges necessary to grow to the next level.

• Reclaiming Your Drive: I discuss how finding pockets of intrinsic motivation—even if they are ancillary to your main job—can reignite your ability to enter flow, improve your work quality, and break through career plateaus.

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by:

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If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

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If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!

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Why Getting Paid Stole Your Drive and How to Get Into the Flow Again (Career Growth Accelerator)

🎧 Episode Notes: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth
In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a morning routine, or a specific productivity hack—it is a meta-habit. It is a specific way of thinking about how you spend your energy and time to avoid the burnout that comes from working hard without seeing commensurate gains,.

The Burnout Trap: • Understand that if you keep putting more energy in without getting equal or greater results out (sub-linear returns), you are heading for a wall. You cannot simply "grind" your way to the next level,.
Recognize Your Default Loops: • Whether you know it or not, you are already running "loops"—automatic heuristics and behaviors that define your decisions, like "while happy at job, stay at job",.
The Inner vs. Outer Loop: • Learn the difference between the 
Inner Loop • (your execution, habits, and daily protocols) and the 
Outer Loop • (the meta-observation that evaluates the system).
Governing the Experiment: • Discover how to use an Outer Loop to set longer-term conditionals for your career experiments (e.g., "I will try this until X"), preventing you from reacting emotionally to single data points,.
Systematic Evaluation: • Move from making random changes to making informed adjustments by stepping out of the daily grind to evaluate the trajectory of your habits,.
🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked
There’s a good chance you’ve already tried a few AI code review tools — and you’re probably ignoring most of their comments.

Not because AI can’t review code, but because it’s missing context. Most AI reviewers focus on surface-level issues: style nits, obvious refactors, or restating what’s already clear from the diff. Meanwhile, the things you actually care about, like whether a change violates an earlier architectural decision or quietly duplicates existing logic, go unnoticed.

That’s the problem Unblocked is built to solve.

Unblocked’s AI code review is grounded in decision-grade context, prior PRs, design discussions, documentation, and system-level constraints—the same context senior engineers rely on when reviewing code.

Teams using Unblocked report fewer comments, higher signal, and automated reviews they actually trust — enough that many have turned off other AI review tools entirely.

Even if you’ve already written off AI code review, Unblocked is worth a look.

Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/developertea.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth (Career Growth Accelerator)

It is review season, and you might be finding yourself confused: you received high ratings and "exceeded expectations," yet the promotion you expected didn't happen. In this episode of the Career Growth Accelerator, I break down exactly why high performance doesn't always lead to promotion, helping you identify the structural roadblocks and strategic shifts necessary to move from senior individual contributor to staff, principal, or leadership roles,.

• Understand why your performance review is never conducted in a vacuum and why your manager’s peers—not just your manager—are the "voters" you need to convince with clear evidence,.

• Learn why high ratings often fail to translate into a promotion if you haven't demonstrated specific impact on the company's strategic goals rather than just your own deliverables.

• Discover the first major roadblock: Structural limitations where the role you want simply doesn't exist because the business context or organizational pyramid doesn't currently support it,.

• Explore the concept of "Outer Layers" of scope—moving from self-focus to team-focus, and finally to business-strategy focus—to unlock the next stage of your career,,.

• Identify the "indispensable trap" where performing too well at your current inner-layer responsibilities makes you terminal in your role rather than promotable.
🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked
There’s a good chance you’ve already tried a few AI code review tools — and you’re probably ignoring most of their comments.

Not because AI can’t review code, but because it’s missing context. Most AI reviewers focus on surface-level issues: style nits, obvious refactors, or restating what’s already clear from the diff. Meanwhile, the things you actually care about, like whether a change violates an earlier architectural decision or quietly duplicates existing logic, go unnoticed.

That’s the problem Unblocked is built to solve.

Unblocked’s AI code review is grounded in decision-grade context, prior PRs, design discussions, documentation, and system-level constraints, the same context senior engineers rely on when reviewing code.

Teams using Unblocked report fewer comments, higher signal, and automated reviews they actually trust — enough that many have turned off other AI review tools entirely.

Even if you’ve already written off AI code review, Unblocked is worth a look.

Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/developertea.

🎥 Subscribe to our Youtube Channel here! https://www.youtube.com/@developertea
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Career Growth Accelerator - Promotion Roadblocks and Knocking it Out of the Park During Performance Review Season

In this episode, we explore how to de-risk your career roadmap by identifying the hidden vulnerabilities that hold your decision-making hostage.
🎧 Episode Notes: De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities
True career growth requires gaining autonomy over your choices. This episode provides a framework for performing a "pre-mortem" of career failure by identifying the sources of power that currently influence your life and limiting their leverage over your future.

Identify Your Sources of Power: • Perform an exercise to list the people, situations, and physical things (like money or debt) that drive your current decision-making and could shift your behavior if they changed.
Conduct a Career "Pre-mortem": • Use this diagnostic approach to recognize what has the power to change your decisions, helping you prepare for potential failures before they occur.
Understand the "Hostage" Dynamic: • Realize that while some leverage is aligned with your values, other factors—like large amounts of debt—can hold your career hostage, forcing you to make decisions you otherwise wouldn't.
Balance Vulnerability and Autonomy: • Distinguish between healthy vulnerability (such as in relationships with family) and unhealthy vulnerability (such as with creditors), and work to de-risk the latter to reclaim your agency.
The Link Between Debt and Career Risk: • Learn how eliminating financial vulnerabilities, like credit card debt, increases your autonomy, potentially allowing you to take "principled" career risks you previously couldn't afford.
Re-evaluate Your Non-Negotiables: • Use introspection to determine which parts of your job are truly essential and which "imagined" risks are preventing you from seeking better alignment with your personal purpose.
Shift Your Control Systems: • Understand that growth often requires giving up control in one area (like spending habits) to gain control and autonomy in your professional path.
🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Wix Studio
Devs, if you think website builders mean limited control—think again. With Wix Studio’s developer-first ecosystem you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionalities that matter most: ● Develop online in a VS Code-based IDE or locally via GitHub. ● Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions. ● And ship faster with Wix Studio’s AI code assistant. All of that, wrapped up in auto-maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Go to wixstudio.com.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review!

Career Growth Roadmap - De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities

🎧 Episode Notes: Using a Nine-Block for Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment
Most career assessments try to paint a static picture of what you can do well with the least effort, but they often fail to provide a practical roadmap for your next career move. This episode provides a simplified, multidimensional version of a classic management tool to help you prioritise your growth:

Understand the Nine-block Matrix: • Visualise a grid where the x-axis represents your 
current performance • (how well you are doing now) and the y-axis represents your 
potential • (your capacity to grow to the next level).
The Energy Dimension: • Go beyond a 2D map by evaluating the 
energy cost • of each skill on a scale of 1–5; this helps you identify where you are on "autopilot" versus where a skill is draining you.
The Risk Factor: • Assign a 
risk or criticality score • to your skills to determine which are "fundamental" to your role (like software delivery) and which can be safely dropped to make room for more valuable growth.
Spot Opportunity Flags: • Identify areas where you have 
high potential but low performance and low energy output • ; these represent your best opportunities for rapid improvement with the least input.
Make the Counterintuitive Trade-off: • Learn why you might need to 
drop a skill you are already good at • if it has low growth potential, redirecting that energy toward a new skill that offers higher long-term value for your career.
Categorise Your "Bread and Butter" Skills: • Recognise those mid-level skills that ensure your reliability and help you get the job done but shouldn't be the primary focus of your intense energy and development.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today! I am in there as well, and you can message me directly.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keeps us focused on what matters to you.

Career Growth Accelerator - Assessing Yourself - Using a Nine-Block to Map Your Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment

This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the specific challenges that will actually move the needle.
🎧 Episode Notes: Going from Autopilot to Purpose
Many of us operate on instinct, chasing goals like "get a promotion" or "make more money" without understanding the "why" behind them. This episode is designed to help you interrogate those automatic responses and find a path that is optimized for what you uniquely value.

Break the Autopilot Loop: • Understand why common goals like "getting a promotion" are often just survival mechanisms intended to keep us safe within social norms rather than reflections of our true values.
The "Never Again" Pressure Test: • Use the mental exercise of imagining you will never get another promotion; if this causes visceral anxiety, it’s a sign that your goal is rooted in a sense of safety rather than self-actualisation.
Move from Post-Rationalisation to Purpose: • Instead of backwards-justifying the status quo, learn to be honest about what you truly desire—whether it's the affirmation of intelligence, the freedom of discretionary time, or a specific mission.
Create Instructive Goals: • Discover why a goal must be personal and specific to be useful; a generic goal provides no roadmap, whereas a unique goal acts as an instruction for what to do next.
Find Your True Challenge: • Once your goal is defined, identify the specific obstacle standing in your way that requires ingenuity and isn't already decided for you.
The "Asterisk" of Solvability: • Learn the most critical rule for picking a challenge: it must be something you can 
reasonably solve • given your current means to avoid falling back into paralysis and autopilot.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com/contact
📮 Join the Discord
Join our supportive community of engineers working to improve their lives and careers at https://developertea.com/discord.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show.

Career Growth Accelerator: Going from Autopilot to Purpose

This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your job title and begin diagnosing your career challenges honestly.

 • Understand why protecting your ego is one of the most 
dangerous ways to control your career • , leading you to discount valid reasons for stagnation or failure by focusing only on external factors.
 • Discover the fundamental shift needed: 
disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations • . Your position is merely a fact and has little bearing on your innate value or capacity to succeed more generally.
 • Learn how to use a 
distancing thought experiment • —viewing your situation as if it were an acquaintance’s story—to remove your ego from the diagnostic process and gain necessary clarity and perspective.
 • Explore why effective growth advice, whether for promotion or post-mortem analysis, requires focusing almost exclusively on the 
diagnostic aspect • ("What happened and why?") rather than building justifications based on your worthiness or past performance.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Announcing - Career Growth Accelerator, Episode Zero - Getting Out of Your Own Way

Are you a mid-to-senior level engineer or leader who has hit a career roadblock or found yourself stagnated? I'm launching the new Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the difficult, non-obvious hurdles that prevent you from moving to the next level.

In this foundational Episode Zero, I cover the critical prerequisite for growth: Getting Out of Your Own Way. Our ego often protects our self-worth by blaming external factors for failures, making honest diagnosis impossible,.

• Learn why protecting your ego is the most dangerous way to control your career.

• Discover the fundamental shift: disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations to gain clarity.

• I introduce a distancing thought experiment to help you diagnose the real problems blocking your path.

• Start focusing on the diagnostic aspect—What happened and why?—to build real momentum.

Subscribe now so you don't miss out on this series!

Announcing: The Career Growth Accelerator Series

When you hit a career roadblock, the methods that worked for you before often stop working. Today, I’m diving into why that happens, and why the first and most critical step in progressing past stagnation isn't doubling down on skills, but clearly defining the problem standing in your way.
Problem Definition As A Path for Career Growth
My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This episode is for everyone trying to grow, especially if you have hit some kind of roadblock. Most career progression, especially early on, happens somewhat automatically through natural experience, domain expertise, and skill accumulation,. However, as you progress, you will hit missing rungs or roadblocks—things preventing you from progressing in promotions, positions, or specific projects.

When blocked, most people rely on the same things they did before, such as gaining experience, reading blogs, or building side projects, using a "scattershot approach" to try and guess what their managers want,. Unfortunately, relying on activity that previously got you ahead will not necessarily work later in your career,. As you climb the career ladder, the number of positions available decreases (the pyramid shape), meaning that even being highly qualified may not lead to the next role if it simply doesn't exist,.

If you haven't defined the problem, you have no way of knowing whether the actions you are taking will help you progress where you want to go. Instead of continuing the never-ending cycle of self-improvement, you need to step outside your own context and try to see the problem from an external viewpoint, like a consultant. Recognizing the core problem—like a lack of available roles—allows you to shift your focus away from only improving your skill set and toward solving that specific organizational problem, perhaps by expanding the necessary scope for the role to open up,. Redefining the problem may mean shifting your goal from getting a promotion to convincing someone to let you perform the activities associated with that higher role, which is a different process entirely. In almost every circumstance where you are blocked, there is a problem that you need to work on defining better; this is the first step towards moving past the roadblock,.

 • Explore why the natural career progression that works early on—driven by experience and skill accumulation—slows down and fails when you hit later-stage roadblocks,,.
 • Discover why relying on a "scattershot approach" of extra activity, like reading blogs or building side projects, is often ineffective when facing a structural block in your career path,,.
 • Understand that if a desired role doesn't exist within the company structure, becoming more skilled or qualified won't solve the organizational problem,.
 • Learn how redefining your career problem—for instance, shifting from needing a promotion to needing permission to do high-level tasks—can open up entirely new pathways for growth.
 • Challenge your self-improvement cycle by stepping outside your own context and defining your career roadblock as if you were an external consultant,.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! I'm also in the community, and you can message me directly there.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keeps us focused on what matters to you.

Problem Definition As A Path for Career Growth

We often look for ways to reduce the load on our brains, seeking shortcuts and optimizations to get ahead. Sometimes this works, reinforcing the belief that we can hack our way around every problem. However, this episode addresses the truth that many fundamental aspects of your career require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.

This episode details the difficult truths about facing the most essential challenges in your career:

Understand the Hard Path: • Recognize that many aspects of your career, skill set, relationships, and hobbies require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.
Identify Your Primary Obstacles: • Pinpoint the hard things you are procrastinating on, such as developing essential domain knowledge, deepening relationships with crucial co-workers or your manager, or getting the necessary "reps" of difficult building and practice.
The Path to Mastery: • Realize that becoming a great engineer (e.g., a great Python developer) is achieved not by reading books or finding perfect tools, but by 
building things over and over • . This practice includes receiving feedback from peers and applying what you learn under challenge.
The Pain of Decision: • Explore why it is difficult to even 
decide • to do a hard thing. By committing to the challenging path, you are choosing to 
cut off your optionality • and giving up the hope of finding an easier, lower-investment alternative.
Sustaining Commitment: • Understand that initial motivation or an energetic feeling will not carry you through the obstacle when the development process becomes awkward, slow, or frustrating. Staying committed requires reinforcing your 
core underlying reason • for doing the hard work.
The Reward: • Recognize that if you successfully address the hard thing you know needs doing, everything else in your life and career becomes easier.
🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Wix Studio
Devs, if you think website builders mean limited control—think again. With Wix Studio’s developer-first ecosystem you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionalities that matters most: ● Develop online in a VS Code-based IDE or locally via GitHub. ● Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions. ● And ship faster with Wix Studio’s AI code assistant. All of that, wrapped up in auto-maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Go to wixstudio.com.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! There are other engineers there going through similar things in their careers, and I am also in there, where you can message me directly.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

You Know The Hard Thing You Need to Do Next - Here's Why It's Worth Doing Now

In today's episode, I talk about four different types of abstract mental models.

Mentioned or relevant to today's episode:

Creating Useful Metaphors
Creating Obvious Systems: Why Mental Models Justify Simplicity, and When to Utilize Surprise and Delight
Allegory (Wikipedia)

Today's episode is sponsored by Squares Conference! Go to SquaresConference.com and use the code SPECFM25 at checkout to get 25% off your ticket to Squares. I'll see you there!

And lastly...

Please take a moment and subscribe and review the show! Click here to review Developer Tea in iTunes.

Abstract Mental Models

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