If you want to know what it takes to have a long career in this industry, then this conversation with Anjuan Simmons is just what you need to hear. As a staff engineering manager at GitHub, Anjuan has over 25 years of combined experience across consulting, startups, and big tech.
We talked about his work at GitHub, and he gave some insight into their AI tool Copilot, as well as the GitHub Sponsors program. Anjuan also spoke with me about the value of representation, and how it led to him attending UT Austin for electrical engineering, getting his MBA, and eventually becoming an engineer with one of the biggest tech companies in the world. He also dropped a ton of great advice on ways to have more of an impact in shaping your professional journey.
Anjuan’s intentional approach and personal story is extremely inspiring, and I hope it will help you recognize that you have the power to chart your own course in life!
Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.
Anjuan Simmons:
I’m Anjuan Simmons. And I am a staff engineering manager at GitHub.
Maurice Cherry:
So how has this year been going for you? Any highlights?
Anjuan Simmons:
Yes, I think one of the biggest highlights of this year is that my oldest son — and I have three children — and my oldest went to college. So we launched our first baby into university, and we literally, a few days ago, dropped him off at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is an incoming freshman. And we moved him into his dorm and we gave him hugs and we tried to not cry. And we got him installed in Jester West in his dorm, and we drove home without him. And it was a very fulfilling experience. It was a little bittersweet, but we’re super proud of him. And that has been a big highlight because a lot of this year was getting ready for that moment.
Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Congratulations.
Anjuan Simmons:
Thank you.
Maurice Cherry:
I love how you say installed, like he was software. (laughs)
Anjuan Simmons:
(laughs) I am a tech person.
Maurice Cherry:
So outside of that, do you have any sort of goals or accomplishments that you want to try to do before the year ends?
Anjuan Simmons:
Yes, I think one of the biggest goals that we had as a family; I mentioned that I have three children. My wife and I, we’ve been married for 21 years, and we do, as you might expect, a lot of family things, right? And so we wanted to have a really reflective and relaxing and connecting summer because, again, my oldest son was going to college. My middle child, a son, is starting his senior year. They just started a few weeks ago. Then my daughter is a sophomore, right? So that kind of gives you an idea of their ages.
And one of the things that we did this summer and we went back and forth on, like, do we want to do something? Do we want something elaborate? Right? Do we want to go to Lagos, Nigeria, or go to Amsterdam or whatever? Then we…no, no. Let’s just kind of tone it back. And so we did just a very simple family vacation where we went to Washington, D.C. for a few days, and then we took this Amtrak Express train from Washington, D.C. to New York City. And we spent time there because none of my kids had been to New York City. And we did all the touristy things. We went to the Statue of Liberty. We went to the Empire State Building. We did all these things. And it was just a nice family time. And so that was a major thing that we did this summer. And that may sound a little bit boring, but it was a delightful little small vacation. My middle son went to a summer program at UT because he’s interested in business like his older brother. And my daughter is on the dance team at high school, so she did a lot of things with her dance troupe. And so this was very much a family summer. So I would say that on a personal level, that was the biggest highlight of this year.
I would say that the other big highlight is that at work I promoted a Black woman and an Indian woman at work. And that was something that is truly gratifying. Not just because of their ethnicity — they were ready to go. They very much, very well deserved the promo. But I’ve promoted a lot of people in my career, Maurice, and just as a person of color, it was really great to be someone who could come alongside them as a manager, help them honestly overcome some of the imposter syndrome that I detected in them and then do the work to make sure that the organization could identify and respect their accomplishments and what they were bringing to the team that, hey, these people are ready for promo. They’re already doing their work in to get that done. And so out of all the many people I promote over my long career, and I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, that was very gratifying.
Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I mean, from the family end, I think a nice relaxing family vacation is definitely a great accomplishment, especially after the past two or three years with the pandemic. Like, even just being able to get out and do things tourist wise is great. So that’s good. And also you got to spend some time with your son before he went off to college. That’s a memory that I’m sure he’ll take with him. So that’s great.
Anjuan Simmons:
Absolutely.
Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And since you mentioned work, let’s pivot to talking about what you’re doing at GitHub, where you work as a staff engineering manager. Tell me more about that.
Anjuan Simmons:
Sure. So the team that I’m responsible for supporting is called GitHub Sponsors. And GitHub Sponsors is a program that started, I mean, really a few years ago, that is meant to allow open source maintainers to receive financial support. Right. So open source maintainers can receive financial support through GitHub Sponsors. And the reason that GitHub came up with this program is because GitHub one loves open source. But also we know that so many of the programs and the apps and the websites and the applications that run the world run on open source. There are so many dependencies that people have of these open source projects that make these projects that make these applications work.
And often the people who maintain those projects, they do it for free. They do it because they love the code or they wanted to solve a problem. And often they work an eight or nine hours at their day job and then they labor at night working on open source maintaining these projects that really transform the world and we want it. Or GitHub wanted to make the open source ecosystem sustainable so that these people who are really doing free labor can find reward for their work, but also ideally do it full time. And through GitHub Sponsors, I’ve heard stories of open source maintainers who were able to quit their day job and do their work full time, or perhaps they didn’t quit, but they were able to bring on a partner to help make the project better. And so that’s the team that I’m responsible for, the seven engineers on that team, I work very closely with the product manager, and so that is what I do at GitHub.
Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Is that a new program, or is that something GitHub has had for a while?
Anjuan Simmons:
We had it for a while. We’ve had it for about three years. It’s been in beta for most of its time, right, the time that it’s been available. But we recently took a GA in April of this year.
Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Very nice. What does your typical day look like? I’m imagining you’re probably working remotely, or are you going into an office? What does your typical day look like?
Anjuan Simmons:
GitHub is fully remote. It’s been fully remote for a long time, way before the pandemic. And so my day starts with me waking up, walking maybe 20 paces into my office, and then I am at work. And so it’s funny, I tell people that I worked at Help Scout before GitHub, and I’ve had remote work as the way that I work for several years now. And I tell people it would take a lot for me to have to work in an office. And I know one of my colleagues said that they basically put, like, $100,000 figure on working from home, right? That if you had an opportunity that you wanted to take, it would have to be, like, 100K over what you’re making now if it required you to go into an office.
And so, yeah, I wake up, I walk into my office. I put some beans into my coffee machine. I make my coffee. I get my water because I got to stay hydrated. And then I log on to my GitHub-issued laptop. And then the first thing that I do, which is I think not very unusual, is that I check Slack and see what happened while I was sleeping. Where are the things that are going on with the GitHub? What’s happening with my team? I also check email, and one of the things that I think people may not know is that GitHub uses GitHub. We use GitHub for our daily work, and so we do what’s called dogfooding, right? We use the tools that we build every single day. And so one of the things that I do with checking Slack and checking my GitHub Gmail account is going to GitHub and looking at all of the notifications about all the issues that my team is working on. Or I’ll check on the pull requests — we call them PRs — or I’ll go into Siscussions. And so I use GitHub every day, because at GitHub, we use what we build for our daily work.
Maurice Cherry:
Back when I worked at Glitch, it was very much the same way. Like any sort of project that we did, it was adamant that we used Glitch for the project. It was never anything like, “oh, let’s think about some third party whatever.” Anything we did had to sort of work within Glitch. So I’m certainly familiar with that concept of dogfooding. I’m curious though, because of that. And you mentioned before, this is one thing through GitHub Sponsors where you’re supporting other open source projects and things like that. Developers worldwide use GitHub for their work. What kind of problems internally is GitHub focused on solving?
Anjuan Simmons:
Yes, dogfooding lets you use the stuff that you build because you’ll see things, right, that customers are running. You know, I’ve gone in and said, “hey, the button on this form seems a little bit off center” and yeah, I can open up an issue and then send it to the team that owns that page and then they can fix. So, you know, a lot of the reason that we use GitHub at GitHub is to really make GitHub better, right? So that’s one thing, that’s one problem that we’re working on, because while GitHub’s been around for a long time, it’s not a perfect product, we know that, but we’re dedicated to making it a little more perfect every single day, right? One of the other big challenges that we’re working on, or a big problem, is what we call developer experience. The developer experience is what developers go through while they’re building code. And so we want to make the development experience one where you feel that the tools that you use don’t get into your way and that you’re able to do the best work of your day, every day based on the tool set, right? So a lot of that is based on how we design GitHub, and GitHub’s always changing. If you use GitHub, you know about GitHub, like I said, pull requests, you know about issues, you know about the other parts of GitHub. And we’re very much invested in their entire teams dedicated to those functions that I just mentioned. But one of the biggest things about the developer experience is Copilot.
And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this quite a bit, but Copilot is our AI tool that is your artificial intelligence peer programmer. It’s like having the best engineer that you ever heard of working with you to help your code become better. So Copilot is a key part of what we’re doing in AI at GitHub. It’s transformational. I think that we’re doing some amazing work. Again, we’ll probably talk about that some more later. One of the other tools that I think is super cool is called Code Spaces, which is basically your developer environment in the cloud where you can log in. And instead of having to do what I did when I started developing 25 years ago and installing all these tools and installed my IDE and my dependencies installed my database, install all these helper applications.
You just log in to basically browse, experience, it’s all there. You can start coding. And so we want to remove obstacles between the idea and the implementation and Copilot and code spaces and just GitHub itself are really some of the things that we’re working on to make that trip.
Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah, let’s actually go into talking about AI. I know I mentioned to you before we started recording that it’s been sort of a running theme on this show for the past two years now. Like everyone that we’ve had on in some capacity, I ask them about how is this cutting edge tech, AI, machine learning, generative AI, et cetera. How is that sort of affecting the work that you do or what does it mean for the work that you do? So how do you use this sort of cutting edge tech? At GitHub? You mentioned Copilot, but are there other sorts of programs or initiatives that you all are working on?
Anjuan Simmons:
So, to go back to my team, right, GitHub Sponsors. So GitHub is a Ruby on Rails application, right? So at the end of the day, that is what runs GitHub. GitHub, for the most part runs on Ruby on Rails. And so we do a few things, right? We very much contribute to new versions of Ruby on Rails, right? We also upgrade our code, right? So we have entire teams that are kitted to that. So I would say Ruby on Rails as tools are really big at GitHub. We also use other tool sets like React, right, which is a popular front-end framework for building programs. I mean, there’s a whole host of programs and languages that we use at GitHub. We also obviously host a lot of the code for open source frameworks, right? Like React and Vue and Laravel.
And so GitHub not only uses a lot of cutting edge technology, we are also the home for a lot of the cutting edge technology that are used today. And so we take that responsibility very seriously. So we always want to make sure that we’re available, that we’re secure and so working on those functions, right? So it’s not just having a place or having a repository for your code UT. We also want to make sure that we’re highly available, we’re highly secure, that all those things are by default. And I want to spend a little bit of time putting maybe a pin on that. No tool is useful if you can’t get to it, and no tool is useful if it will expose your sensitive information. And so security and availability are like super core concerns at GitHub. And I want to make sure that it’s clear that we spend a massive amount of tools, a massive amount of people, and a massive amount of just thought space, all those subjects.
And so that’s really something that is really important to make sure that we understand. We also spend a lot of time on privacy because, again, a lot of personal information resides on GitHub. And so we do a lot of work around that too. So it’s more than just code. Code is obviously a core concept, but it’s all those things around code that we spend a lot of time thinking about and solving for.
Maurice Cherry:
I’m so glad you mentioned availability, because like you said, GitHub hosts a lot of code for other projects. And I’ve seen on the web, like, when GitHub goes down, that people freak out like other services because you never really know, you know, as a user, what’s connected behind the scenes. So if there’s a GitHub outage for some reason, then all of a sudden that’s affecting other websites and other tools that you use. It sort of is all like chained together in some way. So I’m glad you mentioned that about availability. I’m just remembering from my time being at Glitch how whenever the tool went down, it was always a very frantic time at the company because it’s like, “oh, no, the tool’s down. We’re hearing about it from people. How do we fix it? How do we get things back up?” And that’s I feel like especially now, because so many things are connected under just a handful of services like GitHub, AWS, et cetera.
When things happen there, it’s a ripple effect throughout the web about other things that get affected. So I’m glad you mentioned availability as being a big thing that you work.
Anjuan Simmons:
You know, GitHub, I mean, again, it’s a great platform. It’s been around for a long time, but it is a tool that runs on servers, right? There are data centers, that where GitHub is hosted. There are cloud providers. I mean, it is like any other system made by humans, and that means that you sometimes run into errors. And so while we work at this, like any other service, things happen. There could be a variety of reasons why something goes down. And one of the cool things about GitHub is that if there is an incident, right, where, hey, things are running slow, the system is not available. Again, we want this to be a very rare occurrence, but hey, it happens.
I can hop into a channel on Slack and just follow along what’s happening. We very much value transparency. And one of the super cool things about GitHub is that those incidents, again, we want them to be rare, are observable to anyone who’s a Hubber, right? We call ourselves Hubbers if you work at GitHub. And so that kind of transparency is a powerful feature of the company and really speaks to how we do want to embrace the open source model. And again, there are limits, to be honest, and there are reasonable limits, but for the most part, everything should be transparent, everything should be visible. And that’s really an open source principle that we hold very dearly.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned Copilot, and Copilot is like this tool that is used to sort of, I guess, help you code. Like it helps with suggestions, with code and things like that. Is that something that’s used internally or is that more of just like a customer facing product?
Anjuan Simmons:
Oh, absolutely. It’s an internal tool to give maybe a couple of examples of Copilot. Copilot integrates with popular IDEs like VS Code. And so once you have Copilot installed, you can say “hey Copilot, create a component” or “hey Copilot, add test.” So you can literally with your voice work with Copilot or you can add a comment to your code and describe what you’re doing. And then Copilot will put in. I mean, often, if not the scaffolding for what you’re trying to do, it’ll actually give you a solution, right? And so what Copilot is meant to do is to, like I said before, remove a lot of those friction points in the experience that developers go through. And instead of having to hop on Stack Overflow or Google a solution, all that’s built into the IDE, the development environment that you’re using.
But it’s smarter than Stack Overflow, right? It’s smarter than just doing random Google searches. It understands context and it’s able to understand, based on what you’re typing, what you want to do. So again, the analogy that I tend to use is imagine that you’re sitting next to the smallest developer that you’ve ever known and then they’re pair programming with you, right? You have your hand on your keyboard, you have your hand on the mouse, but they’re saying, “oh, try this.” Or it’s almost like that super smart pet programmer could immediately just paste code snippets into your IDE to help you along. Now, again, it’s not going to replace the human, right? It is very much meant to be something that instead of replacing human developers, it’s meant to be something that works with human developers.
And that’s the power of Copilot. I know that a lot of people are wondering, will AI replace developers? Will AI make software engineering a non viable career option for people? And I think that’s not happening at all. And I mean, that may happen, but it won’t be while I’m alive. Copilot and I think AI in general is really meant to be what can humans and AI do together and not what can AI replace what humans are doing right now?
Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean, the tool is called Copilot, not autopilot. So clearly….
Anjuan Simmons:
Exactly.
Maurice Cherry:
It’s meant to be used sort of in conjunction with what humans are doing. I mean, the AI is not necessarily running itself in terms of prompts and things like that. You still have to have a person that’s sort of checking that. So it sounds like what Copilot kind of helps you do is just evolve your development in terms of, I would imagine productivity, like helping you out with maybe code snippets or things like that. I mean, I’m not a developer. I have done some front-end development. Like back in the day, you don’t remember everything, so you do end up looking stuff up. And that’s not to say that a great developer never has to look those things up, but at least what it sounds like Copilot does is it helps put those resources a bit closer to you to make that happen.
Anjuan Simmons:
Yeah. I mean, the analogy that I use, this used to be a revolutionary thing, but like spell check and grammar check, right? We all use word processors, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, where if you mistype a word, it’ll put a little red squiggly line under the word, or if you do something that’s maybe like where the grammar is off, it’ll highlight that. You can click it, it’ll give you a suggestion. Oh, the spelling, try this spelling or try this grammatical construction. And that hasn’t replaced editors. That hasn’t replaced writers, right? People still have jobs as editors, as copywriters, all that stuff, but it just makes everyone’s work a little bit more correct when it comes to spelling or to grammar. So it doesn’t replace the need for people to actually write stuff, but it does harmonize and make everyone’s writing a little bit better. And I think that just like spell check and grammar check have done for writing and we’ve used these for years and they haven’t destroyed entire careers. Copilot as an AI prep programming tool, it’s just that it makes your work a little bit faster.
It removes really a lot of the friction of you having to go over to a web browser and go to Stack Overflow or to Google “how do I do this region” and “how do I do this? What’s the format for this again?” And so by doing that, you really increase the speed of development by removing friction. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about Copilot.
Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just like I’m glad you mentioned that spell check kind of analogy because when ChatGPT really came about and a lot of educators are really concerned about whether or not, oh, is this going to replace students writing and things like that. The language model is trained off of a lot of different data, but just because it’s trained off that data doesn’t mean that you’re getting a perfect output. I’ve used ChatGPT before and yeah, it gives you information. Whether or not that information is wholly correct is up to the human to discern. Now you can take it just like on its face, like, yes, this is exactly what it is because AI told me that’s the case. But you don’t know if that’s actually cognizant code that you’re actually using. If you’re using like Copilot or something like that, you still have to really sort of do that human check to make sure this is something that actually works. Just because the AI gave that to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something that might work for the particular project that you’re on or anything like that.
So I see what you’re saying about that human element is never going to go away because just because the AI can give you the information that you need, you still need to check to make sure it works for your particular situation.
Anjuan Simmons:
Absolutely.
Maurice Cherry:
Now let’s kind know pivot here a little bit. We’ve talked a lot about your work at GitHub, so let’s learn more about you. Of course, you’ve mentioned your family, which we’ll talk about a bit later, but tell me more about you. I know you’re in Houston right now. Is that where you’re from originally?
Anjuan Simmons:
No, I am from a small city called Wichita Falls, Texas; not Wichita, Kansas, which people often confuse the two. And that’s where I grew up. That’s where I went to middle school. That’s where I went to high school. After graduating from UT Austin, I moved to Houston in 1997, and I’ve been in Houston ever since. That’s again, over like 25 years. So I am a Houstonian now. So I’m a Houstonian by tenure, not by birth.
Maurice Cherry:
That’s like me with Atlanta. Like, you mentioned that when we started recording, you’re like, “you’ve been in Atlanta for a long time?” I’m like, “yeah, I’ve been here since ’99.” I came for college. And I’m like, yeah, Atlantan by tenure, certainly not by birth. And I’ve seen how the city has changed so much since I first came here. So I get exactly what you’re saying.
Let’s go back to your time at Austin. You you majored in electrical engineering. Were you first interested in tech once you got to UT Austin? Or did you kind of have this sort of want to work in know prior to that?
Anjuan Simmons:
I’m going to tell you a story about why representation matters. So when I was in junior high, there was a show called Star Trek I’m sure most people have heard about. I find that most people like Star Wars now for these days, like whenever I mentioned science fiction, they typically say, Star Wars, that’s Star Trek. But that’s another podcast.
I’ve been a nerd all my life. I was into anime way before it was cool. I’m talking like 1995 Fist of the North Star, Akira anime. I’m OG Japanimation right here. And so I was into sci-fi. I read Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings way before the movie. So that was me. I played Dungeons & Dragons. I was that Black kid with the weird people in the corner playing Dungeons & Dragons. So that was my vibe circa like, 1985, just to be honest with you.
But Star Trek, you had the initial series of like, Kirk and Spock and all that. But then around my junior high school years, there was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and you had Captain Picard, who was obviously the captain of the Enterprise, but LeVar Burton played Georgdi LaForge. And the first season, he wasn’t in this position. But he became the chief engineer of the Enterprise for basically seasons two through seven. And so he was the key person in charge of all the technology on the Enterprise during this time. And so I’m in junior high then, going to high school while the seasons are going, and this wasn’t the only reason, but seeing LeVar Burton, a Black man, play a Black engineer in charge of this amazing technology was inspirational, right? Representation matters. And that very much was, like, part of the impetus for me seeing myself as an engineer.
And I was always good at Math and science. I was that kid that loved trigonometry, I loved calculus. I loved physics. And so that was what really helped guide my path to UT. And taking electrical engineering with all the circuit analysis and the math, like differential equations and vector calculus, that helped me see that that was possible. And so I became an engineer. And while I never served on the starship, I’ve loved working in technology for my entire career, and that was a big part of my story. LeVar Burton and seeing a Black man running tech in sci-fi.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, you ended up going to UT Austin kind of, and we sort of touched on this a little bit before, like, right around those prime A Different World years. I think A Different World ended in, what, ninety…’92?
Anjuan Simmons:
I think it ended…that sounds about right, yeah.
Maurice Cherry:
And you started at UT Austin in, what, ’93?
Anjuan Simmons:
I started in 1993. You got it right.
Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Tell me what your time was like there.
Anjuan Simmons:
Yeah, I mean, just to kind of put another finer point on that, I grew up with Dwayne, Whitley Gilbert, the whole gang on A Different World. And again, representation matters. I mean, I was a nerd, but I was also a lover of Black culture, right? I was a blerd — I think we call ourselves blerds now: Black nerds. And yeah, I mean, again, another area of representation was seeing these amazing Black people who were casted on the show about Black kids in college. And that really helped me further solidify that I wanted to be a Black kid in college and have that experience.
And so, yeah, I got to UT in 1993. I actually did a summer program called Preview. This was a program designed to give Black students who, for a variety of reasons, would sometimes struggle with the leap from high school to college. In many ways, they may have been the first people in their families to go to college. And there’s all these things about UT. I mean, I always tell people the year that my mother was born, in 1947, UT did not admit Black students. Right? So she was born into a world where Black students could not go to UT, right? So this is not ancient history. This is, like, within living memory, where Black people could not go to UT. And so Preview was meant to be a six week program. So before classes started freshman year, in that, like, September, we got to UT in July. We lived in dorms, we had events, we learned about college life, and that was an amazing program. And I will always owe a greater gratitude to the people who came up with Preview.
So after Preview, yeah, I started my time going to classes. I had a very hard degree, so I spent a lot of time studying. But UT is a huge campus. We’re talking 50,000 students, but when Black people are like, maybe roughly six or seven percent of 50,000, that’s a lot of Black people. And so I was able to find Black people who I could fellowship with. There’s a lounge in Jester West, which is like the kind of the main dorm on campus called the Malcolm X Lounge, right? Which was called the Malcolm X Lounge back then; I think still called that now. And that was a place where Black people went. We went there to play dominoes, play spades. If you were willing to risk your life, we would play Taboo, which can be a very…I’ve seen some people almost get into a funeral for Taboo, but I very much was able to marry my academic experience and grow as a college student with the very rigorous courses that I took as an engineering student. I was able to marry that with the Black experience. I mean, I went to a Black church that I found in Austin called St. James, and so my active experience at UT was really quite special, quite amazing, because I think we were at a time where that generation of Black students who saw A Different World in high school came together, and it was just really amazing.
Now, I will say that this was also the time when affirmative action was being challenged in Texas, right? There was something called the Hopwood decision, and I was the person who, before that decision was handed down, would protest. I mean, the newspaper of UT is called the Daily Texan, and there are letters that I wrote. You can write letters to the editor. Just anyone can write them if you’re a student. I wrote letters that you could find online to the Daily Texan about affirmative action and about Hopwood and why that decision was really wrong and would cause harm. And I took part in marches and protests about it.
So my college career also involved not only growing as a Black person and enjoying the Black experience, it was my first experience engaging in Black protest and really advocating for Black people as a Black person. So that was all wrapped around my experience at UT.
Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I mean, it sounds like your whole time there was really transformative.
Anjuan Simmons:
Absolutely. Totally.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, after you graduated, you ended up working for Accenture, and you were at Accenture for a long time. You were there for a little over ten years. Tell me about that, because I think for people graduating from college now, working any place for ten years after that almost feels like a fairy tale. What was your time like there? And what made you want to go to Accenture?
Anjuan Simmons:
I should also mention that my wife, my now wife was going to — if she hears this — I met my wife at UT, right? That’s a big part of our story. We did not get married in college because we were young, but that came later. But to answer your question, so when I was in my junior year, my senior year at UT, you’re going into the job search field. And one of the things that I learned about myself at UT is I love technology. I love the ones and zeros, I love code, I love software and all those things are true. But I also really like people. Maurice, I’m not sure we’re talking about my public speaking career; so I’ve spoken on stages all around the world. In fact, I’m going to be in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to give a talk, right? So I very much engage hundreds of people on stage. I am not bothered by that at all. But I’m a classical introvert. I am a classical introvert. Most people don’t believe me because I’m a manager. I live with people all day long, I speak in front of huge crowds, but I’m a very big introvert. So I went to UT as that kind of shy, introverted kid. But being involved in what I just described, the Black experience, that really drew me UT of my shell. And I realized that I really like people.
I felt that one of the biggest things that I like about people is helping people. And so when I was looking at jobs to do, there were like the regular software companies, the people that made circuits like Intel and AMD, and then there were software companies that I was looking at and I got offers from those places. But one of the things I loved about Anderson Consulting — which was the name of Accenture before the name change happened — one thing I liked about the consulting model is that you could dive deep into the technology, but you could also dive into the people as well. Because Anderson Consulting very much was hiring engineers, not just business majors, but engineers to join their technology practice because they felt that you really get beauty when you can marry technology and people.
And so my transformation from this shy, introverted kid when I first went to UT, becoming someone who really likes people very much, informed my desire to go into consulting and to go to Accenture. And then one of the things that I really learned to talk a little bit about my early years there was all around consulting is a great way to learn a lot of things very quickly. I learned in the first two years of Accenture things I probably would have taken me three or four years to learn somewhere else because you’re donating these huge projects, you’re learning how to work with clients, right? People who are paying you to be there to communicate the value of the project, to guide the project. And that was really my first few years of working at Accenture.
I learned how to be a better software developer. I learned how to work on teams, I learned how to be managed by a manager. And that was really very much the early part of my Accenture experience. I was in the Houston office, and there was a very vibrant Black community of Black people who worked at Accenture Anderson at that time. And that also furthered the connections that I made with my fellow Black people in tech. And some of the people I went to UT with went to Accenture as well. And so my experience at Accenture was almost in many ways, like the next version of what I went through in college, right. Deepening my technology bonafides and also deepening my identity as a Black person and being in the Black culture, right? All those things really work together, and I was there for a long time.
I mean, let me pause here and say, if you want to know more, that’s kind of the first, let’s say zero to five years of my time at Accenture.
Maurice Cherry:
What were the other five like?
Anjuan Simmons:
That first five years was learning to be really to be an employee at a large company. I eventually became a manager where I was not being managed; I was managing teams. And so that’s a whole ‘nother level of responsibility. One thing I should mention, and I mentioned that I met my wife at UT, is that I got married around year five. I guess around when I made a manager, I became a manager. That point. My wife and I, who had honestly lost touch a little bit after college, we reconnected, we got married. And so it was learning how to be married, which is a thing, to be honest. I’m still learning how to be married 21 years in, Maurice.
I was learning how to be married, learning how to be a manager, and shepherding people’s careers, learning how to be a technologist. And so that last five year period was all that. But the reason that my time in Accenture lasted that long is that I was learning, and I was learning new things about myself all the time. I was learning new things about technology because the technology field is always changing. I was growing, but I was also traveling a lot. And so my new wife, who we eventually became a wife and my first born child, and then we got to child two. My wife was saying, “you travel too much.” When they’re babies, it’s not like that big of a deal. But when they begin to know who you are and they begin to miss you when you’re gone when Daddy has to go away Monday morning to fly wherever and then come back Friday night, I began to see that, wow, this travel thing is really becoming tough on my very young family. And so I began to think about what to do, right? Should I leave Accenture, go work for maybe a company where I don’t have to travel as much or do I do something else?
And so my wife and I talked about it and we made a family decision that I would leave Accenture and get my MBA. So I went to get my MBA. So that was like a two year period that let me get off the road, it let me also get a credential that would help my career. Those were a lot of the bigger decisions about why I left Accenture at around a kind of ten year mark and earned my business degree.
Maurice Cherry:
So I’m glad that you mentioned that sort of you leading up to getting your MBA, it sounds like each of these experiences just kind of like built upon each other. So it wasn’t oh, I felt like I was maybe edged out at work, so I needed to get more education. Everything is kind of built upon each other. In terms of your career up to this point, I’m curious because you sort of alluded to this a bit beforehand. Was this your plan to kind of structure your career in this way?
Anjuan Simmons:
I wish I could say it was a plan, Maurice, but no, I fell into…I mean, there are these things in this part of my life, right, growing as a technologist, growing as a Black person, and yes, very much going from UT to Accenture to my MBA were growing those things as well. Because a big part, like I said about Accenture, is you marry technology and people. And I would also say when you marry technology and business, that’s powerful, right? So my undergraduate degree in double E [electrical engineering], right, that kind of engineering undergrad was kind of getting the technology part in place and working for a technology practice in a big company. My technology credentials are very strong. I also wanted my business side to get stronger as well. So the MBA was a very nice kind of pair to that.
And so these tracks of technology and business and Blackness, I would say, they all kind of built along very well, but it wasn’t planned. I mean, I was, I think, a very smart person married to a smart person, kind of trying to figure this stuff out. But I have to admit, luck played a factor, right? I was able to stay at Accenture when we had a few rounds of layoffs during my time there. The economy took a nosedive, right? I joined in 1997. A lot of people — if you’re old enough to remember 2000, 2001 — was kind of the dotcom crash. I survived that, kept working. And so luck went my way and I was able to have these themes progress by avoiding a lot of the disruptions that a lot of people go through. I mean, I was thinking through this. Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, yes, I was a smart person, I think, making smart decisions, and I was lucky to be able to, like I said before, be married to a smart person. My wife is brilliant, who was my partner in navigating this part of my life. But I want the people here in this to know one of the biggest things that are so important in your career and in life is luck.
And I think that you can’t plan luck, you can’t schedule luck to appear, but what you can do is do your best to be prepared for when luck appears. And I think that I was very much, if anything, always prepared for luck to enter the chat in my life and then use that luck as the stepping stone to the next opportunity.
Maurice Cherry:
And now, since then, you’ve been pretty much working nonstop. Like looking at your LinkedIn, you’ve mostly worked as a technical program manager, in sort of the pre-GitHub years. What lessons did you learn from those experiences that prepared you for what you do now?
Anjuan Simmons:
Oh, so many experiences and so many lessons. What I would say is that, and I should say I did go back to consulting briefly at Deloitte after my business degree because I graduated in 2008. And the people again, if you want to remember, there was a big recession in 2008 — right? — that lasted through 2009. And so I got a couple of offers when I was studying, when I was applying for jobs, when my business school time was coming to an end. But the best offers, to be honest, came from big consulting companies because I had Accenture on my resume. And so I went back briefly, but soon after that I left the kind of big company model and I’ve worked at startups. So look at my resume. You see these names that weren’t nearly as recognizable as Accenture and Deloitte. You see Assemble. You see Allcenter Software. They’re all technology companies, but they were really startups.
And what I wanted to do and again, this was not entirely planned, but what I wanted to do is experience the startup life because I had friends and colleagues who went to startups, like way before I did, and I wanted to see what could I do in an environment where I didn’t have massive resources, right? When you work for Deloitte and Accenture, you have billions of dollars backing the company. You have a massive number of resources, but when you go to a startup, it’s scrappy, right? Everyone wears a lot of hats. I’m having to lead the technology team, but I’m also having to understand the business. I need to support the product, I need to support HR, I need to support recruiting. And these functions existed at the bigger companies, but they were way smaller at these startup companies.
And so that helped me to understand and really put my business degree to use because I was never going to be able to peer deeply into recruiting at Accenture, but I could at a startup. I could know the person running that function, I could really understand their day to day. I could understand how my technology function really interacted with their non-technology function and see how we can harmonize those things together. And so I would say that the lessons that I learned were all around, really, how do these functions interact with each other. And I also learned how to lead teams better, right? Because at Accenture, and the way as a manager, like, there’s massive resources. When I became a manager at Accenture, I went to something called New Manager School in Chicago, right? So they flew people to Chicago from Houston — really all over the world — to learn how to be a manager, right? I didn’t have that at the startup. It was like, “you better…here’s your log on, good luck.” And so I had to learn how to be a manager at that scale.
And I think that that deepened what I bring to management today, and that is people over process, people over technology. If the people are right, everything else really doesn’t really matter, right? Because if you treat the people right, any technology, any process will do. However, if you don’t treat people right, then no technology or process will save you. And that is a core part of my management style. And it was really birthed in that sort of experience where I had to deeply integrate with this team. Because at Accenture, I’m leading teams, but I’m working on projects that have a beginning and an end. So I have a team for maybe four months and my next team might be six months and my next team might be a month. And then we’re changing technology stacks, we’re changing the business problems that we’re solving, right? It’s all changing. But at these startups, I’m with the same group of people, the same stack, the same product, the same customer base for a very long period of time. And so those lessons were all around how to be really a people manager.
And I think that I’ve gotten feedback from multiple people — people who’ve worked for me, people who are peers, people who I reported to — that my people management skills are very strong and those skills were very much honed and sharpened in the startup world. So that’s a big lesson that I learned during that time. One of the other lessons that I learned is you got to manage up, right? I mean, when I started my career, I was thinking, “well, if the work’s good, then people go and notice, right?” I thought the work speaks for itself. No, work doesn’t have a mouth. It doesn’t speak.
You have to speak for the work. You have to make sure whether that’s in your status report, that’s in how you communicate to your supervisors, and that’s how you really take advantage of opportunities to be in front of leadership. You have to market the work. And so marketing the work as an engineering leader was a huge lesson that we can go into more, maybe later, but it’s very important that technology leaders are proficient in technology, in process, in people management. But you have to market the work, because if you don’t do that, the work is going to be invisible. And invisible work does not get rewarded; invisible work does not get promoted.
Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That, I think, is something that’s super important for people to know, I think, in general. And I mean, one…that’s true, closed mouths don’t get fed, right? But also, just in terms of how much is out there, in terms of social media and user-generated content and things like that, you might hope that the work will speak for you, but it can easily, very easily get drowned out by other things. So I like that you’re saying that, especially for engineering, because I’ve been a creative on marketing teams at very tech heavy software companies, like tech startups and stuff. And yeah, getting the engineers to talk about any of the work they do is like pulling teeth. They don’t want to talk about it. They feel like, “oh, it’s enough that I just did it.” And it’s like, “no, we’re trying to build stories around the work that you’re doing so people know that you did it.”
Otherwise, people — I mean, that’s not to say that people have a negative opinion of tech; I think certainly people’s opinions around technology and the tech industry have kind of changed a lot over the years — but certainly being able to speak about the work that you’ve done and to promote it is something that is super important. That’s for developers, designers, whoever.
Anjuan Simmons:
Exactly. And I really think that goes back to what we talked about with my experience going to UT as an introvert, this shy quiet kid, and learning what you just said. Closed mouths don’t get fed, no matter how good looking you may be as a, you know, the ladies like the Hollywood dude who has game, right? I mean, it’s just little things like that. And so, yes, all those things kind of continue through UT, through Accenture, through business school…you got to market yourself. So many opportunities that I’ve received is because I did interesting things in public all along this timeline that we’ve been walking. Twitter came on, Black Twitter came on, right? And by doing interesting things on Twitter, interesting things on social media, I got speaking opportunities, I’ve gotten job offers through just being interesting in public, right? Marketing yourself.
And I think a lot of engineers — I mean, very much this has been my experience working with a lot of engineers — we very much skew introvert. We very much skew quiet, usually very intelligent, but also very quiet. And you’re exactly right, pulling things out of introverted engineers. And again, I don’t want to stereotype, but it’s an archetype that I’ve seen, and that for whatever makes an engineer engineer, often what comes with it is just this kind of maybe quiet nature. And so I realized that that would hold me back, that in my career, being quiet would not redound to my benefit. And I needed to learn to speak and present not only my work, but the work of my team. And that, honestly, has been a big accelerator to my career in technology.
Maurice Cherry:
What still keeps you interested in tech? I mean, you’ve been doing this now, like you said, for over 25 years. What still drives you?
Anjuan Simmons:
It’s a blessing and a curse. And that is technology is always changing. We didn’t have Copilot, we didn’t have Kubernetes, we didn’t have all these tools. When I started my career over 25 years ago, the tools that I had back then would be considered like rocks and sticks today, for the most part, right? It’s very primitive. I mean, not all of them, right? I mean, a lot of those languages still exist, but there’s so much I don’t know. There’re like so much…just sophistication, I guess, is what I’m looking for, in the tools that we have now.
And so that ever-changing landscape where you have to stay on your toes, the cutting edge, the state-of-the-art is always moving. That can be stressful because you have to keep upgrading yourself. You have to really re-invent yourself at least every two to three years in software development because things change that quickly. And so that can be stressful. It’s so compelling because there’s so many cool things that would be hard to do now using the tools I had when I started my career. I mean, spinning up a development environment with a click; all the tools that we have right now, they’re like higher order languages now that really didn’t exist now. I mean, I learned COBOL and C and all these things early in my career, and those languages are still used today, but there are so many more human-friendly languages like Python and other languages that, I mean, Ruby is a very human-compatible language, right? And so there’s so much power in the accessibility to get into technology now that I’ve seen grow over my time.
And so that evolution and watching it, that keeps me interested. That’s one big thing; it’s just the ever evolving nature of technology. And to be honest, I like people, right? I love helping people find capabilities and potential that they may not have found if I didn’t work with them, right? And I’ve seen in people that I’ve managed over the years, I’ve helped to help debug imposter syndrome. I’ve helped to support, I’ve helped to mentor, I’ve helped to sponsor people and then be able to be that force for what I hope is good is also compelling, right? So those are two things that have kept me intact and they add a bit of a bounce to my stuff every day when I walk into my office.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, I mentioned before how people’s kind of opinion about tech has sort of changed over the years. For developers that are listening,I’m pretty sure they might want to know the answer to this question. But what opportunities do you see out there now for developers? Are there certain skills they need to be learning to stay competitive? I feel like you’re like the sage on top of the mountain. From your perspective, where do you see the opportunities for devs now?
Anjuan Simmons:
The opportunity for devs is like…it has, I don’t think ever been stronger because of a couple of things. One, there are so many engineers that I’ve worked for and work with, right? So as people who were like VPs, or people who reported to me, who did not have the traditional computer science background, engineering background, the same background that I came from, but who were so talented, so brilliant, some of the smartest people who became my right hand as tech leads did not study computer science, right? I’ve had people who were speech pathologists, I’ve had people who worked in retail, worked in bookstores, but they went to a boot camp, they learned how to code, they were great at it, and they became developers. So I think one of the biggest opportunities — and I said it’s the people of color who I think are the primary audience for this podcast and the people who have very much been instrumental in my career — because we often don’t have either the funds or the opportunities to go get computer science degrees from the MITs and the Stanfords of the world. And I’m here to tell you that that’s not really required. You can even be like a self-taught programmer.
I’ve even had people who taught themselves how to code, right? So I would say that the barrier to entry to get in software development has never been lower. There are all kinds of opportunities for people to come into this field and there are people like me who are waiting for you, who are here to welcome you, who are here to support you if you’re willing to come in. And so I would say that these tools are so powerful and the things you need to know to be successful in software development oriented technology in general have never been more available, have never been as powerful. So I would say that’s one thing that you should know. The opportunity is so strong, I hope people feel that they can do it. Because if you’re hearing my voice right now, then you can.
I would say the other thing that is a key part of the opportunity is, yes, there are technical aspects of the trade. Yes, there are things that you’re going to have to learn. There are hard things that you’re going to have to learn. But the number one trait that will keep you in this field, that will help you get in the field and stay, is patience and curiosity. That’s it. It’s not learning object oriented programming or learning highly typed versus not typed code languages or learning the difference between these different things or learning Kubernetes or all these things. But it’s being patient and being curious. If you have those things, if you’re willing to go through…often the thing like this thing isn’t compiling and I don’t know why. Let me figure out let me put in a debugger. Let me figure out how to get it working right. If you’re able to just think, “oh, I’ve always wanted to learn about this,” and then taking time to do that, those attributes would do so much for your career. So if you’re willing to be patient, if you’re willing to lead with curiosity, you can do well here. And I have to say that open source, right? GitHub very much loves open source. I run a program that’s designed, you know, GitHub sponsors for open source. You can learn so much through open source software where you can, with almost no financial outlay, join a project, learn how it works, make contributions. There are so many programs that are basically designed to help people get into open source, where you can upgrade your skills. You can work with teams. You can become a valued contributor to some of the most powerful software on the planet.
So those are the things that I would let people know about this field. The barrier to entry is lower than you think. If you’re willing to be patient, if you’re willing to be curious, if you’re willing to be involved in open source, and I can absolutely help you do that. Please reach out. Please come in. The industry needs you to be honest, and there are many people like me who are here to help.
Maurice Cherry:
Now who have been some of the mentors or peers that have helped you out in your career? I mean, I feel like with everything you’ve mentioned, you’ve probably had a really strong community of support behind you.
Anjuan Simmons:
I’ve been super lucky. I mean…so I was a resident assistant at UT. I was an RA, that person who worked in the dorm, who had maybe the bigger room, who was there to tell you, “hey, turn your music down”, or…I’ve honestly walked in on people who drank too much, helped them stumble to the dorm even though they were underage, right? I was that person. UT, I remember when I applied for the RA job, right? I’m probably 19 years old, right. When I first became an RA, maybe 19, 20.
Maurice Cherry:
Okay.
Anjuan Simmons:
And the person who interviewed me, I think they were the head of housing at UT. I remember her office. If I close my eyes, I can remember sitting in her office, and she said, “you know, everyone who talked to you liked you, but you seem a little bit quiet, right? You seem a little bit reserved.” This person was absolutely right. “We want to give you this opportunity, but you’re going to have to lean into the people part of this because as an RA, you are responsible for residents. Residents are people.” And that was amazing. I mean, that little bit of advice, getting that job helped propel this shy, introverted, nerdy kid into being someone who loves people, right?
And I remember — just kind of fast forwarding a little bit — like, one of the managers I worked for at a project at Accenture was very much, again, similar, started the speech like, “hey, we really like you. You’re doing good work. And if I walk over to the place where you’re working with your team, I can see it. But hey, you need to find ways to let other people know about what you’re doing.” And that goes back to the work that speaks for itself. Like, that manager very much was a mentor to me, and so I’ve had people all along the way give me nudges, give me advice, give me support for things that most people can recognize. If you’re involved in Twitter or in technology, Scott Hanselman has been an amazing mentor of mine, and a friend is a very well known person at Microsoft. Kelsey Hightower, who recently retired from Google, is an amazing person, amazing friend.
They’ve mentored me without knowing it, just by having conversations. I’ve met them at speaking gigs, I’ve met them at different places, and I would say that they have been mentors to me. Neha Batra, who is a VP at GitHub, who’s very well known on the speaker circuit in fact, has been a mentor of mine. She really was one of the people who helped me get into GitHub. I’ve learned so much from her about being a better people manager. I mean, I thought I knew what I was doing when I joined GitHub, but she helped me navigate all the special sauce at GitHub, how to be an even better people manager, better technology leader. So I want to make sure people who you can find on Twitter, you know Scott Hanselman, Kelsey Hightower, Neha goes by nerdneha — I guess we’re calling it X now — on X now, and tons of people who you couldn’t find if you looked for them. But at Accenture, at UT, at Deloitte, at startups…they have been all instrumental in my growth and they all saw the potential in me and they saw where I needed a little bit of a nudge to kind of get to the next level.
They basically helped me receive that nudge. And so I really try to pay it forward. And a big part of what I do in my industry, whether that’s the people who report to me at GitHub or other people within the company, whether it’s being someone who is on the speaker circuit and I meet a lot of people out. When I’m on the road, I look for people who like, oh, that person needs a little bit of a nudge. And that same nudge that people gave to me, I try to give people that nudge and just help them see something that they need to do, give them a map for how to do it, and then supporting them as they find their way to higher success.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, you have three kids you’ve just mentioned at the top of the episode. First one is now in college, second one’s a senior in high school. Third one is a sophomore. Are they sort of interested in tech like you are? Like, do they want to follow in your footsteps?
Anjuan Simmons:
Maurice, I did my best, but you know, they’re into, you know, technology toys, the iPhones, the iPads, the Apple Watches and all. And you know, they play on their Xbox and their PS. But when it comes to a career in technology, like helping to design an iPhone, helping learning Swift to create apps on the iPhone, they all did computer science courses in high school. Like, they learned JavaScript and they learned even just regular Java and all that. But I think that my wife is just more awesome than me. And my wife was an MIS major from the business school at UT for undergrad, and they all want to do business work. So I’m like, “okay. All right.”
Hey. My wife is simply more compelling. And so my oldest son at UT is in the business school. My son, who’s a senior who you mentioned, is also looking for doing business. My daughter is kind of…she’s my only hope. She’s my last hope for maybe getting an engineer out of the family, but I think she’ll probably go to business as well. But, yes, I would say that I failed as a father to launch technologists, but I think that from my household will emerge some amazing business people. I’ll take solace in that.
Maurice Cherry:
Well, you never know. I mean, I think if there’s one thing that people will kind of get from this interview, is that you can kind of take control and take charge of your career at any given point in time. So I think even just with this show in general, there’s no set path to get to where you want to go in terms of your end destination, based on what your values are, things like that. So there could still be time. Don’t count them out yet.
Anjuan Simmons:
That’s true. I should be more hopeful. So, yeah, you’re right. I’ll never give up on my kids and their future. So you’re exactly right. And you’re exactly right with your career. I mean, one thread that I’ve learned, that I wish I learned earlier, is that your career is not something that happens to you, right? You have agency, you have volition, and then you can take that next step, right? And so, yeah, there may be people who support you. Hopefully the people give you the safe nudges that I receive, but you also can study the game and learn how to play it better.
And that’s something I’ve been lucky to do.
Maurice Cherry:
Now, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?
Anjuan Simmons:
That is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So if you think about just the career ladder, right? So I’ve gone from individual contributor — or IC, as we say — to manager or eng manager, to senior eng manager, to staff eng manager. And so if you look at most ladders, the next level would be like director, VP, maybe going up to maybe above that. So I think that that’s probably where I want to go. I mean, like I said earlier, what’s kept me in this industry is the way that it’s always changing. There’s always new toys, always new tools, and then there’s also people, right? People to help and people that hopefully that I can impact in a positive way. And so I would say that’s probably from a career perspective, what I’m going to do with my professional career, which is go up that level. I’ve been honestly a little bit hesitant because I do think that the further I get away from the technology, from the people doing their work, the more I may be less motivated.
Because again, I love code, I love software, I love helping people build software. And as you go up toward VP, you’re really far away. I mean, the technology is like a speck on the horizon, and then you’re seeing politics and business and all that stuff. And while I can do that, I’ve been reluctant to do that. But that’s where you have impact, right? That’s where you can impact not just a team of maybe ten engineers, that’s where you can impact a department of hundreds. I think from a professional standpoint, that’s where I see myself going outside of work. I mean, I love public speaking. I have a lot of cool gigs booked for the rest of this year.
I think doing more of that, that’s really what I love doing. And I still love writing, a fair amount of technical writing that gets published. But if I could wave a magic wand and then kind of change the percentages, I would make work maybe a smaller percent of what I spend doing, and speaking or writing a bigger percentage of what I spend doing.
Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your speaking, your writing and everything…where can they find that online?
Anjuan Simmons:
One of the things that is really lucky about having a fairly unique first name is that you can find me at Anjuan at a lot of places, right? That’s Anjuan. Anjuansimmons.com is my website. That’s kind of my home base. But you can find me on Twitter, or — sorry, X — or Threads or wherever you go. If you search for A-N-J-U-A-N you will probably find me and please reach out. You can follow me. You can connect with me again. I’ve grown into a person who loves people.
I’m always happy to do what I can to help people become better versions of themselves because my entire career has been becoming a better version of the person that I am. And so please reach out. I would love to connect and continue this conversation on other platforms.
Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Anjuan Simmons, thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, one, thank you for just sharing your story about how you’ve gotten to where you are, but also from talking about the work that you’re doing at GitHub. And like we sort of mentioned throughout this interview, the thing about your career is that you’ve really kind of owned it, you know what I’m saying? At any place where you’ve been, whether it’s been just getting out of college or getting your MBA and then going to what the next step is, it sounds like you’ve really owned your career, like, every step of the way. And I hope that that’s something that when people listen back to this, they’ll get that they can do that for themselves as well.
Anjuan Simmons:
Absolutely. Like I said, there was a fair amount of luck, but there was also a lot of intentionality. If you listen to this, you can be more intentional in your career. I hope that what you’ve gotten from this interview that that’s very much possible. Let me give you your flowers. Maurice, I want to tell you before I leave, Revision Path matters. It’s important. You’ve done an amazing job.
Please keep doing it. You touch lives in ways that you will probably never, ever know. So I love what you’re doing here. Please keep doing it. And I love being here. Thank you so much for giving me space on this podcast.
Maurice Cherry:
Oh, well, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for that, and thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.
Anjuan Simmons:
Awesome.
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