Run Toward Something - Career Growth, Mentorship & Work-Life Balance with Dave Schwantes

Summary
Career growth through mentorship and work-life balance with Dave Schwantes, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. Brittany and Dave explore why running toward meaningful work beats running from burnout, how mentorship became his primary form of engineering leverage, and what career happiness actually looks like across different life stages. From Instacart and Couchsurfing to building in-house bootcamps, Dave shares how sustainable engineering culture beats individual productivity hacks—and his take on how AI tools reshape what engineers really need to master.

Links
• Dave's personal site: dinosaurseateverybody.com
• Don't Break Prod (bite-sized career advice): dontbreakprod.com
• Grave Danger (Dave's spooky ska band) on Bandcamp: gravedangerskath.bandcamp.com
• Dave on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/dorkrawk.bsky.social
• Dave on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidschwantes
• Dave on GitHub: github.com/dorkrawk
• Web Dev Challenge Episode: youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw
• The Engineer Manager Pendulum article: charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pe…

Host
• Overcommitted: overcommitted.dev
• Brittany Ellich: brittanyellich.com