Transcript for:
Getting Hired as a Software Engineer

we are all here today to talk how to get hired get your cameras on if you want to ask questions I ain't answering questions otherwise actually that's fine you can but do get your cameras on thank you Mason what a wonderful Visage is that pronounced who knows uh let's open the chat if you get any messages people yeah hi Karen hi Josh hi Jay lovely to see you all you all look Fab hi Sofia Fab to see hi Rick Miguel to anami Fantastic uh sorry toan animi lovely to have you Alysa oh wonderful people uh what a pleasure to have Kyle well done look a movement is beginning here people uh Adolfo welcome I think I recognize you ad Doo but welcome back if so lovely to have you uh put in the chat people I'm going to open the chat up uh it is now open it should be if anyone messages you saying anything unpleasant uh you know or uncomfortable or I have to say that but we have uh we have a wild person on the internet who has made it their life Destiny to come in and uh cause issues for you all so if anyone does uh say anything unpleasant to you please hi Rick welcome uh please do uh message me and we will remove them but for now if you put in the chat uh hello and where you are in the world and uh where you are in your I guess software engineer in Journey um and where you found out about the talk so yeah where are you look at that hype enthusiasm from me I keep thinking I listen to some of the Tik Tok voices and I'm like I wonder if my tone of voice will end up sounding like you know when you listen to news reporters historically and you're like why do you sound like some you're doing so much and I listen to you know the latest Tik Tok the one where you know it's like a good embodiment of it is uh what's her name um Sydney Sweeney sorry know exactly I'm talking about they just shouted out for me Sydney Sweeney bringing like nothing to the tone of their voice but of course what they just think is they're bringing you know a new sound and you know when you hear like the people in the 50s they do all do too much like in broadcasting if you don't do that you're not doing less than you're just not doing something from a very old fashioned sound I wonder if I'm going to sound like that maybe ready okay where are you uh what stage in software engineer Journey and where did you find this Workshop there we go and we people today are going to explore together uh uh uh uh uh uh um how to get hired in this era based on some of the insights from codesmith which is the coding school that I run uh we run which we run because it is a rather uh not only do I uh run a um coding school and teach in that program I also have to run the company and so I just get hilarious messages from uh people that is the nature of running a company okay here we go we're going to talk how to get hired in this era I'm so delighted to have so many friendly faces on the chat we a wonderful co-host with me Nester cayanan who is a alumni adviser at COD Smith a part-time fellow a graduate of Franciscan University of Stubenville uh in with a masters in theology what what a great background people what a great background uh but let's get started and screen share my messages are closed good here we go uh so we'll spend a couple of minutes talking uh about code Smith given they are the sponsor of this work shop and then we will dive into oh no that's not the there you go Nesta there we are uh then they will gu we will dive into how to get hired as a software engineer in this era uh I was talking to my partner a few minutes ago and said how can it be that software engineering uh is the the hiring is uh while not perfect still very much there um you know if you look on the Cod Smith homepage this was just in a 60-day period uh you know just like lot of offers lot of opportunity but the commentary online remains uh not in the best place but finally things are even starting to evolve on that front uh we had an Alum who announced a bunch of hiring at Google for software engineering positions I'll be honest there a't been much hiring at Google for software engineerings for a bit so things are feeling good but how uh do you get hard as a software engineer in this era so step one what is it to be a great software engineer in this era what are the things you need to have step two where can you do it where would you do it uh we'll see that primarily um for one thing you know hybrid or remote um for another thing you're probably going to find the industries that are hiring most aggressively right now are things like finance and Healthcare uh all of that sign sign to evolve again why would you do it it isn't a Gold Rush right now although it is a lifelong opportunity to be honest and then how do you get paid to do it which I'm sure is a lot of uh your all goals to learn in this session but also I want to hear all in any questions you have people including I'll just put right now immediately in my LinkedIn so you can DM me with questions uh oh we're even probably live streaming aren't we let's just check the live stream all how do we do that do on my phone um so we can check the live stream as well where's my phone here we go and we can answer all any of your questions use this people as a chance to send me your resume send Nester your resume nesta's advis many alumni on their uh approach to their careers so send Nester DM Nester your resume in here as well um that's fine and then you've got my linked in there uh let's make sure we're hitting people's needs in this Workshop a quick look here at the um at the uh Karen do I feel like I thought I knew that name we've had maybe some other people like do is a maybe a typical Vietnamese name so maybe I'm overthinking that but welcome Karen is it a Vietnam I think it's Cambodian anyway sorry maybe we've had someone else the last name do but welcome Caren uh yesu Fab lovely that's great is that CS Cod Smith or computer science uh the number one major of people admitted into Cod Smith is computer science so it could be either uh Acron acon Acron sorry is it acon the Ohio big town I don't know the name been answered one second I have my coffeee now uh thank you Mitchell welcome uh in the industry looking for job market it's brutal uh let's talk strategies Mitchell to get you there um great off Meetup love it uh cambrio welcome uh yeah ad Doo uh Battleship Battleship with vanilla JS fabulous Sofia um hoping to find an internship most cith grads don't take internships they take you know mid-level roles that being said two recently did do start internships with um Brian Holt who is some of you will know um one of the most prominent people out there in um in the tech industry so I want to go and look up he's super super cool Mentor uh runs ran all of vs code when at Microsoft pretty cool uh okay great Carl so a lot of people with a really good uh extensive experience welcome Christian uh sorry take a bit of time I want to make sure that we're hitting on everybody's backgrounds uh Aiden CSG grad fantastic and Michael Toronto devops okay my need to listen to people talk about software while I'm sitting here coding with co-pilot it's comforting that's sort of hilarious but great all right people um let's get going so uh we'll talk about what makes a great software engineer at this point because that is both going to hopefully be a oh sorry got to spend a couple of minutes talking about what couth is it's a uh program that uh what's it called uh become yeah it's a program that teaches uh you to be a software engineer but some unusual quirks that don't make it sound quite like your typical coding boot camp so while the language you learn is Java script typescript over half of grads people like um Nester I don't know nesta's stack but don't even use JavaScript they use these other languages uh that should also be assigned to all of you on what makes a great software engineer it's that versatility students funny to call them students when they're actually contributing to tools that tend to flow again everything here you can do yourselves without doing codesmith if you do Cod Smith you know you're required to do these things to help position yourself as a software engineer but you can do this yourself you can contribute to open source software like tensorflow the main uh still main neural network interface or uh platform for uh uh development but this is tensorflow.js the implementation of it in the web browser and then also again a coding boot camp and yet the number one incoming major is computer science curious place but I think somewhere that uh is designed and to quickly you know give you a sense to meet the moment of today where software Engineers do need uh to be ready to work across diverse tools um work with fast changing tools and work on things that previously were not even really software isable uh so think about things like legal advice Finance advice Healthcare advice this is a remarkable time to be a software engineer albeit as uh one of our members in the chat just said whoa you know job search is harder my goodness than it was uh so what are the things that make a great engineer well we're going to see in a second but they're the things we look for in candidates for codesmith so we won't dwell on those right now instead we'll talk about them um in a moment uh just for those who are interested given that kosma sponsors this event uh these are the things that we focus on in the program a style of teaching that makes you able to learn any new tool and able to navigate your job search for the rest of your career uh you see that in the description of one of the alumni here Cod Smith grads working with a degree of scale that's possible because they're understanding under the hood of how these Technologies work you don't do your standard kind of react boot camp type thing uh with Frontier technology so the program is pretty heavy into enabling you to be a full stack engineer which we'll see in a moment a full stack engineer the stack is front end backend infrastructure Dev tooling and integrating prediction prediction is the um purest way of phrasing ai ai is using prior data to make predictions about the future um that future might be the right answer to a given question that data might be the best set of words to respond to a set of words or question so that Frontier technology um and then the community is the other big part that makes it work so obviously a lot of um graduates of the big schools UCLA NYU but also alongside people who took a different path uh did know higher education so a really supportive Community because if you want to truly grow as someone who can learn any new thing you've got to hit a a lot of blocks in the program you're not in codesmith to learn you're in cith to learn how to learn to do so you need a community of people supporting you through that and it generates these uh unusual outcomes for a coding boot camp is why I never like the term but you're also try to see some real diversity of outcomes which is exciting it's your classic software engineer for sure uh you know a bunch of grads get senior software Engineers Str out the program um but also roles like this and uh as I said another one that caught my eye down here this offers recent offers obviously you know some grads get machine learning engineer but look at this one here cognitive software engineer I don't I think it's a generative AI software engineer working at the intersection of software engineer with tailoring customizing uh gpts okay so that's codesmith uh Nester you've got 30 seconds so that we can move into the um content of today's workshop on how to get hard as a software engineer where we're going to cover the things that go into being a great software engineer uh where you can prioritize your search uh why you're doing it and reminding yourself and then how do you go about using particularly this flashcard approach to maximize your conversion rate at every stage of the job search from a place of Integrity a lot of us understand that we do not feel comfortable with um misrepresenting ourselves overselling ourselves how do you from a place of Integrity from a place of earned status in the job search make sure that people know you are worth their time so we're going to go through that as well but before we dive to that uh Nester I'm going to shut up for a second I'm going to mute myself and pass to you to introduce yourself as I hope somebody who can answer people's questions respond in the chat with advice and even um yeah give people advice on their careers ahead thanks will wow 30 seconds 30 seconds of Fame hey everyone my name is Nester cayanan uh I am currently a full-time software engineer at SRC Inc um I work full-time remote it's been I I attended Cod Smith I did the part-time program from September 2022 no December 2022 to uh September 2023 um anyways yeah it you know lot lots of things here that will will say uh one of the things that I want to emphasize is he's going to talk about you know becoming problem solvers being um uh having good technical communication and that I believe were two of the skills that really I uh focused on during my job search and I really do believe that those were the reasons why um the company hired me and why they were so um yeah why they like me so much uh since I only have 30 seconds I will just stop here and I'll say um you know if you have any questions please send them in the chat after this workshop I'll also make sure to follow up with each and every one of you and if you'd like to talk to me more um we could schedule time will back to you thanks for the 30 that was fantastic Neer thank you so much um yeah people I was just thinking uh yeah really really great in the room and there's other people like Nester who I'm just seeing for example to andimi uh there's a couple of grads who went to the same school it's worth you know talking to your own uh people who went to the same school but also you know kouth alums who were in the industry just a talk strategy um but enough of that let's dive in please throw questions in the chat people if you feel nervous to do so DM me if you feel even more nervous to do so um Technologies work you don't do your standard I'm just opening my recording of this to see if I can see if we can see the chat in there so if people have chat on the yeah okay great thank you welcome Josh I'm seeing you on the YouTube stream uh okay how to get hard what is a modern software engineer we're going to see at its primary core people and you already heard it there from Nesta and I would strongly recommend and maybe Nester can share the video link of this a fireside chat I did honestly actually both of them people sorry uh it's it's kind of nuts how much these are the days of technical communication the far I chat with Brandy Richardson so she graduated code Smith it must have been three four years ago three years ago two years ago three years ago anyway she uh got a mid-level job at Microsoft um soon after graduating she's now moved to Google but she said everything firstly there's a lot of bsing in the industry so one of the big things to stretch yourselves is to recognize that a lot of people talk a lot about how much they know uh and actually it's funny last week I did a workshop that on the audience in the audience with someone called Rico Rodriguez Collins who who was at a Meetup that I went to at Yahoo's office in Los Angeles 10 years ago where then my then partner before I uh realized I was a a raging queer uh my then sis female partner was in the audience and they were passed over by this speaker who was passing out their you know business cards for potential software engineers and this person Rico called that out and said excuse me why are you skipping over this person and I didn't think they were going to be an engineer that put that's obviously you know pure Prejudice but also it speaks to there is a uh there is a Insider Outsider a lot of talk and a so go watch things like brandy Richardson who describes in her far side chat she went to coith her brother went to coith now at human human uh her friend went to coith now at Zoom her other friend went to co now at IBM and I have to con as I said at the end I'm so grateful um I a call actually last week with a new faculty member of kouth called Jim pinkelman Jim is a 20 years at Microsoft you senior research he like what can I really do to help Co I'm like it's a permanent campaign of convincing people of their validity if you take away one thing from this talk it's that a lot of people myself included um are overstating a lot of the time or you're at least interpreting and you might call this impostor syndrome I don't know I don't know if I use that term per se but people are constantly uh figuring it out and I am so grateful to people like brandy who can from a position of authority she's at Google she was a software engineer hired straight to mid level at Microsoft we stand there and say to you I don't know what's going on and a lot of people don't know what's going on the job is to figure it out and be able to explain it to other people and Brian Holt who is this famous you know head of vs code Microsoft and now head heading up you know technology and product at SQL light um said the the the thread running through all of his time in all these positions he's worked at he was engineer number I don't even know 10 at Reddit 29 people at Reddit when he joined he built reddit's front end he decided it would be done in react he's the person then he went to Netflix where he built out much of Netflix front end then he went to Microsoft leading VSCO it actually went to LinkedIn briefly as well uh then to snowflake I think like these are and he said the thing defining every single moment was technical communication the most important class he ever took he said was the technical writing class he took at his college that's what all the workshops for codesmith are about to get into the program that's what the program is about that's what you all can do by things like pair programming by I would be honest if you can force yourself talking to chat you be back and forth that's a real thing but that's what really so what is a great modern software engineer it's going to be primarily these capacities to problem solve and communicate technical ideas that's what makes you good the problem is it's hard to communicate that in a hiring process we'll talk about how to show that uh because unfortunately you might you've not all of you been on the other side of the hiring but writing I have five plus years experience in react it's like thousands of people are writing that and that's not oh my God I can't get hired that's oh my goodness I need to realize what people are really hiring for and it ain't five plus years experience in react and this can actually be really uncomfortable for people as we have in the room with eight plus years experience in let's say react because it's like well that should be enough right and it's like yeah but they're not hiring for eight plus years experience in react they're hiring for confidence that you are the kind of person who can solve their problems whatever the tools going to be because it's going to change and help them understand how and why you're doing it because they're paying a lot of money and they got to trust you eight plus years experience in react does or does not say that you can do that ability to explain some of the difficult problems you solved which happen to be done with react that's what they're going to hire you for okay so it's pivoting that mindset wonderfully universalizing as well people it means if you can show them that it doesn't matter if you got eight plus I mean you're probably going to have more experiences of solving problems but you could have a ton of great experience solving problems doing open source work you know doing problems of your own Mak problems of your own making in your own work um automating stuff on your job building out a client for you know a piece of your current marketing job in react on the side they're all going to give you stories of how you solve problems and you can explain it well you are what they're looking for of course a person with eight plus years hopefully has a ton of great stories to tell of how they've solved harder problems but it's not the eight plus years experience of react it's hard to even know what that phrase means experience solving problems are but then you better give me some of them explain them to me okay all right so on that note nevertheless let's have a map of high value tools but you know this is what a full stack engineer looks like which is the increasingly we'll see in a moment in terms of hiring at least obviously C Smith is biased towards this the typical gradate work goes into a software engineer or full stack essentially full stack software engineer position here's the stack you got front end that's the stuff you see on the screen it is not just pixel pushing making it look in the right position it's determining what to display when it's determining when a user click something like if I highlight this double tap it that is a complex evolution of state and view state is the data behind the scenes the data is is this highlighted is just this bit highlighted is the select key here or is the select key here or is the select key highlighting here that's called state or data it's the information about the current APP stuff going on in it at that moment but then you got view view is the pixels you see they have to be corresponding you have to be the same so under the hood it has to know right now that this bit's highlighted under the hood it has to know the text that's in this screen and then what you see on the screen has to be the same that's your front end and you know what's displayed needs to look nice um your backend servers and databases is where does all the stuff you see on the screen come from it's not originally on your computer or if it is you wrote it and then it's loaded onto sent to a server computers maybe at in this case Google's headquarters but it you know could be anywhere LinkedIn might be on Azure Microsoft headquarters uh that's the code written by developers to uh serve up the information for a web page like this or app and or or mobile app whatever and the datab bases storing all of that information the trillions the trillions probably trillions of tweets or at least information about tweets um I don't even enough web systems here I guess it's like kind of really tied into front end um okay then the next big bucket in full in the stack the stack is people the uh buckets of tools you use to build stuff in software the next big bucket is infrastructure that's the stuff that helps uh get your code that you write as a developer onto the internet ready to be used to load up websites to extract user data to I don't know whatever uh not extract user data extract a user data from a database and you know log the user in the infrastructure is what gets that code running on not one computer because Twitter couldn't run on one computer but a lot of servers the infrastructure is a vastly important part of the process of a modern software engineering uh skill set you might call it devops as well it's a incredibly important part of being a mod engineer in fact arguably is where a lot of the wrestling and problem solving has to happen if you're building I don't know uh working in a Health Care System you've got hundreds potentially of different um infrastructural components in your Tech system across a hospital alone there might be stuff on Prem that means on the premises there might be stuff in the cloud there might be stuff in private Cloud there might be yourself in public Cloud you know as vastly complex developer tolling this is what helps make you as a developer as efficient and fast as possible then there's the ml Jason stuff this is the productized prediction I call it so um in my book that I'm working I'm enjoying at the moment on deep learning what's the first section all about I don't know maybe it's a different book oh yeah it's a different book people yeah different book anyway this because this is a more sort of intuitive intuition driven book but there's a fancy book on um machine learning and deep learning that starts all in one place prediction it is all prediction so how do you build prediction into your products well llms are predicting based on large collections of how language has been used on the internet how it should be used in a response to your question it's a prediction so productizing making it user usable by a user right that is not just like any other part of the stack that's not just service databases although a lot of it is deploying models the predictors onto servers but there's a bunch of other principles around it that is what it requires to be a full stack engineer now it's in the cith program but you can basically screenshot here and make sure you've got the knowledge of these areas make sure you've got good intuitions on how a data pipeline is built make make sure you got some good ideas about what are the practices around deploying models uh and then ideally maybe have some intuitions around large language models there's a bi-weekly workshop at COD Smith on those intuitions on large language models because now you do want to as a full stack engineer be able to control tribute to a core piece of the product that has some different principles to front end and back end and that's this ml piece you're not being an ml engineer although some of you could uh increasing number of applicants to codesmith are data scientists doing Cod Smith to pick up the engineering piece to become an ml engineer but you got to have enough data science understanding to do that um and then finally you pick your programming language this is the Contemporary tool kit of being a fullstack engineer you want to be t-shaped that means you have a decent map of how these things fit together when you hear Jango you go okay I can see how that fits into the ecosystem when you hear kubernetes you're like ah got it that's going to be allowing me to programmatically write code to treat a collection of different uh servers or instances as something that I can scale up scale down uh treat as different components within an overall system and write code to tell them what to do as opposed to individual units in a program they can I can have whole runtimes and even whole you know virtual machines or whole instances of a server be added or removed are there alternative ways of doing that is to get a full map that's the that's the bridge of the te that's the kind of a top you know a te is like you want to have some knowledge across a whole range of areas but then you want to have some area that you become really strong in I would actually for all of you recommend well I don't know some of you all know already if you've got been around for a bit you might have something you really dug under the hood of um you know Cod Smith people tend to lean heavily on whatever they did in their major open- source contribution bit of the program if they built some visualizer for Docker use then they're probably pretty good at Docker but you can also make it it can be anything you want it could be you're just total expert in asynchronous program architecture so maybe you read a ton of Articles watch a ton of videos and maybe experimented with and maybe taught others on how goang implements asynchronicity that's very legit stem because what it does is it's going to show you and anyone you're interviewing with that you can become an expert in something plus also it changes your way of thinking to go that deep on something makes you able to go deep on other things okay there's your map but uh as I said over half a gr ues don't use the main programming language they learn at codesmith JavaScript and typescript which must suggest that there's something a heck of a lot more important than the tools Tech and languages you use because how can you get a job if you don't even have you know the given language that you learned at your coding boot camp in the job description because more important or at least as important sorry not more important at least as important as your domain knowledge this is your knowledge is your understanding of the principles behind software engineering so I'm not going to dwell on these besides to say uh it's what's really happening what's really happening when code runs what's really happening why do you use classes what's the real benefit and if you've done a computer science degree some of you might be like ah I know it's to organize my code or it's to achieve encapsulation or abstraction be a but like feel why you know youve maybe book learned that but like why would you want to encapsulate your I don't know functionality in your data you why would you want to have them bundled together and that's also the design architecture principles and principles to try and keep your code clean and uh easy to pass off to other people without it breaking and as you have more users for not to break it because of scale issues okay so next bucket these are your key software engineering principles uh if you want to get really good at how code executes really under the hood including functional and oop approaches uh recommend the hard Parts workshops at of codesmith um but yeah design patterns and uh are just as important and more permanent much more permanent than the given tools okay and it's really fun actually people I think one of just if I give you one key takeaway from this slide nothing you learned in in your computer science degree nothing you learned at COD Smith is um Truth uh it's not I'm not even sure if you know this is a thing to wrestle with in physics that we apply mental models to help us reason about complexity in physics that is incomprehensible you know a parabola the movement of an object through Space controls for a a ton of other things going on and in fact one can think about modeling a parabola you know this thing as being a tool for us as humans to do stuff to make our lives easier to explain the world okay well bloody l in computers it's definitely that all the features that you've ever learned object-oriented programming I don't know closure uh composability like every feature you've ever learned uh oper you know turnery operator async function they're all designed by people I know that famous Steve Jobs quote no smarter than you well I think they're probably smart smarter than me but you know not to be they probably are like you know very very quick people but they're designing those tools to try and make your life easier to try and simplify complexity to try and make you as an engineer more effective async functions are not truth turn operators aren't truth their efforts by an engineer or a program language designer to try and make your life easier the principles of software engineering and all these features here are desperate efforts to try to make the reasoning of the human mind able to deal with the vast complexity of a codebase always know that people right that's and that's why if we think about you know the hope that there can be in some future more human language type ways of instructing machines to build Out programs which would be exciting and promising it it's always going to be a process of Designing to try to make you more performative you the developer more efficient and balance complexity and the flexibility that comes with that with Simplicity and the narrowness and specificity that comes with that these are the kind of trade-offs so just remember nothing is true in programming it's all design efforts with an intention to try and make your life as an engineer easier um I mean there are I guess I don't know yeah truth data structures but they're still trying to make your life easier Okay so we've already hit on the principles of an engineer uh the principles of engineering best practices engineering principles but also a growth mindset and resilience I would you know stretching the term there principles a bit your knowledge your technical knowledge of Frameworks tools and then three other areas that we at least at codesmith Value but from everything I've spoken to every you know distinguished engineer in in my community and I do get to you know interview them and present with them and talk give talks with them on engineering um as important as your principles and your domain knowledge are particularly these two engineering problem solving can you take a complex need specification not even specification you got to figure it out first half the time and identify the possible implementation opportunities ways you can build it in Tech in software that is your job as a software engineer to convert the need into software people it can be as Grand as build application that solves healthcare issue in you know end to end to we're trying to work out how to ensure that this notification is not automatically sent on a space Creation in a Dropbox instance to collaborators suggesting it's a new space as opposed to just a shared sharing of an existing space that's a very real example that my friend shared with me they were working on like narrow narrow narrow narrow narrow you as the engineer need to understand what's possible in that code your principal engineer won't know it that's engineering problem solving you've got to also be able to explain it to your colleague to your boss to the QA lead you the person who checks that it's still working to the business lead to the user through the errors to the user that's technical communication can you get your conception of that complex thing you're wrestling with into the head of somebody else and it's on them to focus and hear but it's primarily on you and it's your effort and it's effortful to get that conception of that thing into their head it could be by the way doesn't have to be spoken could be writing uh a couple of weeks ago someone said hey you know doesn't always come naturally to me the spoken no problem it as much as anything it's great written documentation fliping fantastic as Brandy shared it's you know or or maybe English is your second language you know no problem it's great written it's great diagramming the reason she got leveled up in her interview Brandy at Microsoft this is a graduate as I say from a few years ago and who I did a fireside chat with a few weeks ago the reason she got leveled up was great system design diagramming okay so technical communication and problem solving these are the two Superstar engineer qualities we'll talk about how to show them off in a moment there's another implication of them that's really important in a hot Market definitely less important to show the person who's hiring you how focused and dedicated and above and beyond hardworking you will be because it's damn they just take somebody who can do some problem solving in a tougher Market you want to be someone who they respect as a very talented Problem Solver respect is a very talented communicator but that's only half the story we'll see in the green slides in a moment that half of what they're hiring for and that you had to persuade them of to make them pay you money money to do it is how dedicated and how much care you will bring to the problems they have doesn't matter how great a problem solver you are how greater communicated you are if you're not able to show them when you're interviewing all they want to hear people and I've hir enough you know technical technical adjacent roles myself is like there is a bad Temptation in software engineering and in technical adjacent roles to say hey I can do these lists of technologies that you've heard of I can do I in let's say technical adjacent I can do Google ads ga4 or whatever you know like ga4 I can do this it's like yeah but every other person says they have that list of Technologies I need someone who's going to I'm going to be confident they're going to do the emotional work in his emotional labor to help me understand my problems and do all they can to solve them the badass thing about showing experience in problem solving and stories of it we'll talk about how to prepare stories of it in a moment and showing experience and ability in communicating difficult technical stuff is that they're hard things to do meaning if you can show and tell stories of having done them you're automatically showing the person interviewing you or the person you're applying to you are somebody who not only has the key capacities that make a great engineer great Problem Solver because you know what the problems are yet Great Communicator with them because I want to make sure you're actually working hard on them and that you can convince me if you've got that experience that you are someone who is dedicated because I don't know how you solve difficult problems and build stories of having done so I don't know how you explain difficult things to people without a fair bit of emotional labor a fair bit of hard work and that's half of what they're hiring for which is why I would encourage all of you to focus so much on Building stories of difficult problems you've solved not lists of Technologies not domain knowled you know you can't solve difficult problems without showing domain knowledge you can't solve difficult problems without applying smart principles but that you focus your attention on preparing stories of difficult problems you've solved and the how and the why what were the intentions of often in terms of by the way in engineering principles you know we were trying to improve scalability we were trying to ensure that the code was better Inc capsulating our I don't know state for this part of the application um you want stories of how you've used those principles to solve difficult problems they show the key things that make a great engineer and they show that you're bothered because they're hard things to show that you've done okay so there we go that's what makes a great engineer you want to have those stories the best thing you can prepare in your job in the work you do now is opportunities to develop those sorts of stories doing hard stuff it's why it can be really nice to have users in any application You're Building because that gives you the chance to solve hard stuff because users have a hell of a ability to click silly things and make your life hard as an engineer which you have to solve but it's not the only way If You're Building open source tools for others or contributions or hackathons whatever you end up solving hard stuff but find the hardest bit and that's the story you want to tell because that's what they're hiring for and then explain it well and practice that explaining because that's what they want to see okay so that's what makes a great modern software engineer more than the tools all the more because right now we're in a period where those tools are evolving where you have people getting hired for cognitive software engineer in the you know mid 100 case salary what is I try to look it up I can't find any job description what these things are because the tools are going to change so fast they exploratory roles let a sure you know front end focused full stack engineer maybe it's primarily react but maybe they're doing a custom version of it maybe like many they're starting to roll off react and considering other Alternatives uh you know it's always evolving okay let's talk uh quickly through these bits here before we then do a pause for questions so please throw your questions in people know that we're about to hit how do you persuade other people of your ability in these things okay uh so next section where can you do it well basically every firm is a tech firm at this point um Finance healthc care uh conglomerates definitely have not been hiring but they are now starting to hire again this is the last 500 offers out of code Smith up until about January 2024 and you can see while there's a lot of still sort of generic software industry maybe software as a service tech infrastructure there's also a lot of finance a lot of healthcare and biotech even automotive and Aerospace a lot of media and entertainment um so really anywhere and the key thing is people you don't necessarily need to feel godamn it I've gone to Walmart labs I wish I were at Amazon I'd have a much better engineering culture and maybe professional opportunity afterwards at this point part of the consequences of some of those layoffs which while they were not more than about 20% software Engineers during that boom in layoffs in 22 to 23 there was still a bunch of taled software Engineers those have become the Bedrock of the engineering teams at the JP Morgans the capital ones why are they going so hard on Tech a few reason one is there's opportunity you know there's lot of opportunity to to succeed as an organization doing so the other is they're threatened by the rise of the tech firms entering markets like Finance entering markets like healthcare Amazon spent 4 billion doll on one medical to get into healthcare Apple has a 100 million potential Apple Finance customers and you bet JP Morgan goes shoot if we don't protect ourselves they're coming for customers so their growth as legitimate teams of Engineers with a great engineering culture which is also affecting their brand among the engineering community members is very clear and that's exciting that means you can go and work well sure in finance if you'd like to I saw a couple of grads recently goes called Sixth Street and flick you know Finance Tech don't have look after people um in terms of opport in terms of uh you know whatever conversation whatever um but you can also go work in healthcare and work on the front line of healthcare as a softare engineer building tools that improve Healthcare provision um Nesta may know Al Lum called Gio who's working in healthcare at a mental health company as a software engineer you know you can really go all over now probably you're largely going to be focused on um remote which is half of graduates and hybrid roles if you want on-site only which is very reasonable to want it's definitely harder and then software engineer is the standard one at least out of codesmith but just know that there's a proliferation of new roles things like product engineer uh things like these you know this analytics engineer role is a fusion frontend and analytics role um Cyrus here who's senior software engineer Tesla is doing you know something almost as close to technical product management or program management as to software engineering leading creation of new products building them out but also leading the creation of them so and of course this role here I think you can probably tell which I think is so Fascinating People check this out this job here required two years of python backend experience let me you know be really clear there people cith does not teach python um so what the heck is happening there well well again it's about the ability to problem solve at that level and show your ability to problem solve but also this job required that you had a JD which for those who aren't in the academic world is a law degree imagine how I mean that is the future of jobs people software engineer plus law degree required for the job so we're seeing a proliferation of creative new engineering titles some of which even might reward some of your past experiences if you were coming from outside of tech and my mission with codesmith has been to put people yes many of them are computer science grads but I just don't love when Sam mman says who runs open AI I don't want to be another cliche Tech Insider Tech bro kind of thing but and it's like if tech has been always wielded by you and you've never had it you've never been on the receiving end of it as a user as a teacher using bad software it's going to be hard to understand the need for as Brandy puts it being an engineer with empathy but you do that you get to build better things for people and I do think one of the most powerful ways to do that is for the many of you who are coming into engineering from adjacent fields and those of you aren't fantastic too you work with those who are and that is I think really a powerful part um but it does mean also that you've got a broader range of role titles that you might start to look at okay final so there you go um we uh every firm a tech firm and you can have impact across all Industries and also brand you know professional brand opportunity but you want to find your purpose to help carry you through we heard some mentions of the tough Tech Market carry you through that period uh we'll talk strategies on how to you know succeed but also how do you carry yourself through it well um finding your why for doing this can be very motivating because it is uh it is a harder Journey than it was and you want to have wise for the long term yeah jaro I can send the um PowerPoint PowerPoint yeah uh at the end as well I'll put the slides in the in the channel uh for people who are still I need to check the questions I'm going to come straight to the questions in a second people so please start throwing them in and uh you know before we jump into the how do you get someone to pay you for this um okay find your why so software engineering you ain't the coder uh uncollaborative taking features to build and uh having no influence on the product Direction uh um and maybe being kind of outsourced from the core of the product uh-uh that ain't going to work for most companies at this point they need software Engineers to be a part of the creative process don't get me wrong you still spent a lot of your time as uh sorry again quoting brandley because on my mind uh said a few weeks ago in that far side chat it is the old cliche of 10% of time writing code 90% of time figuring out why it's not working that sounds like a sort of joke but it really isn't that's like great yeah figuring it out you are still going to do a ton of creative problem solving every day but you are also going to do as I sat watching my friend working at drop Dropbox who went to Cod Smith and works directly with the CEO there um working on you special projects and in their mlai team as a software engineer but in the M team and I'm watching him like Jesus being a software engineer is so bloody hard as I said that example I gave of the notification thing which probably I shouldn't have given exactly but it was fairly generic um is like it's a heck of a lot of problem solving and going back and forth to the other person on the team to help them understand the problem you're solving and like you got to like that I think it's really really rewarding I also think it's perfectly reasonable as plenty of couth alums do and Brandy Richardson has done to want to at some point fuse that with other parts of your work of a working um setup so Brandy is now a technical program manager half software engineer half product design lead integrating needs of users things like that but to do that having become an engineer who understands how it's really working that's why I went to learn to code I hate the phrase learn to code there's no like learning moment uh you know like I'm now learned it's a lifetime thing but I went to do it because I didn't want to be another person who maybe could lead a product building process but was then going to be pretending to understand how it worked I wanted to be able to build it so finding your why your motivation and don't get me wrong how badass is it to be working remotely I take it for granted and it's got some downsides by the way I mean I'm thinking I need to get better at immersing myself in a city and networking or whatever maybe you some of you would I'm sure feel the same but fliping egg grass is greener living life remote As we spent you know a couple of months in Mexico City a few weeks ago and so many alums do as well you bumping into alums left and right in Mexico City it it's not bad but but finding your why that is particularly tied to the nature of the work you got to do that that this is not a gold rush it's not a short-term thing this is a lifelong ability to impact the core thing of modern society okay so find your why let's look at questions but then we're going to talk about how do you get someone else to understand that you have experience in these things that make a great engineer what's a portfolio look like in this situation we'll talk about that uh and then building out your flash card that's going to give you the things to get you hired at every stage of the process okay let's look in the chat and see what we're missing wow a lot of questions here people um thank you Mitchell great advice about the open source yeah people um there is a couple there are a couple of ways of diving into open source work um I'll put some links in uh when I email out after this of communities including OS Labs something a nonprofit We sponsor uh that give you opportunities to contribute to open source I think it comes from this core thing that soft engineers and Engineering managers who are hiring you so don't get me wrong open source is actually hard I also think that people hiring you Mitchell are particularly impressed when you've done it because they know how to solve problems but they know that your open- Source contributions maybe it's a framework or a library or an automation tool or a visualizer whatever are designed to help not to solve their problem that they were just working on but a standardized set of problems similar to the problem they were just working on so you're kind of working at a level more impactful even that's a bit of an exaggeration in reality you know it may or may not be but they do believe in the power of Open Source it's a moral position it's what everything's built on and they do believe in the legitimacy of the work you did when you work on it it's really regarded um okay yeah Danielle how great to have great people Brandon says what do you think biggest mistake most boot camps make is oh God um yeah um that might be um yeah surface level stuff not the how and why um yeah that's right and the reason being is that to understand that stuff is really damn hard and requires a lot of confidence in a program because reasonably if I go and pay $20,000 or $155,000 was um I want to learn stuff I don't want to learn how to learn learn how to learn like you know I want to learn stuff not least if you learn how to learn I then did the learning after that if one learns how to learn and I go and learn another thing much faster than I otherwise would have I'm like I learned that why am I I didn't get even they didn't even teach me that now in reality the reason they're able to learn those things and that's why we've had to lean as a organization so heavily on the bloody first year graduate outcome comes being so much further ahead than boot camps because it helps justify to people yeah you didn't learn that thing but that was by Design yeah we didn't explain that thing to you but it was intentional that's a pedagogical design and we failed to explain that at times but that's the reason I would say like the fact that open source stuff is so effective as a way of signaling and doing hard work why does every boot camp not do that it would literally get more people hired they don't do it because it's really hard and people rightly go excuse me I paid here this program to learn not to be you know have a hard experience so it takes a lot of conviction in it working um yep Dimitri is right they don't teach the foundations data struction algorithms uh but you can fill these gaps in people obviously side pitch to Cod Smith I think something like 5 10% of people who go to cith did a prior boot camp so there's that there they at least used to be a scholarship for people who' done a prior boot camper to kind of like you know make it a little bit less painful to do it again um but also always you can do all these things as part of this sort of community here um okay uh uh uh uh what's the bot is one of these a bot there's no the none of these look like bot comments I'm slightly worried is it just me um maybe the comments have been deleted or maybe cuz yeah okay um yes F K's probably right um yes exactly I think that's very smart um Josh everything we do is just fancier and fancier ways to write ones and zeros Absol freaking lutely Absol absolutely um Kyle and Sarah welcome um yeah what's the Brian hole I I have a guide I'm writing actually and it's already been tidied up so I can show you it it's it's in the process of being tided up people um figma uh guide writing yeah I've got someone tidying up this so you I'll give you a if you want this link here people oh hey had a right talk oh this is still the oh shoot people uh it I wrote a guide um that's quite long on how to write talks it's basically how to technically communicate Kyle and Sarah um let me see if I can get the link working and I'll put it in the chat later um yeah Dimitri will talk about how to approach LinkedIn messages we're going to come to that right away um yeah fakiri also fakiri forgive me is it is it is the m uh is it m fakiri um hopefully you can help me out on that ah do you mind if I speak or oh yeah go ahead uh it's it's mansur F you can thank you man sorry man no it's fine it's fine I I understood who you were talking to thank you of course man thank you um excluding yeah Alysa says how many IDE should we send a day yeah definitely cover that um Mitchell yeah we'll send out the slides oh thanks Mitchell um wow to animi says um the personal project bar building problem solving skills so I would just quickly cover this one t um before we move on to it's definitely hard to get legit problem solving toly we have a whole talk at COD Smith called what can we build that is really just a big pitch internally to students to Residents whatever you want to call them uh you know students basic but you to to pitch to them um yeah to pitch to them uh that there's downsides to doing projects that you might call as you say kind of person projects the reason being people is hard stuff is hard the hard thing about hard things I spend hours a day now people on this app that I love called cold turkey writer cold turkey writer locks down my computer until I've written whatever I preset as a number of words to write and then once I've written them it will unlock my computer and I can copy or save the text otherwise it's lost and there's not other way out of it you turn off the computer and start it again it's still on it's still locked down that's how hard hard things are and still I stand up and I wander around when I got to write I still wonder I I go get my coffee and because hard stuff is hard personal projects have a terrible tendency of avoiding the hard stuff it's much more exciting and fun to half Implement another feature than it is to handle all the difficult edge cases to actually sure ensure your authentication system is complete the login log out is complete and yet it's that last bit that might take four or five times as long where all the difficult decisions and problem solving is happening you know so that is the problem if instead I it's a it's a matter of degree uh T you know if you're in a work place and you're trying to automate something it's not for the company but it's for your job it's going to help you probably it's is that a personal project maybe but it's a it's a bit more important because a bit more effective because you're going to need to make it work and not break right but then also if it breaks not the end of the world it's you until so you still may not do the hard stuff we're always all looking for ways to avoid the hard stuff and yet the hard parts are where all the magic the ability to grow in these things happens God damn it um and to be honest to be blunt people a lot of the time the reason that people go to Cod Smith is to basically be held accountable to do the hard stuff so that they build the capacity and build those stories okay yeah yeah yeah to as long as it's really hard but if you can push yourself do to follow through on hard bits and not just get excited by building a new feature you know you're better than me um okay but there are ways that's why when you have a job you definitely get to do hard stuff because they're saying you ain't being paid unless you do that harbit um open source is a bit funny it's technically not that but you end up emulating some of the similar things that you would otherwise do you know because it's it's the hard you can't really do much open source without it being quite hard it's just difficult um okay so now let's talk about how do you get paid for this let's first cross the chasm so you are let's assume now somebody who's cultivated some of these genuine hard hard uh sto stories or experience sorry experience of hard problem solving and or hard communication of that to others so now you have to that's makes you a good engineer and and the other bits as well approaching principles and the knowledge now you have to be perceived at that same level these levels here are a bit arbitrary and I must make an edit to this slide deck sorry I must make an edit to the slide deck um cuz I need to yeah these are some levels we mentioned there the the Google L3 no we mentioned the Microsoft Brandy who was at Microsoft applied for an entry level so L3 here would be entry entry uh equivalent at a lot of non big Tech firms to a mid-level so if you look at a mid-level job at Bloomberg software engineer job it might have similar requirements and similar expectations as an entry level job at Google uh they call it L3 that's why I got this three here uh you know we heard about the Microsoft person Brandy she applied for an entry level at Microsoft they don't call it L3 they call it 59 or 60 she ended up being up leveled to an L4 equivalent or what's known as a Microsoft 61 or 62 um which would be equivalent probably of something like a senior level at a non big Tech firm so there's a bit of variation here people but in its core your job in the interview and the application is the incredibly hard challenge of being perceived at the same level that you're actually capable of not less than you might be like oh but goodness me I'm going to be over perceived I'm GNA they're GNA I'm going to oversell myself uh-uh they're going to software engineering interviewing is like that famous Churchill quote which says democracy is the worst form of government besides all the others software engineering interviewing is the worst form of interviewing besides all the others because at least in software engineering interviewing by the time you're on site that means the long interview towards the end of the process right two three four hours whatever it might be you are going to need to actually do problem solving do technical communication not tell stories of how you do it and have done it but actually do it you don't show I don't I don't quite know what the capacities are of a business Business Development specialist I don't know but you don't do it in the interview you tell stories of having done it that is definitely not as good as doing it the best thing about software engineering interviews is at least now you can say in the big Tech firms they're doing it is with algorithms and whiteboarding and system design feels a bit less connected to actually writing the code but it is also what you do you know you are problem solving in the space of Technology you know certainly a system design bit um but you've got to do it but in the buildup to that you've got to somehow convince often someone who's non-technical their job might say technical recruiter but they're very much non aware of how the code works and what the job is you got to convince them often in people in like a three Second Glance that they're going to take that you are of the same level that you actually are that you have the experience you actually have and unfortunately and it's grossly unfair in theory you can't do so by saying I have four plus years experience with react because you have 500 other people are writing that so what the heck do you do well good thing is they're not hiring you for your four plus five plus years of react experience they're hiring you for the ability to solve problems and conviction that you have the experience to do so and explain to them how you did it so we'll talk about how you communicate that on the next slide but just to some to finish this slide here uh some of you are Beyond this level but roughly there's a junior level engineer a mid-level engineer and a senior engineer and then there's principal and and staff and Beyond but roughly Junior mid and Senior and it really does vary by company as I said literally what Google calls entry Bloomberg would call mid-level what Google calls mid-level Bloomberg would call Senior what Capital One would call Senior we have a lot of graduates who get senior engineer at JP Morgan or Capital One or they're not getting senior engineer at Google at best they might get a mid level if they're lucky so you know like for like is not easy to make but roughly more generally your junior level engineer which would probably be the equiv of your intern at Google or associate engineer your junior level engineer they are somebody who is able to problem solve with things they've seen before using tools they've used before so if they've seen that similar problem they can work it out it was going to take quite a lot of practice on the job to get good at solving new problems a mid-level engineer is already able to figure out what it takes to solve any new problem even if they haven't seen it before using tools they may not have used before using languages and Frameworks whatever and and this is not just you know don't just say my word for this although I do firmly you know I've posted this a few times or I haven't but froner Masters has posted this a few times and they uh do always get uh a lot of Engagement and reshares and reposts whatever uh from prominent Engineers saying yep that's what makes a senior engineer so what I say makes a senior engineer is not only the ability to solve problems they've not seen before using tools they've not used before but Empower others to do the same a senior engineer can help other people solve problems they've not seen before with tools they've not used before and that you know simpler said than done requires the ability to what technically communicate you've got to be able to get your conception your understanding of how that thing is working how that problem is defined how that technical system is built out into the head of somebody else so that they're able to go and actually figure out how to use it how to do it in practice that's a definition of a senior engineer and that mid-level engineer able to solve things autonomously great great discussion on either Reddit or Hacker News I can't remember which where an individual contributor that's a very senior non- manager from meta from Facebook uh spoke to what makes an engineer a mid-level engineer what do they say the autonomous ability to solve problems and they said explicitly I have seen people with less than six months experience who are mid-level and I have seen people with 10 years experience who are not it's the great level of people so how do you develop it well you hit a lot of blocks and you keep doing the hard stuff yeah I mean I didn't really tell you how to develop that I swear they said that's what you want to do but obviously there is a way to develop it it's it's codesmith or but you can also you know do it yourself in the in the hard work when you solve real problems on your job but you then got to get good at telling the stories about it so let's go straight to the flash card here the flashcard is a way of thinking about a flash card is a way of thinking about your application process Let's uh simplify and say there's three St stages to the application process at each stage you might think that all you need to do is show them that you are legit let's remember the five things that make a great engineer and let's say you need to show them at each stage you are experienced in all five of these things you have done good problem solving you're a great technical Communicator you've explained hard things before or you can you can explain hard things you've got good experience with it you've got a strong understanding of how to solve uh you know the problems using the best practices principles your approach to solving those problems you're a non-technical communicator I didn't dwell on this one because I'm not going to tell you had to be a good or bad person so to speak but you know you're a hopefully collaborative kind person and you've got good knowledge that enables you to do all these other things explain what's going on SOL problems so let's say you are those things your job at every single stage of the application when you apply and submit your resume when you're on the phone screen when you're on the onsite is to show them as much as you can that you are experienced in all five of these areas that's only half of it though so you will probably think that was like that's the job right explain that you're good at those things um note by the way that it is profoundly difficult when someone's looking at your application for 3 seconds for them to ascertain for them to glean for them to understand that you are good at all five of those things but we'll talk about how to do so we will not leave this Workshop without talking about how to do so think about that as the answer to the question that manzur asked about or do or Demitri asked about great LinkedIn messages okay but it's only half the story as important especially in a tougher Market where you do need to stand out is the other side of the flash card now these are the things that show them that you are not only talented but that you think they are worth your time and worth your talent it's equal in importance having hired so many people I can promise you as important is do I want you is do you want me because if you don't however good you are I cannot trust that you're going to bring your all to the role that you're going to be what used to be called a fit for the role you have to be good I have to be confident and you have to show me how credible how great you are in those five what great experience you have in those five areas and you have to show me your excitement commitment in a substantive way of me as a person to work with to work for those two sides they they're going to look very very different at different stages of the process when you first apply when you're first applying the stuff about you might only be two lines they only have time for them to interpret two lines that make me understand your experience with these areas and then the stuff about them the stuff that shows you care about them well you might just say I don't even have time to say more than I do I care about your company I'm really passionate about your company or maybe something off the job description I saw you use react that's great uhuh it needs to be incredibly powerful to stand you out from everybody else applying and there's a whole range of ways to show it you can't tell them I care unfortunately it's pretty useless because anyone can say it and therefore it has pretty limited value you have to show them you care it's what networking really is networking is really saying I'm bothered I care I'm I'm a real person who's invested in your company that's why I want to talk to you or someone in your company but there's other ways there might even be some shorthand ways some Shortcut ways that don't require going for a full chat with somebody for an hour before you apply um but whatever it is it's something that makes it completely convincing that you are genuinely and dedicatedly genuinely and sincerely dedicated to this job to their company and you might be like what the heck I'm a talented engineer why should I have to prove this you know in a in a hot Market you probably don't half the time in a tough Market you really really do and to be honest why not like sounds good going to be better experience for it both sides are equally important now working back from the onsite in the onsite you know things can be pretty great in the on-site showing them that you have experience with problem solving and Technical communication it's going to be a matter of doing the task they assign you now I can't promise you were able to do those but you know I all I can say is do I would recommend obviously obviously code Smith but each of you've got your own path that you can take I would recommend under the hood understanding of programming so I would go to the hard Parts workshops that Cod Smith offers on programming and on large language models the other parts of being a modern engineer I would recommend those to get good at that problem solving um on the in the interview but let's assume that you know once you're in the on-site I'm sure a lot of you are like oh I wish I could in the on-site so I can show what I can do so that feels pretty good and then the other side about how dedicated you are to them well every way you talk to them everywh you engage with them every you ask questions is going to show that you got plenty of time to get them excited by your excitement in what they're doing and again I can't guarantee all I can't guarantee all of you in this audience are excited about what they're doing but I can be pretty confident that kouth alums like don't have to worry about that but I'm like you know all of you if you got into coith you're pretty passionate excited and you know by the time you're in the onsite the flash card gets really full of things that they hopefully know about why you're legit and really full of things as to why they can be confident you care about them I'm not worried about the onsite uh but let's now work back and start with the application oh my goodness this is a bloody nightmare okay how the heck do you show in your application we heard already from Alissa you know quick applies don't get a hell of a conversion but they can still be part of it a quick apply is basically a one-sided flash card a quick apply is here's stuff that makes me legit with nothing about why you think the company's special so it can work especially if you're super legit they might turn a blind eye for you not having told them why they're legit but part of a application and both paths work by the way you do enough quick applies and you got a legit background you probably get some traction but both approaches work part of a full application is showing both sides but let's say you're drafting a full application meaning you're putting together a message you might call it a cover letter what do you need well about you and about them about you convinces them your special your distinctive as an engineer about them convinces them that you think they're special and are there therefore going to show up by the way quite literally show up a lot of applications that companies receive are literally from Bots and half of their fear and why they don't respond is I can't tell this person's real and if you don't show them why you think they're special which is clearly you know suggest you're a real person as opposed to a copy and paste message otherwise how would it be personalized I mean it's getting possible there's a good hack a news Thread about fake personalization using AI but it's still pretty challenging um how can they even be sure you're going to show up so what do you need to show them your special for codesmith alums and you can do the same you need one thing particularly that signals in a quick glance just a look in the out of the corner of their eye in five six words that you have solved a distinctively hard engineering problem so that means if you're somebody and people throw them in the chat by the way if you want to what you think might be a hard problem we can try and verbalize them but that might be and it's why codesmith alums really lean heavily on the open- source work that they've done because if you can speak to I built a I don't know what was that one that I mentioned in the slides earlier um there's a where is it it's on that is it on that um it might be on that become on on the new website it might be on here uh yeah so this is one of the alarms Kenny who spoke yeah they did a grpc what is it grpc um um seek grpc seek open source tool the uh performance testing tool load testing grpc services okay so if you mentioned that uh most recently I was been I've been working on a load testing GR PC tool five words maybe you want to make sure it's clear that it's a you know web oriented thing you know browser web browser protocol the back end was built in node instantly the reader goes damn this person has legit distinctive engineering experience no engineering problem solving experience it is hard to solve the problem of load testing for a web protocol this person's legit and then they often at least in codesmith lean on compelling technical communication maybe a talk so the codesmith talks are sponsored by a range of different uh tech companies uh one is like a something called press but I think or something like that so they will say I also spoke recently on the topic of I don't know user experience design and different design principles not user experience design I don't know user experience uh uh I don't know automation automation testing I don't know yeah QA user experience QA automation testing something like that at the pressible sponsored Tech talk series those two things instantly signal great Problem Solver great technical Communicator in one glance let's look at some examples from people in the room who didn't go to Cod Smith and can try and identify the hard problems but note even for the person with 10 years experience in the room and the person with 8 years experience and there's others as well funnily enough more effective half the time than saying I have eight years experience with a range of applications with these Technologies which is very legit right that's real experience the reader goes anyone can say that there's a lot of people who can say and of course they can't but it's so it's sadly Hollow in writing it's weirdly better for that person to say I worked on handling resolving um I'm trying to think of an example hold on handling oh handling uh um I worked on a video handling handing handling State view reconciliation on a uh video Codec based um compression tools user interface sorry it's hard thing what what that boom and if you give the name maybe even better like but specific as hell difficult problem to resolve that is an engineering problem um not perfectly phrased and you're explaining it although not perfectly in a clear how what why you did mode yes sure it's nice where to reference a diff difficult open source thing you did but and then you can write and you know hundreds of other implementations over the past couple of years so you don't miss out on the extensive experience but it's better because what they're looking for is a quick signal that you can solve hard problems and explain how you did it okay that's side one side two something to instantly show them and this message by the way in total will be 100 words something to instantly show them that you think they're special they now know you're special but they want to hire someone who knows who's special but who knows that they're special too because that means they'll bring all that specialness to bear on their problems too many vs in there the company wants to know they're hiring someone who is special but also thinks the company special because that means the team will get all that great specialness from the person brought to work on the special problems of the company now how do you show that when you're writing a quick application we're going to dwell on this in a second and I'm going to show you but at its core and this is why you can do this with Integrity people and not feel like you're boot you're bsing at its core it is something that is quite difficult which is why it is not something to be ashamed of when you do it and that is finding something about the company that is objectively specific not easy to find it's objectively difficult to find about the engineering team and culture of the company you might need to go on there LinkedIn you might need to um and damn God damn it people it works I've said for now years give well not year I've only given this talk for six months but I said for six months giving this talk I have wanted to reach out to potential mentors or people in Industry to say hey you want to be an adviser of code Smith kind of thing to do so is essentially what you've got to do in your reply I've got to find the stuff that makes them take me seriously and be confident that I truly respect them that I'm real for one thing um and I don't do it because it's so damn hard even with my cold turkey Writer app I don't do it and all of that changed yesterday people I sent one I sent one I sent one and did it work he got back this is a professor professor at NYU and oh I probably shouldn't spell it out but like a this is online but know uh I mean just like one of the most prominent ml leaders in industry and I did my bloody I did my bloody lookup of their bloody talk I found the interesting piece in it I mentioned it I said how valuable it was I included the thing that made them take me a bit seriously and they got right back to me and said love to hear how you approach that and have a conversation at some point GH I finally bloody did it why am I telling you this and saying how I didn't do it for years because it should show you that if you can do it it works why does it work because people value it why because they know how damn hard it is to do if you're just writing your kind of fan mail to them it's not enough it's got to be both sides why they're special and why you're special but if they see that you put that effort in they can't avoid but know this is somebody who will bring their all to my company now there's other ways you can do you reach out somebody to the company and say I'd love to have a a coffee chat and then now you can mention that person when you apply whatever it is it's something that now you can also be really quick like I was there I you know I didn't spend more than I did on my phone I had my cold turkey writer up had on my phone I searched the person's LinkedIn I looked at one of the talks had had given I looked at one some of the post there done I LinkedIn and I did a bit of reading and I saw oh okay uh you glanced at the clip I looked at the comments in the YouTube video to make sure I understood what was going on and I wrote the message did it take me more than 10 minutes no uh you know actually I'd even seen the video before so it was kind of you know nice did I spend more than 5 10 minutes on it no I did not but it's 5 10 minutes of emotionally labor laborsome energy I know not to use that phrase in a dismissive in an under you know in a way that doesn't value it in other settings but it is really demanding and that's why it's not a failing of your integrity you're not bsing when you do that you're not cheating them you're not because what you're not doing is saying I really care about your company show me oh I just really care no you've gone and found something about the company I don't care if you didn't read it that closely they're not looking for more than 5 10 minutes effort even just finding it is enough effort to put you in a different League to every other application even just reaching out to somebody in the team for a coffee is putting you in a different League now that allows you to literally say I reached out to a couple of the team to learn more about the role spoke to or didn't even even if they didn't respond it's a bit but the point is it's the effort okay you need both sides stuff that makes you special stuff that shows them not tells them not say oh I think you're really special but shows them and that's why it can't be something on the job description you come like oh I saw your company uses this or I saw your company really values this from the job description it it might have used to have worked since CH chat gbt it doesn't work because chat gbt literally allows you and they know this to copy in the job description right copy in your resume and say write me a letter and therefore it doesn't work it needs to be something that for now can't be AI automated it's going to come probably where you can start to like generate these automatically uh at that point I don't even know what we do there was a very profound moment on hacka news two days ago where someone said I got reached out to personally by a ro bot or by Ai and someone had written up a blog post about how they had written a custom message with a real thing that was believable that they' found interesting about 800 people and got an extraordinary conversion rate because it works but of course as and for now we had to do a ton of join together different llms and whatever it's still very far from being automatable for most people but as soon as it is shit's going to go down on this approach I don't know how you stand out when you apply at that point but for now it still as a vastly higher conversion rate than anything else because it's hard humans are gifted at showing new ways of signaling their determination and care so we'll find a new way I don't think it'll be a video because video is still a bit odd to send us an application but maybe maybe it'll it's hard to know but humans are really damn good at finding new ways to signal both sides of the flash card even when they apply okay almost there people the one phone screen and we're going to come back to by the way sorry how to find some stuff I told you the example I did but we've got a couple of uh examples here as well for how to go and find that hard to find stuff about the company or the person you're applying to phone screen the flash card gets a little bit longer on both sides um by the onsite as I say stuff that's special about you they'll have a whole book in all their notes stuff that you shown that makes you think they're special you have a whole book it's all the questions you ask it's the way you engage phone screens kind of in the middle phone screen stuff that shows your special uh it's it's actually going to be three to four stories of your sophisticated detailed problem solving it's going to be uh all the hiring program stuff at codesmith which is about turning your experience of solving problems into being good at talking about it so it's answers to questions like tell me your experience with um I don't know machine learning tools and it's you describing ah so when I think about and I've been actually working on this integrating some you know prediction product TI prediction so AI or machine learning prediction into applications and I was working on a project recently where we were doing this we had uh to um automate automatically uh trying to an example here so our our um application let's say uh is a kind of zapia equivalent so it joins up different apis let's say uh where we didn't have two particular apis uh integrated automatically on the Fly we were going to automate predict a integration between those two API so let's say it was between MailChimp and and I don't know uh Century these are two uh you know automation tools yeah two marketing marketing analytics tools so we needed to generate an automatic integration between those two that could be used in that moment at least the starting point so we're going to integrate to do that um we're going to use machine learning we're going to use some model that predicts uh that integration I'm stretching it's actually very it's actually a real example but going to use some model that's going to predict what that integration might how that integration might function maybe it's not guaranteed to be effective but at least for getting someone to on board onto our platform it's useful enough okay what do we have to think about well we had to think about firstly our data pipeline at least that's what I had to think about as a software engineer what is the input the user need which might be the search query they put in that generate that you know took them to this page on Google um we're going to need to structure that query as the input to the model I had to start working with the data scientists on what those queries might look like so that data scientist could make the prediction of how the integration might work um or at least be described on this landing page I'm eving my idea here described on the landing page um be uh be a good prediction of what could be described of how this integration between let's say MailChimp and Sentry IO which are two as say marketing automation tools might work and it's going to then return from our model a good description my data pipeline is going to be that flow of input examples of uh potential uh Integrations or search queries sorry and potential output descriptions of what those search crewes might look like maybe we're going to use an llm maybe we're going to use Lang chain to integrate it but maybe we're still going to need to do a bunch of customization with our data scientist or our full ml ml engineer but I my job as a software engineer was primarily to think about how do I ensure that the pre-processing of the data so the user search something on Google it's generated it's got into a page where I'm then going to um pass that question to the model that the data scientist has built and maybe the machine learning engineer has deployed the pre- processing to make sure the query that gets shared works and is interpretable by the model by the prediction and the post-processing stage which ensures that the the response that's going to then be displayed or provided to the user is usable and when the user takes some action at that point like bounces from the page really quickly because it's not a good response that that is new data to improve the prediction by the data scientist improve the model I had to think about what would our data pipeline our flow of data actually look like in practice that was area one area two I had to consider was how could I support the deployment of the model and actually we ended up building you ended up being a lot of classic server design and Docker was the system was the kind of container system we used to an off you go so it's a story that you're giving as an example of the decisions you made as an engineer that was a very very you know ml example but let's say you were talking about node you might say we were working on an application it was a actually visualizer for I don't know Sentry analytics or something like that uh and we do it out the server with node and when we were doing so we were really thinking in terms of the type of data we'd use data we'd be working with we were thinking about um on boarding time for Team we were thinking about the um uh nature of and and then you maybe get more to detail Within mode we had to assess what framework we're going to use we chose to use a middleware framework because ultimately the nature of the request was lots of passing lots of interpreting of individual pieces of the request coming in to the server and a sort of list of those for our team the intuition behind thinking about that as a series of steps was really well captured by a middleware pattern okay sorry people that was a bloody long that a five minute examples I apologize hopefully that did give you though some good examples people sorry and we'll stop in a second of the stories you want to have ready on this side of the flash card specific to your experience explained as what how why what tool did you use how did you use it and why in terms of some engineering goal you had that you used it and those engineering goals by the way a lot of the time are it was intuitive you got to explain why it was intuitive it's got takes a bit of thinking you know why was it intuitive not just it's intuitive but why was it intuitive those are very legitimate reasons okay and then you need some stuff on them uh in the phone screen how do you get those well for one thing you bring up any research you did beforehand and you bring it up even if they don't ask for it you say oh I uh was curious I read about the the talk that the VP of engineering gave last year that was exciting uh is that something that your team often uh does oh I mean you can probably do it better than that by the way that's a bad question but maybe you say I really enjoyed the bit where you know she said they shared that they um they shared the benchmarks uh performance benchmarks it's great to see that stuff being shared as a learning resource for other Engineers is that something the team focuses on kind of sharing knowledge the recruiter will be like oh yes we love that you should definitely talk to the engineering team about that um and then just other questions that you have that you can engage with the recruit R is all filling out this side of the flash card why they think you think they're special which is just as important as why they think you're special all right quick ad quick addition here and we're going to come to questions for those who want to stick around for questions quick addition here people um as I said there's two things that there's a the one the worst thing is showing this side of the flash card the why you think they're special when you apply because it's just like how do you even know and half the time there isn't good stuff well there is but it's hard to find one is finding any blog post or writing by that team and even just a little mention of what was interesting about it goes a long way it shows them you think they're special and that's enough to give them confidence that you're real that you'll show up and you'll work hard so there's a good post here by RI games about fixing uh bugs and it's kind of cool that they're showing that in public you can speak to that you Google or you know GPT chat GPT research the other approach is where they don't have anything maybe any blog post or whatever it's a look up leadership on their team in engineering team look for the VP look for the engineering man manager the principal engineer and likely they'll have some commentary on their LinkedIn or they'll have some posts they've done or they'll have some comments they've made or they'll have some even honestly blog posts or talks they've given mentioning that is so powerful I loved seeing the team the VP the share some of their values on LinkedIn I did a bit of research you might be like wait it's a bit weird to do that there's ways of phrasing it like I did a bit of extra research was so excited to see how the team approaches their engineering work I saw Joe's description of the latest features on LinkedIn that instantly shows them this person goes above and beyond this person cares this person did that little bit of emotional labor hard labor because it is emotionally exhausting and I know that therefore they're going to bring that to the job and again you might be like why do I need to do that you're right in a hot Market you kind of don't in a tougher Market they get a little bit more say they want you to be special and they want to think you think they're special because that means you're going to bring your specialness to solve their problems uh you can even look at Junior team members I don't mean Junior titles I just mean like earlier career team members who are software engineers and see what they describe they do in their work dayto day they'll often have a little section on what they do at the job you know mod uh migrated angular code base to react that's cool they're really you know giving the engineering team interesting challenges you don't need to name the person but you could say was cool to see the description some of the work being done the angular migration to react must have been a pretty exciting boom that alone signals now they know you're special with some clear examples and they know you think they're special with some clear examples okay people so there we go let's look at questions thank you everybody for uh all the engagement um I'll share again my LinkedIn for people who want to ask more questions including you know questions you don't feel comfortable sharing here I'll also share here my Twitter in case you want to I don't know tweet at me Twitter there you go um and there's my email in case you want to follow up there please do so and feel free also with Nester to share linkedin's resumés but let's look at some of those questions some of those we did get to hit um which is good I really appreciate getting to share this with you all because you know I hope that that uh you feel excited by the prospects um thank you Rick uh thank great to see all those people connecting yeah I love that t that's fantastic exactly it's exciting stuff um David says where are the best places to find roles some key resources on that just you know on top of the um uh I me we obviously it's all in the program I'm not to be honest you know the latest places LinkedIn is the Behemoth um indeed dice those sort of places are a little bit less effective although it does vary by country and even by area within the US um angelist now known as wellfound is quite effective and valuable um oh Brandon that's such a lovely comment to receive exactly oh Twitter sorry sorry um yeah uh yeah uh people portfolios and good to see that portfolio there Josh portfolios are you know not a Not a Bad Thing per se at all just to be really clear but always remember what they're hiring you for is experience with solving problems and communicating how you did so so the best portfolio you can have is really a Blog of engineering decisions you've made and even little diagrams about how you did it and the choices you made that is a really powerful portfolio I don't quite know how that hasn't become the standard it's not a because a a website is the output of the problem solving right so it's you can't backward calculate from it don't get me wrong a GitHub certainly can show problem solving code is but code is still the output of problem solving I mean you can see bad code but I can't see like the The Prompt what you want to see as someone hiring is what was the prompt what was the issue what was the challenge so writing blog posts about the choices you make and again that comes down and that's hard people takes practice in fact Brian Hol I believe has on frontend Masters a talk about how to be a good technical PM it's basically describing the engineering choices you made at best technical PM is able to do that but you as a great software engineer stand out like nothing else if you can describe those technical choices you made of course it's also very building you think about your LinkedIn having the top three things be legit looking system diagrams of engineering choices you made the three posts you know the featured post at the top that looks pretty compelling um yeah okay um um man uh was it um sorry was manah man Manar I've forgotten your name but um company was happy with my resume but not happy I had oh wow yeah I mean that's a bit of a uh Unlucky One there yeah I mean and also by the way sometimes I hate to say people recruiters and others give you it's storytelling for them there's often five other reasons that they actually didn't pick you I don't know literally the CTO know somebody who knows somebody and really want of that person they can't tell you that can they and that's often the reason or you didn't see they didn't see this side of the flash card that you care about them I hate to say they can't tell you that you didn't seem really passionate about our mission our engineering approach like we didn't we weren't confident you were going to work hard they ain't telling you that well they come up with always stuff that's a kind of technicality oh we wanted that much more experience with that thing and maybe but somebody else say I didn't have that it's a very easy excuse and that's feedback is very hard to interpret in these processes um not completely useless but you got to do a lot of self-reflection and talking through with other often to interpret what was really some companies give you real feedback I'll be honest the big Tech firms are pretty pretty sincere their feedback can actually be very constructive but lot the companies give you kind of avoidance and so just be careful to not answer take too much from you know we you were two months off experience level very lik these are technicalities to avoid other explanations which might literally be you know no harm no foul you didn't seem passionate enough about our engineering therefore we weren't confident you bring your all is that fair uh probably not but it's something you can control next time really engage on the engineering you know the passion you show for the engineering approach they're taking because that will make sure they are confident you'll bring your all to that problems uh uh yeah Demitri spoke about portfolios there I hope Nam says doing course on front of Masters yeah I'm doing a talk on AI for software Engineers um in the next few weeks I'll be start doing kind of regular workshops on the intuitions behind neuron networks and the intuitions behind large language models so um yeah look forward to I enjoy doing that so uh certainly look out for those um okay uh any other questions in here that I missed sofhia what would you recommend if I have no previous experience what to put in your resume or at least get some experience um sopia there's a couple of options here do Cod Smith no um a couple of options here one is uh nonprofits there's one called hack for LA or hack La that I think is really cool um I'll put in the email following up from here uh a couple of open- source um communities that are about encouraging earlier early career Engineers to contribute tribute to open source it's such a powerful signal uh if you are doing any current work sfia we even have a whole bunch of talks which we should probably turn in oh oh yeah yeah sopia go on this bit here CSX do cith um doio and there's a unit on it called build with code that is all about how you can in your current job toia or for a nonprofit or a family friend build something that solves legitimate problems um it can be even more easy now although of course you're going to hit blocks pretty quickly with the help of the chat gpts of this world uh it's definitely hard to do and it's really hard to Benchmark how possible it is if you don't understand the underlying foundations um and if you to be honest problem solving becomes pretty instantly a major part of even using GPT generated code because to integrate it to go beyond even the basics you have to you know start to wrestle with difficult problems but you can definitely get a bit further than you could before you could generate code from some degree of human description it's undoubtedly difficult um you know that's why it's software engineering still even when you're using human you know explanations of what you want to create it's definitely difficult um but it's not it definitely gives you a little bit more you can do so the big one for me would be SQL queries I think it's hard to know whether I still think you need to have a pretty legit conception of what a database is doing but you can definitely generate SQL queries using chat gbt to if you have a SQL database in your workplace you know query it and extract the data um you know the SQ query is not going to be very uh it's going to be quite fragile it might break easily and it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and be inefficient and not but then I guess you could say how can you make the SQL query less of a mess um but you know you need to define the parameters of these things quite quickly within the GPT tools are really useful the chat gpts and the C- parts are really useful obviously profoundly useful but very quickly you have to start to kind of Define as an engineer's job is the parameters of what you need uh and if you don't have the mental models but sfia hopefully it sounds like you've got some of that already maybe you did a boot camp or or whatever or computer science degree uh it could allow you to pretty quickly automate some stuff in your work SQL queries being a classic one um write some um whatever it's called you know Google scripts code or um VBA scripts to have a spreadsheet do more complex data analysis okay so those are some good places to start within your own workplace or within your own life like or you do scripting in notion let's have a look notion scripting am I still screen sharing yeah scripting let's have a look if notion does any script because people love notion right um yeah you see you got some like options here that's kind of cool right scripting is code that is not like a complete application it's code that's doing a small task within probably someone else's application like notion um so the other one is Mac scripts are really cool you could like um like uh what's a good example um sorry I'm getting tired now so we'll stop in a second um Mac scripting uh Apple script it's called sorry Apple script would allow you to I don't know you might have some task that you do every day like a series of series of steps or you know suppose you have to generate a PDF in the same way every time writing and auto automating that task yes you can do use automator that's click and whatever but then to really customize it you might turn it into an apple script which looks a lot like JavaScript I think Apple script is based on JavaScript seem very very similar you know what I mean so those are if you really want those to work sopia they actually become pretty legit you know if you really want to automate I don't know image processing within your computer or automate some yeah notion task or you have a notion Board of your daily daily task daily project management if you want to automate some pieces of that or integrate it with Google Sheets or integrate it somewhere else you can very quickly be writing some legit software and you write that script and then you say actually I want to make sure this script is you could write into chat gbt what are some ways it's not going to be perfect but they might give you some tips what are some ways I can um uh clean up script code and you could even show it the code you've done for notion and make it a bit cleaner it might say oh and and give me the principles behind it they might oh you could perhaps uh um and this is by the way no different to paying for a mentor for coding like when I was first starting I wanted a mentor and I did some sessions on a called Cod mentor.com um you know GPT is just that say hey give me some feedback on this code I've written to automate my um notion personal dashboard you know everyone loves these bloody notion personal dashboards right to one's life um give me some feedback on how to make the code a little bit uh cleaner and it might say oh you could separate it into functions that will make it more reusable well now safia you're able to especially if you take a bit further to write on your resume and it might be more into projects right personal projects whatever but let's say just engineering projects you're able to describe this and describe the choices you made you know made code more reusable and even if it sounds very trivial you know separating into functions it's still more than you know anything else and you can take that to the next level and the next level and that's really hopefully sopia you know exciting to know that those things control of your resume is within your hands it's not measured by anything more than the ability to explain good engineering choices okay I think people were there thank you John that's lovely to receive and Brandon exciting for for that confidence um yeah aah hero it will go up on the yeah on the on the channel Dimitri are we hiring um I we have a lot Demetri of codesmith alums with the software stuff so I would uh I would um but Demitri please connect with me on LinkedIn and you know give me a little message and let's see whether there's any connections that can be made for sure thank you everybody we're out we're done um thank you salvator that's exactly what I'm talking about put that on the resume I hate to say if you write it upright it ain't a bad thing thank you Mason um yes brilliant Mason and and can I just say to Mason there that sort of communication there is intentional thoughtful and will carry a weight in the job search put that style of communication in your Outreach and your go places thank you everybody please stay in touch um I hope some of you have connected with each other as well uh that's it people we had a wonderful group of what was that 40 50 people and uh lovely to have you all there we go um please reach out and stay in touch thank you to Nester for engaging uh everybody in the chat and answering people's questions we're out I'm going to go and have dinner good