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How does a startup evolve from risky venture to stable organization? What role does funding play in a startup’s trajectory?
In this episode, co-hosts Tim and Mike, alongside our guests Michael Grove and Spiro Roiniotis, dissect how the source of funding impacts the way startups scale. Michael is SVP of Engineering and Co-Founder at Stardog, where he manages their world-class engineering organization and helps shape the direction of the Stardog Enterprise Knowledge Graph. Spiro is CTO and co-founder of Decile, a premier e-commerce analytics platform that helps clients make insightful data-driven decisions about their business.
You’ll learn:
– The impact that funding has on a startup’s employee workforce and growth potential.
– The pros and cons of getting funding from a Venture Capital vs a Holding Company.
– How startups stabilize, mature, and become appealing companies to work for.
Subscribe to the Pair Program from hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. Join host Tim Winkler (creator of hatchpad) alongside co-host Mike Gruen as they bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups, and career growth.
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Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of The Pair Program guys. I’m your host, Tim Winkler, along with my sidekick, Mike Gruen. Mike, what’s new with you?
Nothing much. Just enjoy the 12 seasons that the mid Atlantic gets to experience every year. I think now it’s 70 degrees. A couple of days ago it was like 40. It’s great. I love it. I think we’re in third spring or fourth summer or whatever it is.
I don’t know, like we’re matching today to really repping the brand. Yep, definitely.
Welcome to our guests Geoff and Mitch. We like to start things off with our first segment called Pair Me Up where we like to ask our guests what are your favorite pairing of yours? Is it cheating if I say test-driven development and Ruby? Sorry, that was I’ve really I’m super frugal, so I like don’t spend money on anything. And during the pandemic, we just, we were so stressed out. We just started ordering takeout every Friday night. And I just feel like now, like I associate Friday night with the.
The bliss that comes from not cooking for my family, but just like everyone sitting down and relaxing and really enjoying something tasty. To take out a Friday night as my parents are nice, a little different than stir Friday, kind of
go-to spot in your area that you religiously order. I’m an idiot and I taught my five-year-old to enjoy sushi. He is now every Friday night he comes from school and he’s are we getting sushi? And my wife and I are like, oh God, I went for fun for my kids. So it’s a little less expensive,
but sushi is good. I like it.
Mitch, I see a pattern forming. I was just going to be glib and say peanut butter and chocolate, which is a good one, sophisticated in sushi, but still get pair. Although not according to my kids they’re not big fans of the peanut butter and chocolate. So we get all the receipts cups from home.
That’s awesome reasons for days. Yeah. You want to go? I’ll jump in. I’ve got I’ve got one. That’s has a little bit of a story to it from this past week. I’m going to go with frontier airlines and customer disappointment. I not have either of you guys traveled frontier airlines before I, no comment, frontier airlines.
I don’t remember.
I think that’s spoiled at this point. I gotta call these guys out. Got to re-up this, because it was that bad of an experience. Went out to Breckenridge, flying into Denver. It’s a to hub frontier. I ordered my ticket, months in advance. I don’t even think they offered an insurance plan for it, but just went with it.
I’m a sucker for the frontier price point. And this is probably why. Love hate relationship here, but was supposed to fly out on Thursday morning, wake up, get an email. Your flight’s been canceled. We are going to push it to Friday though. And here’s a $50 voucher. And at the end of the day, I was like, this is ridiculous.
Get online, start scurrying, find a different airline. Do I do find myself out in Breckenridge on Thursday as planned kept the return flight, but my buddy’s a big sucker on, jumping on Twitter and like pausing a stir about that type of stuff and getting getting what he can out of it.
And sure enough. Yeah. I got a response Scott more than a $50 voucher. I got the refund. And yeah, not a. It’s like a bad relationship. I just keep going back to them though. I’m like, why did I do this again? But at that price point and it, it interesting to mine. Mine’s not going to be nearly as as a story related.
Mine’s just cinnamon donuts and apple cider had I posted, or this time of year in the fall, I’m from New York. It’s very new England, New York thing. And this weather just really brings that out for me. Love the hot apple cider, the seminar. I’ll tell you down in Tampa that this time of year is like the same time all year, every year, I’m walking around and t-shirt my wife and I joke about this year, we’re going to get a Christmas Palm tree, Christmas day we’ll be on the beach, in the water.
But yeah. You got to go up there, a little bourbon in that apple cider, Mike,
for me growing up. But yeah, no, as an adult, I should try that
good stuff. Let’s let’s get into the meat of the discussion here, guys. So yeah, the, the title of this episode is bootcamp. Obviously you guys have a good past performance of, hiring up folks that come out of bootcamps or, and obviously on the ladder or the opposite side of this, folks coming out of academia.
I’m just a, I want to hear on a couple of things here regarding, what are those options that are out there for folks that are either exploring boot camps. And also just from a hiring perspective too, some of those differences that one might find before. So hiring up engineers out of academia and vocational training we’ve got a number of other hot topics sprinkled within.
So why don’t we jump into it? What’s the kick things off? Why don’t we start with Jeff, I guess what has been, some of your experiences in terms of, working with hiring up engineers out of. Yeah. We’ve we’ve really benefited from good relationships with bootcamps. So when I was at ThoughtSpot, I did some like community development.
So I go to who camps in the DC area and do some technical interview coaching. That was like part of my, sort of Friday community involvement stuff. And I. Sorta got some initial exposure to bootcamps and then, at Conan lit, we don’t have we necessarily have the money to chase senior engineers all the way up the ladder in a frothy, a hiring market.
We’ve really tried to figure out the way to, to make things work with with engineers coming out of bootcamp and we’ve hired. think we’ve hired six bootcamp engineers in the time that I’ve been at compliments, so a little under four years, and they’ve all panned out and been very successful.
I think for us, we have a pretty rigorous interview process. And so we’ve been, we re we grilled people. I sometimes worry that we’re making people spend too much time in interviews, but the fact that we haven’t had a bad hire, it makes me at least think that are doing something right.
And I do think that you have to really look for the right people who are going to continue to grow very fast once they got out of bootcamp, it’s to some extent some of the interview process, and this is the part that I don’t like about interviewing people earlier in their career is I feel like you’re a.
You’re forced to do some extrapolation from where the person is now to where they’re going to be. You’re not hiring this person for what they’re going to produce and their second week you’re hiring them for what, their corporate years, six months in or 18 months in that we we’ve definitely made it work.
And I think, the reason that it works for us is that we have a really. In-depth onboarding process, where we spend a lot of time, people rotate through all the members of the team, pairing with everyone. And then most of the people on our team are career converters. So I think we’ve got an environment that’s there a high trust where people feel comfortable saying they don’t know something.
That’s actually a key thing that we look for in an interview process is like people who will say, I don’t know, and they don’t know something. Because you can do a lot of damage in production. If you pretend you know something and you don’t know, that’s a great point. That’s. Sort of self-awareness is a big thing for me in general character.
I think when you’re pulling people, early in the career, it doesn’t really matter whether what they’re coming from, whether it’s comp psy background or bootcamp or whatever, there’s just certain characteristics that you’re looking for in someone self-awareness open-mindedness. Those types of things are indicators that they’re going to be someone who can grow and learn and.
For some context, Jeff, what what kind of engineers were you hiring these like full stack? Are they front end heavy? Maybe a little intelligent. Yeah. So we’re our engineering team is is nine. So it’s not a huge team. And thus far we’ve pursued a strategy of having everyone be a generalist.
So everyone’s a full-stack engineer. We do have people who lean a little bit more heavily in a certain direction, but we’ve had a hard time having people really only work on the front end or only work in the backend. And it’s a rails app. We use TypeScript and react.
So it’s it’s not a stack where there’s two supply issues in terms of we’re not using any like exotic languages or anything like that. I do think one thing that might make us different maybe from other outlets that are bootcamp engineers, is that we. Colin has a lot of data for a small team and we really place a high degree of importance on SQL fluency.
And so we don’t necessarily need engineers coming out of bootcamp to be cul pros, but we’ve found that when we’ve interviewed boot camp engineers who did know SQL instead of a relational database, that they have a lot of trouble with our technical interview, even when we’ve attempted. Craft the technical interview in a way to help them succeed.
And to that end, I think the, like the bootcamps that we’ve had the strongest interview shows from then flat iron school who happens to do our exact same stack and then turn school because they also tend to do I think their curriculum is a little bit more open and variable over time.
Are there students do graduate with having some SQL. So folks from those places have done well on our interviews in the past. Thanks Mitch. What’s been some of your experiences. Not all that dissimilar probably the, I’d say the thing that I find the most unique about the bootcamp candidates is that they’re typically more committed.
They’re more passionate about what they’re doing because they started their career doing something else. And they said, you know what? I know I’m going to take a hit and I don’t care because this is what I want to do. And. So I’m, not to, I’ll try to keep this short. So for example, a couple of years back, I was a tech fellow at capital one was hiring at an absolutely epic scale.
At that point, I think at one point we had 10,000 people on staff who all had engineer somewhere in their title. It was nuts. And. As if hiring college grads wasn’t enough that appetite was not happy. So they started something called Koda capital, one developer academy and where they basically ran their own internal bootcamp for six months.
And thanks to a colleague of mine being out on maternity leave. I just happened to luck out and got to be the first like technical mentor for the first Coda cohort capital one. And. To this day, I’m creeping on pretty much most of that gang on LinkedIn, just to see what are you up to, are you sticking with it?
And it’s pretty consistent, right? Whereas I’ve hired engineers that came in Who went maybe a more vocational route or they even went with a more traditional route and they got a degree and then six months in they’re like, okay, this isn’t really what I wanted to do. Now. Maybe it’s a, it’s also a consequence of some people saying when they’re, I don’t know about you, but when I was 18, I had no idea what I was going to do.
No freaking idea. So committing to a four year degree in the college, that sounds like crazy. Talk to me. Tons of people when they were going to college. I don’t know what I’m going to do, to software because that’s where the money is. It’s the modern version of, I guess I’ll be a lawyer, I guess I’ll be a dentist, and then they graduate.
And a couple of years later, the I can’t stand this, I hate this. So maybe, bootcampers look better over time just because you’re automatically selecting out all the people that aren’t really a hundred percent in, on becoming a software engineer. The second thing that I would say that was a little different, is that for me the interview process we’re both agonizing over it, for decades, I’ve been agonizing over the technical interview process because frankly it’s bollix I hope I can say that. But.
The thing that I’ve done, that I find the most therapeutic out of the interview process is making sure and sending the technical assessment to the candidate in advance because what I’m, what I discovered and I learned vicariously through the react native team at Facebook actually, who were doing this is they realized that.
A candidate comes to an interview and then you spring the problem or the exercise of the challenge on them. What you’re really doing is you’re playing drop the cat, right? You’re dropping the cat upside down to see if it can land on its feet. And you’re trying to see if your candidate is good at being a cat that may not necessarily be the skills you should be calibrating your interview process for now.
Should they? So when you give the candidate the exercise in advance, One of the things that I love to see is when they show up, have they already taken a look at this? Like for example, we hired a bootcamper who was funny. We hired her and then literally one or two days after she started working at homey an article goes up on business, insider a batter.
She was the bootcamper that went viral. She talked about how she went to a bootcamp and then interviewed for eight hours a day for six months before she finally got a job. And yes, she’s nice. And. Yeah, what a surprise that was, but I’ll use her as an example. She showed up for the technical assessment.
She had done every one of the exercises in advance and very confidently deleted every single one of them and said on the call, she says, okay, which one do you want me to do? And I’ve had other candidates show up and they look like they just rolled out of bed. They don’t remember who I am or who homie is or what the job was and they’re expecting to do well.
And so for me, just sending me the exercise in advance gives you a chance to see who’s got, what’s a football term, high motor, who’s who runs hard on every single play, even if it’s just practice and no, one’s. Those are the people. So when they show up and you’ve given it to them in advance, do you immediately start changing all the requirements to make them feel like what it’s really going to be?
Like?
You bring up another really good point. Something I’ve never understood with the more traditional computer science curriculum is. Why are you doing. Like less than one hello world, right? Less than two should be give your code to the person, sitting to your left and accept the code from the person on your right now.
Fix their code. Exercise. Twos is going to be 80% of your life as a software engineer, right? It’s taking someone else’s code or maybe revisiting your own code from far enough in the past that you’re learning
as you get older.
Yeah. I think the interview process lets you know, the And how it relates. I think the, what you were saying about bootcampers I think one of the differences I’ve always seen between sort of CS versus bootcamp or whatever, is that bootcampers tend to come in with a little bit more of the tool, like the software engineering tool set, like they know what good is.
They know this sort of the onboarding for them is a very different onboarding than for a comp side person who like, in a lot of times you’re unwinding and you’re like, oh yeah, that’s all great in academia. But let me explain to you how it actually works here on the. And so there’s, the onboarding can be very different as well.
I’m curious if you guys have similar experiences, I’m guessing from the nodding heads, that’s the case, but absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a, the differences are pretty profound and pretty clear and stark. The engineers that I see coming in from academia are our. Extremely strong with like higher math and algorithms and the science behind writing software.
So more complex challenges more complex operations and sorting and manipulating data as sets. And that kind of stuff comes much more naturally to them. But like you stated, they’ve never heard of get, they’ve never had to look at someone else’s code. Every project is a brand new blank. How do you do a code review?
And another thing is academia is still teaching people how to write Java. It’s like welcome to the nineties. You talk to someone who comes out of a bootcamp and they’re talking, go, they’re talking react. They’re talking TypeScript, they’re talking languages that are all way more recent and way more in demand.
As a hiring manager, at least in my purse, but I do think that’s a pretty good difference because one of the things, I think the thing that I learned most from my CS background is the ability to learn a language. So I learned Java smart. I didn’t learn Java in college just after college.
But small talk C, C plus Prologue, ML all these different languages. And what it taught me was conceptually abstractly. This is a functional language. This is object oriented. These are these concepts. I think when you’re hiring someone with a CS degree, you get that. Whereas when you get somebody from a bootcamp, you may or may not get the, that ability, they might have the experience you’re looking for in a particular stack, but they might not have the, The rest of the background to quickly learn a new language, which, which may be, they don’t eat. It’s, there’s all these trade-offs. Yeah. They won’t be, we hired someone who is the best of both worlds in this Rondo was someone who graduated with a CS degree and then said, I don’t have any web development skills.
And so they went and did a boot. Immediately after the CS degree. And it’s like the strongest interview performance from someone who wasn’t a senior engineer. He blew it away. We finished. And we’re like, what don’t you guys think about? Like when you’re thinking about the role that you’re hiring for, like how much does that play into whether or not you’re looking more bootcamper CS?
I can tell you my own personal bias, which is when I’m looking for backend developers, I tend to favor people either with more years of experience or someone with a CS degree. If I’m doing web app or something, I feel like boot camps. Prepare students for different or prepare people for different things.
I’m curious what your thoughts are.
Hasn’t really influenced what we’re doing for the reason I said before, because we just don’t have a ton of specialization yet. I do think we are, we look for a little bit of cul fluency in our interview and our technical interview process and. It’s all much more weighted towards Ruby than it is towards react and TypeScript, because I think we are just, I think we’re very confident that we can teach people to write react and type script, certainly the way we want people to write, react and TypeScript versus I think it’s like a harder lift for us, each someone Ruby coming from somewhere else.
And I, I think. I think if we had like a senior engineer candidate come to us who was not a Rubius I think we’d be more flexible about that. I just feel like commonly, it is like a big app for a first, for someone’s first professional job. And I feel like we’re already asking a lot of people, like by throwing them into sort of the deep end of the pool with all the stuff we’re doing.
And I feel like having the learn. A new backend language at the same time you’re doing all this other stuff. I think it’s just a lot. And we really want to put people in a position where they can get some early traction and then start building on that success really quickly. Yeah. We’ve been seeing from from startups hiring up engineers, right?
I think historically it’s been a mixed bag. They’re either really one end of the spectrum or the other, and tends to be, if they’re anti bootcamp it’s because they had a bad experience and they had maybe one, one or two bad apples that came in the door and then they automatically, will associate that with, if I do another one, it’s probably gonna be a similar.
That said we have seen more recently, a little bit more leniency and more flexibility. I think flexibility is the key word of 2021, especially when we’re talking about hiring engineers. You’re going to have to flex in some sort of an area. What a great area to flex on is, the degree requirement we don’t necessarily need this CS degree.
Let’s lighten up what it actually used to be. Now we want a top 50 school and it’s you’re going to need to slice that off your menu item as well. I think too, that some of the. Startups that are hiring maybe in an early stage where it’s really difficult and you’re, you need to do a lot more selling.
You maybe can’t afford that. Cream of the crop type of engineer are lightening up a little bit more in, in going down this path. Some folks coming out of bootcamps, but they wouldn’t just do it as their first or second key engineering hire. They want somebody who’s also going to be able to be a good mentor who maybe is, trained CS degree who can then help guide these folks.
And some of those early stages when they’re navigating the waters. I think you definitely need like a. Senior engineers to junior engineers to make things work. And I think if that ratio gets out of hand, like if there’s too many junior people relative to the rest of the group, then you, the senior people aren’t, they aren’t shipping anything.
Cause they’re spending all their time mentoring or they’re not mentoring at all. And then those junior engineers, one thing that we found is a couple of times we’ve hired people who are worked somewhere else for a year before they came to. And so they’re a year into their career. So it’s a big step above where they were when they were in bootcamp, but they talk about their job before and it was like, yeah, they hired me.
And then they just basically made me learn everything on my own. And didn’t really mentor me. Didn’t really tell me anything. And that to me just seems like a incredibly wasteful use of resources. You’re basically saying, all right I’ll hire the. I hire the least expensive full-time in person help I can find, but then I won’t nurture or grow those people at all.
And then eventually they’ll leave and move on. I just think places in general, I think are really penny-wise pound-foolish about retention. If you’re, if you have a complicated app or a complicated problem to me, The longer people have been working on your app, they should be more valuable to you.
You want them, you want to invest in those people so that they want to stay and keep working where you are. I have simple math for that, right? So calculating the true cost of one of your engineers is what, 1.5 times their comp hiring the wrong engineer is going to cost you what 10 times their comp losing an engineer is going to cost you 20.
Yeah. As a leader, people ask me they find out I’m a CTO oh, how are you doing? First question I ask is what’s my retention. You have to, maybe it’s my open source background where, the only resource you have is people, that kind of oriented me already early on in my career.
That was the main focus of mine. But yeah, the bottom line is it doesn’t matter how good your documentation is and cross-training and blah, blah, blah. When you have a good engineer up and leaves, for whatever reason, it’s absolutely gonna cost you, it will cost you significant because there’s that’s expertise.
That’s leaving that’s knowledge, that’s history. That’s.
Why don’t we jump into some of the some of the other areas of the discussion that we were shortlisting here. Real quick question Mitch on the side, from plucking, from cap one’s bootcamp I’m just joking. What was the bootcamp where the, this rockstar engineer came out of, if you’re comfortable.
Honestly, I don’t remember the name. I don’t remember the name I five. There’s probably six or seven bootcamps out there. That are pretty good. I guess it’s about the business model, the bootcamp, right? If they tell you that bootcamp is free but we want a PC, your first year’s comp, when you get your first job versus the bootcamps that are like, we want 20 K up front, and then you can come to our boot camp and then you’re on your own when you leave.
I guess those are probably more telling but maybe the situation I’m in is unique because we have kind of a. I guess we have a kinda like a mano technical mentality at homie where everything is full stack TypeScript and everything that’s user-facing is either react, react native, be it Weber or mobile based.
If there are bootcamps out there that are really big on TypeScript and react, that’s a no brainer for me that one’s, I’m going to be totally hanging out with that crowd. That’s an easy one. If someone comes from a bootcamp, for example, where an there are some bootcamps out there, iron something was one of them where the front end.
Portion of the curriculum was based on react and the backend was based on rails. I’m sure Jeff probably wants to know about those people far more than I do. Because the technical expertise is much closer aligned with the technology that they’re using there. I think it of iron yard yeah they’re now defunct, but they were in a bunch of locations on the east coast.
There’s flat iron and iron yard. So there’s two, two irons.
Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that’s one of the things in going back to something Tim, you had said, which is early on in my career and my hiring. Yeah. I was against bootcamps because the candidates we were getting from there were more garbage. And I think though, Having seen the evolution of bootcamps themselves, they’re way better now than they will.
They’ve evolved, they’ve gotten better. They understand the market. They now they have these sort of different business models that aren’t just these pay us and we’ll train you and give you a certificate and, and then there’s these other business models that I think.
Prove that the candidates that are coming out of them are quality candidates and things have really changed. So certainly for people who may be shied away from them due to their early experiences, I think they’ve come a long way. Pre-vetting on the front end. Not just anybody that’s willing to cut us a check is welcome.
Yeah. There’s definitely like a diploma mill phenomenon that is you always worry about with a, any sort of for-profit educational enterprise. I think some of the bootcamps have done a better job than others. It’s like making sure that they are. Screening more aggressively. And as Tim said, no, yeah, there’s there’s one that’s for data scientists and data engineers that I’m aware of in New York.
I can’t remember their name, but they were really focused on career changers from hard sciences into the world of data. And so their business model was more like, almost like a recruiting firm where you, you got accepted into this program, it didn’t cost you anything. And then when you got hired, the hiring company actually paid.
Enough money to pay for the training and stuff. So it was a that’s how that worked. It wasn’t even a percentage of salary. It was just it was probably a percentage of the first year salary, but it was the company, the hiring company that actually paid it. It didn’t even come out of the students at all.
So I think there’s lots of different, interesting ways of doing it. Yeah. Lambda school was was one that we’ve been following quite a bit. I liked their model where it was. Yeah, you could do it full time, nine months 40 hours a week a hundred percent online, or you could do it part-time, for 18 months kind of space it out.
I’m pretty sure it was primarily asynchronous learning. And then they would defer tuition where the student pays it’s 15% or 18% of like that. Lambda school income over the course of 24 months. So it’s not like you, your first year, you’re just dishing out, a lot of money out of your check.
It’s deferred over two years. So I think that’s a creative outlet. I just quickly, I just found that article. She went to hack reactor. Cool. Nice. So one of the things, we’ve talked about CS degrees and we’ve talked about. There’s other options. I’m curious what you guys, what your thoughts are on some of the, th there’s definitely some self-trained people or people who just somehow ended up, whether it was, they decided as a career changer, they’re going to go online and do free online learning.
There’s plenty of places. Or I know a couple of people who fell into it because they were working at a company and somehow ended up on an engineering team and just. They went from doing like Excel spreadsheets to software engineering. I’m curious what your thoughts are on those other routes.
Maybe Mitch. Yeah. I’m actually one of those people, right? So I was originally born as a hardware engineer. So I was at apple, was on the teams for the two CX. And to see, I may be the worst two max ever made went down the street to this other company called sun. So I went from the prettiest computers to the ugliest computers in the industry, in one job.
And at sun, I was on the campus and hydro prototypes, which went on to become the sparks. Which was their bread and butter for the next two plus decades. It was there. That suddenly, multilayer circuit boards and crystal oscillators, weren’t nearly as interesting for me and seemed like all the yelling and screaming was coming from the intersection of humans and technology.
And whereas designing hardware, you had to have this long, I got to support this for 10 years. So we’re going to move at a glacial pace software. Hey, fastest, you can release it the better. And that was when I decided, okay, I want to get into software. And yeah, I was in Silicon valley at the time and that was a running joke.
Everybody said, everybody’s business card said hardware engineer until someone discovered how much money you could make on software. And then suddenly everybody’s business card said software engineer and. So that was really my situation. I didn’t get a degree. I didn’t go to college for this.
I just started doing it. And then spent the next 30 years learning the hardest way. And the most soul crushing Ben still would like fashion what you should and should not do as a software engineer. But yeah, I would say. From me the thing that I’d noticed is that you have folks that go down like a traditional route with the schools and they are really strong with theory and they have like several years of really hard, intense training.
You have the people that go to boot camps. So the. There’ll be maybe, surface level and and as much smaller area, but what little they know is very current, very relevant to the marketplace as of right now. And the people that are in between usually just get lost in the wash. If I have someone, actually, I just interviewed someone earlier today who was.
He was doing it and system administration and system support for years. And he just wants to become a software engineer. And every time he tried, his current employer kept pushing him back on the dev ops and do that kind of stuff. So that’s it, I’m at I’m changing jobs cause I want to write software. And so how do I assess this candidate?
Because chances are their expectations for comp are going to be way higher than what you would expect for someone who doesn’t have any experience writing software. But the flip side is. This candidate, it’s also bringing a lot more knowledge and expertise and likely has a higher potential as a software engineer, because they’ve been sure it’s Terraform and cloud formation instead, but they already know infrastructure’s code, man.
That’s the future. It’s it’s software engineering best practices. So it should, a lot of that chef stuff should be translating and that’s not as a hiring manager for me, those are probably the hardest candidates to gauge just because you want to be facing. But the flip side is you have no insufficient data.
Yeah. I come from even like softer skill background than Mitch does. I was a history major in college. And I was a consultant coming out of college. And I worked at like a 28,000 person consultancy and one of the jobs I was doing was writing. Requirements or payroll software that state and local governments use.
So like the city of New York and the state of California with its 300,000 employees, has everyone in the university systems, a state employee it was writing, was printing their paychecks and calculating deductions using our stuff. And I was really fascinated by what engineers are doing.
And I actually applied to. What I think is one of the very first bootcamp, which is living socials hungry academy and and got rejected. And I wore that chip on my shoulder for awhile, but I ended up I used to play in the world’s most complicated fantasy baseball league. So we had long-term contracts and like a salary cap and a.
Bryce Harper was drafted as a high schooler in our league 18 year old, south Korean shortstop was drafted once in our league. This is, it’s a serious stuff. And we had the rules for too complicated to play on like Yahoo or CBS or something like that. So we built our own.
And that was how I learned how to write code, how to do web engineering. That by the way is not a career path that I, or a path becoming an engineer that I would recommend to anyone. It probably made things take much longer than, but at the same time, I do think that there is something to the, like when people come to me and they’re like, how do I get into this?
How do I like having a project, having something that some problem that you’re trying to solve. It’s a great cause if and I’ve had the, the inverse conversation, which is Hey, you’ve you, you’re in customer success. I remember there was a customer success person who came to me. He wanted to get into software engineering.
I was like you see these problems all the time. And it’s like ripe for automation. And if you’re not thinking about how to solve these problems in that way, then you’re probably not actually going to enjoy software engineering. You have to love fighting with. Losing regularly and having that sort of rain and misery of doing that.
And if you enjoy that and if you enjoy those like few aha moments of yeah, I got this, then that’s a good thing. And I think that sort of going into some of those things and like having a problem to solve and try and figure out how to use a computer to solve it is as a good indicator as to whether or not this is a career for you.
I think that’s true and I’m definitely a project-based learner. I tried to learn C plus out of the book, I’ve times and it failed. And I think of myself as a reasonably smart guy and a reasonably, technically inclined guy, and I just couldn’t do it. The, Mitch talking about people getting lost in the washer in between, I’m not sure if I would have hired myself.
I think if you. I don’t think that I actually think that like the people who are super successful out of bootcamp, we’re going to learn most of that stuff on their own. Anyway, like the bootcamp is good for accountability. I think it’s good to help them get started. And I think it’s like a little bit of like endorsement to help employers sorta like sort out who’s who it’s unfortunate.
That means that you have to go to a boot camp to get yourself in that pile, but. When we’ve put out because we’re willing to hire truly entry-level engineers. When we’ve put out job postings, we get like 300 applications when we put out a job posting and we get a lot of really incredible people.
And it’s hard. It’s hard to evaluate people based on portfolio projects. So we have to do some stuff to cut down the pool a little bit, just to make it remotely manageable. We don’t have an HR department, we don’t have a recruiting team. I’m reading most of these things.
I really lucked out in that I had a former. A colleague of mine who contacted me right. When I decided to quit my job and become an engineer and said do you know anyone who is new? Anyone who knows Ruby on rails? And I said, yeah, I do. I wrote the, I rewrote the voting app for a competitive karaoke league.
That was the first time I got paid to write code. That was just, I was very fortunate that I had a series of prior work associates who needed freelance help and that kind of let me establish some credibility and a track record before I went on to. Are there things that needed more tenure and other view pulled from the open-source community, like looking at contributors to top open-source projects or an open-source project, right?
Absolutely. But my open-source background goes on forever when it goes back to the one X Colonel. So I, yeah. I think that’s another good way for those people to maybe who don’t want to do the boot camp. Do what you know, to not get lost in the wash is to try and find some open source projects, become a contributor.
You get that sort of, you can get that. Pedigree, if you will as you start getting your your code accepted into the project and stuff like that, I would agree, but it’s much harder to find those personality types now because the nature of open source projects has changed over time.
I remember I was pretty sure that my code was in a tar ball with a bunch of other people at NCSA server when it was so patchy, they just started calling it a patchy. When we shared code back then there was abs, we were all stuck, working in a basement and on, on a hand-me-down desk and a broken computer.
That’s what software engineering was back then. Now a lot of open-source projects are these big, funded startups and entrepreneurs and stuff like that. So I think that it’s, I think it’s maybe less attractive. Target as a source of good candidates. Whereas in the past, I’ve tried to hire, really high profile open-source contributors as individuals and.
Tends to work well, as long as you can allow them to balance their contributions to a community, but understand they’re going to want 50% or more of their time to be spent supporting that open source project. So you’re going to be paying full price to get less than half of this person’s attention.
So it’s hard. It’s hard. Yeah. Bang for the buck. It’s great from an altruistic perspective, right? Cause you’re helping support an open source project and whatnot, but it’s definitely harder to find individuals that are really going to contribute in a big way to your organization. It probably makes the most sense when that like open source project is so critical to your business’s survival, where you either need to make sure it keeps going, or you need to make sure that you’re somewhat controlling and influencing the direction of where it goes.
I look at all the people at Shopify and get hub who are like rails core contributors. And that’s clearly a strategy that they’ve said is like, they want it. They want to influence the direction that rails goes in. And they’re hiring those people to do a lot of open source and it’s I would argue it’s not altruism it’s it’s but it’s like it’s carefully curated and address.
Yeah. We’ve actually seen also in in the area of data science. There’s a ton of bootcamps out there, but speak on the topic of open source. Kaggle days has really interesting competitions that they run, where they open up large data sets from, from corporations. Folks can come in there and work on those challenges and use that as an opportunity to one, get a little bit of a project under their belt.
But sometimes those companies that are opened up that data or using as a hiring tactic too. So the folks that, came in and did the best work, the end of the rainbow is a, is an opportunity here for you as well. So I think it’s a creative outlet. I do want to transition into our last segment while we still have a little bit of time.
A quick side note, Jeff, we will Blurt out Bryce Harper, his name from this podcast, just for the sake of, he’s not very belonged around here in DC. But yeah, so let’s I guess any final notes on this guys? I think we, we might even want to do a follow-up episode. It would be cool to bring.
The engineer Mitch from from hack reactor, I’m going to get her perspective. That could be a neat kind of a followup episode. I was going to say the one thing I’d really like to add here, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but if I restricted my candidate pool to just college grads, I’m going to find a whole bunch of people that look the same.
When you go the bootcamp route, you get an entirely different crowd of people. And if you believe that having a more diverse team leads to a better culture, leads to better exchanges, more friendliness and professionalism in the workplace, then you’re absolutely missing out if you’re not looking at bootcamp grads.
For sure. Yeah. Cool. Let’s transition into this this last segment here. It’s called a round out my career where we spend this fun wheel of a career growth topics behind me here. These are categories all sit around career growth and they’re questions that are crowdsourced by the Hatchpad community.
So I’m going to jump in here and spend this thing.
All right, culture. So I’m going to pick a question here, and then we can riff on it for a little bit. So when you think of a strong work culture, what are some of those top traits that come to mind? Jeff, you wanna kick it off? Yeah, sure. I think the traits that we look for that first of all, like I think we’ve decided that we don’t want to hire.
Sometimes like in the interview process, we finally really someone or someone doesn’t like immediately hit us. And then we realized that we should, we don’t want to just hire people who like have the exact same personality type as us. For me that means. I can’t just take every like gregarious extrovert that we like to talk to and just sign them up, is then like everyone will be the same and that’s not a good setup.
The things that we look for, like curiousness and dry. I think like one of our company values is learning share. It’s actually like part of your performance review is how much learning did you do and how much like sharing and teaching did you do? And I think that looking for people who really take joy in spreading knowledge out and also, and learning something, internalizing it, processing it, getting it together, and then.
Pushing it out to other people is a really positive thing. And I think it has a really nice influence on culture. I, we’re not a very like competitive group internally. I think people are very eager to share credit. And I think it’s very, it feels very collaborative. And I think that like those kinds of things, I get that.
And the last thing, sorry, I’m just spewing here when I’m doing this. All of these things are coming to my head, but the last thing is like humility. I think that we’ve had. A hard time in the past, if people haven’t been able to have a little bit of humility, I mentioned earlier about being able to admit that you don’t know something.
So you know, those things together are the things that we’re looking for to try to make sure that we built the strongest culture possible in our team. I love that last one. Humility. I’m the humblest guy. There is definitely the humblest.
Honestly, Jeff did a fantastic job of covering almost all of the really critical ones. At least for me, that I’m looking for. I’m also looking for folks that are not just a. Humble generous. But I’m also looking for peop and curious, but I’m also looking for people that are outcome oriented that are goal-driven so that they’re always working towards something that they’re not into just idle pursuits.
There, there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. The joke I’ve always made in the past is so how many hustles you got on the side? And usually everyone that I interviewed that I really has at least two hustles going on at any given moment. And that tells me that’s not just someone that’s driven, that someone who’s willing to say, I’m going to set a goal and I’m going to work towards that.
And my last place we call that outcomes over outputs. What we’re looking for is are you focused on. Getting something accomplished as opposed to just work for the sake of work or getting, oh, who cares if you pushed a number of lines of code or whatever it is like, it’s really, are you solving a problem?
And are you focused on that? I would say that the other, and I’ve, I’m trying to find a good word for this and I can’t, but it’s like being a good teammate. I’m not sure how, what word you’re looking for, there are people that when you put them in a group setting, And they get defensive.
They can lash out and get real aggressive. There are other people when you put them in a group setting and things, don’t go as intended, they’ll withdraw. And then there’s other people who will stop. And the holdup at the same hand and say, this is not going like it’s supposed to what’s going on here. And to me that last personality is a favorite personality type of mind, because this is a someone that’s not.
Going to be aggressive or give a hard time to a coworker, but they’re also not just going to check out and disappear on you. If things didn’t go as expected, they’re going to rate, they’re not going to try to be a superhero. They’re going to hand, toss up a hand and say, Hey Mitch, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been banging my head on this wall for two days and I just can’t do it anymore.
Save me from myself. And that’s totally okay. It’s like a synergy team that teamwork, a vibe We have a pretty simple philosophy when we hire up over here internally at hatch. And it’s, if you’re if you’re not a nice person, you’re not making it through and it we’re pretty good judge of that character.
A lot of that I think comes back to humility too. But yeah, if you’re not, nobody wants to work with, an a-hole, like we want to work with nice people and so that one, and then the other one that I really value is authenticity. Somebody who’s got some integrity to them and I think that’s such a, maybe an undervalued trait sometimes, but it’s just be real, I don’t want somebody, who’s just always trying to be something that they’re not.
Because it shines through pretty quickly when they’re trying to be that person. So yeah, someone who’s got that integrity or authenticity, I think is a big one for us. Yeah. For me, it’s the big three. I think I mentioned it earlier. Open-mindedness self-aware and then a problem-solver, but really on the open-mindedness and self-aware for me, and I think it comes into it, it has these like underpinnings of humility and some other things.
Nope. It’s an idea. It’s not your idea. It’s not my idea. It’s an idea. And we’re going to build on top of it and they, and we want to, I want people who are willing to have that conversation and make things better through, through that collaborative rather than getting defensive. If I say oh, I’m not sure if that’s going to work.
I want you to be like, yeah, no, you might be right. Like maybe we should do this or whatever. And for me to be able to take that same feedback and be. Whatever it is, but I think that’s an important trait as well. I think it really, that’s how you get good teams that sort of collaborative there’s so many, I think there’s a lot of themes that we’re pulling out that ha, but it has to do with that sort of, you want to work with this person and talking about a-holes I have worked at a company.
Years ago. And I, the COO told me that he’s look, you can’t keep every a-hole off the bus. Like eventually you’re going to, somebody is going to get on the bus. What you can control is how long they ride for. And I always appreciated that. So I think that’s another important aspect, which is, part of the hiring process is, making sure that you’re evaluating the candidate even after they, for the first 90 days and making sure, Did their actual personality come through in the interview or do we, did we miss something and stuff like that?
Yeah, it’s an interesting area. We’re seeing more and more, in, in today’s market. So we talk about an extremely competitive market. Where it’s no longer, you, maybe you have some cool tech and the job description jumped out and the opportunity was cool, but we’re seeing a lot more kind of like values based recruiting, taking place, where companies engineers candidates are making decisions.
On how they align, how the company’s values align with their core values. And I think it’s a cool time right now, because it’s what that should do is weed out folks that miss a line or taking on an opportunity for the wrong reasons. So more and more we’re seeing, startup companies representing those, their values on their, about us page.
And I think it’s great. I think. You should put out front and center and if you don’t buy with it, then this isn’t a place for you. And it’s becoming more and more of a recruiting based like alignment tool. I think that’s, it’s generational. Isn’t it? Let’s face it millennials.
Aren’t going to play the. Yeah that’s just simply not the way they’re wired. So if you think you can just dangle, benefits as a carrot or a fancy laptop or something else, they’re totally gonna see right through it. They’re just not going to buy it. And I’m okay. From as a, as an old Jayda gen X-er, who’s basically been told to play the game his whole life.
I am totally okay. With the way things are currently headed. Yes, for sure. Yeah. A lot more like I’m interested in like mission-driven companies and what, how am I helping the world here by solving this problem? Stuff like that. Cool. This is this is good stuff, guys. I’m super appreciative of you guys being friends of the show today.
Looking forward to getting the gang back together for a follow-up episode. I think it’d be a good one. I appreciate you stopping by. I enjoyed it.
