a tale of hiring, devrel, and various other things w/ ted neward

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email social media at tdesntdesen and finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Give the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Who am I? My name is Ted Nourd. I'm a technologist, author. Some have even gone so far as to call me a thought leader. I generally don't answer to that.

My family thinks I'm an insufferable bore. my friends, well, somebody of mine put it once, when you first meet Ted, you, you know, you think he's an asshole and then you get to know him and you think he's a great guy. And then another friend chimed in and said, yep, then you get to know him even better and realize he's an asshole. So the jury's mixed. I love it. I love it. But, you know, most people know me as somebody who's written a couple of technology books, both in the job and the dot net space or they've seen me speak at various conferences worldwide. And yeah, I've kind of done a lot of different things in the technology space.

I love it. I love it. What do I do? Currently, nothing. Yeah. Currently, it's all about that. Job search. Yeah, love it. We're going to dive into that. So Ted, obviously, I've heard a lot of great things about Ted. Ted's got a crazy awesome. All eyes. All eyes. All eyes. Ted's got a crazy background. He's done a lot. So we kind of, I'm kind of gonna narrow this down to a few things. And so Ted, I wanna dive into the first topic around hiring, right? You were about to spit some absolute truth off air. And I said, please stop talking because you're about to say some truth.

So what Ted and I were talking about is basically hiring for a piece of paper for a role instead of evaluating just for talent. So Ted, can you kind of break that down and kind of your thoughts on that? Well, one of the things you frequently see, when you, as a job seeker, you go out and you look at these job descriptions and they frequently focus on the what, right? I'm looking for a React developer who also knows some Python who also knows. And a friend of mine wants to coin the phrase that this is basically like ordering off of the McDonald's menu, right? I'll take one React, one Python, one big data and sure, I'll take a side of fries with that.

And... But those fries though. Oh yeah, you know, in and out's better, but we'll not, we'll not do that. Okay, all right, we won't get it. The thing of it is that in, and the part where you stopped me is in many respects hiring managers, you know, they either know or they've experienced the idea that you can hire somebody and they can turn into something that you didn't anticipate. But in many cases, they're constrained, because you use the phrase, right? You know, hiring managers need to think out of the box. In many cases, the box is put around them by the various tools and systems that they use, right?

They're constrained. So for example, if I'm working on, you know, if I'm building a team, if I'm at, you know, company XYZ Corp, and I run a React team, and I try to hire, say, a Python developer, I'm actually going to be constrained by the process around me and by the tools around me because in many cases, one of the ways that a company allocates some of its most precious resources, AKA Edgown, is by saying it has to be this particular kind of head. Now, in a startup environment where you don't have quite so much formality, you can usually get away with, you seem smart, we're gonna hire you.

But when you get into the bigger company, right, the lanes get narrower and narrower and narrower to the point where if I'm gonna hire somebody, this may be the only hire that I get for the next year or two. And so I need to make sure that they're actually gonna be able to do the job that they're given. And in many cases, hiring managers, especially again at a large company, the worst thing you can do is be wrong with a hire, not because this bad hire is going to ruin the team, but because in many cases, I can't get rid of them, right? To try to take a bad hire and have them leave the company, you know, if I can't transfer them to another team, I've lost that one hire that my team gets.

And so it's hard to quantify, it's hard to really sort of measure, You know, I look at you, Taylor, and you seem like a nice guy. But so have the last 12 other candidates that have come through, they all seem like nice people. So do I hire Taylor or do I hire somebody else? But I do know that so-and-so was really good when I gave them a React code test as opposed to so-and-so wasn't. So I'm going to go with the one that, you know, there's all these forces pushing you into the model that we currently have and to try to hire somebody who's not ticking off checkboxes, really working against the system.

So then what's your advice, right? So let's say you have the ear of every single hiring manager in the entire country right now. That is how big my show is, just kidding. So like, like, they're like, okay, Ted, that sounds great. How do we get around that? Or how do we try to fix that? Well, I mean, A, understand that there are, you know, that it's not necessarily about battles, it's about the war, right? And that in some cases you can only make small changes, but you can still make small changes. And let's me really practical about this. The end of the day, if you're running a React team, you need to have people who can write React.

Now, you may run across an Angular developer who's never done any particular React whatsoever. and or they may have just learned a little bit of react, but you look at people in terms of their depth, not just in terms of what, you know, how they measure up against the specific things you're looking against, because I'll be honest with you, right? You give me, if Rocket Mortgage, for example, is mostly a .NET shop, .NET in an old 4GL named Progress. Hey, man, love those 4GLs, man. Oh, yeah. I mean, and, you know, they were wonderful tools for their time. Right, in the same way that C++ was and before that C.

They were wonderful tools for their time. But where I'm going with this is, if I'm looking to hire a C-sharp developer and you show me somebody who's got Java for 15 years, I'll hire him. I'll hire him in a heartbeat. You will. Absolutely. Why? Because Java and C-sharp are close enough that in a relatively short period of time, I can get them to migrate over And that 15 years of experience, thinking about distributed systems, look, if you've done Java with Spring, you've seen some ideas that the dot net folks are, you know, in some cases flirting with and played around with, but you're gonna also bring in some different ideas and some different dynamic, because one of the things, one of the principle things that I always think about what I'm hiring is what's my biggest weakness?

What's my team's biggest weakness? Where are we not strong? Have I just continued to hire a bunch of people that think like me, look like me, I'm gonna have a very, very single dimensional team. I'm gonna have something that spikes in particular areas, but we have no width. We have no depth in many respects. Okay. And go ahead. Go ahead. All right, sorry. So I wanna talk about this whole group think, group think thing that is happening in tech where, hey, we need to see S-degree for you to work here. No, you don't. No, you don't. You want to know something? Worst kept secret of my life?

I don't have a CS degree. And I have taught at universities a number of years ago when .NET was brand new, the company I worked for, developed Ntore, had a deal to go teach .NET to the professors, the faculty at a relatively prestigious University down in Alabama. I mean, the end of the day, look, my degree is in international relations. If you want to sit and talk about why nations go to war, we can go all day, man, all day long. Because that's my background, right? I really thought I was going to be Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy novels. By the way, great show on Amazon.

And that whole notion of intelligence analysis and thinking about, you know, what's Putin thinking about doing? Why is he moving these troops ever? That was a large part of what I was thinking I was gonna do. International relations is probably the most liberal arts degree you'll ever see because it's a schmorgish board of all these different liberal arts, economics, political science, anthropology, ton of history, all of these different things. And I will argue, I actually have a talk by the same name, I will argue that my international relations degree prepared me better for career and technology than anybody's CS degree. I teach for the iSchool, the information school at the University of Washington.

I teach mobile development. And the iSchool there is take your average CS program, drop the algorithms, add entrepreneurship. And they're churning out graduates that just, I mean, they can't churn them out fast enough to be very blunt. That's awesome. It's, you know, the learning algorithms, learning the theory of computer science is important. Don't get me wrong. Sure, right. But it's only one aspect of the job. And to somehow suggest that a computer science major is necessary to get into this space, greatest trick that Devil Ever played on an industry. Yeah, I want to get some shoutouts to some people. Becky goes, good morning. and then she goes afternoon now.

Yeah, we're so, my group's so used to the morning. Chris Ellis, Chris Ellis goes, any aspiring iOS steps here, I love it already, networking on this thing as this was what it's all about. Eric, good morning. Jason from Vegas. I need to hang out with my Vegas people. Christina, what's going on? We need to do a little meet up in Vegas. We need to do a little meet up in Vegas. He's a good friend of mine. We need to just talk him. Yeah. That's awesome. And then Becky goes, I love that Ted. Thank you so much for this talk. You're a breath of fresh air.

There we go. I bet that's the nicest thing Ted's been told this morning already. Ted is bringing the heat on today's show. Yes, that's why I was very grateful to have Ted because I've never met Ted, but the stories I've heard have been incredible. All right, so let's move on a little bit more about hiring. Okay, one thing, one thing. We'll put it, reinforce something that you were saying, right? The guy earlier who was talking about, finding iOS devs, right? This notion of networking, I stress this a great deal to my UW students, right? I tell them first day of class because quarter just started this week.

I tell them, number one, jump on LinkedIn, friend me, because then you can connect into my network. But more importantly, look to your peers, create that network because that tribe is the word that I use, right? It's not family, it's tribe. It's a group of people that you feel comfortable with that you can ask questions of. I have been extraordinarily privileged in my career to call my tribe, many of the other people that people pay money to go see, speak at conferences. Dave Thomas, Neil Ford, Mark Richards, a bunch of folks from the .NET space. These things I don't know people would recognize anymore because in many cases, Aaron Scottard, the CEO of Whirlside, you know, used to teach .NET together, right?

That's awesome. That tribe in many respects has done tremendous wonders for me. And my job search right now, I mean, I occasionally LinkedIn will throw, you know, you may be interested in this role. And I throw my resume, because it takes just a few clicks to do so. Sure. But by far and away, the positions that, you know, my job at Rocket Mortgage came from my tribe. Buddy of mine, Joe Guadagno down at the bank said, hey, can you interview Joe? Joe? So, yeah, Jojis who got me hired at Rockin' Mortgage. That's awesome. You know, before that, Smartsheet was because I met one of the recruiters at an event.

We talked, didn't go anywhere at the time, but then one of my UW students did an internship at Smartsheet and I said, oh yeah, go tell Sasha. I said hi. And she called me back and said, hey, yeah, Evan, your student was in and blah, blah, blah. And that's what led to me getting to Smartsheet. Dude, I went to, I went to like one of the, I mean, our grad, our MBA program is really good at the University of South Carolina, but like, I don't know what this says about our undergrad. I was never taught to network, and that's why I'm so loud about this, and that's why I have this platform is because literally, if it like, like, forget NFTs, I said something, forget NFTs, forget Web3, forget, you know, Board Ape Yacht Club, forget all that stuff, When it comes down to it, what is your social currency?

Who do you know? That is the most important thing. I want to obviously give, you know, again, Pia goes this nice to hear that having a non-CS degree is more than acceptable. Steven goes good morning and then Elliot. More affirmation. See Ted, this is why you should come with my show more often. You just get, we are affirmation heavy on this show. So I love it. But yes, agreed. Networking, I think it is the most underrated skill right now, or period. Well, and this is where I think you start thinking about how you build your own individual brand, right? And that's not necessarily you have to go out and speak at conferences.

Correct. I mean, brand doesn't have to be global for it to be effective, even if it's local. Go to your local user group, volunteer to assist the organizer of the local code camp, right? Or other community coding events, volunteer at a local coding boot camp, right? There are a number of them that are catering to underrepresented folks in tech. Even if you're not one of those folks, just getting in there and helping those folks, you know, teaching what you can. Best way to learn a thing is to try to teach it. All of these are ways that you can get to know folks. And again, the story about Evan, my student, that one is one that I find particularly powerful because we often assume that, oh, I wanna cozy up to the people who are more senior to me.

No, this is a case where this was a reason, he hadn't even graduated yet for crying out loud. And he literally is what reminded the recruiter about me which is what got me the job at Smartsheet. It doesn't take much folks. It really does. It does not. Also timing. That's it. So, and I wanna say this too, and I'm sure you have thoughts. I'm about to say, I don't know if you have thoughts. You have thoughts. You seem like a guy that has thoughts. So basically, man, it's not like crazy right now. So basically, I think, no, I think, stop taking rejection so personally, because most of the time it's not your fault.

as somebody who's been on both sides of that table. There were candidates that I would have loved to have hired in various positions that I didn't because in some cases there was somebody else who was just a better fit or because there was a shift in plans. I mean, in my job search, I think I've been rejected, you know explicitly at least a half a dozen times and I've only been doing this now I mean over the holidays even just say that again. I show for people can hear it right? Yeah, yeah, I've been rejected half a dozen times Right explicitly Implicitly rejected. I couldn't tell you how many of the you know, hey, I'm looking for such and such throw throw something into the LinkedIn machine It's probably dozens of those.

I've lost I've lost count. I've lost track None of it is personal, right? I mean, there were a couple of places I looked at, I'm like, oh yeah, I could be CTO of that company. And I threw my name into their system and got the email back. And we're sorry we don't find you to be a good fit right now. Yeah, it's because generally, when you're just a name and a computer system, there's no depth. They're just looking at, and again, they're looking at that checklist of things. One of the things that we'll tell you, and this goes back to the networking thing, It's far better to talk to people.

Let me give you an example, right? When, you know, the smart sheet thing, right? When the recruiter called me back, when Sasha called me back and she said, hey, you know, I talked to Evan and, you know, thought we should, and so I brought your name up and we thought we should bring you in. They literally asked me, so, you know, what do you wanna do? So note, first of all, I'm not applying for a particular role, right? I'm just, I'm applying. And I was talking to them a little bit about developer relations, DevRel, and what you... Which we're gonna get to here in a minute.

Yeah, I figured as much. And was in a interview panel with three people, right? Was the current, I think he was the director of research at the time, I can't remember what Todd's title was, and the current CISO, the chief information security officer and the CTO, one of the founders. Okay. And we talked for probably about 90 minutes or so. You know, Todd had seen me speak at various local events. Again, interesting bit of networking. I didn't know that he'd seen me speak until he brought it up during the interview. So he already kind of knew who I was and what I knew. And so he was already kind of sold to start with.

The CISO was interested in getting better at speaking. So he basically asked me to grade a talk that he had done that happened to be recorded. Yeah. He was the one who really kind of grilled me a little bit. We got to talking about DevRel. He told me at the end of the interview that when he walked into that room, he was absolutely convinced that they had no need whatsoever of developer relations. And walking out of that room, he was absolutely convinced that this was a necessary step for smart-sheets growth. And Sasha told me later, I'm really glad you accepted the offer because John was on fire to get a DevRel team fired up.

If you didn't accept, I didn't know where I was going to go find one, right? A, power of networking. B, this job didn't exist when I went. There was no, there was no website to apply to. C, it came from literally a random conversation with a random recruiter at a random technology. And I talk about all the time, please people. I understand that a lot of people get blind, blind emails, cold emails from recruiters over LinkedIn and so forth, and they can get really annoying. I cannot stress this enough to technologists in the world. Recruiters are your friend. They look to you. They look to you as the ones that get you jobs.

Right? Yes. Elliot, absolutely. One of the best things you can do is make friends with the recruiting departments. Part of the reason why when I got to Smartsheet, I spent so much time helping the recruiters try to do their job more effectively and similarly at Rocker Mortgage. part of my role as the director of technology culture was to help our talent acquisition team do it better. It pays off in space. Make them a part of your tribe. Absolutely. So let's talk about DevRel. Sure. It's definitely a term that gets thrown around and also just kind of some catch up of some comments. So Kafka goes, you got blessed Twitter spaces.

You know, I like this. I like the video. Twitter space is just audio. I don't know whatever. Christina, I'm very wealthy in people. You are, Christina reached out to me. I was on her podcast. Agnes goes networking, my social currency, absolutely again, more Ted is dropping gems, picking up gems. So, all right, DevRel, what is it and why should almost every tech company, why should companies consider this type of model? So there's no official definition to DevRel, right? Different people have different definitions of the demo. It started with tech companies who were looking to sell developers on their various tools and platforms, right? Microsoft, I think, is the one who really created this space with what they called their developer evangelists, the developer experience and so forth.

And in many respects, what they were doing is they were going out and going into the community. They were meeting with developers, they were sponsoring user groups. During the early days of .NET, for example, there was an organization that Microsoft subsidized called INETA, international.NET Association. I think I've heard that. Yeah, INETA's job was basically to help connect fledgling.NET user groups with.NET speakers. And part of the subsidy there was Microsoft would cover the travel to bring some of these big name speakers out to speak at these little Donna user groups. I mean, yeah, I've been to all these different small towns all over, you know, what we on the coast refer to as flyover country.

Um, Nashville, um, um, what's your favorite to small flyover town real quick? Go. What's that? What's your favorite flyover small town? Oh, without question, it's where my mother grew up. Woodworth, Illinois population 50, about 100 miles south of Chicago out in Kinky Kinky Kinky. You're kidding me. That's awesome. No joke. Mom graduated her, her, let's see, I'm trying to remember she graduated from Wichita, not Wichita from Watsika, sorry, Watsika High School, I think her graduating class was four people. Yeah, the town of Woodworth, I mean, literally Google Earth, you'll have to look at it. I gotta go check out. It is a crossroads. It is a crossroads.

It is a four-way stop. I'm really cool. A general store that has since shut down that was made out of a converted rail car, a bar, a discontinued fire station that's still, according to state law, has to run their air raid siren once every six months. The church and school, it's a four-way stop out in the middle of farm country. Yeah, oh, I love visiting because that's where my relatives are. But it's just, it's so, so peaceful out there. So peaceful. I love that. Anyway. I have the dev rep. Well, so part of the thing is Microsoft, Microsoft did this because, it's people aren't, they really wanted to get people to adopt.net and the best way to do that is to go out to the individual developers and provide them with some kind of infrastructure, in this case, use your groups and places where they could go to get material.

So a lot of your developer evangelists would create tutorials and so forth. But the interesting thing is, as more and more companies have begun to embrace technology in various ways, they've come to realize that they actually want to engage with the developer community as well. And so, for example, I was just talking to one of my former students a couple days ago. she was a part of a data science group studying the Nike supply chain, working at Nike of all places, right? This is a shoe company for crying out loud. You don't think of them as a technology company and yet their supply chain, so they can make more shoes, is absolutely crucial to what they do.

Well, part of what Nike cares about to some degree is also, how do they get more technologists and so forth. And it was while I was at Smartsheet that Andy Leights, who was the senior VP of R&D there, introduced me to the wider definition of DevRel. I don't know if he even realized he was doing it. But one of the things that he was thinking is that not only should people relate to the developers outside the company, but they should also relate to the developers inside the company. And so part of my perspective on DevRel now is, look, it's about connecting developers to a variety of different folks, connecting developers to developers.

How do I connect the outside developers to the inside developers and vice versa? And so it's this interesting melange of technology and sociology and giving talks and writing articles and blog posts and so It's this mix of things. And so if you're one of those people who likes programming, but not eight hours a day. Right, right. Right. One of the most successful hires we did on the Rocket Mortgage DevRel team was somebody who was one of who would actually come to Rocket Mortgage as a marketing intern. She'd worked with the marketing team for a while. What's that? What's their name? Alyssa. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Alyssa, she came with me. I think she just connected with me today on LinkedIn this morning. Yeah, Alyssa's great. And she's awesome. I'm not better at Casey DZ. Yeah. And the thing that was fascinating is, Alyssa, we were talking in a one-on-one and she said, I really thought that joining the DevRel team, I was going to be really the, you know, I would have no idea what I'm doing was it's all technology. and instead what I'm finding is, you know, you want me to write copy, you want me to think about how we mark. These are all things that I did on the marketing team because DevRel also includes, yeah, there you are, Alissa.

Hey, there you are. Alissa. You know, a lot of what we do in DevRel is about marketing, right? And so that's why it's this really interesting melange of both the hardcore technology as well as, you know, the more human skills that we see in sales and marketing. So, Well, I'm gonna argue this. I'm gonna argue it. I'm gonna state it, because I truly believe it. I created a recruiter advocate role for myself. Because what industry needs it more of blending tech and non-tech people than recruiting. I mean, literally any recruiting company that watches this. And I'm actually, I had one recruiter reach out to me.

He goes, I've been interested with what you know, and following your journey. I kind of want to do this with my company, what's involved. I think tech systems, Robert Haff, IDR, Audubic, you name it, I think there needs to be a team of recruiter advocates that go to conferences, do podcasts, do marketing, write copy, because at the end of the day, I think moving forward, and I've had so many conversations around NFTs, like there's JPEGs, and then there's the community driven NFTs. I just think community is how you grow. And if your business is not developing community in either your immediate market or in general, I think you're gonna lose.

I think you're gonna lose. Well, part of, if you take it back to some of the more traditional terms, right, a lot of what you do in terms of building your community is marketing, right? And marketing has such this bad name to it, right? Nobody wants to be in marketing. I mean, that's- I went to school for marketing. I had no idea what it is. Now I do a little bit, maybe. Well, hey man, there are people who went to school for computer science and still have no idea what it is, right? There you go. Maybe that's an indictment of our educational system, but that's another debate.

Don't even get, don't even give me a start on that thing. Look, at the end of the day, a large part of, regardless what you call it, whether you call it community building, whether you call it developer relations, whether you call it marketing, a large part of it is how do I get people to understand who we are and what we do and think of us, because that's a large part of what a lot of these companies doing DevRel are also thinking about, you know, when I, when I was at both Smartsheet and Rock Mortgage, part of the job of the DevRel team was to show people that this is where the cool kids are, so that they want to come be with the cool kids.

I mean, in some cases, it's just that simple. You know what, that sounds stupid as all get out. It sounds stupid, but the thing is though, So that's how you get talent. And what does talent do? It fuels business. Yep. I think that's right. I think that's right. Yep. I mean, the end of the day, the company can't exist without people working at the company. We often talk about, there's that classic phrase that employees or the company's greatest asset, which of course, Dilbert has made fun out of every which way from Sunday. But in many respects, I mean, you look at a lot of these successful companies.

look at the companies that have had, you know, successful founders and they will tell you absolutely it's critical. That's part of the reason why these people will go on at great length about why hiring is so important and why it's absolutely crucial to get that higher right, which is why it's so frustrating when you see companies that are working their hiring process so badly. So I mean, it's it's it's not hard. I mean, people, at least I don't think it's hard. Well, you think hard. I mean, people are hard. Let's be really good. Yes. People are hard. Yes. Being in the recruitment for 10 years, I hate people.

That's kind of my joke among my team. Like literally like, I'm a grumpy old man. People wear me out, which is why I'm thankful for content because it allows me to scale my time without having to talk to many people. But yes, people are terrible for the most part. And the thing of it is, the hard part about people is that they're non-deterministic, right? Something that I say to you that gets you all fired up and excited that I say to somebody else won't work, right? With Python, if I write code, it runs the same on every place that I can write Python, but I can run Python.

But with people, no. You invest time to discover who they are, to figure out what they're interested in and what would make them get excited, what helps them get past the obstacles. And that can be both frustrating as well as exhilarating. Because if you're somebody that's constantly looking for challenges, there is no greater challenge than walking up to somebody brand new and trying to figure out how to get the most out of them. Yep. Absolutely. All right. So last question, because I want to get to it, because I want to get this on. I want to get this documented because I think Ted's going to have some pretty good thoughts on it.

And again, thank you for everybody who's who's shown up today. You know, Alan's talking about yes, recruiter advocates. Alan, hey, hit me up. Let's let's talk. I can pitch that to any leadership within a recruiting organization because I've done it. So hit me up, man. So last question is we'll end here. And I'm going to go play in the snow. How to hire junior developers and build out teams effectively with junior developers? Now, this can be its own topic for the next hour. So let's not do that. But give me kind of the give me kind of the high level Ted. So when I was that smart sheet, Andy, the head of technology there approached me and said, I want to build a brand new team, build applications on top of our API.

And I do not want to use senior full stack Java developers to do it because that's what the company was looking for to implement the rest of the product. Didn't want to cannibalize our existing efforts. And I Well, first of all, let's think tech stack. Do you want to do .NET? He's like, nah, he worked at Microsoft, had some feelings there. He's like, no, I don't want to do .NET. Besides which .NET folks, we could probably convert them over to Java folks more quickly. I feel like that's still the same. Okay. What about Python? And Andy said, oh, well, if we do Python, then I could write some code for the product.

And I said, Andy, you've just convinced me it can't be Python. and we lack. What about JavaScript? Because there are all these boot camps that are teaching people JavaScript. That will definitely allow us to staff the team very quickly. He's like, well, if you hire people straight out of boot camps, you're going to have to support them. I said, oh, yeah, no, no, no, don't get me wrong. If we go this route, you're going to need to help me find a strong team lead from inside the company. I'm not going to do it next time I'm higher. Again, what's the biggest weakness if you're gonna hire a bunch of juniors?

That's it. Especially if they're coming from outside the company, they need to have some good partnership. They need to have some good mentorship. They need to be given and part of what we did. We staffed the whole team. We staffed a team of eight in about six weeks. Wow. Start to finish. Wow. I mean, you know, because the juniors are out there, man. They're begging. They're absolutely begging for somebody to give them a chance. Yes. but it didn't stop there. Hiring juniors is not that hard. The hard part is getting the juniors to be productive and you can pretty much write the story at this point what happened, right?

A, I immediately went out and with the team lead Garvis, we went out and identified a book that the team would use and we held a weekly book club. No way. We had the entire solutions team. Yep, we took, because we were doing JavaScript type script, we took one of make it supermoniums books, bought copies for everybody. And then every week we walked over to a pizza place in Bellevue, and we sat around and we talked about the next chapter in Vankett's book. And because Vankett's a friend of mine, occasionally I would send an email off to Vankett and say, hey man, when you said this, what did you mean?

Because we're not quite sure, right? Which he loved because it helped him think about what he wanted to correct in the next edition. Sure. And we did that for at least a month and a half, two months. Isn't that crazy? Hey, congrats, junior developer. It's your first job. You need to read, and we're on a book club. And they ate it up, right? They absolutely ate it up. They loved it because most juniors are, they're very aware of what they don't know. They absolutely are very aware of what they don't know. And we started forming the team in March. We had everybody pretty much in place by April.

April and May was rough. The team really was not producing, but we kept at it. We kept going through, we kept, okay, let's continue to work our way through these things. One of the things that I did as their director is I actually worked with the facilities people to make sure that they could all sit next to each other in the open office plan, so that they could just turn and talk to each other and ask questions and so forth. And we really created this environment where there were no dumb questions. At one point, I was, because I'd been out of the code for a while, I wanted to get back to, I wanna do a bill on my machine and run it and see where we're at and so forth.

And I'd hold stuff down from Git and couldn't get it to work. So I posted a message into the team's lag saying, hey guys, can somebody come over and help me? And sure enough, one of the most junior developers walked over to my machine, and said, all right, what are you running into? Now, keep in mind, think how ballsy that was for this woman to come over to not just her boss, but her boss's boss's machine and say, how can I help you? It would have been really easy for her to say, oh yeah, no, I don't want to reveal that I maybe don't know as much, but we really tried to create this space where anybody could ask any question at any time, which is part of the reason why I as the skip posted that to say, hey, I'm stuck.

Somebody helped me too. This concept of psychological safety where anybody can ask a question and not be judged for it is a large part of what you really have to install around junior developers. Well, business in general. I mean, I'll say business in general too, man, because I tell you what, there have been some, yeah. If you don't have that, I don't think you're gonna grow as fast. The larger the group, the harder it is for everybody to feel safe, which is part of the reason why YouTube and Facebook are such cesspools as they are, because the less I know, the more anonymous things get, the easier it is for bad behavior to not be called out and shut down.

Sure. If it's a group of six or seven of us, and somebody were to stand up and utter something absolutely vile, the group would reject that individual. but when it's six or 700,000, it's just, you know, it's too easy to let them, you know, to let it go. So psychological safety, you definitely want to build it in the team that you're in, and ideally you want to build it in the group around that, but when you start getting out to, you know, thousands of people, it's harder to do. But this is part of what's important for junior developers because if they can't feel comfortable asking questions, then they're not going to grow and they're not going to get better.

The flip side is you have to be willing to listen to what they do know because it's very common in a technology team to say, oh, well, I'm the senior most person here. I've seen the most things. And when a junior makes a bid, that phraseology actually comes from some relationship counseling, right? When you see somebody making a bid suggesting, hey, what about you can't just shut it down. You can't just say, no, that's dumb. and we're finished here. You've got at least listened to it. And in many cases, yeah, the details of what they're suggesting may not be exactly correct. But at the very least, you need to honor that, you need to say, that's good thinking.

I don't think that's the case here because, thought, thought, by the way, when you're doing that, you're teaching them at the same time. All of these things are what are gonna take your junior developers and grow them because from a company's perspective, if you're not thinking about succession planning, if you're not thinking where the next generation of developers are coming from, if as a manager, you're not thinking about who your replacement will be when you can or need to leave the chair, your company's gonna die. I mean, it's just absolutely crucial to the future of the company that you'd be thinking about, where do we get the next generation of all of that?

I literally tweeted today, I said, hey, it's a casual reminder to start hiring for Q2. To like literally like, people just don't think ahead. People just don't think ahead. And succession planning like this, when you think about that next generation, you're hiring for 2023 and 2024 and 2025 because those juniors that you hire now, the fact that you gave them their first chance, the fact that you grew them, I mean, you give somebody that chance, you encourage them, you help grow them, they're going to be loyal for life. I mean, just, you know, and that's the kind of, companies are constantly whining about the fact that they hire somebody and then they lose them again.

And this goes back to where we started with this. If you treat this like a transaction, like ordering off of the McDonald's menu, don't be surprised when there's no loyalty there and they go transact someplace else. Yeah, if you treat this as a relationship and you invest in the people, It's hard and it's long and it's slow, but if you invest in a world that's cool, it pays off in spades. I love it. All right, Ted, thank you. That was great. I love that. Y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. Guys, Councilor 2.0, the lunchtime edition. We are back to normal time tomorrow and guess who I have.

Kent Dodds is coming on the show tomorrow. We're gonna talk about another dang JavaScript framework called remix that's out there now. So just to confuse everybody, every other recruiter out there some more. So you're very excited to have Kent on the show tomorrow morning. Not 30 a.m. Central Ted, thank you so, so much. We went 45 minutes. I'm very impressed. I think we could probably go on an hour and a half. So I would love to have you back on very soon as a follow up. But y'all go ahead and please connect with Ted on LinkedIn, on Twitter and Ted stay on for a quick second afterwards.

But again, y'all have a good one and I'm gonna go clean the snow now. Bye. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. Destin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.