interviewing as a principal engineer as a first timer w/joe flateau, technical lead/staff engineer at density

full transcript

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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 T D S and T D E S S E Y N. 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. So let's dive into it. Joe, let's go what they want, man. Who are you and what do you do? And we'll just go from there. Yeah, I'm, you know, my title right now is Staff Software Engineer.

You know, I'm a full stack guy. Right now, I'm kind of focusing on distributed systems and event driven systems, event processing. There we go. But, you know, I also like to keep my hands in react and, you know, I'm a remix guy. Yeah. Big fan of what they're doing over there. 100%. You know, I've been, I've been a software engineer since, you know, about, you know, eight years old when I stole my dad's HTML 4.1 book and started learning what that was all about. Could basically type before I could talk. So I don't really remember life where I wasn't tinkering with something or other. I love it.

And also, so I want to mention this, but I want to go unnoticed because again, I want to let you know like I eat my own dog food as I say. Joe and I met over Twitter, right? And I'll never forget meeting Joe. I tweeted about one of my hockey games on the way home. And some dude from New York is starting to tweet at me randomly who I've never met before about ice hockey. And I was like, hell yeah. And so Joe and I became best friends after that. So Joe, Joe, Joe, what position do you play? And what would you say your strengths are out on the ice?

Sure. Yeah. So I'm a right wing. Okay. I would say my strength's out in the ice and this is a hockey podcast, right? This is not. Yeah. We're only talking hockey for the next hour. Everyone's like great. Yeah. So I'm a I play right wing. I would say my strengths are my stick handling. Okay. And yeah, kind of vision of the ice, I guess. I love that. No, in a different life, I was also rather swift. Okay. But you know, that was, you know, 10 years ago and about 50 pounds ago. And, you know, I'd say that's the last of my, my, my experience and my insights are my strength now.

I love that. I love that. I think it's Jonathan right here, HTML 4.4.1 really feeling, feeling real old, I haven't learned basic on an Apple II. I don't even know what that is. Alex, great to see you. So all right, so no, this is not a hockey podcast. So Joe, you brought up such a great topic, quote unquote backstage about how you were essentially at the same company for 12 years, which I would say another podcast in and of itself of what kept you there and what was so great about it and yada yada. But the one thing you said that I want other people to know is you said you came out of there and started to interview and people told you it would be easy and it wasn't.

So can you talk, so let's do first thing. What in your gut made you finally realize you need to move on? Because I think people a lot of times struggle with when to move on, why to move on, how they're feeling. So I don't wanna necessarily talk about all the 12 years but talk to me about what led up for you leaving. Yeah, so, you know, ultimately, I would categorize it as burnout. I don't know if I knew it at the time as burnout. What did burnout look like for you? Burnout for me looked like, you know, I would get to the office on, you know, this is way back in 2019 when there was these things called offices that people wanted to do.

I would get to the office and just like dread the workday. I love software engineering. I do it for fun on the nights and weekends, even though it's also my full-time job. I'm just really into it. I went through this time and it was almost two years where I really didn't like... I would dread the day. I would show up, you know, I'd sit in my desk and just like, you know, there was days where I just kind of like stared at my screen all day long and just couldn't turn my brain on. Yeah. I was like, you know, this, this, this needs to change.

Um, so, you know, I, I left the full time employment and went and did some, some contract work and consulting for, for almost two years. Yeah. Um, after that. Okay. And then I want to give a shout out Danny. It's great to see you man. For those of you who are in the Dallas area, please connect with Danny. He's one of the good ones and a former guest of the show. So talk about your experience, right? So you had burnout. You're ready to go. went into contracting, consulting, again, went to another podcast in and of itself. But talk about the issues that you faced, even as a principal engineer, right?

Because I think a lot of people are like, oh, principal engineers, they have an easy-to-job search. They're senior, everybody wants principal engineers. Talk about like maybe some experiences you had that maybe didn't agree with that. Yeah, so like you mentioned, I was in a job for 12 years and while on a resume that's kind of nice to some hiring managers that like, you know, this guy isn't just bouncing around, you know, for whatever opportunity presents itself. Like it also, I went 12 years without selling myself, right? Oh, anything about that? Yep. Yep. I didn't really have experience with like interview process. I hired people, right?

So I kind of knew from the other seat, you know, what, what, you know, I was looking for and some of that stuff, but like, I'm very much like, again, like, to go back to hockey. Like, I'm the assist leader, usually, not like the scoring leader, right? So I'm very much like a team guy. And in this, you know, when you're searching for a job, you have to sell yourself and your accomplishments. And when your tendency, when my tendency is to talk in terms of like the team did this and team did that, you gotta kind of focus on the team did this, but I did this.

So that's interesting, right? So I wanna dig in on this. So you had to learn yourself and say, I did this instead of the team because if you're in the interview, the interview doesn't care what the team did, the interview wants to know what you did. Yep, interesting. Interesting, okay. So that was one thing you fixed, what else? One thing I fixed that something else. Or learned or had experience with, sorry. Yeah, just like, you know, how to organize a resume in how to, you know, not essentially accumulate too much like resume debt. Like, you know, you apply for this job and you see in the job posting that, you know, they're looking for this particular skill set.

And I have that, but like it's not front and center on my resume, nor do I think it's like super applicable to a whole range of other, like, you know, one, one job I applied for, wanted experience with like protocol buffers and message pack and like yeah I've got experience with that but like do I want that accumulating on a resume so you know what I what I went and did is I actually built my resume as a react app and it has this like control panel where I can like toggle on and toggle off different like skill set areas and I can like You need to sell that.

That would go over really well. Yeah. I'm maybe ahead and thought of that. But you know, upside there is that I can generate, customize PDF easily. Downside is it doesn't generate a Doc X easily. and some of the systems want the DocX. Yeah, so we can parse the information on the back end. So talk about how did you find your next job? So again, for the last few minutes, you've been talking about what you learned, how to sell yourself, how to build a resume, not collect debt, quote unquote, on your resume. But I'm sure people are going to be like, all right, that means the act great and all.

But how did you actually find a job as a principal engineer? Yeah. So, you know, I was kind of going, I wouldn't say I was doing like a like spray and pray approach on like applying, nor was I doing like a, you know, sniper applying either where, you know, applying for, I was applying probably five, six jobs a week. Okay. You know, I went through, you know, several of the kind of big tech co interview processes and got fairly deep in some. You know, unfortunately, the market at big tech co's, a lot of the roles I was applying for, interviewing for got frozen or, you know, removed completely.

Right. I was at interviewing at AWS and I was kind of getting towards a cool video role. I have a lot of video experience and they froze the job right before I got to that last step. But ultimately, the job that I did take, that was through a personal referral from somebody I worked at, worked with at, you know, that company I worked at for 12 years. He was a colleague from there. I got a referral to a role that I thought was pretty cool. I saw the role pop up on, like LinkedIn jobs. And I saw, hey, I've got connections here. And can you give me a referral?

I got that. So two things I want to dig in on here, right? So, you know, I know a lot of people are dealing with cancel jobs, jobs on hold. How did you take that, I guess, internally when you started, what did you have to kind of get over, talk about kind of the interpersonal kind of strife that you probably dealt with people canceling roles on you? Because, you know, I've had so many people junior devs like I canceled roles. I mean, I know one junior dev, his name's Emmet, he was on the show me, he told me he got so many canceled roles over the holidays.

So what's your biggest piece of encouragement and how did you get over that? Oh, man. I went into the job search as like, what's the saying, like the world's your oyster? Like, you know, I'm a principle software engineer, right? Like everyone's gonna walk me. Right, I'm gonna show up. I'm gonna be like the hot chick at the party. Anybody's gonna be like blessed by my presence. Yeah. And then, you know, that was not my experience at all. It was, you know, trouble. So there was a little like reset. There was, you know, I went into it with super high expectations. And then there was a period, you know, like the stages of grief essentially where it's like, oh, oh no.

I guess I was not quite accurately viewing the landscape of things. And so like a reset of like, nope, this isn't just gonna be like, I step into the room and people are throwing cash at me. I'm gonna have to work for this, even though I've got all these years of experience and I'm pretty good looking resume. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's a fascinating thing. So Kevin, Kevin doing a hockey analogy. So you're saying the hockey puck is our resume portfolio. The players are champions, advocate referrals. The opposing team is a posture to burn out the goals. Yes. Yes. Right. Love that. Yeah. Love that.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. That's exactly. We can go hand in right there. That was great Kevin. My man Raymond. It's great to see you buddy. So the next thing I want to dig in on, okay, so obviously you had to reset kind of mentality of like, Hey, you know, I'm not the hot girl in the room. I'm going to have to work for it as well. The next thing I want to talk about too is the referral, right? because I tell people that in my opinion, just my opinion, you're most likely gonna find a job from your community in some way, shape or form.

Now, whether that community is like a sixth degree community of a friend or a friend, but it's gonna be there. Where was this personal referral in your career? Like where did they cross paths with you? Just so we can try to frame it up for people to maybe look back into their network. Yeah, so I worked with them back in, so the company that I worked in was on the Syracuse University campus. This person was a student there, kind of like a student worker in essentially the IT department there. And we worked on a few projects together And he was a good dude. And we, you know, we got along pretty well.

And, you know, we stayed connected. You know, our lives kind of went different ways after we graduated. So, you know, we weren't talking regularly, but we both- Which is great. Cause I think a lot of people feel so weird, like messaging people that they haven't talked to. So keep going. Yep. Yep. So, you know, we both had like this positive experience with each other, but weren't like regularly communicating. And then, you know, I saw the job popped up. I saw like, he worked there and I was like, Hey, man, you know, I'm, you know, on the market looking for a new FTE role. Yeah. And would you mind, you know, putting in a referral for me.

And even if, frankly, even if this person on the topic of finding referrers, even if this person didn't necessarily like me, right, often, and I know the company, there's a referral bonus, so they're financially incentivized to refer you even if you're not like best buds. So definitely like when people are hesitating on asking for referrals, you know, frankly, you're often doing them a favor. Yeah. Like it takes them, you know, five to 10 minutes to fire up a referral. Yeah, email HR or put it in the, you know, the greenhouse system, whatever. But, you know, they can make a decent chunk of cash off of a referral if it goes through.

And I think so. So, yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I've done only one other episode where a developer said this and I think this is Emmett. Hey, Joe, cross check. I love it. It wasn't me. It wasn't a cross check. I love it. I love it. So, um, I've had all, I've only talked about this in one other episode with one other developer. And he said the exact same thing. He goes, please message me first before you submit your information. Yes. Because once you submit your information to the company, Joe, Joe, Joe can't rep me anymore. Now Joe can say, Hey, my friend is in the system.

But if Joe is taking your resume and obviously like email aka carrying it to HR and be like, Hey, this is my friend. Can you please get him? That is going to go further than you just sending your resume into the system and then texting Joe, but hey, Joe, I just submitted right because it because I say this, if you text Joe, but hey, Joe, I just submitted my resume. He's gonna go, why didn't you send it to me? Yep. 100%. And I think that's so good. I had that experience with one of the jobs I applied to earlier on, which was like, hey, man, I just applied for this job.

Can you drop a referral on my application? And he was like, it doesn't work that way, brother. You need the referral before the application. Yeah. And let me ask you this. and people are so scared to DM somebody that they haven't talked to in a while and just ask for something. I mean, was your contact, I'm sure he was fairly chill with it. He's probably like, yo, Joe's probably been, it's been a bit man, sure, I'll do it. I mean, like what was the, I mean, was he fine with it? Oh yeah, yeah. No, he was stoked to do it. Yeah. You know, again, forget like the little financial incentive.

Like you're gonna help, as the referer, like you're gonna help somebody get a job and help them support their family and help them get new experience. So there's a lot of incentive to be the refurrer. And so it's really, it's an opportunity for the refurrer as much as it is for the refurrer E. Yep, 100%. Becky comes in here goes, yes, the referral is the way to go. It can be a win-win for both the person applying and interfering. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my brother has made some referral money at the company he works at, sending people in. I mean, companies have that. Companies have that in place.

Vaco has it in place, right? So again, I mean, it's a great little perk and it needs to happen. So Joe, another thing we want to talk about too, that you brought up that I don't talk about enough on this show, just because I kind of replace it is the cover letter, right? So you brought it up, supposedly you got reamed over the coals with your cover letter. So talk about it. Talk about how you originally created your cover letter, what was said when someone saw it, and then how you fixed it. That's too funny. So that was, yeah, we were talking backstage before. So in the job that I ended up staying in for 12 years, I actually wrote a cover letter that was, you know, a full like eight and a half by 11 letter size paper page, page, cover letter explaining why, like, you know, I have this like imposter syndrome at the time and into like an extent even now, how, you know, I didn't go to college, right?

Like I went to a community college left early for professional experience, don't have the degree, you know, at the time the job I was applying for, I was still like fairly young, I was like 20, 21 years old. And so I wrote this full cover letter explaining why they should still consider me and all this stuff. And when they saw, I learned this later, when they saw the wall of text letter, they plopped it right in the trash without even flipping over to page two. But fortunately, there's two people involved in the hiring. The other one was like, yeah, let's pull it out and let's give them a chance.

Right, right. And it worked out. Now, I'm curious, right, the wall of text and I tell people this a lot too. I feel like people feel the need to pack their resume with words because they feel like they need to, to feel like they, but like in your experience again, this is going in a little bit of marketing and copywriting, which I'm super passionate about. But what, in your career and your feedback, I mean, I would imagine you would probably say less is more almost probably. Yes. Yeah. I would, I would say at this point, you know, you have four to five sentences. Maybe each of those sentence should reflect something from the job description.

Yeah. And not like the, you know, the generic, like generic job requirements. It should be like, you know, I have this specific experience. that specific experience and maybe like I don't have this, like I don't have six years of go experience. Right, right. That is a to be discussed and to be tested on whether or not saying like I don't have this particular experience would be a good move or not. You know on one side like it shows a bit of like honesty and kind of makes the rest of your stuff a little more credible on the other side. Like do you wanna be like nagging yourself in, in your application?

Yeah, five to six sentences, very short, very sweet. Yeah, I love a few things you said here. One, obviously short and sweet. Two, putting the things in the cover letter that specifically relates to the job description. Obviously your resume is more encompassing. I always say, and Joe, I'm interested in your thoughts. You can agree, disagree. My thing is, if you can get in the elevator, 30 seconds with the hiring major for this role, and this person says, what are your milestones in your career? Those are the things you put on a cover letter, for the most part. That's the kind of way I view your cover letter.

It's like a highlight reel. So, all right, so time flies when you're having fun. So last three questions, because it's Valentine's, For those of you who did not realize, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. So I'm helping. I actually text it. I text in my hockey guys for the games tonight. I said, hey, just FYI. Tomorrow's Valentine's Day. Joe, are you a heavy hitting questions this morning? Are you a candy fan? If you are a candy fan, are you more the chocolate type or are you more like the sugary sweet type? And if so, what is your favorite type of candy? man. So I'm not particularly a candy guy.

Okay. However, like Reese peanut butter cups. We can't go wrong. No, you have okay. I'm diving a little deeper here, right? Yeah, heavy heavy hitting questions this Monday. Do you like the traditional we see cups? Do you like the pump kins, the Christmas trees? I think they're even is the Easter Bunny, do you like the various forms of Reese's Cups or do you just like just the Reese's Cup? So I like the, I think it only comes in like the traditional Reese's Cup form, but like dark chocolate Reese's Cup is like love that. So good. It's the way to go. It really is. So I'll say it's my wife, Turn Me On to the Reese's.

It's Reese's natural. So when I say healthier, it's not necessarily healthier. It's just like, doesn't quite have the typical stuff in it. It's like a little cliffhanger. It's really good. It's really good. If you haven't checked it out yet, I would actually, I literally just had a senior engineer to text me about our conversation about Reese's. So hey, Brian, Brian's watching Brian just texted me. So anyways, yeah, my favorite is, I think the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree is a little bit more peanut buttery, less chocolate, which is a really light. So, interesting. All right, next, next heavy-hitting question. Tech, what tech trends, tools, technologies, are you experimenting with either at work or on the side that you're pretty interested in other people's to check out?

And don't say chat, GPT. I'm just going to. No, I'm not. I'm not. So four, I guess this is kind of relevant. So I actually never put a patchy Kafka in production in my old job. But I had an interview with Wayfair that didn't go super well. And so when I was interviewing for my current role, I was like, you know, it's a homework rather than like a live coding type thing. And I'm like, you know what? Like, I think I wait under-engineered my solutions in like the systems design at Wayfair. So I'm going to like, wait over-engineer this one here. So, you know, I went and kind of did a deep dive in Kafka and delivered my homework.

using that and got great reviews. So diving into that particular tool was useful in my job search. And I would definitely, I'm just kind of taking this as a second to plug that as like if you're looking for a back end heavy role, some sort of diving into Kafka or SDS and knowing how to use one versus the other important. You know, my role right now, I'm writing Rust. Oh, nice. And go. Before I got this job, I'd never written a line of either. Okay. And so I'm very much in a like learning, you know, how to work with the, you know, the Baro checker and some of the, you know, interesting bits in Rust.

So, yeah, and I kind of consider myself like an infinite learner. Like I love learning, I love being in situations where I'm uncomfortable and need to learn something. I love that. And so, yeah, I'm learning that. I love that. Chris, see, Chris gets it. All Reese's are good, but some of the holiday ones have it better. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Kevin, a mentor told me to say I don't know yet, but I'm willing to learn instead of it. I don't know, yay. That's, that's, I don't know why people don't get that yet, but yeah, it's, it's so good. All right, last question, Joe, to wrap it up here.

You know, the show's called Guidance Council 2.0 because well, it's actually two, twofold one. I always said I want to kick the guidance counselor in the shin to keep telling people to write one page resumes. So that's actually the main reason why this is called, I don't think I've ever said that live. That's the main reason why the show's Guidance Council 2.0 because I want to be a better version of that guidance counselor. Sure. But the other reason is too, because I really feel like in our careers, like we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have like a guidance counselor.

Like we have therapists, which I'm a big fan of and I'm a big fan of mental health, but we don't really have like, Hey, what about this? Hey, what about that from a guidance? And that's what I really want to be for people. So what is your biggest piece of career advice that you would tell your younger self? Oh man, I would say, you know, view yourself as a business rather than like a dependent on your employer. So like ultimately as a employee, you are exchanging your kind of goods and services, if you will, to your employer for money and benefits and learnings and things like that.

So, yeah, like view it as that kind of a, you know, ultimately, like, you're a business, they're a business. And I think my time as a consultant helped me with this view. So you need to be working on your product all the time and you need to learn how to sell your product, which is your talents and your time and your learnings. So just like when I started a little startup, I thought I'm going to build a great product and then the customers are going to come flocking in. I don't have to be a great marketer or anything like that. learn my FTE life, I'm going to be a great engineer, I'm going to be great at front end stuff, back end stuff, the whole stack.

I'm going to do the best I can at that and job offers are just going to be flying at me faster than I can control. But no, you still have to learn how to sell yourself. Do your work. I wouldn't want to over correct and just be like somebody who's always going around self-promoting and what have you, but your work doesn't speak for you. It certainly gives you a good base to stand on, but you still need to be out there selling yourself, essentially building your network, whether that's LinkedIn network, You know Twitter network or you know, what have you? Yeah, I love that. I love that cool, man Well, Joe, thank you again for hanging out with me buddy.

I appreciate it Stay on real quick so I can they body you when we end But y'all thank you again tomorrow. I'm taking off for Valentine's Day. It's kind of a little tradition I hang out with my family of Valentine's Day So I'll be taking off tomorrow. I'm taking my daughter to the zoo do a little brunch in the morning That we're doing an early dinner because I'm old and I like eating early now I understand the appeal of old people even early. So no live tomorrow, but Wednesday, I'll be back with our head of M&A at Vaco. His name's Dimitri. He actually wrote a book recently on streamlined management.

So we're gonna talk about that Wednesday, Thursday, Unicorn Finals. We have a startup in the music space. It actually helps musicians get connected to venues and all that. So that's exciting. And then Friday, we have Friday. Friday, we have Andrew Lewis, who I'm excited about. That is going to be recruiters anonymous. He is a recruiter who's doing great things. So again, thank y'all for hanging out with us today. Joe, appreciate you and we'll see y'all on Wednesday. Peace. Thank you. 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 finished 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.S. and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.