chat w/webflow's quality engineer manager - josh cypher - on hiring

full transcript

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

And thanks everybody for tuning in to guidance counselor to 2.0 this morning, Thursday morning, a cold, a dreary Thursday morning. So a few people coming in, Kathy, what's going on, Amy from Memphis, a hotman student from New York City, Brian. I know Brian's in Alabama. Also Amy says, hey, do a favor and turn down the background sound or turn up Josh. Yes, absolutely. Sorry. The music's like elevator music to get people hyped up. The music is off so we can all hear Josh is being a voice. And I'm going to put a little bit. There we go. Yeah, awesome. So I messaged Josh and the whole point of guidance counselor to 2.0 is to obviously help people both from a hiring perspective and a candidate perspective.

Find a job, hire better. Before we dive in to talk about Josh's background or what he does and how he can give advice, I want to give some shout outs first to my team kind of around me helping kind of fuel this Taylor Destiny machine. So we got Alex Pooler, Alex Pooler is on up in New York City. We have Summer, letting 10 out West Coast Seattle who's redo my website. Josh, we aren't using Webflow. We're using Squarespace. I'm sorry, but she is doing Taylor dessin.com. And then we also have Drew Skeleton doing some work for me as well as Brandon Arbe, who's two men in as well, who's kind of leading the whole direction of my marketing efforts.

And then finally, if you are a hiring manager, I've obviously begged Josh to hire for me. But if you are a hiring manager and you want to work with me in 2021, I'd love to work with you. Even if your recruiters are terrible and you just want an audit of what they're doing, I'd love to just chat with you and I won't sell you all my services. So that's the shameless up plug. So let's go ahead and dive in Josh. Give the people what they want. Give a background about yourself who you are, what do you do at Webflow and then I'll ask you some questions.

Yeah, so I'm Josh Cypher. I do live in Nashville, Tennessee. I've lived here about 12 years. Came here for college, never left. My senior college, I actually started working with a local company called Golden Spiral Marketing. At that point, it was just called Golden Spiral Studios and it was very fresh. There was like four of us and really kind of cut my teeth there, mostly doing project management and working to kind of just fill the gaps in those four of us and we were trying to run a company. So sometimes I was collections agents, sometimes I was trying to drum up sales, sometimes I was managing a project and sometimes I was trying to debug code that I didn't even understand because I didn't know how to program.

From there though, I got really interested in creating like a quality experience for the customer and kind of fell into QA, which was a weird vertical. So did that for a bit. I hit my glass ceiling and QA. The market wasn't really good for quality rules at that point in time. This was like nine years ago. So I started doing more on the programming side so I could kind of grow my career. When I did that, I went and worked at another company called FlowFinkery that is no longer around. And that was great. It was just another consultancy, just a bigger company. And from there, I went to Emma.

And Emma is really where I cut my teeth. Those of you who national remember Emma, it's a bit of long staple of the tech community, then they got acquired by campaign monitor. And that happened. It really kind of shifted how things were. And you know, prostate campaign monitor, they're doing great. But it just wasn't really for me anymore. So I started looking for my next opportunity, which was at Webflow. I always wanted to kind of build my own team and do things in a way that I thought. Like I wanted to really just turn a dream big and push boundary of what quality and technology could do.

So I ended up taking a job at Webflow to go build out their quality team and shore up their engineering efforts related to that. Which is really great. It's things that we do a little differently at quality is that with quality at Webflow is that it's a function of the engineering department. We don't hire QA engineers. We hire quality specialists that aren't really required. I mean, they're not required to do any sort of coding because we have a very hands-on product that require a whole lot of detail and finesse. But we hire software engineers specifically that work on more of our test automation. And we have our other engineers do it.

So it kind of dissolved the classes to divide. We sometimes see an organization between QA and QA engineers and engineers. So we're all kind of just one big happy interdisciplinary family. I actually didn't go there to necessarily be a manager. But I started out just kind of like a tech lead, like team lead. They'll just a big automation framework. I'm like, OK, cool. I got it. I sort of just, you know, trial by combat. They were like, hey, we need somebody to lead this. And obviously you have some ideas and we'd love to get behind you and try it. So now I'm technically a senior engineering manager at Webflow.

I've been doing that for about two and a half years out of the three that I've been there. A probably interviewed, I don't know, three, four thousand people in the junior there. And I've hired probably 15 or 20. So it's, which is a good, I think it's a good, I think that's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. So it's been a really awesome adventure, especially working in a mostly remote company. We do have an office in Francisco, but we operate as our remote company. And it's been kind of amazing. So I like awesome. Yeah. So between Josh and I, we've met over 8,000 engineers at this point in our career.

So all right. So Josh, let's get into it. And again, for those of you who are watching tuning in, if you have any questions for Josh from a hiring major perspective and or a job seeker perspective, we will answer them on this show. This is a great way to get direct feedback from a hiring manager. This is why I do this show. So Josh, the first question is, is what do companies and hiring managers need to be mindful of in 2021 hiring within the pandemic within obviously a more fully remote environment? And maybe just some tips that y'all then, have met a being a really already a fully remote company before the pandemic.

Yeah. So one thing that I've seen that significantly changed the pandemic is the shift to remote work. Like before it was like kind of this cool golden unicorn of a luxury where some people get and some people actually hate remote work. And that's fine. Like there are times, believe it or not, that even me doing this, like working remotely almost for five years and like, yeah, I kind of just wish I had an office with a coffee machine and like I could just put my laptop down, walk away. We've essentially do a democratized remote work. So it's no longer like, there's not a lot of compromise like where people like, you know what, I'll take less money if I can work from home or I'll overlook these benefits or this compensation package like work or home or I'll work in an industry I don't care about as much like work or home.

There's a lot more availability to that. At the same time, a lot of the remote first, like a lot of the earlier remote companies, like most of us have kind of like a location based compensation package. So we will pay you based on a percentile looking at the cost of living index. Usually San Francisco and New York end up being like your tier one markets and then there's like a 10% reduction for every like 15% cost of living reduction. It's a whole mapping and it's an attempt to make it fair and to be able to still hire talent in certain places. Now what's interesting is that worked really well when there, you know, there was scarcity in remote work but what's changed is that now it's much more available and so now you're not necessarily competing like in the San Francisco market or in this market, you're completing on a global stage like anybody can log in and do remote work from anywhere.

Like I was just in the middle of Colorado like not even like the population. I'm just nothing around. It's like I'm working from there. Like I could live there easily. So I'm seeing more companies that are starting to essentially offer just a global compensation package like this is what we do. And yeah, that maybe that doesn't work out so well for some of these tier one markets like San Francisco and York and London. But at the other hand, it's allowing them to get more diverse talent from all across the place. So the big thing I would really look at especially like when you go to look for candidates and if you're trying to add diversity in your team, it's like ask yourself like is the rate we're paying competitive with what other companies like us on the global stage.

Like we've answered that before but it's a giant pitfall that we're falling into. So for us, like we see that our tier one markets are fine. But like by the time we get to like a tier four market, like I lost a candidate recently that was great who lived just basically in the middle of nowhere, but Wisconsin. But based on that payment structure, like you reduce 30, 40%, it's like it's just not even competitive. It's not a competitive. So even in their close because that guy in Wisconsin can go get a new world, New York because new companies see I feel like y'all did it the right way.

But now the new company's like what's just thrown by a man? What just now are you just re examining it? And it's actually fast because there's not a good way to do it. So one thing I'd like really think about what that means. The other thing too, I think another thing that a lot of this probably jumps into the candidates, but I think it's a relevant higher manager too. If you're in a company that is like, you know, we're going to be remote now, but we're eventually going to go back to work. I don't know how well that transition's going to go. And I think that's a really big attrition risk that you might see because a lot of companies just say that one more time for the companies in Nashville real quick for the companies in Nashville, in the Southeast.

And I see this mostly in the Southeast like out west like I don't know what I mean to be. Like I mean, REI built a brand new corporate headquarters and it's never going to move into it and sold it. Like, and that thing looked awesome. I want to move to Seattle for that. You want to move to Seattle for that? Exactly. I was in Seattle three weeks ago. But yeah, but like, but really think about that. Like are you in a business that genuinely needs every single person to have a body in a seat? Now there are certain levels of access control, there are certain levels of security, or certain levels of physical paperwork.

Or the barrier to do that is too expensive or it is too complicated. And I understand that. But for 95% of like startup companies that have a digital only product, it's like you really don't need to spend $50,000 a month on office space to put people there and then make them spend half their day driving. Like it's very frustrating. So really think about that. That's going to be really tricky. The other side that you might be seeing is those that still haven't received jobs because of layoffs in the pandemic are starting to get very desperate. And that's a tricky place. Because as a hiring manager, there's a part of me, I want to give everybody a job that I can.

So at the same time, at the same time, a lot of the candidates I'm seeing as of recently seem like they've been back to a corner and it's like, hey look, I've got to do something. It's kind of jamble. It's like, yeah, there we go. And it's something to look out for. And you definitely want to figure out how to mitigate that, like in your own way depending on the job. Like, because this person might be a big, like you might only have them for 14, 18 months anyway. And so if you're really trying to bring on a candidate that you want to stay for two, three, four years, like you need to really think about like, what does that plan look like and how are you going to engage them and keep them?

Because right now I feel like people are just like, hey, you have money and I can work from home so my kids can like be here because they can't go to school. Like, that's that's that's that's been a big concern that we've definitely been thinking about and like how are we going to support? And I know that Webflow does a lot to support that to make sure that people feel supported and welcome. But in my experience, a lot of companies don't do that. So so really think about it and to be fair, if they're going to go like some attrition is good, like you're going to churn through people.

It's going to happen. But like as a hiring manager, like you should have some sort of succession planning in mind of like, okay, so if I only have this person for six, eight months until they can find that fully remote job or until they can find something that pays better or that's more aligned with what they want to do, like is that okay? Because in some cases it is like, you know, I just need people to do this. But that that says everything about your onboarding process. It says about your current support structure. And so a lot of times like it's forced us to be like, oh man, we have a level up or onboarding process.

We have to level up some of our current people and engage them so they will stay so they can be good mentors. And then we hope to do this. Josh is over here for me. Everything I've been tweeting and talking about. I mean, I'm pretty big on. I think now you can't go to code conferences anymore and pass out swag. There's no meetups to pin back your company. The one thing that is consistent across all companies to showcase who you are and your brand to candidates is the interview and onboarding process. Yeah. And we've had to completely redesign ours to even streamline it and make it make more sense and to really show off like what it is that we have to offer.

And like I would consider us a pretty attractive company to come work at. And we still put a lot of effort into it to convince people. What's the biggest thing you've changed? We don't have to go into details. I'm just curious. Super high level. So one common thing you'll probably see in a lot of companies is like either a contract a higher period or a trial like a trial week or even a trial project. Like some of the you know some companies and that's what we used to do. I think it's more. Yeah. So here's a 40 hour project. Like here's an issue like we'll put you in a private Slack channel.

You'll sign an NDA. You work on this project and objective. Take some feedback. We'll see how it goes. You get a little bit of a sense to work here. We've consolidated that into a single day interview. So we call it the big day. And it's a six hour interview process. Now we will split this into like multiple sessions. We need to. But the point is is like we are getting this down to six hours. You can do this in a day if you want to. Or like you know we can do this in three afternoons. Which is what a lot of candidates end up doing because they still have another job or other priorities.

And at that point like we do something where they'll collaborate one on one with somebody on the team that they would be hired on. We'll do another one where they'll go do like a hour long by themselves exercise and then review it with somebody else. And so it's kind of like ones like pairing the other ones more like taking feet more about taking feedback. We're trying to see how you take feedback and how you can challenge your ideas. What it's like to work with you in that situation and how you explain yourself and articulate yourself. Then there's another one that would be like a product or an engineering manager on the team that would be more along the lines of like you know like the culture fit questions like you know or how do you handle difficult situations competing priorities.

So you all did it. So you all did it have this six hour interview before. We didn't. So we used to kind of pepper these interviews like throughout the process and then still do the the contract project. And now we just do all this and then the last one's like an executive interview whoever the executive sponsor is in the team. And that's more of like a hey you have any other questions for us like usually like we're like you're interviewing us now like you've already done all the hard work like now is your chance to ask any other questions or tell us what you think.

And so we started doing that it makes it super efficient because it's very time conscious of the candidate. It's very straightforward. It's also very easy to keep the consistent like a lot of our trial projects ended up being like oh here's an issue and here's an issue. We did we did pay people for these like it wasn't like so that's it's awesome. I was going to ask you that. I mean are you because let's face it companies. Yeah companies if you're you're high man you watch this and you got somebody taking a few hour coat. I mean I literally have had companies in the past.

Something like a multi like a 10 hour code you bow and then not pay the person. It's like you have to be careful with that stuff. Yeah yeah. So we still send out a code you bow like as like at the screening point. It's designed to be done within. So we say it should take you no longer than 90 minutes. We expect at least for senior engineer that you should be able to do it in about 30. However we don't track the time but like that's what we calibrated at. It's like this takes most of the time to 30. We'll give them 90 because we're like we tell the 90 because it's like we don't want to be like you should be able to do the 30 minutes because like you know everyone's learning sales differently want to accommodate.

But we've tried to calibrate it that way but we send them the same one because we wanted to be super simple. And then a lot of times it's not really about how it's completed. And if it's completed properly it's more about how you approach it and what you're thinking. And so to kind of get into the candidate side of things and segue. One big thing I see with candidates over and over again is that they won't explain how they're reasoning and how they're thinking. It's like in terms of like JavaScript technology like whatever. I can teach you how to code the way that we do.

Someone on the team will ramp you up on how we do things like you might have written a react here and you're going to do react there. It could still be two completely different things depending on the point and time in which the code base originates. What's very difficult to do is to teach you how to reason for yourself and how to explain your thoughts and how to articulate and communicate. And I run into a lot of situations with candidates where they're just trying to be like yeah well look at my resume it's awesome or I just am trying to get experience. And it's like both of those are great like yeah lean in on your strengths and like you know be honest about your intentions but please explain to me why you're thinking what you do.

Like because I'm much more likely as a hiring manager to take a risk on a candidate that I see as a high aptitude to understand. And you don't know that. I said don't communicate. Yeah. Yeah and if you don't communicate that then I don't know. I recently just a few days ago sent out rejection and one of the biggest I may ask for feedback and I usually will when I can like in this person went all the way through to the end and anytime that happens if when I do a rejection I usually do it live I talked to them well I'll tell them and then I'll be like hey companies if you're watching yes that's the way to do it.

Yeah no I mean like and it's not comfortable for anybody don't give me wrong but one of the biggest things I said is like hey like you know I really need you like like part of it was like okay we have more experience candidates there's nothing you can do about that other than keep working keep checking along your career you'll get there. The other side of that though is like I need you to articulate where your rationale is coming from and I want to see a certain level of confidence in your statements that's another thing that I see like there's a lot of uncertainty and I think there's a difference between recognizing your weaknesses and admitting that and like not being confident.

It's like so like I could be like hey like are you like do you feel good that this is like everything that you're going to find and they're like yeah like you're just like yeah maybe someone I'm seeing like yeah I think this is good it's like or like what do you think about this thing it's like well I don't know it's like well I think I know like it's very different it's like it's risky when I hear that hesitation and like we're going to ask you a bunch of questions throughout the process because you know some people just get nervous that happens but yeah

like be like be articulate and explain your reasoning if you don't know something tell them that you don't know something and own it like a badge of honor like don't don't be like oh I don't know this and I'm in trouble yeah if they're like hey do you know Kafka and you don't know Kafka and you're you think of the job for that then you probably don't want to work through anyway like you know it's absolutely well and then and then I threw up Amy's thing Amy's pose just because we've been talking about it for the last few minutes about what are you looking for

from a quality specialist role and that again from what Josh just said if sound what what it sounds like you're saying is that it really comes down I mean obviously the tech has got to be there but it's a lot of skills it's a lot of songs yeah yeah it's I don't know yeah I honestly think the the soft skills are hard skills like like those are the those are the none negotiable terms like the tech I can teach yeah but it's like yeah so skill wise like for quality special I mean there's certain things I'm going to look for like obviously like software testing

experiences working in an agile environment is great but I have I have a quality special to my team that was a technical writer and you know what they're really good at communicating and documenting things which is exactly what my team needed and so they had no experience working in quality whatsoever but they were such a good technical writer I'm like hey do you want to come do this job and you know they started out you know basically at entry level and you know they hit a senior level like within two years which is awesome like we were able to kind of grow and do that

so so yeah really realistically especially more so with quality than engineering I am looking for those soft skills I'm looking for how like how you pay attention and how you think about things like what kind of questions do you ask like I literally write down anytime someone asks a question in an interview I write it down on my scorecard because it's like especially as a somebody that comes from a kid looks like the quality of the question you can ask is very important to me so good like because it shows me hey you're thinking about other things you have other ideas and you're trying to

you're trying to figure that out so in terms of like actual qualifications we still have a role live on the website it's if you go to web.com slash jobs you can kind of see more of the detail click in Taylor for your referral.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly we're probably going to close off that roll pretty soon so I'm just wanted to set an expectation but it's because I'm should finally make my hire and at least in the next speaker too but awesome but some of the people that were rejected that are still good I do have a couple actually we should talk.

Okay yeah we should yeah there's one that I feel bad about it oh no yeah yeah so Josh as so as we conclude here and again I mean you're one of the guys and I was excited to have you on but I also knew that you and I could talk to about nine hours on this stuff so yeah we can talk about okay yeah so what is the the one thing for the people who who are still watching from a job seeking perspective what is one just motivational thing career guidance like what is just like one thing you want to leave the viewers with from

a job seeking perspective right now um uh so I encourage everybody to always look at their long term goals outside of their career um like what are what are your long term personal goals and how how is what you're about to do getting you there sometimes it's like I need to work this and make some money so I can get there sometimes it's like uh you know I want to move to this city so I need to look in this markets but like a lot of times I see people's career steer their lives and I feel like your life should steer your career um now

and like that's and then it becomes really important because like one thing I always like to say is that you're interviewing a company as much as they're interviewing you at the same time like you know you have your own bottom line you have to cover it so like there are times where you'll take the job that's not what you want but it's gonna pay your bills and that's okay um uh but there are other times where you don't have to do that anymore and that's all right um and so really think about those long term goals and how you're getting there and check in with

yourself on a regular cadence and be like okay what am I doing that advances me to this place um it's something I even do in my one and one's with my own staff I'm like what's like I'll be like what are some of your long term goals and they can't be related to work and like we'll write that down because I want to know that when I'm supporting them as a as a major um and help kind of keep them accountable to their own goals that's awesome even that means telling them maybe it's time for you to go um not because I'm hiring you because

it seems like you might want to do something else so like go find them like it's cool you're good here just keep doing your work and then when it's time I'll write the recommendation like I love that yeah I love that cool man well Josh thank you again for hanging out buddy I appreciate your turn um for anybody who wants to reach you what's the best way for people to reach you um um my dms are open on twitter it's at Joshua's Cypher um uh if you're in the national area the national edash website pretty great uh otherwise I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn

or something so some of your requests um on LinkedIn or twitter um yeah well Josh thanks for hanging let's let's definitely catch up especially about the candidates so yeah yeah for sure all right i'll be emma all right buddy okay bye