gun.io devrel team w/vp of tech, deividi silva

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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, social media at Tdssint. 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. All right, all right. What's going on everybody? Happy Monday. We're live. Well, we're live. Like no one's here yet. It's for those of you who are tuning in, It's good to see you. I'm excited about this episode. This is a another guidance counselor gun collab this morning. Have my dear friend David G from Brazil, tuning from Brazil this morning, South America.

It's good to have you, buddy. Thank you, man. Thank you. It's good to be here. Yes. So for those of you tuning in, welcome. Probably like wondering what is guidance counselor 2.0. Guidance counselor 2.0 is a podcast that I started back during COVID in March 2020. I was recruiting engineers and I was having all these conversations when COVID originally hit, a lot of people get laid off in the engineering space. And so I was talking to engineers all day and I was like, man, there's got to be a better way to scale this information. I'm giving back to developers day in, day in, day out.

And so I decided to start this podcast thing. And three years later, it's kind of morphed into this thing where I've had some amazing engineering leaders on it. And David G is definitely that. In my two and a half weeks of working with him, he's incredible. can't wait to dive into this conversation more about gun.io. I'm talking about community, talking about what we do in the back end so you can learn more just about our platform. I've had a lot of questions for people, a lot of questions, which has been great, but also it's exhausting to answer all y'all's questions, to be honest about guns.

So we're doing these so you can learn and ask questions, and David G is a great person to do that with. Again, if you're commenting and say, hey, this is a meetup. This is a networking platform. For those of you who are commenting, please go connect with people on the platform. I've had people find mentor mentees on this show. I've had people find jobs on this show, not even with my help. They've just messaged people and they've connected with people. And so please again, comment. Even if you watch this in the future, people still come through a network. One of my goals is to kind of create this ecosystem where you can network off the back of myself.

Connect with David G, connect everybody on this platform. If you hop over to Unicorn Finders, you can connect with all the founders and CTOs and CEOs I've had on. And if you do that pretty consistently, I've been doing it for three years. If you've been networking off the back of me for three years, you're gonna be in a pretty good space. And so that's my goal. And again, bringing David G on the show as well, connect with him because he's a great individual to connect with. What else? Second off, I wanna give a shout out to that conference. So that conference, I key noted two weeks ago, but also too, they're the official coffee sponsor of the show.

They're the only conference that has a coffee line And I'm obsessed with coffee and so shout to Clark cell for hooking me up with some coffee beans I appreciate you the right there. You can see if you if you want a few bucks off check out GC go go to the website GC2 It's great Sweet some people tuning in this morning Alex. It's great to see you Jordan Eugene Sofia Kaelin it's great to see you Chris my guy Kevin Brad Ezra mark mark. It's good to see you buddy Erica I'm gonna see here de-pack. It's great to see you as windy. It's wonderful to see y'all this morning All right, y'all keep commenting, make David G feel at home.

Otherwise, we'll go ahead and dive in. So, David G, who are you, man? What do you do? And we'll go from there. All right, my name is David G. You can call me David if you want. That's my Starbucks name. I'm here in Brazil and VP of technology here at Kanda.io. That means I run engineering, product, and developer relations. This conversation today, we're going to dive into to develop our relations, but I'm happy to talk about the engineering product too, because I love those teams. And I think we're doing an excellent job on those fronts as well. Absolutely. So I think one of the questions I get a lot is like, are you guys a recruiting company?

So we're not a recruiting company. I said, we do things we're like a recruiting company on steroids. So let's talk about the DevRel program, how y'all do things, and kind of maybe a little bit what really separates us in the market? Yeah, Ganyo is a technology company, first and foremost. And we connect great companies with proven software engineers. That's what we do. And one of the areas that the developer relations here work is just understanding who are the proven developers out there, the proven software engineers. How can we identify them quickly, get them through quickly, no friction, and they get hired, simple, efficient, and human, most importantly in the human way.

That's what we do, the developer relations team. We have three main areas that we focus, the onboarding part. So from the time you're signing up to the platform until you get approved to our platform to be part of the community, then all of the work from the moment you are approved, you're a member of the community and to get your first job. And then continuing on the third part, as you got your first job, how you continue to build up pipeline with Gandhayo, so you're always hired to us. And once you're hired once to us, our goal is to have you hired here forever, working with our clients and understanding how great it is to have a community behind you, working for you as you on your jobs.

Absolutely. So for those of you who tuned in last week with Victoria, David, how would you talk about the difference between you in Victoria and kind of what Victoria does again, just a quick refresher for people who may have not seen last week's episode and kind of how that process works. So I want to kind of get this message across and we work a little differently, right? A lot of people are like, let me send you your resume. Let me send you, I want to send you my resume. I'm like, it's a little different. So can you talk about the process? Excellent. So talking about Victoria, Victoria is the leader on the first segment of the community from the moment you sign up until you are approved.

She's gonna be the one, she's the face of Gandharaio. That's what I tell her to be every week on our one-on-ones. I need you to be the face of Gandharaio when people are coming in. You are the internal community leader. So she's responsible for when people sign up, they need to go through our app and create their profile, give us information, not just give us a resume. That doesn't help, right? We need to know what impact you caused, what was your impact in your previous roles and how you were great fit for prospects in our platform. So, giving us all of those details, Victoria's great at helping people write them in a results-oriented way so everyone can be highlighted and we can present them to our clients.

So, she's responsible for that. And then some live conversations because of the human aspect also, having live conversations with her, she can understand your communication style, how are you going to be a fit to some of our clients that we have open already. So that's onboarding, that's her. And then let's focus her with her, then let's go to the next step. So yeah, so again, right, we talked about this a little bit. Go to gun.io, create a profile. listen, and again, I'm gonna say this too, we're primarily focused on senior engineers, right? I get this question a lot, and again, we are gonna do a lot more things for the community from the zero to five, six year range, right?

You know, one thing David and I were just talking about is we're doing some open spaces upcoming. With a lot of the guests you've seen on Guidance Councilor 2.0. So be on the lookout for that. But all that being said, senior engineers only, and why is that, David? We want to know what kind of impact you had in a past in your career and there's no way we can do that if you haven't done that yet. So clients coming into our platform, they're looking for expertise. We cannot show expertise if you haven't had those experiences. That's why we're here to focus on those in that niche, that those type of people, those are the ones that we can help get them higher with great clients.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, our bread and butter and David Kritney from Rome, but our bread and butter really is freelance part time fractional work. And so you can't be thrown into that and be successful for the most part unless you've had a lot of experience on your belt. But again, like I said, we're going to do a lot of things. David's really passionate about the community. We're not just going to focus on the seniors. We're going to do a lot to give back. And we are aware that we're going to do some pretty cool stuff. So all right, so they get through the conversational interview with Victoria, they, you know, the applications submitted, they get through the first conversation of Victoria, then what?

Yeah. So after they got on through Victoria, Victoria is going to send them a link to schedule a one on one conversation with one of the technical talent advocates. That's going to be your approval call. And we don't do co testing. We don't believe in that. That's not part of the that process there. We are going to be talking about your career. We're going to be focused on your career. And from that, from the examples you provide to this person doing the conversation with you, TTA as we call, we're going to dive deeper into the technical details. We'll understand if that matches to what we expect in our in our community.

Do you know how to set up a project with good practices in terms of your expertise? Do you know how to do things in a more professional way? So we evaluate for that and if the conversation goes well, you're approved to the platform, you can apply to any jobs you like and you get the benefits of being a part of our community. Talk about why we focus so much on communication skills when you're going through the process, right? Like we don't beat you over the head with a bunch of hacker ranks and code tests. Can you explain the core of why we don't do that?

As a contractor, it's your responsibility to be the first one, to be the one engaging in communication and making sure that every step of the communication with your client is crystal clear. So for that reason, we need you to be shocked. We need you to be able to talk technically and guide your project from beginning to end with a successful course. Of course, we're going to be there for you. So if we see that you're not going in the right direction, if there's some indication of things going that way south, we're going to be there to help you correct that and get to a better place.

Of course, there's sometimes where clients don't even know how to manage a project that well. And you must be as a professional contractor. You must be the one stepping in and getting things to the right place. So that's why communication is so, so important. So you talked, you mentioned just now, this is one of the coolest things, I think, about what we do. You mentioned about how we're kind of with you through the project, right? I spent 12 years in the agency recruiting world. While I think personally, I prided myself on staying really close to my engineers that I put out on billing, most recruiters don't do that, even most consulting firms don't do that.

You kind of feel like you're on an island. Talk about how we're trying to change that mindset at gun. Yeah. Um, there's a program that we built called talent success management. We have that, um, it's more, it's more common to have that on the client side as a customer success management, but we're doing that for freelancers. We're going to manage their success throughout the engagement. So they can be engaged more often with us. It's heartbreaking when you have a senior developer. We like them on the onboarding. We like them on the approval call. But then when they step in to work with one of our clients, things don't work because it's hard.

It's a different piece, right? When you're working in full time employment and you're working as a contract, it's completely different. So you need to understand as a contractor, consult and you're in a different way. And we're there to help you. That's what we wanna do. We wanna be together with you with this talent success management program. We'll ask you how things are going on weekly, by weekly phases. We're gonna be there for you. We're always offering, hey, if you wanna have a technical conversation about something you are detecting and you don't really know how things are gonna go and you don't have anyone in your team, maybe you're a solo contractor with a client.

I imagine being solo on your first contract, that happens. You're like first freelance gig ever and you're like, buy yourself, that sounds terrifying. That happens. So that's it. You're not by yourself. When you're with Gandaro, you have me, you have my whole team behind you. We can help you to make decisions and consider trade-offs. Those are the most important things of the software engineer career. How do you make the right trade-ups when you're thinking about delivering solutions to your clients? Right. So, I want to, if you can give a highlight of your dev-real team, because, and again, over the next few weeks, I'm going to have them on the show and we're going to talk about their background because they're so talented.

And I want to get this across. I mean, it's not like we have like just random senior engineers. I mean, we have folks that are former CTOs, former VPs of engineering that are on staff at gun. Can you give a quick high level of the folks on the dev rel team and just a quick bio about them? Yeah, first of all, it's geographically distributed. We don't only have Engineers coming into the platform that are from the US so we've got to have deeper from all over available To talk to you at any time you want so we have people in India. We have people in Spain UK, the one in UK travels back and forward to the US a lot.

Great guy, Gersh. Then you have me here in Brazil. And notice I'm going across time zones. Yeah, no, you don't know how to go here. That's how my mind works because I need to talk to all of them. So me in Brazil and then you have have a teacher in Canada and Lake also in Canada. So people across the world, as you said, former engineering managers former CTO and just high level professionals, they're able to talk to you in like many different aspects. So they know different tax tax, they've been there, they've done it, so they're part of the community getting you true. So if you need, for example, if you need an expert in bytones setting up your Django stack, Giresh is going to be there for you.

He's excellent. He's done many startups with that stack stack. So he's going to be able to help you with that. That's what we want to have. We're going to have more and more people trying to find those gaps where you don't have as many people. But I think at this point, we can cover a lot with the people that we're having in developer relationships. Yeah, absolutely. And Chris, yeah, you have to be mindful of time zones. I think what's really cool, you know, about coming to to gun based off my past experiences is like I said, I mean, we get opportunities all across the world.

And it's really, really cool. And it's and it's it's just such a wonderful, it's a wonderful little community. When I say little, it's not little, it's over 2000 engineers on our Slack channel on our platform quote unquote, but it's some pretty amazing engineers on it. So, so, uh, can you also talk about how there's so many ways to take this and kind of figure out, um, talk about your background a little bit more. Cause I want to, I want to, I want to dive into you and who you are and kind of your work history. I mean, you spend some time in Amazon. I mean, can you talk about, um, kind of your career just so people can get to know you a little bit more.

Of course. Yeah. Um, start my career here in Brazil, um, worked with a healthcare company kind of bigish here in the area. After four years there got really tired of knowing, learning more about the health industry than tech. So I left, joined a startup. First, one of the first startups here in Brazil to get investment from I was an investor in Silicon Valley. They were there. I was employee number seven there. So I stayed there for a year. Learned a lot. That was like in a year, a lot about new technology. That was what I was looking for at that time in my career. Worked every day from 8 a.m.

and 2.4 a.m. some days. So it was crazy startup growth at that point, but I learned a lot. And then I moved to a big company here to the biggest Latin America ERP provider. Oh, wow. So I went to work there because I saw the opportunity to, they had a program with the new lab in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to be there. So I saw that opportunity and I went there. They, and after one year there, they sent me to Silicon Valley. I was there for five to six months, and that was awesome. That really changed my mindset. I could talk to people like, had of engineering at, at Nat Police at that time.

And I could see that I could talk technically with that level of people in the industry. And I saw it and I must be doing okay, because I can talk to these people in a technical level. And I know what I'm talking about. And I'm a little bit more comfortable about myself and my career. So that was the change in my mind a lot. I'd been there, I went to meet up every single night after work. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Lots of conference events. I learned a lot. And at that time, I really liked the IoT space. Came back to Brazil, stayed for another year with this company.

And those things in the universe, World Po called me and sent me an email actually with a new IoT platform they were wanted to build. So I was responsible for, I've changed jobs, responsible for building their IoT platform there, build my first experience as an engineering manager, set up my own team. It was great. I had a very close relationship with AWS. And that relationship turned into me going to Ireland, work with Amazon DynamoDB. So I didn't realize you were in Ireland, that's crazy. Yeah. So I went there to work with DynamoDB for a year and a half. We were there during the lockdown and the pandemic.

And that was kind of crazy for me and my wife. So we said, nope, not working. I'm going to go back to Brazil. The job was fine. I love the job. I love working. And a lot of times you can see me talking like a true Amazonian about leadership principles and all of that. So I decided to come back to Brazil because family is here. So we wanted to be close. And at that point, I said, I'm never going to work full time again. I'm going to become so tense, set up my own practice, started working with a few startups. some contracts there was having fun.

But one of the things that I was missing is the connection with the engineers. I was alone and I didn't have that connection. So, and I was also trying to build my channels. So I signed up to Gandarayo. So there's community trying to build my channels for finding new jobs quickly after that. that the folks here at Candorayo, they saw my potential and they said, hey, do you want to come in and evaluate people for us? Cool. Yeah. Evaluate people. That was a little different request than like, yeah, we've been asked. I was, yeah, that sounds cool. I'm going to be able to talk to engineers again.

I'm going to be able to give them advice, coach them in their career. So yeah, that sounds damn cool. So I agree to that contract and quickly after that I realized, oh, this is going to be something different. I saw the opportunity for taking over developer relations and setting it up the way it is today. I thought if I find this to be such a great experience, which we must have other engineers out there that want to do this as well and want to be part of growing a community and coaching people and mentoring their career. So that's me for the past two years doing that in the beginning of this year, then I took over product engineering and that has been amazing to me.

That's awesome. So again, I want to reiterate, like gun, not only do we match top engineering talent to companies, but also we have our own product, which is the platform, which is the search. Can you talk, I'm gonna bring gray on, so I don't wanna go too deep, but I still wanna give an overview. So can you talk about our product for a quick second? Of course, yeah, we're always iterating and growing the product. Companies come in looking for talent, and we wanna give them a quick way to connect with talent. And talent coming in looking for jobs. So we have tools that capture all of the bright information company side and talent side.

So they are able to connect in a streamline way. And of course, everything that comes below this with interviews and all of that. And all of the internal tools that we need for setting up all of the technical talent advocates for success when they're selecting people for jobs. So that's a platform. We have three main customers who are the companies, the talents, and our internal team. So we try to create solutions for all of that. And that's all great. It's gonna it's gonna be talking about that of course. Absolutely. RJ comes in here. I mean, I feel like going out solo and doing contract work is fun, but I missed the heck out of mentoring folks.

I mean, again, I want to reiterate like that's what's so cool about the gun platform, right? Like, I think if you really want to try and have a go at the freelance side of things, like, you get to be a freelancer, but then also have like, like you're, how much I say this, like, you're going to have other people to help you. Like, you're not going to be alone within our platform. I think that's so awesome. David, I'm kind of curious just about your engineering leadership principles, right? So this show, I interview a lot of engineering leaders about what their thoughts are around leadership and scaling teams and all that.

And obviously, you're a leader as well. So, I still want to ask you just at the core of who David is, what are kind of your main principles when growing engineering teams. It's all about people. You need to be an excellent listener when you are an engineering leader. You need to really listen to people and understand what their desires and where you're gonna place them on the perfect spot. So you're able to make them grow. You're there as a servant. You're there to allow people to grow and find their opportunity for growing. And that's my thought process. I'm going to be 100% people focused as much as I can and letting people shine, right?

Finding the opportunities for letting people shine. Of course, you've got to be sharp technically. You're going to have technical conversations and setting them up for success as part of that. You've got to understand what you're talking about. That's my principle there. Focus on people, listen to them, make them successful. You're going to be successful as well. I love that. Why do you think that's so hard to do an engineering culture? Because not everybody does it. So again, there's no wrong answers here. So I'm just curious your thoughts. Yeah, I think people get caught up in the competing priorities. You're going to listen to your stakeholders and feature backlogs filing up.

And you're going to try to fight a way out of it. but if you are experiencing up, you're going to realize that a better way out of it. Just understanding that all of that, all of those deliverables that you need, they're going to come from people, right? We still have people creating solutions. So as long as the machines don't take over, we're going to be around there and understanding people for a while. So Dominic comes in here freelancing plus the community gun to I sounds like the best of both worlds again I'm a little biased because I work there, but I truly believe it and again we're gonna do we're gonna do more stuff I mean like we've we've hired a ton.

I'm very thankful that I'm with gun now And there's just a huge emphasis on community And growth within our organization so look out for a lot of cool stuff and Dominic, you know know, you know, we're going to do a lot more cool stuff for zero to five year range as well. So be on the lookout for that. And RJ, I'm going to check out gun to IO for sure. Yeah, buddy, absolutely, man. We definitely love to have you go felt the application. Again, I always say this, we don't we don't give clients resumes. Your resume is the profile you fill out when you join or apply to our platform.

So please take time to do it. Good data in good data out is what I tell people. I would probably say aside, David, I've been I can tell people like an hour. Do you think that's an adequate amount of time to like sit down, no distractions, an hour to fill out the application? Yeah, I think that should be enough. And if you need help of course, reach out to Victoria or anyone in our staff, send us an email, you can send me an email. We can help you out. Yep, absolutely, absolutely. All right, so as we wrap up here, again, if you all have any questions, please ask, but we're definitely gonna wrap up here.

So David, first question always asks people, any tech trends, tools, frameworks, libraries that you're tinkering with or that we may be implementing in Guns soon that no one knows about just kidding. But like, I don't know, just anything fun you're experimenting with right now? I think a lot of people are looking into that. So Gen AI, I'm looking at different APIs available. As a AWS fan, I'm looking at the tools they have there, bedrock and all of that. And you can expect our platform is going to have some of those. We're still going to be human first, but we're going to have some of those throughout your journey, helping you setting up your profile in a right way as a company or talent, helping us augment the abilities on the technical advocates team, as they select people for jobs.

All of that, what I'm studying and what the whole team is looking at, it's going to be coming out soon. That's awesome. Another question for us, kind of like lightning around a little bit. What do you do outside of work that brings you joy? I like playing video games. So, and I'm a big Nintendo fan. I've played hundreds of hours of Cheers of the King of so far. Okay. Awesome. that. Yeah, it's been three close to three months since launch. And I still haven't finished because I don't want to finish. I want to go with it forever. But yeah, big, big zautop pen. I love it.

I love it. So then last question. So this show is called guidance counselor 2.0, because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college. But now as adults, we don't really have somebody that turned to just to ask questions, especially around career stuff. What What would be your biggest piece of career advice to younger David? Take curious, man. You continue. Well, I think I always did a pretty good job of being curious and learning stuff. But for everyone, just be curious. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to look dumb. Ask questions. Look at the data. Please always look at the data and study for yourself and understand things.

That's my main advice for everyone. I love that. Let's see here, Dominic, looking forward to addition of the year. Yeah, again, we're gonna do some cool stuff. Wendy, even if I'm not a senior engineer, so it's great to learn about gun to IO. I had no idea to be honest, now I do. There you go, we love it. We love to hear it. Yay, video games. He has to fail a ton of stack. I love it. Video games roll my all time favorite. I love it. All right, y'all, well, that's it for today. We appreciate it. 30 minutes goes by fast when you're hanging out with friends.

Please go connect with David on LinkedIn. Send him a message if you want to learn more about gun.io. Again, we're gonna have a lot more guests on the show from the gun team. We're gonna slowly introduce everybody. So you know our team and who to contact. And so again, thank you all for showing up today. We appreciate it. Again, Alex coming in here, being curious is my favorite way to approach life too. Definitely keep an eye out for that zero to five year tier. And then great advice, always be learning and curious. Alright y'all, y'all have a great one. Tomorrow morning, 930 AM Central, head of developer relations, Demetrius Clark.

He is my spirit animal. He's an amazing individual. So I can't wait to hang out with him tomorrow morning. Again, 930 AM Central, Demetrius Clark. He's a head of developer relations at clerk.com. I believe it's some API or something like that. I don't know. But y'all have a good one. We'll see y'all tomorrow. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Cause you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. 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 at T. Dastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.