the importance of taking care of devs w/ vitor oliveira, talent @ gun.io

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 for 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 tdesinted 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. We're live. You can keep dancing if you want. No one's here yet. So no one's even gonna see you. What's going on everybody good morning good morning happy hump day. We made it Vitzers feeling himself It is Wednesday, and I'm excited to be here for those of you who are tuning welcome I know it takes a hot second for this to hit the interwebs, but say hey, we'd love to hear from you This is a little gun.io guidance counselor 2.0 So, it's gonna be a great conversation.

So for those of you who did not know, I'm at gun.io now, so we're gonna talk about what it is. Another thing too is we've already had Victoria on. So Victoria is responsible for really helping the onboarding of developers on our platform. Then we have David G, who is a VP of technology a VP of technology who kind of handles everything. And then we have Vittor, which I'm very excited. Vittor and I started around the same time together. So I'm very excited to dive into Vittor's background and kind of ways it gone. But again, before we dive in, first off, let us know where you're tuning in from say, Hey, the reason why I tell people to that is because this is a networking platform.

That's just what it is. It is, it is, I do it every day. And if you comment, it'll, it'll show visibility to yourself. And so please comment, say, Hey, Let us know what you're tuning in from. This show is worldwide. I've had people tune in all over the world. And then three, ask questions. This is gonna be a little bit more informational about gun.io. So if you are a developer and you are interested in freelancing and you wanna be a part of that platform, you wanna know how we do things, please ask questions because we can absolutely help you with that. I wanna give a shout out to the official coffee sponsor of the show, that conference, it is the only software engineering conference that I know of that has their own coffee beans and a great conference.

So my friend Clark Sell, thank you for the for the coffee. And then if you want to go buy some coffee, use a co-GC two for a few bucks off your bag of beans. But like I said, I am drinking it right now. It is fantastic. And then shout out gun.io for hiring me and taking a chance on me. And of course, if you need engineers, you do them quickly. Let us know Because we can help. All right cool. So I want to give a shout out to people to name Ryan. It's good to see you Lynn It's great. See you as well. Mr. Ricardo as always great.

See my friend LinkedIn user. What's going on? Joseph is good to see you. What is the topic of discussion? We are talking about gun.io my friend and what we do and how we do it and how we take care developers Chris is great See you as well again for those of you who are stragglers just want to keep saying hey would love to hear from you Hey, Shradda. What's going on? It's good to see you All right, Victor It's good to people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? There Sure Yeah, so my name is Goto and I am I've been a software engineering professional since 2004 Started studying web development by myself so I've been always a self thought developer and I specialized in web applications also in mobile native mobile applications, so Swift and Kotlin apps.

And during my career, I worked for around 12 to 13 years as a software engineer, and then I switched to engineering management. So I had my first team of software engineers, five people. This was 11 years ago when I started my own startup. So during my career, I worked as an engineering management professional for six years, you know, working in different titles like VP, engineering, and a FinTech company here in Canada, leading at the end of 25 people, and also leading my own startups as a startup CTO. More recently, I joined Ghandario as a talent success manager, and I worked to manage the developers and then I go with a platform.

That's what I want to hear a little bit about the talent success manager, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, before we dive into that, and I want to ask you a question, Victor, and again, like, you know, I want you to kind of talk about what got you here, right? Like what made you interested to, you know, because again, listen, I mean, you're a very tenured engineer. You know your stuff, you've scaled teams, you've managed start, you've created startups. What made you get into the talent side, right? Because I think a lot of developers are, don't look down on the talent side of things, but they think talent, they think recruiters, and it's like, wha, right?

So like, what made you interested to join gun.io? Yeah, so between 2016 and 2019, I worked remotely for companies who are competitors to GAN.io. And I was living in Brazil, so I'm originally from the state of Rio de Janeiro. And I was in the other side of the business as a freelance developer working remotely. I relocated to Canada five years ago. I applied for Gun.io. I was accepted in the platform. So I was part of the community, the content community, and started interacting with Victoria, with DD, saw position for Gun.io, and I thought it would make sense. So I started the conversation with them, build a connection, I built a connection with them, and then it made sense for us.

So for me, it was first. I was always on the other side of the table as a remote freelancer, so I understand their perspective. And I'm very passionate about people. I'm very passionate about talent, even though I'm a technologist. I've always put people first. And I came to understand in engineering management that when you were able to lead and work with a team the impact that you can make with digital products is much bigger and I got very passionate about that and started mentoring and coaching developers a few years ago on the all-time first community maintaining a few Ruby and Elixir projects and this mentorship and coaching aspect scaled and that is one of the most important aspects that I have that might roll in Gannale.

So there are a lot of things in this road that attract me a lot and I would say people is the first one. I love that. Yeah, I was, let me ask you this, in your words, so you've worked for competitors, what do you think kind of separates us from the competitors? It's a very good question. I think we are a very personalized service and we offer support for developers in their career development. We help a lot with client relations when engagements are happening when developers are working in our network. And I would say that differentiates us from other competitors. I would also say that developers at the end of that I will make more money than in many other companies that are competing with us.

So yeah, the hourly rates, the monthly rate are very attractive. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah, more money is never a bad thing. So let me ask you this. So your title is Talent Success Manager, right? And what is that, what were you hired to do? And if you can kind of maybe talk six months down the road, a year down the road, like what's kind of your vision that you would love to build out for the Gun I.O. platform? Yeah, so I would say talent success managers basically oversee the technical support. And we provide the systems to companies and talent when technical issues come.

And we could have problems in freelancing projects, both with the client and with the talent. So I am that person who brings the technical perspective that can provide technical mentorship for our network. We also have company or customer success managers who work directly with the companies. My role at gun involves a lot of cross-functional relationship. So I have to build connections with other stakeholders. Internally stateholders and also external stateholders. I do a lot of one of the meetings with talent. So regular checkings to see how they're doing, to understand, you know, like workload, to understand satisfaction, well-being, technical aspects, client relations, communication, stuff like that, right?

We are, so one of my goals and vision work done is basically to create a system that can automate feedback delivery and also feedback collection. So as we grow, it's becoming a problem to be able to connect with hundreds of developers. And eventually, we believe that this number is gonna grow even more. So I am running a research building a few proof of concepts internally to be able to come up with a performance management system that is gonna allow us to be in touch with the developers and work to the companies to provide the best experience in the platform. So that's my vision. I hope in the future we can assist developers both in Zoom calls, but also in using other mechanisms.

Yeah, I love that. And let me ask you this. So, well, let me ask you, but also tell people as well, right? So at Gun, we, at Gun.io, we kind of have a two-sided thing here, right? So we not only help engineers get placed, but we also sit with our clients as well, right? Which I think that really differentiates yourself. And I talked about some of the David G, but can you talk about how we essentially almost assign you like a peer mentor while you are on, like to me, like I've never heard anybody do that before. And when I joined y'all, we're not joined to us, y'all, us.

That was crazy to me. So can you talk about like, like, I guess why we're so high touch and then can you kind of talk a little bit more about the high touch on the candidate side and on the client side. When you see high touch you're talking about the mentorship and coaching. Yeah, the mentorship right right right right. Yeah, so I think first I'd like to differentiate coaching versus mentorship. We use both mechanisms to understand issues and engagement and also not only issues to understand weaknesses, to understand opportunities of improvement in the talent side and also in the company side. So a coaching session usually happens when we identify that something is wrong in a project.

So let's say that I connect with a software engineer and I know that that project is blocked. So I usually run a coaching session discovery, that's how I call it. And I allow the developer to talk, let's say 70% of the time, and I pay attention to the developer. I take notes and I ask questions about the things that the developer is talking about. And in that way we can do a deep dive on the situation and we can identify the problem like the what what is really causing what is the root cause of that problem and once we understand what is the growth topic that we need to evaluate then mentorship starts so then I'm able to explain how the developer would be able to achieve and to improve in that situation and but you know before in many situations we need to to understand the what in the talent side or in the company side.

Yeah. And that's basically how we deal with performance. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I wanna give a shout out to a few people who are tuning in. It's good to see you, Christina. No, it's not Friday yet, but we're getting there. Richie, it's good to see you, buddy. Tiago, it's great to see you from Portugal. I love it. Alex, having someone there to consult sounds like a level up for the workflow. Yeah, I mean, listen, like, again, coming from a traditional agency recruiting side. Listen, I always, so I saw the value in this. When I was a typical agency recruiter, I knew that, and this is what my keynotes about is about not being alone.

And I feel like one of the things in Victor, you can talk about this I'm sure about, when you freelance, you can sometimes feel alone, right? You're kind of on an island. Maybe the communication is not always there. You don't have somebody advocating for you. And the one thing I love about gun, I-O is that we not only have it on the client side, we have on the client side, right? So we have another team that focuses on making sure the client's happy and walks through them with that. So it's, again, it's so high touch. And what we're doing is hard because you're trying to scale talent with being high touch at the same time.

That's a very difficult task and that's one of Victor's tasks. So good luck, Victor. Yeah, I like when you mention about community, because like once you apply for the Ghanaian community and you were accepted in the platform, like in the interview process and also in their protocol, you would be joining the Ghanaian community. And we have a very strong community there where software engineers are collaborating with each other by questions and answers. And we also are starting to do professional activities, like professional development activities with live sessions that Taylor is leading. And in this community, you can definitely see like a very people are very authentic.

They have, they are humble to share knowledge with each other. And you can feel a sense of of abundance in this community. Like people are willing to be first and they think that they care about this growth, like a real growth that they can basically build with each other. Yeah, and I want to use this for example, whenever you create a new channel on Slack, right? There always takes a lot of adoption for people to join. For example, we're doing this open spaces program and that's kind of my idea to really bring in all my friends to talk about the technical side of things, right?

When you pod it up with me, we don't get into the nuts and bolts of web accessibility or rust or anything like that, right? We talk very high level. And so we started an open space to Slack channel like recently, and it's already got 52 people in it. It's already got 52 people on the platform, like in the Slack channel. Typically, when you start a Slack channel, there's only like three people in there, right? So again, like people are engaged, people are hungry. which is really, really refreshing. So, and Victor, so I wanted to ask you, when it comes to coaching and mentorship, let's kind of pull this out a little bit, what are some of the common themes that you see where developers can really improve themselves, especially for the people watching right now?

Kate, can you kind of share what you see and how developers, maybe not on our platform, can still level up themselves? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I see like, I would say two different types of profiles. The first one is usually a software engineer who is a super great engineer and they have the hard skills, but they are not able to do a good job in the soft skills. And I think soft skills play a critical part in software development because software development is, it's a sport that you have to play teams to be able to achieve success, you want to win a marathon in the digital product world without playing as a team.

And so for this group of people, I would recommend just trying to understand how to build soft skills and practicing those soft skills and techniques in your personal life at your house, like with your mom or maybe with your husband, with your kids. So things like active listening can generate empathy for people like improving communication skills. So your ability to communicate with others when you need to deliver bad feedback or when you need to deliver positive feedback. When you have to deliver bad news it happens a lot of in a lot of moments in software engineering career when you have to deal with incidents or when you don't know how to to solve a specific problem, right?

So you cannot under-communicate in those situations. You have to show up and be honest and transparent with clients having a positive attitude, I would say is very important. In a freelancing lifestyle, I think it's very important to be able to build connections with clients, like building, you know, building intimacy, build affinity with people, building rapport. Because in my experience, for example, at Gondorayo, usually direct hires happen when freelancers build connections with clients. And when I say direct hire, I mean, you were hired as a freelancer initially, and I'd say that we're going to work part-time. And then three months past, client is amazed with your job, and then they decide to hire you externally.

So they take on a fee and then you join their team full time. So these kind of situations happen When first you show up you have a positive dance to you manager. So you're always on top of the game Manage up hold on hold on connection Hold on I'm gonna interrupt you real quick. Let's talk about managing up. This is a this is a topic I am very passionate about that. I just don't talk about enough Talk about the importance of managing up. What is it? In my opinion, it's, yeah, managing up is kind of like I have a manager, but instead of my manager managing Jitter, I'm going to be managing my manager with my checkings.

And I'm going to be updating my manager with progress. Like, I'm building stuff, but I'm building public for my manager. You see the impact of that? Like, not everybody does it. So if we're able to do it, you're going to be different. You're probably going to be a star in or Kim. So that's the definition of managing a premium. What about you? How would you define it? I love that. And also too, I want to stress the soft skills part. So I've had people ask me a bit, Tor. They're like, do you guys do heavy code test, heavy screen, hacker rank, leak code? How do you guys judge developers?

Now, talking about this a little bit with David G, but I don't think we can talk about it enough. I would say most of like you kind of have three interview steps ish to kind of get onto our platform, right? You got the application phase, which we've written, you know, I guess you could say an algorithm where it kind of evaluates your background, your skillset, your pay rate, your location and how that works. Once you pass that, then you talk to Victoria, who I brought on the show. And then after that, you go into our technical eval. We focus more on the soft skills, right?

Yeah, we focus on your ability to explain your outcomes. So what did you do in your career? Can you describe me the situation? Can you let me know about the actions that allowed you to achieve and resolve that problem? And what were the results that you were able to achieve in those experiences? So we want to see that you were able to tell a good story of your career. career so you need to have a good level of self-awareness and reflection. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult. Yeah. I love that. And again, I think that self-awareness is huge, right? Where are you good at? Where are you bad at?

It's okay to be bad at things. I'm bad at things. I'm bad at documentation and details, right? Like, I'm an idea guy and I go and I execute, but then everything else is kind of fuzzy, right? So like, you got to know your strengths where you're at. and I feel like as developers, the one thing I continually hear with hiring managers is like, I'm never told I don't know. Like, I feel like engineers just kind of power through interviews, and that's something that we really try to vet here at gun. So again, you heard it here. We don't do code tests. We really, really focus on the soft skills, the people skills and the awareness that you have.

Viter, so I want to go into, as we wrap up here, in the last eight minutes, time flies when you're having fun with friends. How does GONAO handle performance of software developers? Right, so at the end of the day, we're gonna put you on projects, you're gonna be working for us. How do we judge performance? Yeah, I think, yeah, so performance is a very difficult topic to talk about because it involved so many aspects, but I would say I would define engineering performance into it, okay, so the first one would be process metrics, where we evaluate the flow metrics, the value delivered, the quality of the work.

And we don't have the metrics of these metrics, but we can identify issues in the quality of work, for example, when we talk to a company. So for example, let's say that I'm a software engineer, I'm completing my tickets, and 70% of my tickets are failing in the quality assurance phase, like when people are testing what I do. we are able to identify that via our regular one-on-one meetings with the companies. And so there is the process matrix that we collect with companies, and there is also the people metrics. So the level of collaboration, well-being, how the engagement is going. So via this one-on-one meetings, we are able to identify the client's satisfaction, these technical aspects that are blocking developers.

And when we are able to encounter, when we are able to identify the situations, we sometimes do some interventions to be able to recover some engagements. And so it's still like a very face-to-face relationship where we are connecting with developers, connecting with companies to collect feedback. And once we have the feedback, we analyze, we build next steps and we deliver the feedback to the other party. Yep, absolutely. I want to get to Mike's question. I get this question a lot. Does Gunioh accept early career developers listen? At the end of the day, most of the roles we get are very senior. 65%, I confirmed this with our head of sales last night.

65% ish of our roles we get are freelance part-time roles. Due to the nature of that, it is very senior, right? you typically don't throw mids and juniors into the fire on a freelancing project. So Mike, we mostly do not accept early crew developers. However, that is one thing partnering with Vittor and Victoria, we're doing a lot more stuff publicly. So we have a public gun.io discord that I created. We actually just passed the 600 IT. We passed the 600 member mark this week. So we have 600 developers on our public discord, where we do a lot of education. I keep up, keep everybody updated with events.

I even post our jobs that we get internally. So you are aware of the types of jobs we get if you do wanna join. And then we do those open spaces. So Mike, one of my focuses is basically to build out more content to help educate early career developers, but as of now in terms of accepting onto the platform, we do not. Victor, I didn't know if you had any more questions or any more comments on that. Sorry. Yeah. Good. Yeah. All right. So as we wrap up here, man, I want to ask you, you know, we kind of touched on the important skills that obviously an engineer should have.

I do want to talk about, as we wrap up here, last three questions I ask everybody, the first question, What do you do outside of work that brings you joy? I would say connecting with people who have a different lifestyle and have strong purpose in their lives. Doing different activities outside of technology. It's something that excites me a lot because technology is my professional side and also one of my favorite hobbies. I can end up finishing my work and wanting to study or build the open source project or do more stuff. So I find it exciting to connect with others, I would say. I love that.

I love that. Well, I tell you that. With that response, you're definitely in the right job. I'll tell you that much. The second thing is, what tools, technologies, trends, are you tinkering with right now inside that you want to share? Yeah, there is one tool that I'm enjoying to use a lot. The name is Fonton, Fonton.amp. They are an AI tool that you can, it's a meeting bot that connects in your Zoom call and they are able to report the session, create a transcript, and also generate a summary of the conversation. For me, it's very transforming. It's a super good tool because before, Every day I would have to do the journaling.

So I would sit down and just write down the bullet points about my day, about the situations, about the behavior that I had. And with this tool, I'm able to record and store things in the cloud so that it automates some of my manual work that I was doing previously. It's really good for self-awareness as a leader, and also to understand more the gun that I own at work. So I use this tool a lot. I can share with you audience later. I love that. Yeah, yeah, we can post in the comments for sure. And then last question, Bit too again, thank you for hanging out with me this morning.

I appreciate it. Last question, the show's called Guidance Council for 2.0 for a reason, because we had guidance counselors in middle school high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have anybody to really turn to and ask career questions and advice from. That being said, what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Vittor? Wow. That's an excellent question. Yeah, life is about hard work. It's about persistence. It's about having a vision. So you have to lead your life, like build your visions, get the leader and make your life happen. 11 years ago or maybe 15 years ago, I was in Brazil.

I didn't know that I wanted to come to Canada. but I had this dream of pursuing an international career. So I had a vision and I worked to achieve that vision. So create your own goals, like monthly goals, yearly goals, have a long-term vision and work super hard. Like you're gonna learn with your failures and you have to build this growth mindset muscle that is gonna allow you to sit failures as an opportunity to grow. So anytime that you fail, you should think the situation like, and you should ask, what this situation is trying to teach me, and how can I improve so that in the next attempt, I'm gonna be successful, or I'm gonna increase the chances of achieve success.

And that's the mindset. And when you see, you're 99% of complete, and that 1% people, you will overcome, and people will say that it was lucky, but at the end, it's just hard work. So that's my advice. just heads down, you get what you put in. So sure, I love that. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. I appreciate it. Bittor, stay on real quick so I can say bye to you backstage. But go connect with Bittor, listen, he's awesome. I'm biased, I work with him, but again, it's really cool. And you're gonna hear more about this until you're sick of hearing it.

But what we're doing at Gun IO is very different. And it is led by people first. We understand that we need to take care of the engineers on our platform to be successful. So we'd love to have you a part of our public discord. I'll drop it in the chat when we're done. And then I would love to obviously have you a part of the platform if you're more senior in your career. Otherwise, y'all have a great one. I will be back Friday morning, 9.30 a.m. Central. Um, and we will, uh, we will be, I'll be hanging out with Zach Wentz. Zach Wentz is former engineering manager at Netflix.

Um, and now he's engineering manager, um, at Amazon over Amazon music. So it's gonna be a great conversation on Friday. Y'all have a great one. Appreciate you all. And we'll see you all Friday. Peace. Thank you guys. 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. 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 at Tdastin on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.