how ai is effecting the interviewing w/ head of dev relations, angie jones

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All righty. Let me alert the troops. Give me a second. Good morning everybody. I mean everybody. I mean I always feel like a greeter at church. Morning. Please shake your hand. Please shake people's hands. Introduce great. All righty. And alert the troops. Okay, cool. All right. Morning everybody. Happy Tuesday. Uh excited about this interview. So again, for those of you who are trickling in now, um you know, I don't have preset questions. Never have, never will. Um I like to see what's on the guest's minds. I like this to be a platform for individuals to uh really just kind of talk. Um you know, I know um I I have a unique opportunity to pull in a lot of tech folk who talk tech talk all the time.

Um, and I think what's fun about this live show and kind of what this is is it's kind of like the soft skills part of the tech side of things, whatever. So, uh, excited to have Angie on and I literally hopped on with Angie um, five minutes ago and I said, "Hey, what you want to talk about?" And she was like, "I don't know. What do you want to talk about?" I said, "Well, I have a topic and the topic is how AI is affecting the interviewing uh, uh, process." I just realized I forgot to I forgot to put process in my title. But anyways, we'll we'll we'll edit that in post.

But um so excited for this topic and uh excited to have Angie. Um I want to go through quick obviously kind of housekeeping stuff. First and foremost, um I am an apprite hero, probably the only non-technical person on a hero program. Um so, uh Sha Appite, they uh was was able to sign on them with another year. I guess they've liked what I've done. Uh kind of touting their name. So, go check out Apprite. Um, also, if you want to be kind of just kept up on everything we're doing with Torque and kind of just help people get connected, check out our site, torque.com community.

We have a lot of live streams. We pretty much stream every day of the week. Um, we get people connected. We have a bunch of Discord stuff going on, too. So, if you want to check that out, please go to torque.com community. If you want to get updated on when I go live, I literally just sent out the text that says I go live with Angie. So, shoot me a text. This is actually me. It's not It's It's not AI. It's not a bot. It's actually me. Um, and so, uh, text me, text live if you want to get updated. Um, and we got some people tuning in.

Jeff's, good to see you. Jordan, TA, Chris, Devon, Ricardo, uh, it's wonderful to see y'all this morning. Um, Bejorn, great to see y'all. Yeah, we got people tuning in, which is great. All right, so uh, uh, Angie, for for those of you who don't know you, give just give a quick background about who you are, uh, to the folks watching. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, uh, Taylor. Uh, Angie Jones here. I am head of developer relations for Block. Um I've been in the tech industry for a very long time. Um multiple decades at this point. Um but yeah, excited to be here. I focus on all things tech and right now um AI is the the main focus for me um as well as the rest of the industry.

So yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, so I I I I do I am curious kind of kind of a quick icebreaker. You know, I've been following your career, you know, ever since I kind of ran into you at conferences years ago. Um, I am curious, you know, uh, on on kind of the shift to AI for you, right? I think you've become very vocal in AI. Um, you have a great newsletter. For those of you go follow up, go go sign uh, if you're not connected with Angie on LinkedIn, do that. LinkedIn sends you kind of a request to sign sign up for a newsletter, but definitely do that.

Just give me kind of your thoughts on the transition to AI and why you become more vocal about that. Yeah. So, um I am an inventor. I have uh about 27 patents and so for Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. So, for the entirety of my career, I uh have worked on the cutting edge of tech, right? Um this is what I do. is what I really enjoy. And so, um, it was a natural transition like, you know, wherever I see the industry heading. Yeah. Uh, I try to get ahead of that. Um, and one to educate myself, but more importantly to educate everyone else.

And so as uh someone who's in developer relations, like that's my passion is to make sure like we all understand what's going on in the industry at any given time. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So talk talk about some stuff. You guys released the new AI agent. Is that correct? Is that is that accurate of me saying? Is that is that the technical term? Is that the That's right. You got it. I'm learning things. I'm learning things. Open source. That is a open source AI agent. Yeah. So talk uh talk about that because it it seems cool. Yeah, sure. So we um like everybody else you know have been uh looking at AI tools and how they can make us more efficient and so we built uh an AI agent inhouse uh for our engineering folks.

So a small team of engineering uh engineers at the company built this uh AI agent called goose and uh they built it to be uh a developer AI agent. So AI agents for those who don't know uh is basically AI that can do stuff for you. So for example all of us are familiar with something like a chat GPT where you're asking questions right? So Chad GBT will tell you, oh okay, if you want to do this, if I say how do I do something, it'll say give you a list of steps of things to do, right? So a AI agent takes that further and does the steps for you.

So it doesn't tell you what to do. You tell it the problem like, "Hey, like that text you uh sent out, you were like, "Oh, I didn't use AI." I could say, "Um, hey, send a text to all my my people." And it could just do the thing for you, right? Yeah. So that's what a AI agent is. Well, we built one. There's AI agents for all kinds of things. People put them in different applications and stuff like that. Well, we built one for developers to help them uh do all sorts of development tasks. For example, I can say set up my e nvironment uh to do X Y and Z, right?

And it'll know, okay, what dependencies do you need? What application and software do I need to install? And it'll just do the thing for me. So, we built that so that our engineers could move faster. We found that they were saving a substantial amount of time um in using this and then we open sourced it uh and so now it's available to anyone who wants to use it. But here's the funny thing, Taylor. Uh other people in the company like yourself who are not necessarily engineers said, "Now wait a minute. We want to save some time, too. We want to have fun." And so, uh the task then became, "Let's see if this can just do regular stuff." And it can.

And so, uh we improved it in ways that everyday people can use it. And now our entire company is using it no matter what department you sit in. I know. And uh other companies are using it and then just your regular developers are using it as well. So I love that. I love that. So I have to ask it's called Goose. I don't know if I was wondering about this. Why? Why Goose? Yeah. So um it's a Top Gun reference. I've never seen the movie, but apparently So good. Yeah. Goose is like the sidekick or something like that. Okay, so this is your side. Love that movie.

That's wonderful. That's awesome. You heard it here first, folks. I don't know if I've seen that content come out of why it's called Goose. You've heard it for your first on guidance counselor 2.0. That is why I think that's brilliant. I think that's brilliant. I I do have to say it's pretty cool. I was um I had the pleasure to to see Angie in Raleigh for all things open AI. Um uh she she gave a talk about Goose. Didn't understand half of it, but it sounded great. And uh you know uh it was it's funny. We had the same plane uh on the way home and uh and you know you don't I'm nosy, right?

And Angie sat right in front of me on the shout out Southwest on the way home and uh I was kind of peering over her shoulder on what she was doing and it was so funny. You turned around to me and like you showed me like what it did and I was I mean for me I was impressed. I was impressed. I mean it it seems like a really cool tool. So so people can just go and I mean where can people get it? Like h how does one acquire a goose? The the AI tool, not the animal, right? block.github.iog. If you don't remember that, just uh search for code name goose.

So, we had to put a little something in there so you can search it. Otherwise, is it is it BL? Here, I'm going to throw it up here. It's BL CK or Okay. Back goose. That's right. Does that look right? Yeah, that looks good. All right. Cool. Awesome. So, so, so, so people can use this whatever they want to use it for. Yes. So, I'll give you, if you don't mind, just a a very everyday example. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so um Goose is an MCP client. So, I'm hearing about MCP. What is MCP? All right. Get into the topic here in a minute, but we started early because I knew we were going to have a lot to talk.

So, so what is MCP? All right. So, MCP is a standard. It stands for model context protocol. And it's a standard that allows these AI agents to connect with your your systems and your tools and your data. Right? So I have goose installed. It's a local installed. So it's not like in the web or cloud-based or anything like that. So I have goose installed. And if I want goose to interact with my other applications, I can do that via MCP. So any API or anything like that, databases, all of that good stuff, you can kind of wrap it into an MCP server and then the AI agent can just utilize it.

So you can have as many of these as you want. Here's a great example. So um yesterday is Monday, right? On Mondays, this is how I use Goose. So I use a sauna for my task tracking. Yes. Sure. All right. And then I have a calendar, Google calendar that has all of my meetings and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. At some point in between those meetings, I got to do some other work which is in a sauna. Yes. You got to find time to do the actual work. Yeah. It's wild, right? Upper leaders. So I say, "Hey goose, here's an MCP server for Asana. Here's a MCP server for Google calendar.

Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to Asana. I want you to find all of my tasks that that I have not completed. And then I want you to look at my calendar and figure out where I can plug these tasks into. And then using your brilliant AI mind, this is what I want you to do. Don't just slap stuff on my calendar. Look at the context of the the task and I want you to kind of group things that are similar together so that I'm not doing a whole lot of context switching, right? And so I was able to look at it and say, "Okay, these things will require you to talk to people.

Um, let's put this on a on the same day, right? These things are more technical. You're going to need to focus quite deeply. Let's find a day where you don't have a lot of meetings and plug those things. You see what I mean?" And so, and within 30 seconds, I have my That's impressive. That's impressive. Uh, Curtis coming in here. up. Curtis, former guest of the show. Hey, I've been diving into Goose and it's unlocked massive productivity. Hey, this is you can literally just take this clip and add it to your website. Uh, I'm literally working on an MCP server for Slack docs right now.

I use the Slack MCP. I think it's comm. So, here's the other thing, Taylor. Slack, I don't know if y'all got it already, Curtis, but y'all make it on. Okay, so look, anybody can make MCP server. But right now, I'm using a Slack MCP server that's just made by a community member. Like, you don't have to work at Slack, but I'm sure Curtis and the team are working on an official one, which will be great. I'll swap it out when that when I see it, but uh right now I'm just using the community built one and um it works pretty great. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Yeah, some things I do with it. Repurpose content, get me free times and Xm inute free chunks for meetings, analy analytics, reviews, coach work, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jay. Yeah. Jace, I was about to text you. We need to look at Goose. uh or at least I do. Um so I love it. And then and then then Roselle's obviously in the chat as well. It's Hey Roselle. Um all right. So let's actually talk now now now that we got that out of the way. Let's let's let's let's talk about you know again you know hopped on with Angie and I was like what do you want to talk about?

And you know, we talked about the the the market right now and and how it's obviously not ideal and and you know, I asked her, I said, you know, one of the things I haven't talked to anybody about yet on this show that I've been interested in is how is AI affecting interviewing? So, that's what we're going to talk about today. And so, Angie, I just some initial thoughts. What are you seeing? What have you experienced? Um because I because I I put out some posts. I was like, how do hiring managers really navigate hiring right now with AI out there? Yeah. So, okay. I got some hot takes.

Actually, I love hot takes. Hot takes on a Tuesday is my favorite. So, okay. First of all, we're seeing like AI all over the place in every part of the interview cycle, right? And you know what's funny is that on the hiring manager side, they use AI. like they use AI to go through the thousands of applications there are and kind of filter out the best ones for the job. We literally just posted a tutorial yesterday for Goose that was like, "Hey, evaluate this resume against this job wreck and give me a score for the person and it like analyzed it and things like that." So, and then we're seeing it on the other side from the applicant's point of view.

And for some reason, that part is viewed as taboo, but not the part where the hiring manager is using it. Why is that? You know what I mean? Interesting. Okay. So, why can't they use AI? In fact, if I were to hire someone and they know how to use AI effectivel inute free chunks for meetings, analy analytics, reviews, coach work, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jay. Yeah. Jace, I was about to text you. We need to look at Goose. uh or at least I do. Um so I love it. And then and then then Roselle's obviously in the chat as well. It's Hey Roselle. Um all right.

So let's actually talk now now now that we got that out of the way. Let's let's let's let's talk about you know again you know hopped on with Angie and I was like what do you want to talk about? And you know, we talked about the the the market right now and and how it's obviously not ideal and and you know, I asked her, I said, you know, one of the things I haven't talked to anybody about yet on this show that I've been interested in is how is AI affecting interviewing? So, that's what we're going to talk about today. And so, Angie, I just some initial thoughts.

What are you seeing? What have you experienced? Um because I because I I put out some posts. I was like, how do hiring managers really navigate hiring right now with AI out there? Yeah. So, okay. I got some hot takes. Actually, I love hot takes. Hot takes on a Tuesday is my favorite. So, okay. First of all, we're seeing like AI all over the place in every part of the interview cycle, right? And you know what's funny is that on the hiring manager side, they use AI. like they use AI to go through the thousands of applications there are and kind of filter out the best ones for the job.

We literally just posted a tutorial yesterday for Goose that was like, "Hey, evaluate this resume against this job wreck and give me a score for the person and it like analyzed it and things like that." So, and then we're seeing it on the other side from the applicant's point of view. And for some reason, that part is viewed as taboo, but not the part where the hiring manager is using it. Why is that? You know what I mean? Interesting. Okay. So, why can't they use AI? In fact, if I were to hire someone and they know how to use AI effectivel y, that's a bonus, you know, on the job.

So, why would I fault them for using it during the interview process? Interesting. Now, the key here is to use it ethically. Now, if you're going to have AI answer your questions that I'm asking you, that's not cool. Have you seen that? Have you seen somebody literally just have chat GPT up? Could you tell they were just ripping it off? Well, people have been doing this even before AI existed where you can tell they're reading from Google search results or something like that, right? So that this is nothing new but people have taken it to the extreme where you know they they might um have a AI bot like actually answering the questions is not them or actually uh writing the code for them.

That's not cool. But what I think we should make space for is if I'm doing um a coding challenge, for example, I asked you to do a coding challenge. I don't think it's fair to say disable all of your AI help within your IDE and just answer it raw. Like the same the same argument is for like okay anything like if they come on the job and you are going to allow them to use it, why not allow them to use it now? And if you know how to interview people and you know your stuff, then you can tell like if they still know what they're doing or not.

Like if you use AI to help you generate this code, explain it back to me. Tell me what parts are not good, you know, where would you then step in as a human being and a developer to fix this or improve it? Like talk to me about it. And and I think that's enough of a signal to make a decision on if this person is competent or not because let's face it, on the job they're going to use AI. Now, um I think that we should allow for this, but again, in an ethical way. So, I'm not cool with if you're trying to trick me with AI, but don't trick Angie.

Don't trick Angie. Angie get angry. I'm not gonna get tricked, but that's the thing. And um so, so let's just be honest. And as hiring managers, let's be realistic um and set candidates up for success. In fact, I want to see if you know how to use AI, right? Are you just going to generate the code and say, "Okay, there it is. It runs right or are you going to kind of look at what was generated? Are you going to uh you know figure out like if this is good or if it's not and and and talk to me about that?" So that's my take on it.

Yeah. No, I love that. So much to unpack here. Um I I think what are you guys doing? I I am curious. I I guess for me as a non-technical person and kind of a recruiter, I I I guess I don't see a huge concern. I think it would be really obvious for a conversation type of interview step and it would be very obvious if you're just reading off of of I I think that's very easy to screen. How are you guys addressing take-home test, live coding test? Like what does that look like for y'all? Because I've been wondering I think the idea of take-home tests now maybe is not as much of a thing as it used to be because I feel like take home test you just go and run all this through all these co-pilot line whatever all these you know.

No really things. Yeah. Yeah. Like so like how are you guys addressing that? Yeah. So, we do uh coding test that's live like a pair programming type of situation. Yeah. Um and I don't know if if we've even adopted the stuff that I'm talking about. This is very much so an Angie take. So, don't Yeah. No, I love this. Yeah. This is this is why we have these chats. I just want raw and unfiltered. I mean, you know, sometimes sometimes talking about is is your best medicine by the way. Yeah. You know, because you can eventually implement Right. So, um we do the live thing, right?

And I I I I think I don't know what what folks are using these days. So, everybody might use something different. I don't know. But, uh you have like some system or whatever that you log into and I think like the the AI stuff is not enabled in that environment. So, you wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Now, of course , somebody could just kind of try to copy it and put it, but we'll see if you're copying the code or something like that. Like, I don't know. I guess there might be ways around it. But again, like I just think all of that is really deceitful.

And more than anything, like the deceit is what'll knock you out of the the interview process more than just the AI, you know? Yeah, absolutely. what um I do I want to go back to kind of what you said around using AI, you know, when when in the interview and and how to use it well and and you know, at the end of the day, you're going to use it your job, so why not enable the interviewer? I think that's huge because when I started recruiting, I I'll never forget when I started recruiting back in the day, like 2011, I was told I was told, get this, big hot take from my manager, who obviously had no idea what she was talking about.

Um she said she said bad developers Google good developers don't and which is hilarious now because now that I mean even early in my career when I got into recruiting engineers day in day out like everybody googles right but I feel like that's where we're at. just a more powerful Google thing, right? So, in a sense of if you are in your interview and you're making people code essentially on notepad, right, with no tools or anything, it would and correct me if I'm using these terms wrong, but I feel like it was the same thing like like when you get a job, you're going to use tools at your job to make you a better developer.

So, why not make the interview process very similar to the environment you're walking into? Yes. And and and more importantly, let's think about this. Let's say that I had a developer that I said, "Go code in Notepad, and I don't want you to use any tools at all because I want to make sure you know how to code." Right? All right. They do that. The code is fine. Beautiful. We hire this person. And then we are trying to force them to utilize AI tools to be more efficient. Now what if th at same person goes I don't want to use AI tools I am you know like like I don't want to use any tools so then I'm dinging that same person that I told not to use AI tools up front and then tried to force them to use AI tools and I'm dinging them and saying you're moving slower than everybody body else like you're not being efficient.

Why don't you use AI hypocritical? I mean, to me it does. To me it does. And again, I think that's where as as a non-technical guy viewing the industry at a macro level, I think that's where I've never understood hiring managers making the interview process not like the environment they're stepping into. I never understood that, right? I think it's the whole, you know, that that that I think it's the meme of it's like the interview is like a Tyrannosaurus Rex that looks really mean and then the actual job is a Tyrannosaurus Rex off Toy Story, right? Um I never understood that. I never understood that.

And so I I I I would imagine that if you're using AI heavily, yeah, that it would it would behoove you as a manager to to have that type of environment interview process. Um, let me let me ask you this. And kind of going back to Goose a little bit. And I I when I meet with engineering leaders like yourself, I always want to kind of get a peak under the hood of how you like to be approached, how you like to be um uh how people like to position themselves to you when they're interviewing. Would you say you are going to probably look at somebody who is maybe building in public with Goose utilizing your tool like if they want to come work for you?

I would imagine I would imagine that it would probably be of use to maybe be doing some cool stuff with Goose in public. Thoughts on that? Um that definitely will be a bonus. Um even if it's not Goose, you know, just some sort of AI agent. Um bonus points for the MCP ecosystem. Yeah. And uh yeah, I think that's definitely will help you stand out. So, we were talking Taylor earlier about how rough th e market is right now, and I'm like, I barely know advice to give people because it's really brutal out here. But I have seen like folks stand out and that's exactly how they stand out is by creating content like that catches people's eye where the job opportunities might even come to you versus you seeking them out.

You know what I mean? And so, you see people who get it. you're like, "Oh, they get it. Oh, they already know how to use Goose. Oh, wow. They're using it in ways that we hadn't even thought of. That's somebody we want on the team." You know what I mean? So, uh, those are standout ways, even if it's not an AI. I saw a woman um who recently got laid off and maybe about a month she had a new job and I thought, "Oh, that's really impressive." But I watched her job search and it was it was I I was very intrigued by it because I hadn't seen this before.

And real real quick, did you know this person or not? I want to try to make a point. Did you know this person? I did know her. Okay. Okay. Okay. I know her. So, she's on my LinkedIn and she's a leader. So, she um she she posted that she lost her job. That message there I I watched very carefully. The message was very thoughtful. you know, you feel a lot of emotions on layoffs, you know, um, and it's natural to want to vent, but that's not extremely helpful as you're trying to seek jobs, right? So, I I think you should find a safe space to vent.

bit with your friends and your family, maybe not so much on your LinkedIn profile because the next manager is looking at that and you are justified, but also nobody wants somebody like that on the team who's kind of like bitter even though you have every right to be. It's totally unfair, but I'm just telling you the truth cuz that's what I do. All right, so um this lady, she had a very thoughtful message. She was appreciative of her time at her job, but you know, uh whatever. I'm on a I'm on the hunt now for my new job. And I watched every day she would post and she wou ld post about things she was doing.

It could be everyday things. But she turned those into lessons on leadership. And then at the end of the post, hey, by the way, I'm looking for a job. If y'all want a leader like me, holl at your girl. You know what I mean? and it was just brilliantly executed like and and you've got to take a peek into her mind and her thought process, how she approaches leadership. That's things that you can't necessarily put on a resume, you know what I mean? Um and and and I wasn't surprised that she got scooped up relatively quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And let let me ask you this.

I'm assuming trying to make another point here. Hopefully you go with me. I'm I'm I'm assuming that you probably didn't like or comment on everything she posted. That's true. But you saw it. Oh, yeah. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at here is that I think people are like, "Oh, well, I'm not getting likes. I'm not getting comments. I'm not getting engagement. I'm just not going to post." And you see what I'm saying? And and it's like, you know, I tweeted this the other day. I said just because your stuff is not getting likes doesn't mean people are not seeing it. And I think like I think that's the unlock, right?

You this person was on your radar even though you did not engage with them consistently, you saw the whole thing and you were invested. And so that's what I want to encourage others. I guess a prime example here where it's like people are watching. Yeah. All the time. That's right. If you look at any post, the number of impressions far exceeds the number of engagement, right? I look at um even how my friends and things use social media and they're like cracking up laughing at a post and they oh think it's the best thing they've seen and then they keep scrolling. Like I literally asked my husband like why do you click like on it?

And he was like huh I hadn't even thought to click like on. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, I literally That's so funny you brought that up. Uh, and your husband's great. Um, I, you know, I was talking to, um, one of my social media friends and I was like, I I I have a I have a a meme, a GIF, whatever, going viral on Tik Tok. It's got like half a million views. Oh, wow. And only 50 followers came from it. Now, you're probably like, that's a lot of followers. Back like a year ago, that would have netted me two to three thousand followers. And and I think like there and again I don't want to go too social media tacticy here on this conversation, but again just want to encourage people to to put yourself out there and and to not worry about the likes and the comments because I think people there's so much content these days.

People just want to watch and they're probably not going to engage with you, but that doesn't that doesn't mean and I think this is the prime example. And Roxy brought up too. Yeah, Aaron Francis, if you have not um I actually talked about I actually had Aaron Francis on a few weeks ago. Check that out. It's it's on my YouTube but and it's on my podcast on Spotify. But Aaron's talked very similar to this, right? Aaron is very open about just his journey of building in public and how things happen. Um, and it's been it's been great. And honestly, you could probably speak to it too about starting to put out more with AI.

I'm sure you've gotten a lot of requests and a lot of attraction from it by just starting to go. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. Um, lot of opportunities. I was um I have a young uh developer advocate on my team. She's junior. Um her name is Ebony Lewis. And uh Ebony, she's just learning the DeLe game or whatever. And I told Ebony um I was like, "You have to start posting externally. Like that's how people will know who you are. That's how you'll get opportunities." And she was a bit hesitant at first and then she started posting not long ago and within like the first two weeks of posting like literally opportunities just coming to her in her DMs and things lik e that from conferences that she applied to and got rejected.

Now they're like sending her a direct invitation to come and talk. And I say, "See what I told you?" And so she's like, "Okay, you were absolutely right." and uh she's posted about this so I'm not like telling her business but she's posted this very thing like okay I got out I started talking and like now opportunities are coming to me that's the key like how will people and she posted this how will people know to call you if you didn't tell them you know so you have to get out there and tell them even if people aren't liking even if they aren't commenting they see it word of mouth gets around somebody will say oh I'm looking for somebody to talk about AI oh yeah I just saw this girl make the connection, you know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. And again, right, the power of, you know, you know, power of content and and and Aaron said this in his talk, like is it fair? Is it fair that that's the way the world works now? Probably not, right? You know, to you have to post stuff to get seen. But like, you know, prime example, if I if I have an AI question now, I'm going to Angie or I'm going to Gant, right? like like in my mind or April at Microsoft like those like like when I hear AI those are the three people. Why? Because they're consistently doing that. And which leads to kind of my other thing too and I'm curious about this.

I I tweeted this this morning that I think niching down right now and becoming a specialist is incredibly important in today's market. We are no longer in the age of where COVID was where like if you can spell react we'll hire you. It's it's now, hey, we need this specific problem solved using this specific technology. Have you seen that as well or or are you still on the generalist train? Um, specialists always shine to me, but generalists like you know um you want somebody who okay after this problem and I give you the next one, you can solve that one too, right? even if it's like different tools and stuff like that.

And so it's a balance. I'm someone who I like I like to be a T. Like I go really deep in something, but I also am a generalist in a lot of other things. Yep. Yep. I love that. I love that. Um uh trying to think of anything else. Um I had a question and escaped my mind. Anything else that maybe popped into your brain since since we've been yapping that that you want to get out for for job seekers right now? Um, I would say just kind of general like tips and advice. Uh, we all know that the market is rough right now. We know that for any given job there's like an abundance of applicants.

So, ways to kind of stand out. I think um, if you can use a reference, people message me after the fact and I think that is so wrong. Like people say, "Hey, Angie, I applied at at block. Angie out. She can't remember." Yeah. And I'm like, "Why didn't you come to me before you did that?" So go to the person. Here's how it works behind the scenes. Like if someone refers you at a company, there's like some some sort of indicator of that on your resume. Like maybe you float to the top of the 3,000 applicants that are there. And people, you know, these are people that the company has already employed and so their word kind of means a little something like, "Oh, you know that person?

All right, cool." Now, that doesn't guarantee you anything, but at least your resume will be looked at versus not even looked at at all. You know, there's a lot of résumés that's not looked at. No one has time to look at thousands of résumés. If you pull a crop and it's like, "Okay, there's 10 people in here that I can interview. I'm just going to go with those. I'm not going to look at the rest unless I Okay, none of those 10 were it. Maybe I might pull again." But, you know, th this is how it works. Again, not fair, yada yada yada. It's the way it is.

All right. So, uh, utilize your network. Uh, get people to refer you if you know someone at the company, right? Um, and then find ways to stand out. Now, I used to say things like, "Oh, I think a cover letter is stupid." In this economy, put your cover letter on there if you want to. You know, you gota in this economy, you got to find a way to stand out. Um, yeah. I mean, if I'm looking at your resume, most people are gonna maybe like, especially if I'm about to interview you, people might go and look at your social media, especially if you have links to it, right?

On your resume. Here's my LinkedIn. I I might click that link and I go to your LinkedIn and I want to see what you're talking about. If you are talking about the thing that I'm like hiring for, that's a no-brainer. Yes. Kelly Von said that on a recent live we went. She actually she said she would rather look at your social proof of what you're putting out because she says, you know, we were hiring an API person and if you have a bunch of LinkedIn post and blog post on API, she goes, that's going to mean more to me than a portfolio. That's true. That's very true.

It gives a lot of signal like this is something that you are comfortable enough with that you would go publicly talking about it. Like think about the signal that that gives, you know? Correct. 100%. All right, rapid fire. We'll wrap it up here. Angie, you're a gem. Thank you so much for today. I appreciate it. Everybody, everybody, go connect with Angie. She's awesome. Um, so first question, um, I always ask, if I told you tomorrow morning that you woke when you woke up you could not do anything in tech, what is the one hobby that you would pursue? Cooking. I love to cook. I love it.

What are any any any dish any like thing you're I'm from New Orleans. So like uh one dish that I make that for people when they come visit me is yakamin. So yakamin is like this kind of cajun ramen infusion. All right. Okay. Right. It's beautiful. I want that. That sounds great. Um uh next thing um what is aside from goose? Aside from goose because you know we obviously promoted that . Um, uh, what's kind of another framework, language, AI, something or other that you're working on tinkering with that you're pretty excited about? MCP. I can't stop talking about it. Um, MCP. That whole ecosystem is just like so simple and brilliant and I'm I'm obsessed.

I love it. I I I don't get this reference. Air frying tips, Angie. Okay. So, I'm an air fryer ambassador. Okay. I love I love my air fryer. I love it. Okay. Very good. So, I literally just did a talk and uh Valencia two weeks ago. The title was air fryers, automation, and AI. A hit. A hit. Stop. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Um I love that so much. Uh next question. Anybody in the anybody in the community? Anybody in the tech community that you love what they're doing that you want to give the flowers to? Uh, April. Uh, April. Is it Spite? Yeah, I think it's Spite Mary.

So, I don't know if her name changed or not. She's great. But, um, April is just making such beautiful content. Like, I don't know. Makes me feel so good when I watch her stuff. And she's doing really cool stuff with agents and fashion and AI and you name it. like she's pretty impressive. Yeah, she's awesome. She's a force for sure. Um let's see here. Last question. The show is called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults who don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to and just ask for general career advice.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Angie? If you go back in time and tell tell young Angie one thing 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, what would it be? Be fearless. uh be fearless like uh we have so much fear as we enter this industry and we're surrounded by these brilliant minds and it's really easy to feel imposttor syndrome and feel intimidated but I mean just be fearless like literally do not carry any fear with you and just go for it learn consume share and and that'll take you far 100% uh Jasmine comes in here where can we hear that talk the airfire talk Um, they I think they're going to release it this week, Ashley.

So, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I will definitely promote it. There you go. Cool. You heard it here first. Follow and I'll put it in my newsletter. There you go. There you go. All right, y'all. It's a pleasure. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed this. Very excited I get to have Jordan Wallace on the show tomorrow. Um, so, uh, going to talk job search stuff with Jordan Wallace. She is a, uh, fellow Ronstad Torque employee, so we're going to have a good time, um, with her tomorrow morning, 9:30 a.m. Central. Go follow Angie. I'll tag her in the show notes after this. Um, Angie, you're a gem.

Thank you so much. Stay on so I can say bye to you off air. But y'all have a great Tuesday and we'll see you on the