in demand skills in today's market w/ founder ken schumacher

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Got that. Got that. Got that. Got to alert the troops. All righty. Sweet. Well... How you doing, Ken? I'm doing great, man. It's good to be here. How's New York? How's New York? New York's good. Honestly, New York's perfect right now. It was about as hot as it gets a couple weeks ago. So if you asked me then, it would have been a different story. But no, man, everyone's in good moods. Morning runs, you know, the whole nine. So I got to ask, are you part of a run club? Are you part of the Pinted Run Club? I'm not a part. We jammed. I love their videos.

But no, I'm not a... Not subscribed to do my own thing. But no, man, the city is is is alive right now. And our office is like fortieth and seventh. So we're Times Square of Times Square. If you know Margaritaville in New York, we're about two doors down. Are you serious? Yeah. You want to. You want to talk New York? It doesn't get a lot more electric than where we are. So for better or for worse. It doesn't get any more electric than Margaritaville at Times Square. No, it doesn't. That's where all great work gets done. Yeah, a hundred percent. Nothing but posting up with a little bit of a margarita and some vibe coding.

You'll be good to go. It is genuinely hilarious when you hop out at, you know, ten p.m. from the office and you're just thrown into a new world. But, no, man, it's a blast. We're having fun. I love it. Well, good morning, everybody. We got some people tuning in. We're trying this live chat on stage. So you can see the comments down here. It's good to see everybody. Ricardo, Teron, Mark, Richie, Sebastian, good morning, y'all. um also want to give a shout out to my uh business partner jason he is uh we're hosting a pretty heavy uh heavy hitting um panel today um today at noon actually um I wonder if I can throw it in the chat is that possible I don't think that's possible um but anyways yeah so follow um so we're gonna be live jason's gonna be live we're streaming with leon noel um, Danny Thompson, um, and Quincy Larson of, um, uh, and it's just gonna be a great chat.

It's basically the state of the web, which, which is really interesting because we're kind of going to talk about it here, right? Like, like the state of the market, um, and kind of what's going on. So excited about this chat. You know, I've, I've started doing these lives. So, so an hour. Um, and, uh, so I, I've, I've done these chats, um, heavily every day for about four years um which has been nuts I've met so many amazing people Ken is another guy I'm gonna add to kind of my uh to kind of my my uh my net my my network My tool belt is what I was trying to say.

And, and so, you know, and so lately, lately I've had to pull back. Ken and I were talking backstage. I had sixteen meetings yesterday. That's not a brag. I'm not bragging about sixteen meetings. Sounds like a brag. It just, it got crazy yesterday. And so, Because there are days with sixteen meetings, which is a new all time record for me. Fourteen was was the previous all time high. To be honest with you, was probably eighteen because I've had two auxiliary phone calls after that. All I had yesterday was a protein shake. And so, you know, I was talking to Ken like I do run a business.

I help run a division. Um, and so it's not always yapping online, but I think one of the, one of the cool things. Um, about this and going to an hour has been getting to more meaningful conversations, right? Um, the feedback on the hour sessions, I've gotten a ton of DMS, um, has been tremendous. So excited to kind of dive into Ken over the next hour. and kind of what he's doing. But again, great to see all this morning. Again, we see in the comments, so keep commenting. Let us know where you're tuning in from. I love it. Anybody from New York, let us know.

Again, Ken's by Margaritaville in Times Square. A few housekeeping things as always. First and foremost, want to give a shout out to AppRite. I am part of the AppRite Heroes program. I always tell people I'm probably the only non-technical guy part of a technical heroes program. I love the crew. I love the DevRel crew. I love what AppRite stands for. Check them out. I know they've pushed a lot of new updates. Again, don't know what they really do because I'm not a coder, but I love their people. So if you do, reach out to them. Tell them that Torque Boy sent you. Jason Torres, my business partner, is an AppRite hero as well.

Also, listen, we do a ton of stuff on the Torque community and we'd love to have you a part of the community, right? So Torque.community is kind of our community page. You can check us out. We'd love to have you. Obviously, most of our chatter is in the Discord. I kind of tell people that, listen, like our Discord is kind of morphed into like a massive community. friend chat at this point, which is really, really cool to see. We have close to five thousand members in the Torque Discord, which is which starting ten months ago, we had zero. So it's been a huge growth on our end and thankful for everybody who's involved.

Also, if you want to be texted when I go live, shoot me a text. This is actually my number. It's not some AI bot. I didn't vibe code anything. This is actually my number. So shoot me a text and we'll update you on when we go live. And again, it's great to see you all. this morning I see y'all jc m ray amelia jason it's good to see you um again and devon it's great to see you um from dallas I love it all right can enough of me yapping let's get the people what they want man who are you what do you do and we'll go from there yeah uh man I'm fired up I guess it's like I got my cold brew here with however many let's go hey hey where are you where are you drinking from though where like like like there's a lot of coffee spots in new york where are we We're not sponsored.

La Cologne is the official cold brew and coffee of Ropes AI. We drink a lot of it. Clean, good. Just jet fuel. Straight jet fuel. Yeah, genuinely. You don't need it on some mornings like this. No, man. We're feeling great. It should be a fun hour. Yeah, my quick spiel. So I'm Ken. I'm the founder and CEO of Ropes. And Ropes at its heart is kind of a new type of assessment company. So my background is I'm an engineer. At least I was an engineer. They don't really let me write any code anymore, but... Back in the day, I was an engineer by trade. I worked at a startup called Retool, which maybe some folks in the chat have heard of.

Shout out to Retool, one of those kind of hot Silicon Valley companies. And my job was awesome. I basically just got to build AI tools all day. So this was, it sounds like a long time ago. It really wasn't. But like ChatGPT, you know, GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT-GPT. That's so funny. We're dating AI now with like the certain reasons. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that hilarious? And people hated those models. I loved it. I mean, for me, it was like, I was like a, you know, whatever, fresh out of college. So. I didn't want to go write a bunch of like boring code and they'd sped me up. And I kind of just got to become the AI guy where my job, I didn't really have a boss.

I just kind of came into work and hacked on AI tools for as long as I wanted. And, you know, every now and then Ken will ship something cool and life will go on. So my job was like perfect, except for, you know, like two hours a day, I'd have to hop in this phone booth and I was giving this kind of algorithm interview question to some smart Stanford grad and, you know, the Stanford student, just like I would have like a couple of years ago, would go look up the problem on Glassdoor and come into the interview and knock it out. And I'd fill out my little and I was like, this thing is just so absurd.

Right. So that's kind of where Ropes came from is doing really cool, awesome stuff out there, working on AI tools. I had to sit through a lot of boring interviews. It gets you thinking about the combination of the two. So that's kind of what led us to today. I love it. The idea of Ropes at its heart is that we have interviews, which work. They're not perfect. They're biased. They're slow. Sure. um you sit down with an engineer you get a good sense of who they are what can they do are they going to be successful in a job that sort of thing so there's interviews and then there's tests and everybody everybody hates taking tests everybody yes uh you know it's and when you hear tests think like scantron right it's like you got an hour taylor I haven't heard that word in ages holy smokes But the beautiful thing about a Scantron is like, you've got an hour, Taylor.

Go fill in the bubbles. I'm going to come back when you're done. High anxiety. Just making my palms sweat. Oh, yeah. And it's completion-based. I don't know how the hell you got to those, you know, an interview you're looking at what did somebody do how do they work it's it's more holistic right right so the goal of ropes is simple it's like take all that quality of an interview and bring it to a test yeah and um you know there's great reasons you know there's like business reasons on why that's valuable for companies right but one of the things we really believe in is There's a lot of really smart people out there who didn't go to Stanford or pivoted into tech more recently or don't have the great background that you post on LinkedIn or whatever.

Right. Sure. But they know how to do the job. And if we can give everybody kind of the quality of an interview, jobs should go to people who can do the task. Right. Not the people who have the perfect background. So, yeah, man, it's been a wild journey. It's been cool. So you guys moved into an office. Moved into an office. You got to pull up the picture. You got to pull up the picture. Pull up the picture. I'll show the picture. So this phone booth was not in existence last night, correct? No, it was not. This was a bunch of boxes. I just kind of, there it is.

There it is. Ken specifically bought phone booths for this live. Yeah. We're going to be live with Taylor. We need to look good. We need a phone booth. You got to get the lighting. I mean, our sellers are just rejoicing today. I've never seen them so happy. It's like they need their, you know, their their space. But yeah. No, man, that's what startups are all about. It's been a lot of fun. I love it. So, well, let's look, there's a lot of angles. And again, I kind of, again, every tune in welcome. I see all in the comments now that we have it up on the live here, I can kind of see it more.

So I'm not going to, it does not quite as much of a moderate as it used to be. So I kind of like it, but it's good to see all. Yeah. Jason says, uh, Jason goes, to be clear, is a work pod in Margaritaville, because if it isn't, why not? And then Sebastian, our ambassador, comes in. Can you imagine the Torque fam working in office next to Margaritaville? We would get, I will say this, remote work has allowed probably the Torque team, community team specifically, to be more effective. Because if you got the Tor community team together too often, I think it would just- Trouble.

It would be trouble, a hundred percent. So a lot of different angles we can go here. I want to start out by the most important thing. And that's, you know, I said this backstage. I think there's lagging indicators and like forward thinking indicators. I don't know if that's the correct term. That's just what I call it. Lagging indicators here are the DICE reports, the Indeed reports, the job salary reports, in-demand skills. Typically by the time those are posted, it's a year in the rears. with the way tech is changing, it's, it's, it's, it's super fast. So those aren't going to be the best things. I think one of the big things that you need to be talking to agency recruiters, we are in it.

We see what's happening. We see the hiring that's happening, but also I'm really excited to get Ken on because he actually runs a company that people are asking for assessments being built in real time that are like that. That's it's like a true, uh, visit like it's like a true I'm having problems with words this morning but like it's a true insight into what companies are hiring for so ken can you just talk about the landscape of tech what you're seeing what what you're being asked for for assessment perspective and and let's just go from there yeah let's do it um Yeah, it's kind of a cool position, right?

And I think a lot of our users are recruiters, right? So we're right there in the trenches with them in terms of those are the people who are knowing first what's coming. A, they're the ones in the ears of hiring managers who are asking for these things right off the cuff, right? And B, they're the ones kind of delivering that message to candidates. the other hand candidates who come to us and say hey like where should we be going next right so it's kind of a privileged position uh to be on the forefront right and part of that again is like we try to be the best in class for our customers right so uh you know staffing firms companies hiring that sort of thing and for the candidates on the platform it's a little bit weird kind of um having two sets of customers at the same time.

So yeah, I guess TLDR is like, it's a cool position and one that we watch pretty closely. I think a few things come to mind. First, positions aside, is like the pace of all this stuff. So we are seeing trends like on an order of weeks, not on an order of months. Really? Yeah. I mean, this thing is moving really, really fast. And one of the big believers I'm in is like the cost of building software is just dropping, right? And as that happens, kind of the whole cycle starts to speed up and, Um, it's one of those things where like, you never know, like when you're on an exponential, you never like have the feeling that you're on an exponential, but you can see it a little bit.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, the quick answer is like, it's changing so fast that I'll give you an answer this week and it'll be outdated, um, for next Tuesday's podcast. I know. Seriously. Seriously. Yeah. The big push is AI. Um, and everyone's tired of that word, but I think there's AI kind of on two, um, of like two different paths the first is uh how well can you drive ai tools so it's weird because this skill is never is never necessarily someone for like I want someone who can use cursor really well right or someone who has been using yeah weird it's always like I want a great.net developer but then when they're evaluating.net developers they're looking for like do you use cursor or whatever right right and I'm sure that's probably stuff that's being talked about in the community is like you know how well you can drive these tools right yeah So what are companies wanting?

Because I want to kind of go down this rabbit trail hole a little bit, whatever you want to call it. What are companies wanting from an AI perspective? The people who are watching that, and we got some questions coming in. If you have any questions for Ken around the state of tech and what you're seeing, please ask them. We'll get to them here in a second. But how are assessments being created to judge a .NET developer with AI? What's those conversations like? Yeah. So one of the more recent kind of developments we have here is like AI open assessments. And Ropes is an interesting place because some of our customers still are not as AI forward as we'd want them to be.

And that's totally okay, right? Like if I'm in a highly regulated industry, there are reasons why I can't just let contract workers drive, you know, cloud code across all my like prod DVs, right? Yeah. So for those customers, we have to be very careful on like, there's skills that should be evaluated without AI, right? And we need to not necessarily lock down the browser, but be conscious of where and when people are using outside sources and how they're aiding a solution with that.

and we can that's a whole separate topic right sure um there are some companies though that want these skills they either are okay with people using ai tools it's like I'm gonna hire the best.net developer and if that's a developer who uses claude really well amazing right or we have customers come to us and say no I specifically am looking for developers who can drive these tools really quickly right um interesting okay assessments today aren't really set up to look for that right I know yeah yeah you know you take a leak code problem or one of these classic tests and plug into chat gbt

it's going to give you the answer right so uh I'm not really testing how well you can drive claude if you can do it in one prompt or whatever right so um one thing that we've been developing is what we call ai open assessments so these are assessments that instead of locking it down and you know promise to me you won't leave your browser all that stuff it's like go crazy uh I want you to to run with ai uh like remember to use these tools right um and instead let's look at how fast you can drive these things Yeah, I think that's kind of

where a lot of development is going.

So we'll give like a front end project, for example, and I'll be like, here's the dashboard. I want you to build a feature with it. Go ahead, plug the whole thing into cloud, like, you know, drive these things however you want. And those tests are really cool, right? Because there's some folks who have used these tools quite a lot and they can pick up a project like that and get moving really quickly. And Um, anecdotally, what we see from hiring managers is, man, do they love that? You know, as someone who's just got that, that gusto and can, and can get after it quickly. So yeah.

Okay. So, so I want to pause in the, in the comments are out of control here this morning. We've always just struck a nerve. So first off, before we, before we get to some questions, so you're kind of seeing two types of tests coming in right now. You're seeing, Hey, we don't want AI. We just want to test on the fundamentals of C sharp.net or react or whatever. Um, Then there's other companies coming to you like, hey, we actually are a very forward thinking AI first company. We want to develop a problem and then essentially have a person develop it. Are you guys in your product like helping judge how they do it?

Like, how does that work? Yeah. First I'll say it's not just like the new startups asking for that. Like we have like fortune, a hundred banks who are like, give me the AI skills. So it's like, really, really start to see the, right. Okay. Now there's a lot of opposing forces. These companies are large. There's different opinions within a, an enterprise. So it's all scattered, but, uh, you, it's very cool. And this is what I meant. Like we're on the edge. You can feel the, the permeation day over day. So, um, Yeah, the way ropes works is we don't have like a library of like canned assessments on the platform.

So everything's kind of custom built for you guys. Everything's custom. Yeah. So we're never going to give somebody like a hello world and say, you know, write me hello world in Python. Because, again, you can plug that into chat GPT in one prompt. And I mean, I could probably do that. Dude, it's also just like not interesting. Like you're a candidate, you show up, you're just like, man, you know, like I got to write another like reverse link list or whatever. I certainly didn't enjoy those days. So we don't want to bring that back at all. So part of, To answer your question, part of the experience is like putting people in interesting situations.

The second part is like helping judge. I don't really like that word, but helping kind of show hiring managers how people reach the final solution. So if you're driving Claude Code, we want to show you, hey, they used AI at this part, this part and this part. Right. Interesting. And a lot of it is to credit the developer. Right. Think about kind of how where we started Scantron versus interview. Well, the cool thing about an interview is like, I actually don't care if you get to the final answer. Right. It's really not important. What's important is like, did you know how to approach it? Did you reach for the right tools at the right times?

Right. That's the goal of ropes is like, let's watch the hour and show hiring managers why this person might be a good fit. It's not just that they built the perfect front end. Right. But they had the right instincts and tendencies. We want to be on the candidate side and say, hey, we love Taylor, not just because he can solve problems. Right. But because he's got all of these instincts and that's kind of what ropes is all about. I love that. I want to get to a few questions here. Let's run it. uh let's see here um m ray comes in uh he's a really active member in the tort community do you think we're in a framework wars era do you think we're in the framework wars era of hiring like every company thinks from hiring sucks and is hard and no other platform is good let's create one which leads to a billion of these interested your thoughts on that Yeah.

I'm Switzerland for what it's worth. Yeah. So I think for what it's worth, I think like ambition is a good thing, right? So if a lot of people are like hiring sucks, let's improve it. I'm all ears for that. Part of at least our strategy is like, I'm not good at everything, right? I'm actually not a recruiter. I'm an engineer. We have a team of engineers, right? Um, I think recruiting, ironically, we're a software company in the space, right? But I think like recruiting at the end of the day is human to human, right? So, um, you see a lot of startups trying to throw out, um, you know, agencies or staffing firms or recruiting firms or whatever.

And I think that's a fine approach for us. It's like, let's leave the human part to humans, um, but use technology to help them where they might not be quite as strong. Right. Um, so, uh, Yeah, I think competition in like every industry is going up as the cost of software decreases. But no, I don't think everyone's kind of has the goal of building a platform. We don't, right? We empower the folks who know recruiting really well. I would say, I mean, Emre, my hot take on this is I feel like we're actually on the other side of framework wars. Like my hot take is like the framework wars happened like five years ago, right?

We had Vue come out, we had React come out, we had Angular kind of two dot O plus, right? Like we had all this. I feel like now that the internet is kind of morphing into kind of this one thing, right? where and I think a lot of that's being led with ai that's just what I see I'm not saying I'm right but I feel like the framework wars were like five years ago that's just my take kenny any thoughts on that I think it's a good one. Again, the world's changing really fast, right? I will say the energy feels really collaborative. One of the cool things about the opportunity right now is like, I don't know how to say this bluntly.

It's like there's kind of there's like problems that you can solve to like financially make a lot of money, right? And then there's like problems that are like morally good for the world. And one of the cool ones is that if we can help people fit into the jobs that they care about, you're kind of doing both, right? Like companies are, are super excited because they're finding great talent faster for cheaper and people are getting jobs. Right. So, um, I think that's a big reason why we're all, uh, you know, building phone booths late at night in the office or, uh, all grinding here is it's like, it's a rare moment where those two axes are kind of aligned.

Um, and obviously we're trying to build a great business, but, uh, you're also kind of doing a lot of good too. And it's very cool to obviously hear all the stories of people getting jobs through the platform or, you know, successes of our partners like Torque. So no, man, it's cool, cool space to build in. And I think too, Emre, like, he goes, yeah, like not literally saying we're in framework, we're saying we're in a similar era with hiring. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Going back to Emre's thing here. Yeah. I'm not saying the framework, we're saying that we're similar. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think, I mean, hiring platforms have been out there for a while.

I would say what people are realizing is that to scale hiring across the globe you kind of need more of a platform but then that's where I think when we say platform then we go into community building which is obviously you know emre which is what we do at torque right I think I think there are a lot of platforms out there I think now just with the way the market's moving I think yes I I do have to say I think I think there are more hiring platform wars happening but again that's why you know you you can go to upwork and get a

job but do you feel part of their community probably not right so um I want to get to some more questions here and again I love the questions um also another thing too going back to the framework wars even though emory wasn't referencing this if you watch aaron francis's talk keynote talk from laracon in denver this year he's talked about how the the age of the web is moving towards pragmatism which is just shipping things well and fast right and I think that's why laravel is pushing a lot of things to help their developers ship fast and high quality code so I think that's just

kind of if you have not watched that uh go to aaron francis's profile and find it it's it's a great keynote um another jeff jesse one of our ambassadors companies don't know what they want from ai developers because they don't know what they want from ai thoughts on this ken yeah uh I think this is uh mostly correct um what comes to mind is again like a lot of people don't know they want ai not necessarily right uh but they want the best.net developer and it just happens that the best.net developer is the one who knows how to using LLM, right?

So a lot of it's like tied. I'm not saying I want AI. It's like I want .NET. And then so that person who can drive .NET really well wins. But I agree with the take. Part of it's just like the ground is shifting so fast, at least like the larger enterprises where ropes gets played in a lot. It's hard for a large bank, for example, to plan a two year AI. Right. Yeah. Runs too quickly. So, yeah. But yeah, I mostly go to take. Let me ask you this. And this kind of gets into. Hold on. Let me get ahead of myself here. Jamie comes in here.

What's interesting to me about the mention AI tooling is that I'm seeing a lot of engineers who specifically don't want to use AI tooling. Yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts on this? I feel like you're going to have to. So I presented this in Raleigh at All Things Open, the meetup I spoke at. It was a seventeen minute talk. For the record, it's very difficult to give a fifteen minute talk and be coherent. Oh, yeah. I actually had to rehearse. I never rehearsed my talks. I actually rehearsed in my hotel room. I think where we're at right now is when React came out. This is verbatim one of my slides.

When React came out a few years back, you had people who were like, React's a fad. I'm going to keep using jQuery. I'm going to keep using the tools that I have right now. React's a fad. Those individuals who did not adopt to React eventually have had problems. I know people who still are resistant to new tools that have issues finding jobs. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think you have to be open to it right now. Thoughts on this, Ken? Yeah, again, I mostly agree with you. That's fine. Yeah, no. Hey, listen, we can banter back and forth. I love bantering. I'll get into arguing.

I love arguing. Yes, I agree with you. So you have to adopt AI. Part of it's like it does mess with your head a little bit. Okay. The example that comes to mind for me is like if I was teaching like an intro to CS course right now, I feel like I'd be in a really tough spot. Because if you just over rely on these tools, it almost feels like you're not really learning, right? Like I can code things very quickly that I don't. totally understand, which is probably why they don't let me touch the code base anymore. And also, but it works, right? But there's kind of like a, it used to be the kind of like the more you ship, the more you learn, right?

And now there might be a little bit of like this going on. what you're learning is maybe not the fundamentals of like whatever you're implementing, but like how to drive AI to accomplish that goal. Right. Right. The problem is that if you just say, OK, I'm not going to do it and I'm going to keep kind of doing things the old way today, you might be missing like, oh, I put it like a one point six X speed up. So one developer at ropes might equal today using AI tools might be like one point six engineers uh who if okay that's pretty close I've I've I've been saying one point two five so there you go depends on the York right so as you go smaller in size I think the power of ropes because that makes sense So when I was solo, I kind of built V zero point zero of ropes totally on my own.

And that's crazy. It was so much fun, man. You were just flying. Now all the engineers are still unbundling your code to this day. Yeah. So now we are paying down the debt. Yeah. There's a running joke in here. They're trying every day. They're like excavating more of my code, more actual stuff in. But that's what you had to do, right? Because I had to go sign first customers and prove out the idea so that we could get to the point we are today. And today we're fighting for tomorrow and so on. So coming back to the question from Jamie, the problem is if you just say, I'm not going to use it today, it's one point six.

But tomorrow it might be two point two and interesting three. The models I often say are never gonna get worse than they are today. Like this is the absolute worst they'll ever- This is the worst. So if you're the type of person who says no today, then you'll be the type of person that says no tomorrow, right? And that's part of the problem and maybe part of the reason you see people not getting jobs, who pick up new tools. It's not like you're that far behind today, but you won't be the person to adopt it tomorrow when the Delta is higher. And that's a problem.

So- Yeah, absolutely. what are your thoughts because jeff comes in kind of along this and again I love this chat I knew this conversation was going to be good uh so the problem becomes developers that rely on ai this is what we just talked about to the point they don't understand what the code uh so that so the issue rises they cannot debug or fix the issue without the assistance of ai how does a newbie or somebody early in their career balance this? Because I feel like if you're senior and you've been through the trenches and you know the fundamentals, you kind of can do that.

But if you're junior or mid, I feel like this is absolutely a problem. Yeah. Do you have any, like... It's a really hard question, to be honest. I know, I know. I think Terran's partially right, where it's like, as an engineer, I think the definition is just like, you're learning, right? So, if I was an early engineer, I would be leaning as far as I could into AI. I wouldn't be... I wouldn't hold back. Now, part of it's like, when AI... implements things you are kind of just learning by following in some ways um I'll give an example I I was not an infrastructure engineer uh it's kind of like me showing a vulnerability on the podcast I was so scared of aws I was like I don't know uh you know what's gonna happen and I remember it was like v zero point zero point zero of ropes and I had to figure out how to get the thing online and block it down and all that stuff And I blocked out a week.

I was like, all right, this is going to be AWS week. We're just going to figure it out together, right? And, you know, I turned to ChatGPT and I think we were done by about noon on Monday, right? And that was one of the moments where I was just like, holy crap, man, this thing. But when you walk through that, now it's like, okay, I understand like what an instance is, how to turn it on, turn it off, right? So you learn by doing. And I don't think you can be scared of this stuff. I think just like every day you show up, you try to learn as much as possible.

For me, AI has been accelerant for that, not a deterrent. So yeah. Yeah. And I talked about this in my talk, too. And I'm really glad this conversation is validating my talk. So thank you. I mean, I feel kind of crazy as like a non-technical person speaking on a technical matter. But again, I'm speaking on a large swath of like, you know, kind of a viewpoint. But like Jeff, like if I were to say a junior to mid-level developer right now, I would still say, while you need to go all in on AI, you still got to be focused on the fundamentals. Like, like, like I would say, if you've gone through bootcamp, if you are coding, I think it's marrying the two together.

I think you can both go a hundred percent on both areas. Right. I think you need to, and then if you find yourself doing a bunch of things that you don't understand why go figure that out. I think that's the biggest disconnect. You can use AI to do all this stuff, but you, if you want to take it upon yourself, you have to go do research as well. Like, Hey, why did this work? Why, why, why did I not know this? That is, That's the onus on you for sure. Here's an optimistic message, Taylor. If you want to be the best React expert in the world, right?

You're at a little bit of a disadvantage. There's other people who have had about a twelve, fifteen year head start, right? If you want to be the best Claude Code expert in the world, well, Claude Code came out four months ago, right? So by definition, the greatest folks in the world have only had their hands on the tools in their four months than you have. So that's one of the reasons I try to encourage people to lean into this stuff as much as possible. It's like everyone's just starting out in a sense, right? You're not that far behind. So I think it's an opportunity, not a risk.

A hundred percent. Yeah. And that's one thing I said in my talk. I said, you're not behind. Nobody's behind you. No one's behind. No one's behind. I like what Jamie said here. That being said, I'd be interested in how both Ken and Taylor recommend that AI tooling experience be listed on your resume. Yeah, what are your thoughts, Taylor? So I think there's kind of some fundamental things. Me and Jason Torres do resume reviews bi-monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, twice a month in the Torque Discord. There are a few fundamental things. I think if you're using, again, I'm just making this up. If you are using Clawed, or GitHub Copilot, I think you need to put that in as a bullet point, right?

Leverage Claude to do X, Y, and Z, you know, blah, blah, blah, or use GitHub Copilot to do this because of this, because of this, whatever. I think you need to put that in there as a bullet point. I think where you need to start sprinkling this stuff in is me and Jason always talk about the last bullet point of each position on your resume should have a technologies used bullet point. And that's where you just list every tool, every technology, every framework that you have touched in the job. And that's where I would start inserting this stuff right here. If you did a large project and you heavily use Claude or GitHub Copilot, put that as a main bullet point.

But if it's more an auxiliary thing, I would absolutely put that in the technologies use bullet point. So I don't know if you have any thoughts or if I just answered it properly. You did. I love Emory's comment. You should put leverage Claude to generate the resume you're currently writing because that's beautiful. Yeah, you're asking the wrong guy, because I'm like the most anti-resume guy there. I think the resume is dying, honestly, because of Emre's point. It's just like so easy for anybody to write anything in there these days, right? I think that's kind of one thing that Torque has done well is it's... Learn by doing, right?

Show me your projects. Show me that you can pass some of these harder challenges, right? Do something. Build a side project. Do whatever. As a hiring manager, I guess that means a lot more to me than anything I see on a resume. Yeah, we send profiles over to managers, right? So it's like, you know, I know you're hiring right now. So if anybody wants to go work at Ken, you got to be in New York. But if you want to work with Ken- You know, so for me, it's like, hey, you know, if we were to send Ken, we don't send Ken resumes. We would send him profiles and we would show that they've taken an assessment or that we've showed them.

We would highlight any AI projects and basically cultivate the profile of the person as it relates to what Ken is looking for. So Ken can have a better holistic view, which is why I truly believe what we're doing is is single-handedly changing the way hiring's done at torque it's going to take time for us to get there but I do think what we're doing is definitely I'm heading the right direction uh uh thomas comes in here um going back to rope specifically how are you guys judging the cleanliness of the code with with with your assessments uh loaded question uh I could pull a share screen and show you uh behind the scenes it's actually very cool um Part of the founding thesis is when somebody sits in an interview, we don't have to train ICs on how to interview well, for example.

It's all very innate. Part of the difficulty and the cool problem we get to work on is how do we load that into a computer? Um, so, uh, I guess to answer the question sort of, um, like cleanliness can be one of the many things that hiring managers look for. One of the cool things about ropes is everyone's looking for something different, right? So a.net developer at bank a looks a little bit different than a.net developer at airline B, right? Both great companies, both hiring for a JD that might look exactly the same, right? But they care about different things. Someone might care about moving really fast and maybe the cleanliness is less important.

And somebody might care about like, I'd rather them write two lines of code as whether they test it really well and it looks perfect and it's clean and all that stuff. So the answer is kind of. maybe to tie it to a more interesting message. I think like the world is moving towards more custom stuff. Everybody's looking for something different and going back to like the hiring wars or whatever, like platforms are starting to figure out the more you can tailor the experience for the hiring manager and the candidate, the more success you're going to have. So yeah, Yeah, people want to really is just it's really just what the company wants.

Really? Exactly. Exactly. Tell me what you're looking for and we'll go look for that in the best candidates and bring that to your doorstep. That's kind of the end of the platform. Let me ask you this random question. If people want to is any of your assessments like public facing, can somebody like go try out a ropes assessment if they just want to give their shot at something? Is that something you guys offer at all publicly? Yeah, we're getting there with Torque. I don't think it's live today, just open source. I would bet you that a few folks in the chat have seen the ropes challenge.

That would be awesome to hear about. But yeah, it's all over Torque. And pretty soon, I think we'll be at a point where you can just go step into one. Yeah, that's kind of my goal. That's kind of my goal. It's awesome, right? And I think this is part of the really the value that we're trying to deliver is like, you've got great people in the community who have these skills, right? And we can go train them on, go write Claude and the tech, and they should, right? Go put this on your resume, go do all that stuff, right? But there's just so much noise in the hiring market that it's really hard to stand out.

So the whole idea of ropes is like, Give them the room to run, if you will. Don't put a seal on it. You know how to drive a model or forget AI. It's like you're just a really great .NET developer and you're sitting looking for a great new role. Well, go write something that nobody else can do and post that right on your profile so you really stand out. I think there should be more and more opportunities to do that right within Torque pretty soon. We're excited about it. Talk about... So we kind of got through the questions. That was great. If you guys have any more questions, please ask them.

I want to kind of pick your brain, Cam. You kind of said something that kind of jogged my memory about building, showcasing it. How are you evaluating talent when you interview at your organization, right? I think I've kind of been more vocal. I've said it for a while, but I think more so now in today's age, you kind of have to show you can do the job before you get the job. And I think that's... There are two arguments. People can say it's incredibly unfair. I need to just get a job so I can get the experience. Then there's the other side of it. It's like, well, companies are at a point right now I call the great hesitation where it's like, we really want to make sure it's a fit.

We want to make sure you can do it. How do you guys structure interviews at Rope? And just as a founder, CEO, how do you guys evaluate talent? Yeah. So there's this really cool tool called Ropes that helps us evaluate a share's downscale. We do use Ropes at Ropes. Eat your dog food. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Oh, it is awesome dog food in the product, by the way. Like every founder that's listening, like thousand times over, you should be using your own thing because you learn, we can listen to customers all day. But when you're actually the one using it, like, God, that bug is like so annoying.

I know. I know. It's like, God, we're actually not as good as I thought we were. Yeah. kind of have this thing where like you're using it and it's almost unconscious. You're like, God, that thing is really annoying. And then you have like a conscious, like, wait, I was the one who built that, you know what I mean? So, uh, that's been very healthy for us, but, uh, we do do interviews afterwards as, as every company that uses ropes, um, does as well. And, uh, we look for kind of, um, yeah, trying to think of like good traits, um, For what it's worth, you know, hiring at a startup is very different than hiring at like a Fortune.

Sure, yeah. Only speaking to your experience for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of startups, I think technical chops are the baseline and a lot of it is culture and fit and all that stuff. And that's one of the tenets of the product is Ropes is a technology company, right? Like we... we vet out hard skills or kind of these like hard slash soft skills, I call them. But things like culture, are you a fit? Are you going to be excited to work here every day? Are you a good fit for the problems we're working on? That's not stuff that an AI is going to be really great at.

That's stuff that like is human to human. So we try to spend a lot of time with these folks, understand who are they? What are their motivations? What do they want to do in five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, right? Because that helps me as the founder kind of assess, are you Are you going to have fun when you're in October first and we've got all these like. Oh, did we lose Ken? Ken? Ken, did we lose you? I think we lost Ken. Hold on. Let me text him. Ken, come back. Ken. Ken. I think I lost you. Yeah, there you are. You're back. You're back.

You're back. All right. You're back. Sorry about that. I'm mid-ramp. uh, TLDR, uh, culture, um, you know, fit, all that stuff is really important and you might be a horrible fit at ropes and you might be a great fit for a startup next door or vice versa. Right. Sure. Do you, do you look at, cause I'm always trying to think of how people can jockey themselves, uh, kind of to the front of the line. If somebody is like, Hey, love the idea of assessments, you know, I've, I've hated assessments. I've, vibe coded assessment platform and kind of want to give you my thoughts on it or hey I I've taken bits of ropes you know I walk through your product I've taken I've I've created this feature that I think could be beneficial is that something that you guys look at like yeah like would that help somebody's chances to get into the top of the line Yeah, I don't know if you need to go that far necessarily, but like mission alignment is really important to us.

So one cool thing is like every engineer that works here has taken, you know, these crappy tests before. Right. So they all have like a little bit of a vendetta. Yeah, dude. Oh, yeah. Trust me. I've always said if there's and I think we're there's plans to do it. But if you can like get other devs involved in fixing the hiring process, devs have lots of thoughts. And one of the coolest things is, again, our customers are the firms, right? But our customers are the candidates. And what we love is candidates will write in and be like, hey, that was actually badass. I felt like it was fair.

I love that stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah. um and uh to be honest that's like one of my main focuses over the next six to twelve months is like listen ropes you have to do something right you've got to log on you got to go through this stuff uh it's a test in the sense that it's uh asynchronous there's nobody on the phone and all that stuff right but we built this thing not to just be another you know checklist item that everyone's got to go through to go get a job right we built it for The reasons we were harping on twenty minutes ago, it's like you've got great folks.

Give them the room to prove themselves and jump to the top, you know, the top of the list. So, right. For me, it's really validating when we have people write in and be like, that was cool or I enjoyed that. Or like you haven't heard those words before in a testing environment. So I feel like we're on the right track and we just try to make these things interesting and cool. And hopefully you learn something. Right. But also fair and fun. evaluative and all that stuff. So it sounds like what you're saying is, is that like for people to really stand out for you is like to give their thoughts, to like actually try the assessment, to come to the interview, be like, yo, I just took, I just took the JavaScript or the react test, loved it.

Maybe here are some suggestions that I see really just taking ownership during the interview of the product and doing some research. Spot on. Yeah. It's, it's just, uh, like doing stuff, right? Like, isn't that wild? Isn't that wild? Just applying yourself a little bit more goes a long way. The thing is like the bar is fairly low. Uh, that's the cool thing on like Torque. It's like you go dress up your profile, you go spend a few hours, uh, in some of these biologics sessions or whatever. And you're all of a sudden in the top two percent of profiles, right? Like there are people looking, um, um, But it does take some action.

Right. And in the short term, it doesn't feel like there's payoff. So there's a little bit of faith. But, yeah, it definitely matters for us. Like how much you care for lack of a better word. So as we kind of last last ten, ten minutes or so here, I want to kind of just go back to kind of the I know we I know we started to go all in on a real fast. Obviously, yeah. Yeah. What what what are some other skills that you guys are getting pinged a lot? I'm just from assessment building right now. Like what's hot? Everything. I think I tweeted out like a graph of like the actual skills.

You're on Twitter? I don't think I follow you. I got to go. Actually, it was LinkedIn, not Twitter. Go on my Twitter for unhinged thoughts. But I used to be a bigger Twitter guy back in the day. Too much of a time waster. Oh, that's great. You should bring it back. Yeah, React, I think it's like hot right now. Frontend type projects, Herpon.net, we always see a lot of that. We're not back in. I feel like we're at market saturation for frontend, and I feel like we've swung really deep to Python and Java and data. Are you guys seeing that too? I know I just led the witness here from a question perspective, but I need to validate my opinion here.

No, you're wrong. No, I'm just kidding. No, you're spot on. Data science seems to be a hot topic. Data science and what? Are we talking about ML, NLP? When you say data science, just heavy data analytics and stuff like that? Yeah, kind of all of the above. So on the right, kind of like niche side, ML engineers, NLP stuff is still hot, although it's trumped by all these like AI generalists, that sort of thing. On the left side, it's like QA analysts, like your data science roles. Okay, there you go. stuff that's good for folks to go swing into for a few months and learn the ropes, if you will, and kind of move towards some other stuff on the right.

So yeah, seeing a lot of data stuff. Yeah, hopefully the market is starting to tilt kind of back upwards, but we like what we see. We're actually still hot. Okay, that's good to know. That's good to know. By any means. Love it. All right. I'm trying to think. Anything else that I know I told you, like all these things we were talking about, we didn't get to any of them. Is there anything else? Any words of encouragement for job seekers right now before we go into our rapid fire? Uh, I'm excited for rapid fire. Uh, yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of opportunity out there.

Um, I really think we, it doesn't come up a lot, but I think it's like important. It's like the, I don't want to say like the floor is low. Cause it's, it's, it's a tough market right now. Uh, there's a lot of people looking, um, Jobs are sparse depending on where you look right, but I do think There is an opportunity to stand out and everyone's kind of doing the same thing. Everyone's polishing the resume doing whatever right The more side projects the more time you can spend with an LLM the more You can dress up a profile on tour Hopefully the sooner you can run through a couple ropes challenges improve your abilities like that's such a jumps you to the shortlist so I wouldn't be discouraged I look at it as the opposite of like there's a great moment right now to stand out and it kind of is the snowball that certainly happened in my career where it's like you have one win the one win leads into the second the second leads into a bigger third um and the thing just keeps rolling so um yeah man uh which which which back-end languages are trending what'd you say Rust is like top of our list right now.

Go Python. Yeah. Go and Python are always hot. Yeah. All the likes, but I love it. I love it. Yeah. All right. Let's let's let's hit rapid fire and then and then we'll be on our way. First off, I always ask you kind of answered it. Are we hot coffee or cold coffee? Ice coffee. What are we? Cold. Yeah, baby. Always. Yeah, dude. We were all hands in Boston in January. It was like twelve degrees outside and I was drinking ice coffee. I love that. Gloves. Like the coffee freezes all my lips. People look at you like you're crazy. You're like, yeah, I'm that guy, especially in Boston.

That sounds right. Oh, it's brutal. The wind's brutal up there. Do you have a favorite? I have to ask because I've been in New York quite a few times. Do you have a favorite iced coffee spot that you like to go to? We already were sponsored by Lockdown. Oh, come on. Do you have an actual location? Like Devotion is always like my go-to. That's if you're a VC in New York, you know, you know, Devotion well. Yeah. I don't have a lot of, you know, I'm trying to think about like Duncan. Duncan gets shot out. No, no, no. uh you're you're you're such a founder you're like I don't need I don't need I don't need frills I just need straight to the dome yeah just just give me uh give me raw uh caffeine no we're we're a hundred percent uh you know cold brew or two a day but I try to keep it clean none of that celsius no I can't I had my wife bought me the other day like I don't know she got influenced on tiktok by all these like fitness influencers And she bought some drink.

I forgot what it was called. It made me feel weird afterwards. I was like, nah, I just want to stick with coffee. You don't like that? It made my tummy hurt. All right. Next question. What tool – you can't say ropes. What's one tool, tech tool, or app you can't live without right now? Yeah, that's a rope say I thing. It's just – Stop. Stop. That doesn't count. What tech tool can I not live with? Yeah, or app. I don't know if you got an app on your phone you love. I don't know if we're on the Aura app. through right now uh I've got an aura I've got an eight sleep uh sleep is is pretty cool uh yeah uh I think I've spent way too much money it's three thousand dollars or whatever but it's worth it dude I I spoke with one guy years ago I'll never forget I was like uh I was like how much you pay for your pillows and he told me ungodly number and he's like listen you spend like half your life sleeping Literally.

I don't get to spend half my life sleeping, but a little under a third, I guess. Yeah, or whatever the number is. It's a fair amount of time. If you can feel like three percent better every day, that's worth a lot of money to me. It's funny. I bought it full price and like literally three days after, one of my good friends started working at Eight Sleep. So I was like, man, I wish I had hit her up a couple of days before because she could have got me. I would like negotiate the package, like whatever, but. No, I'll shut out Aidsleep for that. I love it.

What's the very first job you ever got paid to do? Um... ever. I'm a big baseball guy. I feel like when I was twelve, I got paid to run scoreboards for fourteen-year-old baseball games. I would have done that for free, honestly. There's nothing like when you're twelve and there's a scoreboard in right field and you've got a lot of buttons and you press the button. It's the coolest thing in the world. Instant gratification. Instant gratification. That's the first thing that comes to mind. Are you a Yankees guy? Are we Mets? What are we? I'm a Tigers guy. Tigers? Yeah, I'll be back there this weekend.

Tigers at heart, although I went to a Yankees game on Saturday, and they lost, and everyone's mad and want to fire them. It's fun to be around, but no, Detroit's going to win it all this year. I'm pretty excited about it. I love it. I love it. Um, all right. We've already talked about the question here. Um, I always ask people like, what's your ideal in office scenario? You guys are a hundred percent in office. So this question is kind of null and void. I've asked people this, you know, my, my preference would be onsite for a week, once a quarter. Um, but obviously you guys, what, what, let me ask you this then let me change the question a little bit.

What, what was the mindset to go all onsite for ropes? It's just so much fun, man. I can harp on. I don't work well remote. I get too distracted. I go on too many coffee walks, whatever. But it's just so much fun. This thing, it's kind of weird. The better it does, and we're lucky that we're doing well, the harder it gets. So it's hard. There's all these... problems and big decisions and big moments. And, uh, when you're with, you know, the crew, uh, every day and so much funny stuff happens, uh, every day to, to love, we just, we just can't do anything without it.

So, uh, yeah, man, it's like one of the coolest parts of this thing is we work really hard, but it also doesn't feel like work. And, um, it's a really, really enjoyable way to, uh, just spend my days. So, uh, yeah, all in person. I love it. I have to say I do miss being in the office. I can't believe I said that. But after five years of working remote, I mean, my entire career was in office as a recruiter. So I do miss it. I do miss it. Yeah. Back in the day when you were young doing scoreboards, what did you originally want to be when you grew up?

professional baseball player I think uh maybe there's still time uh maybe there's still time I will michael jordan and just run a company and then also that'd be cool I think my days are probably running out on that but uh I will say like when I go out and like throw a glove on and throw in central park or whatever it like literally comes right back to me so um yeah probably professional baseball player I did uh my dad's an entrepreneur um so I kind of grew up around uh startup life so I didn't necessarily know I was going to be uh in the world of uh staffing and recruiting uh building air necessarily but um no man it's been cool to see it all kind of come into fruition and long way to go but uh yeah I'd say probably professional baseball player astronaut but you know the regular deal What's a career mistake you're oddly grateful for?

I've made a lot of mistakes. It's funny. I'll sit down with a candidate or whatever, and they'll be like, I don't even know. It'd be like, tell me about a time you failed. I'll be like, I could literally tell you like a thousand. But I am grateful. It's kind of like, I don't even bias and hindsight or whatever, like a lot of the failures have kind of gotten me here. So, you know, I founded the company solo. I one of the big mistakes I like spent a bunch of months like just building, building, building. I should have been just like talking, talking, talking, talking. Right.

And that was a mistake. I think like when founders start a company, they shouldn't even touch product. They should just go have like a thousand conversations. Right. But also like building a lot of me to learn a lot about like the space. It gave me like the punch in the face and what you built was like wrong and people want something else. So yeah, building instead of kind of talking to customers on the outside was probably a mistake, but it's also one that kind of led to the product being where it is today. So I'm grateful for it. I love it. I love it. And then if you weren't, well, we kind of talked about if you weren't in tech, let's just say realistically baseball's off table.

If you weren't in tech, but money was the same, if not better, which hobby would you pursue? So many. I wish I had like ten lives. No, dude, same. One would be a professional poker player. I think that would get boring really quickly, but I could do it for like a week. I love the game of poker. I'm not very good at it, but I think it's really, really cool. So that comes to mind. World traveler, golfer. Yeah, I don't even know. we'll see uh but uh yeah poker's first thing comes to mind I love it last question as we wrap up here and again thank you all so much for the comments the the chat's been off the chain so thank you and ken thank you my friend for coming on yeah the show's called guidance counselor because we had guidance counselors in middle school high school and college but now as adults we don't really have a guidance counselor turn to and ask if we can get general career advice hence hence the name of the pod so if you could go back in time and tell young I mean you're still young but younger ken something what would be the one piece of advice you would tell them Just go lean into the stuff, like do something every day.

I think we've kind of already harped on it in this session, but it's just like all the tools are out there, right? Like I think one of the cool things about the current state of the world is like everything's accessible. You can go sign up for one of these AI tools for ten bucks a month or if a lot of them are free, right? Um, you can go hop on to like torque and like, see what happens. You can go hop on to, uh, you know, uh, uh, well, I guess rope through torque and take a test. You can go try out for the tigers or whatever.

It's like, just go, uh, out there. Cause the more action you produce in a day, the more feedback you get, the more you kind of iterate into wherever you're supposed to be. Right. So, um, I love that. It's also just like a cool way to live. So that's my, uh, that's my big takeaway. I love it. right y'all well again thank you so much appreciate y'all this is the last live of the week um we are back next week uh with some great guests but you have a great good one I'll tag ken but go connect with ken on linkedin um and uh ken thank you my friends stay on so I can say bye to you backstage but y'all have a good one we'll see y'all next week oh and remember today jason torres live with uh a great panel on the state of the web we'll see y'all bye see ya