a very analytical approach to the job search w/ jerome hardaway

full transcript

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

website so yeah all righty let's see here send send anyway send it now all righty good morning everybody good morning oh i do one more thing hold on hold on you're new at this say what say you're new at this what's going on i'm sorry no you're good brother you're good forgot one thing All right, sweet. Good morning, everybody. Say hey. We'd love to hear you. This is the only live for the week. The Torque Boys, me and Jason, we are headed down to Dallas tomorrow to go hang out with Danny Thompson, the Commit Your Code guys and gals. Going to be a great conversation.

Going to be a great time. We have a booth. We're going to be pioneering our resume review session. So we'll be doing live resume reviews. We're going to have like a projector and a screen, and we're doing live resume reviews at the booth. Always trying to find ways to give back to people. Jerome and I are obviously chatting about resume reviews backstage. So excited to do that live down in Dallas. If you are watching this and are in Dallas area, we are throwing a Torque Community Private Event invite-only event. If you have not gotten the invite yet and you are in Dallas, please shoot me a DM so we can get you on the list.

It's going to be a great time. Going to drop some new swag at the event. It's going to be a grand little time. The vibes are going to be immaculate, as always. But excited for this episode. Jerome, this is the only second time on the show, right? Second time or third time? Second or third? For Torque? No, just for me. Oh, this is three. This is three? This is three. I love it. I love it. So, honestly, Jerome... is one of the reasons why i wanted to pull this thing to an hour because every time jerome and i got together it easily went an hour because jerome's got a lot of good thoughts um and so jerome was one of the catalysts for over the last few years i was like man i want to go deeper i want to have better conversations more meaningful conversations um and so now we're at an hour um and one of the reasons why is for jerome so thank jerome for that um i see some people tuning in welcome good morning uh please say hey would love to hear from you it's like i tell people and jerome Jerome's obviously a big fan of this.

This is a networking event. This is essentially a virtual meetup. The people in the comments are the people attending, so you can message back and forth with them. Like I tell everybody, connect with every guest too. Jerome is a wealth of information. You will see that here over the next hour. He's going to come with a lot of data. Jerome is a data guy. I'm a vibes guy. Jerome's a data guy. We work real well together.

um and so he's got a lot of good information so please go connect with him send him a note um and then as always want to get through kind of some housekeeping things uh torque.community check them out uh check us out we just dropped to check them out i'm speaking in third person this morning uh torque.community we just dropped a brand new recite site redesign it's pretty it's nice go check it out all of our events are on it um also listen if you want to be kept up to date when i go live with amazing guests like jerome uh shoot me a text this

is actually my number it's not some AI bot it's actually me um so I just sent out a text to a few folks that were live so we'd love to have you um so uh and again the dev Alex Chris Sally Jeff LinkedIn user Jerome is he is he is a legend uh Toronto it's good to see you Elliot uh Cameron it's good to see you as well um and uh again y'all keep commenting all right Jerome let's give the people what they want man a little bit about yourself who are you what do you do for the people who don't know who Jerome is

which is very rare because Jerome's somewhat of a celebrity so I am not a celebrity I try to avoid celebrity I'm at home minding my business uh so yeah so software engineer by uh by trade I started coding around Two thousand ten, two thousand eleven, right after military.

I work with a lot of vets and military spouses, vets who code. I've done every stack imaginable. I've worked in WordPress. I've worked in Rails. I've worked in like a little bit of .NET PHP past five years. I've been in data engineering. and AI engineering. So what that means is I understand from in the end the whole scope of building AI products, like going from gathering data to sanitizing the data, building your ETL pipeline. And then after you have the ETL completed, you've got a knowledge base. Then you turn that knowledge base into an inference pipeline or a rack. application, like chat bot, whatever you want to call it.

I've gone in the end on that a few times. I've worked with some pretty, I've worked at Microsoft for almost five years, worked with the Democratic Party for some of this year, working with a, got a super cool opportunity that Taylor and I was talking about, like this G-Fourteen classified, can't even talk about it. I'm just happy to not be in politics anymore. But now I'm in a, i'm in finance kind of like yeah i'm in i'm kind of in like the like i'm in a weird i'm an ai so like i guess that's the best way to say it i'm in ai engineering and in data engineering uh so uh like i said when i'm not doing that um i am at betsu code and i'm building a lot of things actually i'm doing some things behind the scenes with our platform, adding some AI toolings, doing three, adding two new verticals to our education and ready to debut some cool stuff on Veterans Day.

So be out there for that. And a speaker and I'm a dad and I am always tired. um uh all right so Jerome I mean so again so to let y'all know like I do a lot of listening I have a lot of people on text uh texting basis Jerome is one of them And, you know, Jerome over the last few weeks has been sending me just tons of data. You know, one thing I admire about Jerome is he's very analytical. You know, to be honest with you, he speaks truth. He is very frank with me. um throughout my career he's definitely called some things out that he's liked about some things i've been a part of and some things he doesn't like that i've been a part of and i really really appreciate that candor and so literally like i'm reading through our text messages right now we can get into those man but i mean you i i mean i don't even know where to start so where where do you want to start with this latest job search man i mean do we want to start talk about dice do we want to talk about that first before people get bored tune out I guess, well, we can, but one, I'm only frank with you because I like you.

Like, a lot of people I don't like. Like, oh, sure, you know, yeah, that's a great idea. If you like it, I love it. Like, that's the Southern lie, right? Like, right there, if you like it, I love it. You're like, oh, no. you're going to be, you're definitely getting lied to right there. Like, but no, that's not me. Like I keep it one hundred with you because like, I like you. So if you want me to, I will start lying to you. That makes our relationship. No, no, no, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm pulling up, I'm pulling up your sub stack article.

I mean, I don't know if you want to start here and kind of just walk through it together, but okay. We can do that. Or I have another, I, may I share my screen? yeah sure absolutely yeah go ahead it's it's the uh it's the plus button down there with the screen do you see it uh you know thank you for those of you welcome good morning if you are having connection issues it's okay we will have this uh this is will be streamed it's other platforms so Yeah, so I made this for the sake for the purpose of this talk. So, you know, Substack says, you know, it's a sixty day job.

It was definitely it was sixty days. I went from zero to four offers within sixty days. How did I do that? Right. So I'm talking about one of the reasons why I created this. Why even did the Substack and this is because I was getting frustrated with all the generic advice that was out there being given to people. Yeah, it was it was very irritating for me because I'm like, that's not what you should be telling people. Sure. I need people to like we had to look at because I like you said, I've always been a strategy person. I was in the military, military. You can't go off of the vibes you because one of you know, doing intel based on the vibes bad things happen um and i was seeing a lot of bad things happening in this current market so first i think the first thing we have to understand is i was hoping to get this information out because we're at the we're at what the first month of so you have this month and maybe what beginning of november before the september surge as they call it is done because once like you know, Thanksgiving happens.

People aren't really hiring it. Right. Until January pops back up. Right. So that's one of the reasons why i was like yo we got to talk about this because i want to get this on people's radars so people can think of as fast uh think of it sooner so the sixty days got the data driven approach uh final outcomes for competitive job offers on end of sixty days fifty percent pay increase and created three uh distinct specialized resumes now i want to talk about the re so At first, I had one super resume. I put everything for the past ten years on this resume. I chose ten years because one, in finance, they usually don't go any further back than ten years on the average.

Those are the strictest resume. Those are the strictest ones that I've learned in the past. Those are the strictest background checks. So they go ten years in the past. So that's why I chose ten years. Also, with my ATS research, I found that, oh, you know what? Ten years is a sweet spot. Once you start going past ten years of information on your resume or in your websites and all this other stuff, you tend to we started seeing ageism pop up once you pass ten years. It's wrong, but it's a reality. People start wondering, oh, can you do this if you're, you know, been doing this for fifteen, twenty years?

So that is one thing that I was like, same thing for ageism and regards to lack of experience. It seemed like five years and ten years seems to be what works. If you put less than five years on, people are like. Oh, you don't have enough experience. If you put more than ten years, you're a risk. Right. And so like that is what so. So so so the main main thing to get out right now, keep your resume. If you're more than ten years in the industry, keep it ten years. yes keep it ten uh or if you know maybe add some of the freelance projects or something you did if you're less than five right so that's one thing the second thing that i uh that i definitely learned is that ats's they are trash so if you had because of my background with ise like literally i have this jump of three four five years just straight front-end work then i got a bunch of data engineering and ai work and product engineering work because of Microsoft.

And then it just, it wasn't, it didn't provide enough context for artificial intelligence. And so ATS systems that use artificial, I said ATS systems, when the ATS systems, I'm an idiot. So ATSs that use AI could not really understand my resume. So what I had to do is I had to take I took my resume and created three separate verticals, one for front end, one for data engineering and one for engineering. And I absolutely actually this made me like Python even more because there was so much of the work in Python and Azure that I learned and picked up. that's transferable between data engineering and AI engineering.

It was super cool, super clean to be able to see that in outcome. Let's go ahead and talk about the, so that's why I created it. Here's mine. As you see outcomes. Yeah. And real quick to Ron, I'll drop the article and the show notes after I can't do it live. So I will drop it after we go live. right um i did so i just spoke about my three-pronged uh approach uh as you see uh here's the skills that i did without here so you broke out your resume into these three main areas okay yes these are three areas uh and i was able so the conversion rate for like javascript was actually The conversion rate was high.

Quality was like the focus. It wasn't as it wasn't as deep as I wanted, like the conversion of like when I say conversion for context, like from application to getting the interview. to going through the phases. Like whenever I apply for a front-end job, after I stopped everything at ten years, and also try to keep it at like a high-level IC section, because you know, they're trying to flatten orgs, so if you go past... Yeah, so then how'd you write your resume? You brought up a good point, I'll interrupt you here. organizations are trying to flatten companies are trying to flatten organizations not as much hierarchy you're very senior in your career are all three of these resumes geared more towards the ic level and did you do that on purpose i did that on purpose uh because i did manage people in my last my last role but i intentionally was like i want to be a person of mentor But I have mentorship experience, but I want to be icy because like they're flattening, they're flattening that role.

They want people with more hands on keyboard and less middle management. So I was like, okay, we see that tactic. You see that in the job market currently. People, the people that are now getting impacted the most in big tech are middle managers, engineering managers, engineering manager, too, to the point where I'm seeing like there's a software software engineer for senior software engineer to things of that nature popping up because people rather they rather have a higher level of IC than a than engineering managers now. Right. Yep. So these are the, but as you see, like I said, JavaScript, it was high conversion in regards to quality, three deep interviews I went, but they also had the most interview rounds.

Like front end, I don't know why, like front end is the easiest one to sell. So I don't understand why it has the most interview rounds. It's insane. There was a coding, everyone had a coding challenge, which I want to iterate to people. Used to be, you did not have to do like, There were alternatives for coding challenge. Now, not so much. The coding challenge comes early in the resume. It's always on the leet code, usually leet code middle is what I saw. a lot of us have a lot of leet code middles. So whether you're doing JavaScript, Python. What is what is leet code middle?

I've never heard that. What is that? All right. So I'm so I say leet code middle. I'm thinking of a concept of like how we look like. So there's easy middle. OK, OK. So the leet code problems were usually in the mid tier, but they were verbatim in the mid tier for every everybody. I did a code challenge for It was verbatim, leet code, need a tier. Like, if you saw, like, and pretty much it was just, now here's a good part I did. Like, it was just enough to know that you actually knew how to code. I actually got the, like, same stacks and queues questioned twice in two separate interviews.

I was like, oh, so y'all are just picking the first leet code middle question. code challenge y'all see and just throwing it on here all right whatever um so that was uh that was nice that that's something that you have to think of like uh i recommend starting in my article i recommend if you don't have a lot of experience with uh leet code and things that started code wars code wars is way more friendly it helps prepare you for like coding tougher coding challenges and while solidifying uh how to think like that but they they're easy is like actually easy versus like lee cole's easy is like oh you know sophomore year at like a computer science coding program right uh so that's what that's what i that's what i did i did that i went i ran through three different um books starting with daily coding problem and then crushing encoding interview um i did a very systemic approach just in my sub stack of how i stay explicitly for encoding challenges because i was like that's a problem that i'm having i haven't been focusing on i haven't had to focus on so let me do that um but When it came to Python engineer, the demand like right now that I've saw is hot, hot Python and sequel.

Are is this is it is very hot like so hot? Yeah, so like the response times were. The response time were fast. The interviews were much flatter. Like for the average JavaScript interview was four to five rounds. The average Python interview was three rounds if I was lucky. Why do you think that is? I'm curious. Why do you think that is? Because, one, because I have applied experience in Python. So I'm able to talk about that. But two... Because it's a talent war on that and that stack and in those areas of data engineering. And that's one thing people like everybody's talking about AI. But what is really hot right now is data engineering and product engineering combined, because most data scientists and data engineers, they don't build customer facing products.

They build internal products. They don't think about how to solve for when a bunch of people are using the same app at the same time. Software engineers, they do, right? So converting your experience as a software engineer into understanding data engineering and AI engineering, how to go from that whole building knowledge base and doing inference pipelines and cleaning, making sure you have the guardrails and doing cache processing prompt caching, things of that. All that stuff, once you start learning how to do that stuff when it comes to product engineering, like using an XJS application, for instance, it makes you more valuable because data scientists don't push code to prod.

Right. Same with data engineers. So what about this? What about this question? Do you think that company is pushing for developers to utilize AI more and more? That's still using leak code in the interviews will continue to be the thing. Or do you think you see it advancing to something different? I, based upon what I experienced, I don't, I can't say that that's going to be conclusive right now because of the way like I was explicitly asked about what coding tools that I use my day to day AI coding tools. They want people who use AI coding tools, but the code challenge is to see if you actually understand how to code, how you think like they just want to see if you can actually solve a problem.

I think that's why I leak code middle, why it was such a low barrier of entry, right? Like just please because they still want to just see that you could do the thing. Yeah. Can you do the thing? It doesn't even have to be a hundred percent clean and pristine. You can, you know, force it and then you can refactor after, but we just want to make sure you can do it. Right. So that is one of the, so here's the response time. Like first one or two weeks, as you see, it was very little response times, but by the time week five and six rolled around, I was going through applications.

Like I was getting targeted applications to ask them to apply. And by week seven, I was deep in by week seven, eight. I was deep in interviews, like to the point I was turning down interviews. Yeah, this is only just one point. But what do you make of this? Right. Like so. So if I'm a job seeker looking at this, what I would infer based off this data is, man, like you really don't get things wrong until like a month into it. I think for me, because I was doing research, if you already know what's going on, your pipeline is going to be shorter than mine.

If you follow the exact same rules and philosophies as me and then you start jumping into this, your pipeline is going to be tighter. Your convergence is going to be much tighter. mines wasn't because i was actually taking i was figuring out i was solving the problem as i was i like i said i approached it as a problem so i was looking at the problem solving the problem and trying to optimize it right yeah like like you do code this is for me this is the quote this is much more fun than actually doing code um but once i uh Once I got there, like once I figured out the resume component and the ATS to key to recruiter component, that's when I did something that I always tell people to do.

Reach out to your network. I knew that my highest time of people on my LinkedIn was seven forty five a.m. on Thursday. So it took me. Yeah, it's all data, right? Like I use LinkedIn as my social as my signal booster for people that were looking at my resume on Dice. That way I've made it easier for them to find me. People share it, it raised that LinkedIn engine optimization. On those days that I was not doing my ask, I was focusing on generating value, talking about things, there were data engineering focus, AI engineering focus, planning those out, scheduling them, entire week in advance, trying to explain to people what interference pipeline was, talking about Presidio for PII, talking about cash prompting, talking about how AI safety is overlooked.

So you used LinkedIn to signal that you know these things. You pick certain topics to talk about on LinkedIn, which then drove activity to the type of roles that you wanted to get. absolutely that's literally what i did and i try to tell people like no just talk about the things yeah i don't know that that's the hardest thing to get people to do like no talk about it because then you can start a conversation i literally this morning i said you can literally become known for anything if you just talk about enough yes okay literally anything anything Yeah. I started talking about AI around twenty twenty one.

Yeah. And that was in my talk for all things open. Like there are a bunch of people who are just started being loud about AI and you guys are now known for AI. It's funny how that works. I'll scroll down. I want to get the dice distribution of application results. Here we go. So here's a no response. I was twenty. So forty three percent with no response. This interview is thirty two percent. Final interview, seventeen percent offers. This is great. So I want to point this out here for people who and for people who listen to this in audio form via podcast, you're going to be very lost because we've been sharing our screen pretty much the entire time.

But Jerome's got a Jerome's got pie chart up right now. And Jerome, as senior as he is, got no responses for almost half of his application. Yes. Now, mind you, I'm senior and I have a very unique. All the hot skills. I mean, you're back in Python, AI. Not only that, like there's not many people that have, oh, I was awarded by a president of the United States on their resume. Right. And you still did your back from almost fifty percent. Yeah. So just so think about that. Like I I've been invited to the White House for my work. uh for the work that i do currently like in real time and still not fifty percent like not uh almost fifty percent of no responses of all uh resumes so that is something that you know you're not going crazy you're not getting like relaxed like it it's it's a wild market it was a wild market out there for anything for everybody it didn't really start picking up until halfway through the, like through the market.

I started getting, that's where the whole dice thing comes into play. Yeah. So let's talk about that. Cause I definitely want to know that that's not on here, but so we can stop sharing and I can go into that. So, Boom. So now we're done. Do you want me to share the Substack article? Will that have it? I think it has it, but we can just talk about it. Okay, cool. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it'll make it more organic for the people that are just listening while they're driving and crawling while they're working. So one of the problems that I was seeing other people report was that LinkedIn Easy Apply just was not working for them.

LinkedIn Applying on LinkedIn was work for them. They were getting people that were not responding or anything. Even hilariously enough, I was getting people that just now started responding and letting me know, oh, well, we decided we're not taking. Oh, I applied to that in July, dude. It's almost October. My toddler is about to be four, bro. I got a birthday coming up a little bit. What are you all talking about? uh so but what i i just literally went on dice signed in and they still have their their system is very like trigger base so you sign in you you put your resume up yeah you see which i like uh it's trigger base sign in you put your stuff up everybody is able to see your stuff and it starts triggering with all these keywords and people there that there are real people because then they'll have a lot of ai baked into the system So there are real people looking at keyword search phrases and looking at your resume or they're searching for your for resumes.

And then they then they are looking at your resume deeper and then they go to your linkedin and that's where keep your linkedin active wins right because i treated linkedin as just a social media network that wasn't a psychopath land right so because you know threads is funny but not smart threat uh blue blue sky is smart but not funny they don't have a sense of humor yeah twitter's a hellscape so linkedin is the only place that i could like really literally like linkedin and youtube are like the only places yeah you know you do comments and stuff on youtube now that was crazy like whole post um those are only places that you could really go to that we didn't have anything like wild going on uh so using linkedin as a social media network to you know signal boost right like that's where it is value was starting to uh for me was signal boosting uh my uh knowledge base and then being able to go through and you know see my recommendations and stuff also Recommendations that's not in my data points, but those LinkedIn recommendations that help.

Yes. And not only does LinkedIn recommendation, you need to get somebody who has directly managed you. At least me, at least. So on two separate occasions, I was asked for, uh, one person who was my, who has, why was the direct report of as a reference and Josh Holmes, he not only, um, well, he, I was brick Portuguese at Microsoft. He not only put a great glowing review on my LinkedIn. It's like a Yelp review almost. Dude, I say that all the time. I was like, listen, listen, listen. What is the first thing you do when you look to go to a new restaurant? You go to Google reviews or Yelp reviews, right?

It's the same thing with your LinkedIn. It's not going to make or break you, but it's only going to help you. yeah like literally i mean have you ever seen something on instagram like oh this video looks nice and then like you go click it and then uh you send it to your wife and then she looks at um no we're not going there like look at these stars like no this is three point two stars bro grass walls and drama i'm not doing that i'm not paying twenty dollars to park there and i was like okay New plan. But yeah, so those LinkedIn reviews work.

Make sure you get at least one person who has a direct report of yours or mentor or something like that. Someone who you had to answer to in this space as a potential mentor. Like that is what really close to deal with me. Having a person who had a person and having a person that reported to me, having a person I was direct report to really helped. Like I had one reference was like, and it was just, it worked being able to speak strongly. Now this is one thing that like, this was the first interview process. Like when I, last time I interviewed AWS was the hottest thing.

when it came to Cloud. This time, everything has been Azure. It's everything. It's so funny. I literally just went live with somebody. Who did I go live with? There was just an Azure guy. And literally we talked about that. I was like, I feel like Azure was hot. Azure is always like when I, when I was recruiting at Vaco five years ago, like whenever we were like, we need AWS person. It's like, I'll just go just shout it from the rooftops and I'll find twenty thousand people. Whenever, whenever it was Azure, it was like I couldn't find anybody. And it's still the case. Azure's hot because Azure has the most models right now.

So what's driving cloud is AI. So whoever has the most trustworthy AI is winning. So that's why Azure, you hear a lot of GCP, you hear a lot of Azure, not so much of AWS when it comes to SageMaker. Right. But the Azure jobs are blowing up. And if you're sleeping on Azure right now, now I will say Azure, I will not defend Azure and how hard it is to use Azure like Azure. Azure is an enterprise level skill. I'm not going to lie. But the you know, the reward is there for knowing Azure because there's so many jobs out there of people like everybody's on multi cloud.

So AWS and Azure is fine, but they're all explicitly asking for Azure. Every interview I've been in, every role, all offers I got, they were multi cloud. And they were multi-data. Some was on-prem, some was in cloud. They were all multi-cloud. And they all asked explicitly only about Azure. You'll figure out AWS, but we need someone that knows Azure or has been around Azure enough to get comfortable with it. So I highly recommend look at Azure if you're looking at any AI roles because you're going to be working with it. Yeah, let's get a nice question here. How can a beginner get LinkedIn, like reviews or references on LinkedIn?

Like, what would be your best approach there? Um, well, teachers, mentors, instructors, people that play with on groups, going in DMS, and asking people for to review your project. So like, there was a young woman when I was on Twitter, she slid into my DMS and asked me to go do a PR a code review of her work. It was like, yeah, I'll do that. And I tell people all the time, product focus networking wins because people like when you ask them questions, but people like when you execute on what they tell you. And I was like, yo, somebody come back. I give them feedback and they come back and they did the thing I told them to do.

Yep. Yeah, I'm like, you know, you're awesome because you listen, you know how hard it is to get people to listen, especially right now when the market. So the market has done kind of a it's done a curve downward. It's a bell curve type thing right where the market looking closer to twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. And people think they feel like the market's bad because we had three years where the market was like super high. But now the market's closer to where it should have been three years ago if we hadn't had COVID. Having said that, when I tell people what to do, they still are kind of like, I kind of want to wish we could just do it the way things used to be.

I was like, no, that was an anomaly. Like you're asking for a time that you're asking for, you know, you want the weird time to be the normal time. And that's just like a weird time to be normal. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's not how, you know, life works. Right. Right. So the whole like the process that I'm seeing is that people, they don't like one thing that I saw people speaking about that are a thing I wrote that seems to have gotten a lot of views. I didn't even know until I looked at it. that and when i would i did a refactor tech uh meet up with people i know we're all talking about this uh about making artifacts using your github making your design docking your github issues converting that to a ticket and stuff so that way you have things to show for your interview and we were like wait y'all not doing that and they're like that's that's brilliant we never thought to do that i was like i always do that like yeah you i you know in the military we had a term train how you fight.

So I take that in the same way of being in tech. You got to train how you work. You're going to have a planning meeting at work. You might as well have a planning meeting for your personal projects and plan that out. You're going to have to do design docs at work. You might as well do design docs for your projects, personal projects. You're going to have to do tickets, might as well do tickets, pull them out, do PRs. You get a co-pilot, get a co-pilot doing the PR for you. And then you can learn from the AI how to improve your own code by going back and forth with getting a co-pilot, right?

Like these are things that people aren't doing that just going to give you growth, right? Yeah. And give you an advantage because you're not, you know, a lot of people just aren't doing it. A hundred percent. So you've said a lot of good information, right? So I want to, I want to just distill it down a little bit. So first thing you talked about is if you are senior in your career, keep it to ten years of experience. The sweet spot that you saw was like kind of like that five year and then that ten year, but nothing more. for ats right so yeah five to ten years like as you saw a work day they're going through a thing right now they have a weird case yeah because like no dude was like i'm getting a hundred percent failure almost you know i'm gonna sue uh but and then and then you broke down which i've talked about a lot You had basically three different...

So you had a master resume. Yes. And you essentially had three focused resumes. Let me ask you this question. Did you ever use the master instead of the three kind of... Absolutely. I had to get a test, right? So I had to test the data, right? And that's when I was seeing that my master resume, my primary resume that's unabridged was... like i said it was for ai it was too contextual contextually all over the place right yes gonna get a good read so yeah i couldn't with context with proper context and power understand my resume and say what i was like an expert in yeah i knew a human wasn't gonna be able to do that So that's when I broke it down into three different verticals and focus only on that.

I love that. I did the test before, like I did a week only using that. Oh, it's like a seven percent comeback. And then, yeah. After I did that, I started like, okay, let's do all this down and focus on this. Let's take this off this resume completely and going back and forth. Like I built a whole like resume GPT to do this. I use Harvard data. I use all of my, I use my connects. I use all my resumes, use all my performance reports. I use every article that I always have. that's ever been written by me, every video ever been done. So I was like, this is how I did it.

Like, I created a scoring mechanism. This is how, like, because even my troops now, when they send me, like, their portfolio, I score their portfolio. When they send me the resume, I score their resume. Whenever someone sends me a resume, I score it. And I always ask them, send me your unabridged resume. If you want me to redo your resume. I need to know everything and then we can make it and based upon the roles you want. And so that way, and I show them like, yo, this is how I, this is the process that I'm going through. I'm not just going, I'm not eyeballing this.

I'm looking, I looked at it. I guide, but I also am like, I have, I've been focusing on creating these mechanisms to amplify the stuff that I can do by creating scoring systems. Like, all right. trying to keep the language below like at seventh grade reading level because most Americans read a seventh grade reading level, right? So you got to keep it so it's easy. Like I try to tell people, you want, when you're trying to win, you want to be approachable. so i'm thinking of all this like removing words i know i i you know speak half military third military a third southern and then a third technical it's very hard to understand what i'm saying half the time right talking to talking to you know a country einstein over here sometimes that's what my mom says But like that is how I like that.

That's the process that I've been working on. So, yes, one resume comes in here. Systems is process is what I'm getting right now. And I yes, like like if you go back, I've interviewed a ton of people who have had success in their job search. One of the most consistent themes that I always hear with people who navigate the job search well is they have processes. They have systems. They wake up. They approach the job search like a job. They get after it day in, day out, and they're successful. So, yes, a hundred percent, a hundred percent approach, approach, approach. How you approach a job search tells me more about how you approach coding.

Yes, because the job search in itself is a problem you have to solve, not just getting a job, but getting a job that you're going to be happy at. Right. Like, you know, you can get a job that pays well. It absolutely sucks. But can you get a job that you're happy at? Can you do the right signals in your career that's going to draw the right people to you? So that is, you know, you know, people literally I have, you know, people literally beating down my like inbox. Like I have a job that I know is based upon everything you put out. Right. Like I know that you would do well over here.

I know that you would do well over here. And I got offers at those places. They knew that I was going to do all that. Right. That is how that works. It's funny how that works. Cause it's a problem. So, so the next thing I want to highlight again that you've said, so still down, cause it feels like we had kind of a rush people here. This last half is that you use LinkedIn and, to amplify and talk about the things you know, to signal to people that you are an SME in that area, but then a lot of your actual just job search leads came from Dice.

So LinkedIn was like the social conversation, but Dice was the thing that drove it. Yeah, so I was applying leveraging LinkedIn. And I was like, I'm not going to do that anymore. So you were, okay. So you were, that's where I, I was like, no, it's not making any sense. I'm not getting good leads. I'm going to go to dice. I did not apply to any jobs on dice. I just put, I logged in, you know, like, let me say they're very true. Real quick. So dice, you, you rise to the top of every recruiter, every hiring manager search. If you log in every twenty four hours.

yes so i put my resume on there i put my three i put three resumes on there and then i just log in and then that's it that's all you did yeah but you didn't even apply to jobs on dice you just used it as a way for intake two of the four offers i were cold or dice and crazy recruiters that reached out to me the roles i did not know existed and yeah i love so like that is like i did not know anything about these roles that came to me uh because i because i leverage i knew that dice did i was

doing my research i knew that dice did not have a lot of ai baked into it and it was still like and you know that like we just said that trigger focus of dice correct it worked it helps yeah which is crazy hot when i was recruiting ten years ago yeah so shout out to dice just as a platform for keeping it the old very pure or true or whatever i don't know what you want to say there but classic right like sometimes the old ways work right like they just kept it kept it and it's also dice for those of you listening or watching

it's only tech specific so like one of the problems i saw as a recruiter is when i was recruiting let's just say quality assurance analyst back in the day if i typed in quality assurance on career builder i get like construction workers But like but but if you do quality assurance analyst on Dice, you are going to get QA analyst in tech because you have to be in tech to be on Dice.

Yeah. Taryn was like, so what's a good way to talk about your freelance projects you use? There's a project section in LinkedIn. You can do it. Now, here's my thing. If you're not going to have videos, you're not going to have demos. We don't have working things. don't post those projects. Every demo, everything that I've showed them, I have something working for. Yes, I agree. GitHub makes it so easy to just have simple UIs and things up each repo. You can literally use the GitHub pages and turn each repo into a separate page. Just add that to a nav on your portfolio. right and call it a day so i definitely recommend you doing uh you're doing just that um On your resume, you can talk about your projects and then as long as you only talk about the components of your project, it is relevant to the resume.

I think that's a great idea. I did that multiple times. There's projects that I worked on at work that I couldn't give names to, that I couldn't give all the details to, but just talking through that process of the technologies of leveraging this from this end all the way to this end and then how you go to production about the project. I went, oh, this person knows what I'm talking about. I have one Because of that, we want to get into the biggest thing I saw in my job, this might be different just for seniors. There was a lot of system design conversation, one, and if you knew the uh if you knew about the the thing that you're building and you talk well about it you can end up skipping around so one one offer i skipped around because it's supposed to be my first interview was supposed to be thirty minutes and it went ninety two minutes and we were just talking about system design about you know azure and things like that and they were like You know what?

We're just going to go ahead. Yeah. Dude, if you can get people talking on interviews, they kind of jump you a few rounds. Yeah. You do it well. Don't. Yeah. Go deep on every single one. Ask a lot of answer questions. Ask questions. I know a lot of people do not ask questions. I was asking questions about why people are making certain architectural decisions in their application. And there was a resume where they were kind of defending questions. It turned into a reverse interview. They were defending their decision because I was asking, why didn't you do this instead of this? And they were like, you know what?

You're just going to talk to the VP. And then I talked to the VP and it was like the weirdest conversation ever. And they're like, yeah, we're just going to send you an offer letter. And I was like, we didn't talk about anything technical. Cool. We talked about sports, but whatever. And I let you know that I don't watch most sports ball. I'm a big boxing fan. So whatever. I love it. But that is how you... That's how you do it. What bigger center for people breaking and take a project that checks out a skill boxes or a project that is done well and being used.

I will say this from my personal experience as a person who broke into tech without, um, without a CS degree or bootcamp experience initially, uh, I. Built a thing. Like I, I, the story of Etsy code is out there on a million podcasts. I literally was playing hooky from work that day. I was chilling, chilling with my lady about to like do nothing. I got a friend calling me asking me to help a family of a fallen veteran. I did the only thing I knew what to do, which was like build a website and then tell the story on social media. Raised twenty seven. Yeah.

Two thousand dollars and twenty seven hours. And the next thing you know, I was getting jobs. Yeah. So I think that people use a thing that people think that people use will always beat. You know, just having small projects. One thing that works well end to end, because that touches people because your little bitly projects, your JavaScript tech layers, whatever, They don't really touch people until you get a website that people are using. And then you get a call from somebody that people use AO. Your images are uploading very slow. Like, so the images are big. So now you gotta figure out why the image is doing this and how to make it smaller and things like that.

Or your form isn't working or your form is working on your end, but the people don't know that the form is working on that end. Like on Betsy code, we had that problem. And then we had, we would do a little green message to let people know that, you know, it worked. and they still weren't seeing it so now when you do the form and you submit i make it rain like military medals when you hit submit so because it's my website i can do what i want right so like yeah when you submit now you know we got emojis that rain down so you know that something worked um but like that is i i a good a product will always outrank a project, but you better be able to talk about it.

I see a lot of times people, they go get templates and things that they cannot speak about the things that are in that template and they make it really easy to like search through that template and see what's going on. It's like, you know, I'm asking questions about this, right? So let me, so we got twelve minutes left. I want to, I have some rapid fire, but I do want to ask you, kind of two things one's a little bit of a hot take do we think boot camps have ruined do we i'm trying to think how to frame this question do we think boot camps have ruined front-end javascript development yes because because of the amount of people they've put into the market which is which has made back-end skill set so much more in demand No, I mean, it's just like anything.

So remember when you might have been around when this was when it started, when boot camps first kicked off in twenty fourteen, they are all. Yeah. So there you go. Right. So, yeah, the market's just saturated. The market used to be saturated with Ruby devs. Right. And then the computer science people were like, we don't like the fact that these people can't. like do computer sciencey things because of ruby on rails so we're not going to hire any more rubydales right so uh so like that is what happened same thing with the javascript department but how do we solve it right here's the real problem that i see with boot camps they were not paying attention to the market.

So when the market started cooling off, they still had to make their money. So they were still pumping out twenty, thirty JavaScript engineers for a cohort a month. But you can clearly tell that that's not being the thing. And they weren't changing it, right? Like, so we now know that architecture and system design is being valued a lot more than just being able to build a CRUD application. They want to know, the new junior needs to know why they made decisions, right? What you're choosing? Like, okay, you chose Supabase because what, lovable picked it for you? What about, so how would I make Supabase HIPAA compliant?

Oh, so you don't know that. So now you're interviewing at a medical place and you have a database attached to your front end project that you just let the AI pick for you and you don't know anything about it. Thank you. We will let you know our decision later. And then they'll email you, you know, thanks for considering us. Yeah. You can find out six months later, you can get a job. That is how like that's what we're seeing. I'm seeing not a lot of decisions. We're still treating learning how to code or coding in itself or boot camps like it was in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.

No, the new senior is the new junior is kind of like senior because, you know, things are different now. Right. It's just like how. The new front end designer in twenty eleven wouldn't be able to get a job as a front end designer today. Right. Yeah. Like that is, uh, that is just something that, that happens, right? The skills evolve. So does the market. So to what you need to learn, right? So you need to understand the architectural value. You need to understand, all right, you chose the next JS, like, all right. So how would you use your images? I can use next image or you're going to use a CDN.

for your images. And why are you going to do that? All right. These are the type of conversations and things you need to think about. How does somebody learn? I mean, like, again, not a coder over here by any means. So like, this has kind of become a theme, right? And where it's like, you know, people are using AI too much to rely on AI too much. How does somebody learn these things? My suggestion is find a damn mentor. But like, I mean... I wrote an article said, find a mentor better yet. Fine too. You need to find, I always recommend people have two mentors.

It's like rich dad, poor dad. You want a person, uh, what can help you for the things you need today that you can learn with. And you want a person who you want to be like five, ten years from now, right? Are you on things like that? So I do not, I believe in, that's what I believe in. I believe in finding two mentors. You need a mentor. who the person you want to be when you grow up and yeah who can you know like the second grade teacher helps you uh learn how to read and write and you know make full sentences but then michael jordan on your poster is the person that you aspire to be right it's the same concept right So that's how I look at it.

But you absolutely you don't have a mentor. You need to be talking to people, get feedback, build. And the thing about building the public is not just supposed to be showing off a finished product. You're supposed to be putting yourself in a position of vulnerability to get feedback. People are self-conscious. They do not want to be told that they suck at something. I tell my veterans all the time. Being bad at something is a first step of being sort of good at something. Took that from Adventure Time. It works for my kids. It works for them. It is okay to be trash. The problem is when you don't, when you're trash, you don't want to know you're trash.

first minute you admit your trash it's all it's only up from there like look i'm garbage to this can you help me step up my game of course do this but you don't let anyone know no one can help you because you know you're letting you ask for help so that's what the purpose of building in public does here's my github what would you do here's a repo i'm trying to focus on data engineering how would you help me oh I don't have any GitHub. I don't have a GitHub project board. Should I do that? Yes, you should do a GitHub project board because guess what?

Now as a recruiter, when I go to your GitHub and say that's what I'm working on now, you can see the ticket flow that I have right now. I can press this little public GitHub project board that you have and I can see your projects in real time and like, oh, what you're working on, what's in done, what's in done, what's in review, what's in project. What's in your backlog? Wait, this person has their own personal backlog of what they're learning and what they're building. That's cool. That's super cool. All this stuff is in public. Now I can ask this person, oh, they have a hobbies lane, how they're taking care of their hobbies on GitHub.

Oh, snap. I want to ask them about this. I've learned so much from them, right? Yeah. You have an income building in public is about vulnerability. It's not about just signals. I talk about the things I'm learning. I talk about the things that I need to learn and talk about the things I, uh, I should focus on. I talk about, I give, I like to give flowers. I'm a big, you know me, I'm a big flower. I'm going to come LinkedIn because I'm, you know, I just had a co a former coworker pass, uh, while doing a charity bike ride last month. And I'm like, people do not give people enough of their flowers when they're.

So I'm like, I make sure that like when Josh Holmes, when he was laid off from Microsoft, I made sure everybody knew that like this is the best manager that I have had since my days in the military. I can I literally can draw a line from my top manager, my supervisor in Iraq. and my supervisor with Josh and they're like they're the top two. Those are the people when I leave. I look at I want to be able to lead with empathy. I want to make decisions critically, thinking about things from with positive intent, but also focusing on the reality of the situation. I want to be able to tell people like, look, this is so we can we got to focus on the way the world is while also working on how to think we want things to aspire to be.

And it's OK to say, no, I want to talk about how you built like building coalitions with people you might not agree with. Yeah, but. You also build that coalition with that person that I always agree with because they can handle the people that you definitely never going to agree with. Right. Like I talk to you because I'm like, oh, you talk to people. I'm definitely never going to talk to you. So it's like, yo, it works. Right. That's it. But there was a question that was very someone asked me about that. Well, no, I said this one, find a mentor as hard. I mean, here's the deal.

And I was like, listen, like if you I think so many people are willing to help, but you have to drive the relationship. Nas, where are you at? What country are you in? Slide in my DMs and LinkedIn and we'll see if I can get some time to work with you. There you go. There you go. All right. It's not, it really isn't that hard letting people know that you want to mentor. I will, I will, I can see what I'll do. I'll either see what I can work with you or I can connect with someone if not. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let's wrap up here.

Rapid fire questions. Ready, Jerome? Yeah, ready. All right. What's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now? monologue by every it does my it does diction i can talk to it and it just writes everything i do it's like a scribe so that's one thing okay awesome awesome oh the question earlier was how is the curriculum at bet two code adjusted to the new world Well, there are three vertical. Well, you know what? I don't want to get out of the secret. This is a really long answer. That's a long question. I will tell you this. As long as Jerome's in charge, they are pivoting.

They are pivoting. I know we already pivoted like two years ago. We just haven't debuted the stuff. We've already got a lot of, like, we have some, I don't want to give it away. Cause like there's, we have demo day showing up. So we have demo day. We have a platform, some platform things. We have some AI things to show off. We have some, like, we've been working with GitHub. We've been working with Google and, We've been working with, we've been working with Azure. So literally we've been working like Addy Osmani is on our board now. So we've been working very close with Google and local Kirkpatrick also.

So doing a lot of Google Gemini work and a lot of data engineering and looking in Python and how to make this, how to make it practical. And like for instance, our code challenge, I just got to be there on November. Cause that co-challenge module is, I'm very proud of the co-challenge module. How do you drive the interactions without pushing someone away? I'm kind of curious what this is in referencing to. If you give more than you ask, like that's pretty simple. If you keep asking me something, but I don't see any action, I'm going to get annoyed with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Back to rapid fire. What's the very first job you ever got paid to do? Taco Bell. Nice. I love it. Hell yeah. Let me ask you this. If you could craft your own off-site remote, what type of setup would you have for the office? Or are you just like fully remote, never want to go back in ever again? I am fully remote, never want to go back in again. But if I had to do an off-site, it would not be in America. It would be like a one big room, either in French Polynesia or we would go to. So. So destination once a year, all hands is what you're saying.

Yeah. Destination once a year. We got nothing but tables and chairs. Everybody sees everybody's work. There might be some booths if you need to take phone phone calls. But I want like once a year or maybe twice a year, like, oh, yeah, let's all jump on a on a plane, go to Tokyo. uh we're gonna go get you know wagyu for you know a like third of the price and yeah we're gonna eat our way or you know eat our way through kyoto right like yeah like that market in kyoto is like i'm going back so i go there like every year now nice and because i gotta go get my seeds my spices for like when barbecue season rolls up man like i am couch so i love it i love it um uh yeah next so what did you want to be when you originally grew like like when you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up man when i was a little kid i wanted to be archaeologist yeah a what archaeologists I wanted to study an oncologist I was like I don't even know what that is now you know how weird of a child I was a weird kid and even that's too weird for me uh that's funny archaeologists I wanted to study dinosaurs and you know uh look at the different periods of how you know the planet moved through yeah right I was interested in how dinosaurs became oil.

Cause no one really explained that to me. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what's, uh, what's a career mistake you're weirdly grateful for if there is any trying out dev rail. So I, uh, Indiana Hardaway. Indiana Hardaway. Dude, that is funny as hell. Doesn't have a daughter of a colleague. That is fantastic. India. I'll make her India Hardaway. That'd be cool. But yeah, so when I left CBS for a DevRel position before Microsoft, and I realized quickly that I did not like DevRel because I like, one, building things, and two, They want to kind of own your brand. And I'm just not a fan of people owning my brand because my brain can't be tied to your brand.

Like, especially if you're not going to pay me like. need like money money for my brand especially like in i was like hot i was getting two articles in business insider github star like all this stuff and i was like nah this is not right for me plus i just i don't want to have to tell the company line when it comes to the technologies like i feel like The beauty of not being in DevRel, also kind of not being in Microsoft, is you get to go and you get to play with all the technologies and not sell just the tech that is there or only be just focusing on the technology that's in the room because there's so much.

So that is my biggest, oh, trying out DevRel, finding out, you know what, I absolutely hate this. When it comes to tech, I like talking about veterans, but and jobs i don't really like talking about you know whatever like about inner source or any some stupid stuff about that but like that yeah that was biggest like that was a huge mistake but i'm grateful for it i tried it hated it yeah i love it what's uh um uh if i told you tomorrow that you couldn't do anything in tech and you couldn't do that to coke because that's tech what hobby would you pursue or Cooking, cooking.

So I've been, we've been playing my wife and I've been playing with this new style of like cooking we could since the pandemic called Delta Pacific, where we try to blend flavors and stuff from our hometowns in the South with like flavors or countries we like in Southeast Asia. That's cool. A lot of Szechuan style and Southern style cooking is done in my house. that's a lot of like i've become a pork belly master a lot of vietnamese and texas style beef cooking like because you know with uh fuzz beef based uh kind of essentially beef based raw right right like texas style of making brisket and then converting it with how we do the beef and with pho and still like that so that's what i would do i would become like i'd open a restaurant call it delta pacific and then you know i love that that's cool that's really really cool last question wrap up here and again thanks for everybody tuned in i appreciate the comments have been great uh it seems like y'all got a lot of value out of this i will drop they're like they want a two-hour one it's hilarious i will drop a i'll drop the link to the article in the linkedin post but i'll also drop it in the tort community too so you can check it out um but jerome i mean this show is called guidance counselor because we had guidance counselors in middle school high school and college but now as adults we don't really have them what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young jerome getting started in his career Start.

That would be just start. You're going to mess. I mean, I think people get so overwhelmed with the idea of messing up. Right. I think so. My background's in like the sport I was in was boxing. I was a kid. and you have to learn that everybody has a plan to get hit in the mouth right mike tyson made that saying um uh he made that saying famous but that was always in the boxing gym you always now plan to get it to get hit in the mouth so start be adaptable focus on your skills like we had on the wall we had this uh so we had this this mantra skills pay the bills uh like no we drill the skills the skills pay the bills Right.

And like, that was our mantra. You drill the skills, the skills, pay the bills, drill the skills, the skills, pay the bills. And you are, everybody has a plan till they get hit in the mouth, but those skills are going to come and save you. That's why you drill them. Like, and so start, because as long as you're putting in the work, you're going to make mistakes. We're going to learn how to adapt our own mistakes. Going to learn how to, you know, take a step back, pivot, go move forward. You're going to learn to, Hey, like this ain't going to be a knockout. i'm gonna have to you know drag it i'm gonna have to drill down on this i'm gonna have to lose the world i have a weakness you know oh my short game is not my inside fighting game this week but my long style fighting game is strong but i can't really work on that right now because i'm in the middle of getting punched in the face so i need to focus on keeping this person outside so i can do my long my long range fighting game like this these are the type of things that come up with boxing that's just life in general right like You know, so start, start a thing, ask questions, always ask for feedback, you know, feedback from the right people.

Feedback is a gift. Sometimes feedback isn't a gift, but then, you know, you build that trusted advisory or people that you can always ask questions to, right? Like that's, but yeah, but first things first, just starting. I love it. That's awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. Only episode for Guidance Culture two point oh this week. Again, we'll be in Dallas starting tomorrow. So hope to see you at commit your code. Jerome, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. And y'all have a good one. And we'll see y'all next week. Peace.