how to level up your career w/ ai + nader dabit, growth at cognition

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all righty so where where where are you right now because i also feel like you're everywhere well physically sao paulo um oh really my base is uh jackson mississippi and i would say the main office is in san francisco but i've kind of like actually been to the new york office san francisco office we also have an office in austin and a few other places Nice. So you're still in Nashville. Yeah, dude. Still in Nashville, man. We got I think since we last spoke, we got some acreage. So we're on fifteen acres up twenty five minutes north of town. So we got a we got I got a miniature donkey.

We got three horses and three kids and a cat and a corgi. So, you know, we're I feel like we're the Brady Bunch right now. Very, very cool. uh how long you been down sao paulo for uh just uh just a day oh nice sweet well thank you thank you for doing this i appreciate it i appreciate it for sure the time is is a good time sir i love it i love it um so for those of you tuning in welcome good morning um i know we're getting started a little bit early i there there's gonna be a lot of information on the show um and i'm very very excited about it i'm excited to hang with uh nader you know uh nader and i have known each other for years um obviously kept up with what he's doing um and uh he's been on the show a few years back um and we were chatting backstage and and uh it's just good it's good to have you back on the show man it's great to have you back on the show Thank you.

Good to be back. So I'll run through some housekeeping kind of announcements, and I'll kind of yap for a second. Nader can just look pretty like he always does. But first and foremost, I want to give a shout out to AppRite. I am an AppRite hero. Love the crew over at AppRite. Definitely go check them out. Great team, great product. Also, listen, we got a lot going on in the Torque community. um you know we have obviously our jobs platform you can go sign up on um but if you go to torque.dev backslash community it kind of gives you a quick snapshot of who we are what we do love to have you check that out um we also too uh we have a pretty uh pretty awesome newsletter um it's one thing i'm super proud of um a lot of people like man you guys have so many events going on i can't keep up join the newsletter We have all of our events in there.

When we're gonna be at cities, we're gonna be at all things AI. I'm speaking next week on basically this topic. In full transparency, I'm using these interviews with Nader and also Aaron Francis to help craft my talk. So Nader, some things you say today, I'll give you props in my talk. But basically, my talk is how to ready yourself in this job market around AI. I'm speaking on that next Tuesday at All Things AI. But we're going to do a meetup. All that's in the newsletter. So definitely sign up if you haven't already. um if you want to be updated when I go live uh with amazing guests like Nader definitely text me this is my actual number also too if you have any job search questions shoot me a text six one five two three five five six five zero would love to have you um but I also send out updates um whenever we go live and or any updates of newsletters Etc um and then of course our our Discord super active um you know I I The vibe of the Torque Discord honestly is like a massive friend chat.

There's a lot of people helping people review resumes, give career advice, job search advice. So we'd love to have you in that as well. And finally, the official coffee sponsor of Guidance Counselor, Seat Coffee. So I didn't know about this, but most coffee has trace mold in it. There's a founder here in Nashville. His name is Caleb. Caleb and his brother started a company called Seat Coffee. It is completely clean, no mold. He's really big on just producing very high quality coffee. It's fantastic. If you use Code TDS and you get fifteen percent off, highly recommend it. I'm drinking it right now. It is fantastic.

I've also been talking to Caleb about getting just a tap installed in my house because of how much I love cold brew. So anyways, that's that. I see people tuning in. We're here. It's great to see y'all this morning. Nader, let's kick it off, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we will go from there. Sure. So my name is Nader Dabit. I'm currently at Cognition working on the growth team. And for the last, I would say, eleven years, I've been doing developer education all the way from just local meetups and coding schools in Mississippi, where I'm from and live. the way to like leading developer relations teams and companies like aws ave and now i'm working kind of across multiple roles at cognition and cognition we essentially are an ai company and we have a platform for developers and teams that are deploying coding agents at scale within their within their companies that's awesome that's awesome so again i was talking to nodder but uh but behind the scenes and Uh, backstage and, and again, the purpose of these streams kind of that I, that I want to do is, is to really help people better position themselves, um, with the market right now, AI is kind of changing everything.

I'm even using it. I'm literally using Claude right now to create a custom dashboard with my team. It's pretty tremendous. I feel like a magician and I'm not even a developer. So I can't imagine how developers feel right now. So Nader, I want to go ahead and just kick it off to you. What's your general thoughts, state of the union right now? Are people behind what people should be learning? Let's just kind of kick it off super broad right now. Yeah, it's probably the most, it's for sure like the most interesting, crazy, confusing time in the history of my career to be a developer, first of all.

But there's always kind of like a spectrum of, I would say how people look at what's happening at any given moment, right? And it's like on one end you have the pessimists on the other end, I would say you have the optimists and you have everyone kind of in between. And I would say the people that are kind of like more on the like optimistic spectrum are often like more proactive and they're out there kind of like being real with the current situation as opposed to being in denial and trying to find ways to kind of like stay ahead or stay ahead of the curve.

That's kind of like my general overview of kind of like where things are and how do you actually, I would say, take that and put it into practice. Because there are people, like if you look at the job market, there's a lot of doom and gloom around layoffs at these larger companies. But on the other end, you have people like the creator of Open Claw who are getting essentially acquihired at hundreds of millions of dollars. That happened when I was on paternity break, by the way. I literally saw Open Claw get created and then bought in like six weeks. Yeah, so there's obviously massive opportunities and there's massive potential.

And if you look at some of the discussions on social media, you'll see certain people are hinting towards AI code generation. It's just not good. It's not good enough. It's not going to be something that we're going to really use in production or whatever. And those are less and less, I would say, nowadays. And then you have people on the completely other end of the spectrum that are literally out there building abstractions to enable agent orchestration. And I think the people on that spectrum are the ones that are, I would say, doing much better in the job market, and they're staying ahead. And I think my general take is that you can't like deny that this technology is here and it's getting better and it's not going away.

And that our jobs as developers are completely different than they were even three months ago. I think when Opus four point five and Codex five point two came out, it really, really changed everything. And that's kind of when I decided completely to pivot my career. I think everyone knew we would get there at some point in time, but I think it was I think it was maybe a little earlier than a lot of people thought. And we can't think of ourselves as just a front end developer or a back end developer. You have to kind of have a large skill set. And part of that skill set, I would say, yeah, would be agent orchestration.

But you also need to kind of learn how to leverage a lot of other things. You have to kind of lean into design. And I would say there's people that have a lot of like devops and sre experience i think maybe trying to lean more into that as a general purpose developer makes a lot of sense because you need to kind of be able to do a lot more yeah i have i have so many questions to ask you uh based off everything you just said uh the the the first thing i want to ask is like do you think and we'll give some hot takes we'll give some hot takes on this morning's show do you are we heading towards developers not focused necessarily calling themselves a front-end or back-end developer are we are we heading towards a place where you're just going to be a developer like like like are we heading towards that now or no Well, I think that everyone now is basically a developer.

I would say a lot of the stuff that a developer, quote-unquote, would do can be done in natural language now. I think there's still the category of engineering that is a lot more complex. There's a lot. There's cloud engineering. There's SRE and DevOps. I think that sort of thing is still not yet automated. Then you also have a lot of the ML development I would say roles that are also not quite, or for sure not automated at all, right? Auto research is interesting to kind of look at that might disrupt certain other areas as well. But then you have also, I would say these people like I don't even remember his name, but the creator of Open Claw who are like giga chat agent orchestrators.

They kind of really, really understand this at a deep level and they're able to create an insane amount of value and be able to, again, like be acquired at hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think like that's the spectrum of that. That's the end of the spectrum that you want to be on. If you previously considered yourself as a developer, a front end developer, a back end developer, you need to kind of really understand how to just maybe be someone who's like hyper optimized and just managing agents, right? So someone like I wrote a post that said something like, I don't know, I've written a few like tweets that went viral, but one of them was like, I can't believe we used to actually write code.

And that's kind of what was just a thing that went through my head when I was doing something. And I was thinking to myself, wow, I can't believe I used to write all this code, right? And then I had a lot of people that were arguing with me. And they were like, well, if you're not writing code, like, what are you doing? And I was and this was like back in December. And I was like, I was like thinking and essentially, yeah, it's the same thing that a lot of people are also, I would say, come to the conclusion of you're essentially orchestrating agents at this point, if you're previously just a developer.

So what is what is orchestrating agents mean as somebody who's non technical like me, you've brought that up now a few times already. In the few minutes we've been live, what does that mean for somebody who may not know what that means? It just means that you have agents that are integrated into your code base that are doing different things, and you're able to control them in a way that is very, very efficient, I would say. I would say there's two main ways that you see people working with agents at the moment. One of them is like locally. So you have essentially a code base that you've checked out locally with Git or whatever.

And you've spun up like Cloud Code or you're working with and Windsor for cursor or something like that. And you're just iterating I would say synchronously. So you ask a question or you prompt and you get a response and you test it out. So that is like one workflow. And then you have the other workflow, which is like async, where you're sending multiple requests in parallel. So you might say, do this. And then you might then jump into another session and say, do that. And then you have another session to do that. And all these things are kind of like happening at the same time.

So that is more of like, often i would i would say are like remote workflows whereas like the local experience this the synchronous experience is often local um but with codecs i believe they and a few other tools are kind of uh enabling this parallel orchestration locally as well and i believe they're doing it you know with a few different techniques but um yeah i would say working synchronously locally is often like what most people get started with. And then for like large codebases, large teams, and for collaboration, you have like this remote or background agent experience where you're kicking off a bunch of tasks, I would say asynchronously.

And I want to talk a lot more about that because that's kind of like, I think where things are headed and that's where we're seeing a lot more of the... Yeah, so like at Cognition, our main product is Devon. We also have Windsurf, but... Devon is kind of like the original product and it's essentially an asynchronous background agent or cloud agent. I would say framework or platform and the way that most people like use Devon is that you have like large teams and you're collaborating on a code base and you can interact with your code base via these remote agents. through a couple of different ways.

You can go to the application and you open up the screen and you can say, hey, go fix this bug or go make this update. And it'll automatically kind of either you can tag a code base or automatically kind of like understand which code base you're talking about. But the most interesting way that we're seeing most teams actually interact with the agents is through Linear and Slack. And what's cool about Slack is that this doesn't seem like that apparent or obvious or even interesting to me at first, right? But what's been happening, what I've noticed, it's that it's actually maybe one of the best platforms for interacting with your code bases because what ends up happening is that it opens up the code base to everyone in the company.

because in the past if if some non-technical person saw a bug or if they saw something in the documentation that wasn't like correct they would probably maybe go in slack and say hey this this is broken and it would get forgotten or maybe they would go open a ticket and put it in linear and it would get put in the very backlog because it's just a little typo and no one really cares and there's a lot more important stuff to do but now in slack they can just say hey devin this typo exists in the docs fix it that's crazy anyone in the in the company can just do that right and then what ends up happening is devin takes that creates a pr and and it's ready to be merged and you can even kind of have rules around auto merging for like certain low level things that aren't gonna you know break anything which would be something like that right So that's one thing that's happened there.

But another thing is that you actually have the context of the entire Slack discussion that you can use as a prompt. So someone might open up. Yeah, it's really cool because like someone. So what happened recently within our company, even I can give an example. Someone was like, we've been talking about adding light mode. for a long time into Devon. And we had someone that made a comment that it's really bad that we don't have light mode. So we started a thread saying, oh, we really need to add light mode. And we had a bunch of people chiming in. And then finally, someone just said, hey, Devon.

And they wrote this really, really in-depth prompt to kick off an actual production-ready light mode. And the whole context of that conversation got put in because there are a few variables that people were kind of just pointing out. And those types of discussions can be sent to the agent as context. And everyone in the company can kind of chime in. So this is like a completely different paradigm from what coding has been. Because in the past, coding is like one engineer reading a ticket and making an update. And then what ends up happening is the pull request gets sent. And then someone reviews it and then it gets merged and then ten people chime in.

They're like, oh, actually, I would have done it this way. But when you have all of these things being able to be discussed before it actually gets sent, then you now have a lot more broad participation in the code updates. Now, this might not make sense for really complex things that need someone really technical to understand. But for a lot of this stuff, it actually makes a lot of sense. Sure. man all right so let me ask you this i i i kind of want to want to rewind a little bit you talked about how devops um you know kind of the ml type stuff uh is is still you know cannot be automated do do you think if if Do you think individuals, because I think Jason chimed in here, figuring out what AI can't do and focus on it because there are a lot of things it can't do.

What are your thoughts on this? That's very spot on. Getting very good at what AI can do and being able to leverage that and getting good at what AI can't do will really, really set you apart. And I think those are the types of folks that are going to be not only doing okay, but they're probably going to be doing better than ever. Yep. Yep. Lawrence had an interesting comment. Lawrence, it's always good to see you, man. I've been calling this phenomenon the great positional smush for a year now. Devs doing ops, PMs are making PRs. We're mostly technical staff. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Any thoughts on that? Spot on. Spot on. yeah um let me let me ask you this let's let's let's kind of break it down to you know for for folks who may be watching this who uh are early in their career and or have been kind of the you know very kind of more in the enterprise because i do want to talk enterprise here here in a minute what would be your biggest suggestion for folks who are in an environment and or starting out where they just don't have access to these tools what can people do today this afternoon to start, uh, learning, learning all this because, because, because I just want to point people to where to start.

You had Aaron last week, say, go buy Claude's a month. Cause that's what I use. Um, you know, and start messing around with it. Do you have any other suggestions on, on, on how people should get started? Oh, Nader, you froze. We lost Nader. Nader, where you at? Nader was going to drop some bombs and then he froze. Come back. All right, so while Nader is getting back on here, it's one of the things that I've talked a lot about in terms of bettering yourself. I think you've got to start tinkering with it. I'm going to kick him out of the studio and see if he can come back in.

So we'll resume the conversation in a second. We'll resume the conversation in a second. But I wanna go back to what Aaron said. I think you can't stick your head in the sand anymore. I talked about this. I'm gonna talk about this next week. I saw this when React came out. There are a lot of people who are resistant to change. And I think what you really need to do is you need to be able to adapt, right? Prime example for me, I've downloaded Claude. I'm on the twenty a month paid seat right now, and I'm currently building a dashboard for the community team, right?

I am non-technical, but I do need to know how to use AI. And so I am building a dashboard that tracks budget that tracks social media interactions that tracks email sends to this dashboard to report to upper management and so that's something that again you need to be uh aware of now are we back we're back I just I switched to my hot spot I think I'm having internet issues here okay sorry about that all right you're good all right so what can people do to get started today right so i think like there's two things that i would do number one i would set aside about a hundred dollars a month and i would kind of try to experiment with the most bleeding edge tech that's out there and this would be a combination for me at the moment of um i would probably have codex cloud code windsurf and like two others maybe.

And I would kind of like stay up to date with what else is coming out there and maybe drop one of the others as other things come out. And I would have like my daily driver. And then I would have like a couple of other things that I'm kind of just kicking the tires on. So you have open code, which is really nice. You have, I would say, Conductor, which is really cool. I'm going to plug Devon. Devon's free to get started. I would definitely check that out because it's kind of like the only true background agent platform that exists today. And I would just kind of really, really say a hundred dollars a month.

It's totally worth it. Don't eat out or something for a couple of days if you don't feel like you have the money. It's going to make you a lot more money in the long term just by being on the bleeding edge of this stuff that's number one number two i would really try to stay on the bleeding like how do you actually know what's there well it's staying on that bleeding edge and for me there's a handful of ways i do that number one i look at hacker news every day i actually have a claude bot that summarizes the top stories from hacker news um in a certain category and like sends them to me in telegram every day I would also stay on top of GitHub trending, and then I would have a curated list of people on X that I follow and try to see what they're talking about.

If you have the money to set aside to do that stuff, you have this notification set up or this daily curated content that you can go and look at. then you're going to really be on the very you're going to be like in the top point one percent of the world right there's just so many people that just show up to work and they don't really keep up with any of this stuff you're going to be way ahead of them but you also might be way ahead of most people that are trying to keep up yeah All right, so people can use the tools that you mentioned.

Let's say I'm speaking to the legacy code base, but who's interested in, in branching into these tools, does that, what, what would you say to that developer to, to, to get started? Are we talking about building side projects, helping businesses? What are your thoughts there? Yeah. If your company doesn't allow you to use these things in your day-to-day work or allow, yeah, then definitely go and just build stuff on your own, build, build side projects. Um, you know, experiment every day, set aside like thirty minutes or an hour. I think if you're working within a large company, you can also really, really set yourself apart by demonstrating the power of a lot of this stuff to the people within your company, because they're going to realize it at some point.

if you're the person that kind of like shows them like what you can do then you're going to be kind of like that ai person within your company right don't wait for them to figure this stuff out on their own right you should be the one um kind of pointing it out and that doesn't mean you have to integrate it and your actual day-to-day workflow for them to kind of see it but you can kind of show them and maybe like a different like they have these sessions that you can put on maybe for your team, kind of like lunch and learn type of things, whatever, just find ways to kind of, um, to demonstrate your expertise.

So I, so I'm curious, this kind of goes into interviewing and not even necessarily at cognition, just more the, the, the state of interviewing, um, are based off your experiences. What do interviews look like? What do people need to be able to do? Like, you know, I'm sitting here, I've been out of the recruiter seat for a bit, like hands on recruiting, I'm still in it in a way, I would imagine the interview process is it has changed tremendously. What in your experience are companies looking for from a proficiency perspective with this stuff? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Because I mean, I think like you, for sure.

Oh, yeah, it's going to be all over the place. There's people that are still stuck in two thousand and twenty. And there's still and then there's people that are like on the very, very other end that I mean, you're even seeing these massive companies. I forgot exactly which CEO, but there was a CEO that basically said, if you're not staying on the cutting edge of everything going that's going on, like we just don't even want you in the company at all. Crazy. So like that's kind of the mindset I would go in into an interview. You want to be, you know, it's always been a fast moving industry.

It's just moving ten times faster now, which is you could either look at it and say, oh, that sucks. Or you could look at it and say, oh, that's an opportunity. And you want to be obviously on that end. and yes um you only have like x number of hours in the day to do your work but i would still say it's super important to set aside one to two hours every day to kind of tinker kick the tires research experiment whatever you want to call it and bring that knowledge into the interview and you're going to really stand out i mean i've i've totally seen people like share recently like on twitter and stuff that they they found it hard to find someone who's like ai filled to hire because I think the people that truly are on the cutting edge of this are able to land roles a lot easier.

And something I want to point out, too, is that there are a ton of really fast growing, fast moving, early stage startups that are hiring in an insane pace, including Cognition. That's one of our number one focuses right now is recruiting and hiring. And then you have companies like Meta who are reportedly going to be laying off twenty percent of people. You don't want to join like this legacy company with like one hundred thousand employees for a lot of reasons, in my opinion, at least because you're going to be they're going to be downsizing, I think, for the most part, like more or less. And then you have the opportunity to get in early on a smaller company that's going to grow like one hundred X.

So if you're looking for like equity, a lot of these companies are also getting acquired and going public a lot faster i would say than in the past some of these software as a service companies so like you know if you want a position for your career in my opinion i would look for the one billion dollar or less valuation um startup and that is like growing like wildfire enjoying that because you're gonna have more job security also right um it just makes a lot more sense in my opinion overall now there are ai teams within these companies that are growing as well so you can look at it like that like you don't want to just be a front-end developer at some large company right now um and you don't want to like apply for that position in my opinion instead you might want to join like the ai team of a large company or just join a la a fast-growing smaller company Yeah, so you bring up another great point and I was gonna head this way.

There's a graph circulating around, I forgot the source, but I tweeted it, a bunch of people tweeted about how the job postings for software engineers are actually going up. And I think the general thesis is that AI is taking people's jobs but I actually think AI is creating more growth because of the smaller companies. I think one of the parts of my talk that I give is that I think for the longest time, startups have been viewed as this kind of Last last ditch resort. Very shaky. Not the best place to be at. But I feel like that the momentum is completely shifted and that the startups that are starting, especially around AI, are the ones hiring engineers.

And there's actually more opportunity right now than there has been. Thoughts on just a general state of that comment? Yeah, I think that there is, it's not a bad time right now to be a developer, but you can't, again, just be like we were saying, just a front end or a back end or a Python or whatever. You have to kind of be someone that's well-versed in a lot of different things. And I would say being like really good at front end is amazing, paired with being someone who's on the bleeding edge of AI, you're going to probably have a lot more luck Because when you think about it, they can't just hire someone who is a vibe coder to replace an engineering team.

That's not happening, actually. The people that are being brought in still need to understand how GitHub works. They still need to understand version control. They need to understand how to set environment variables. They need to understand database schemas. security and all these different things still actually really really matter so it's not like some random person off the street that's kind of learned how to vibe code over the weekend is going to take your job i'm not taking anybody's job but like yeah someone that is like just just fresh out of some other industry or fresh out of school whatever that spent the last year like really really going hard at all this probably could take your job because they're going to be you can learn all these things now faster too and you can actually figure out these things if you are high agency so i don't know it's but yeah so if you also look at like a lot of these legacy tech companies or just legacy companies in general i mean even like a car manufacturer like uh or a plumbing company that's large like every big company has a tech sector within their company, there is a lot of opportunity there to come in and help them be a lot more efficient and improve things with AI.

I would just say being AI native is indispensable at this point. If you're not already that way, you should start moving in that direction. One of the things that is on my brain right now is that I feel like developers... And I know this is going to be like, yeah, no shit, Taylor. But I feel like you can't sit in a hole anymore and be like, I only do this when it comes to solving business problems. I think one of the things that AI has done is it's allowed engineers or it's allowing people to solve bigger problems much faster. What are your thoughts on just...

telling people like, hey, you need to start thinking holistically on how to solve business problems. And I understand that developers were hired to solve business problems. But I think a lot of developers are like, I'm only going to solve the problem that's here. And I think what AI is doing is it's allowing people to solve more problems a lot faster at scale. Thoughts on that? Am I going? Because I'm trying to think. of like the person starting out in their career like I feel like you can now use AI to create a bunch of different things that provide business value to smaller businesses or whatever it makes you more business oriented instead of just code oriented Yeah, that's absolutely correct.

You can't just be, I would say, code oriented anymore because, again, that's kind of like what's the code generation is what's being automated. But the domain expertise is what isn't automated. You still have to, again, understand how all these things fit together. permissions and I would say access controls and security and environment variables and you know all these things are really really not that easy to to kind of grok and you know it took me a while to understand git right like someone can't just come in and understand that overnight so yeah I think like the combination of technical expertise and business acumen would definitely be something that would set you apart in general.

But I would say if they have two teams, I'm sorry, if they have two developers that they're interviewing and one of them is like really good at one thing that the other is not and they're both equal everywhere else, they're going to totally hire the other person, right? So again, I think it's just about expanding what you're able to do and your skill set in general and not kind of like boxing yourself into anything like really small. Yep. So I want to go back because again, you're validating my talk. So I appreciate you. I want to talk about the X comment you made about following people and creating lists.

Talk about the importance of that because not many people talk about that. And that is worked into my talk about literally creating lists to follow people, to learn from people. Talk about just the importance of that right now with how much noise is out in this market right now. Oh, gosh, yeah, there's so much noise in the market right now. So much noise. I mean, you know, if you kind of if you are early into something and you're able to kind of like make a name for yourself there, there's a lot of value there. So how do you become like early on something? Well, you have to kind of be aware of it at the earliest possible stage.

And I've been keeping up with all this stuff for twelve or thirteen or fourteen years at this point. I've always kind of tried to understand what's the newest thing. And it's come and given me so much opportunity in my career. I would say React Native was kind of like the first thing when it came out. I was like, oh, this is going to be big. And I went all in on it. Right. And then it kind of gave me a lot of good opportunities. And I've always tried to curate ways to find the latest and the greatest. And everyone has their own ways to do that.

But for me, it's really cool now with automation. And for me, it's OpenClaw. I'm able to set up these Cron jobs that essentially will listen to everything happening on Twitter and then send me a list of the most i would say like interesting things that have to do with what i'm interested in and send it to me every morning in telegram along with github trending along with hacker news along with product time so like spending about thirty or forty five minutes reviewing that i mean like what's trending on product product time is a good signal what's trending on github uh you know trending is obviously a good signal because it's trending, right?

What's trending all these different places. So kind of like reading all that just kind of like gives you, I would say, your daily dose of what's what's hot and what's trending and um sometimes you can kind of like see something that's blowing up on github before anyone on twitter has even seen it actually um it's almost like its own little thing like i've seen a a repo that's had like three or four thousand stars that has zero mentions on on twitter sometimes and that's kind of crazy yeah Yeah. And I think, you know, and again, as a non-technical guy myself, I mean, I even have a I've started to put out a job data weekly job data reports on trending things on.

So I pull from staffing companies. So staffing companies, LinkedIn, Indeed, because those are kind of some leading indicators of where hiring's going. And so I drop that every week on my sub stack now. And I wasn't able to do that before AI, right? I mean, I think like, You know, again, the purpose of the show is to give people like really tactical advice. Like one of the things you can use AI for is literally just to like not or saying like search the web, get information. Right. Because I think I think what what people need to realize is that you can't live in a bubble and you have to know how things are happening and when they're happening and how fast they're happening.

And AI absolutely can do that for you. Let me ask you this, Nader, just because I think this is kind of a random question and it just popped into my head. What are your thoughts on these companies? I saw one post on X, I'm sure you saw it too, about somebody hiring an AI dev advocate. What are your thoughts on that? Are we heading to where we're just all going to be chatting with bots? Or do you think that's just kind of a marketing... I think that was a that was definitely a good marketing stunt. It was great. While I think the sentiment is kind of the complete opposite.

If you look at again, I think the founder of Open Claw is a good gauge on how people view a lot of this stuff. Like he literally blocks and kind of like calls out anyone that does any automated conversations on X. I think that people don't want to interact with AI at the moment. It's just not good enough for, I would say that sort of thing. It's great as an assistant to a human in that sense. And a lot of the large DevRel teams can probably and realistically probably will be condensed because each person can get a lot more done with AI. But I don't think anyone wants to just only talk.

If I saw a company that has an AI DevRel person or an AI, whatever, I might ask it for information, get some of the things I need from it, but I wouldn't be like that impressed. Yeah. So that was just a random thought. I want to ask you this because you travel a ton, you go to conferences. Aaron Francis and I talked a little bit about this, that the really the power of in person i think is is is probably ramped up more than it ever has what are your just your general thoughts i mean i know you're very you you're very active in the community you're you're going to events what are some words of encouragement to folks to to to encourage them to get to a conference why they should get to a conference why they should get to meetups especially in the age of ai right now Well, for the purposes of this discussion and what you do for a living specifically might just be the fact that these recruiters and a lot of these job platforms are just overwhelmed with submissions because it's so easy now to automate that.

And you have people that have the ability to essentially tailor cover letters and resumes specifically for companies without even knowing the company exists. right like if i have a bot that can go and scrape a thousand job listings and then create a custom cover letter and a custom resume and then submit that um and then everyone else has access to that technology as well they're going to be flooded with a hundred thousand like submissions so you are not standing out digitally and it's really tough to do that and i think in person allows you to kind of meet that person and make a human connection and i think that what i've seen is a lot of people being able to land jobs cut through all the red tape and just land opportunities because of a real world connection that they make.

That's one thing. I think like building community in person is obviously also just another thing that is a lot easier to do than digitally. I think digital is still the best medium for conveying information and teaching.

Like, I don't think I would go to a conference and fly across the world just to learn something because I could just watch the video at home later but I would go to kind of like network and meet people and oh we're all interested in the same thing this is amazing and like that will probably make the community of that thing like last longer and be stronger so yeah it's funny um pivoting pivoting to a job fair company i listen i i i i think there could be some validity in this um for sure you know and henry comes in here needs better access to

events and you know i i think this is interesting because because aaron aaron francis talked about this last week that i think with this sea of ai is that everybody can learn anything at their fingertips now and i've even thought about it just from from a content perspective with the tort community and helping people in their career i think it's important digitally to be able to to teach people but i think curating the in-person events and as aaron said aaron's like i'm probably the most least interested in i've ever been in going to hearing talks but i think i'm the most interested in meeting people

and networking with people in person so i do think again um as the um uh you know i i i do think as we continue to go down this road it's going to be interesting to see uh what conferences are going to look like that's just kind of my general uh thought totally Yeah, I have no idea the answer to that, but I've also kind of wondered that as well.

I mean, I think in the past we used to see a decent amount of technical talks about how to do something, but I think now we're going to be seeing broader, like higher level talks, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Now, as we kind of slowly wrap up here, obviously, I got some rapid fire. Got to ask you anything else that maybe we haven't covered that's kind of popped into your brain as we start to wrap up. If anybody has any questions for Natter, please, please, please ask them. no not really i would just say never subscribe or prescribe whatever to the doom and gloom type of things that you kind of see there's always a positive light there's always kind of a good opportunity to be made out of like all situations and if you kind of like try to maybe follow people that have a similar perspective and um always look for that opportunity there's always going to be an opportunity out there because if you do kind of like take the, the opposite, it'll ends up in my opinion, kind of leading you down the path of that and, uh, having less opportunities.

So, yeah. Yeah. And David, you know, listen, man, I mean, you know, I, I absolutely, I think right now I did, this is part of my talk, but again, it shifted. So I gave this keynote to all things open in October and the state of the market has changed drastically since October, which is crazy. But I think at the end of the day, uh, most people are on the same playing field right now now i think that playing field is quickly uh not becoming a thing but i think everybody is starting with ai right now so no matter if you're fifty two or twenty two or eighty two you can absolutely use it and david i think because you're here you're interested you're learning from folks that i bring on the show I don't think age isn't gonna keep you back.

Honestly, you have a different view of the world with your age. You can solve solutions that maybe haven't been solved in either your industry or your network. So don't let age be a factor there. So Nader, what's your favorite pizza topping? Pepperoni. There you go. There you go. I love it. I love it. All right. As you wrap up here, rapid fire. And again, please go connect with Nader on all social media. Nader, what's your handle on X? Dabit three. D-A-B-I-T and the number three. There you go. There you go. So go follow him. Go send him a message. Tell him you enjoyed him on the show.

All right. So the first question, obviously, you can plug Devin if you want to. But what's one tech tool or app you can't live without right now? I would say just in general, the agentic CLIs. I really love those because I use them outside of just coding. I use it for research and writing and I use it for just all types of random things. I love it. I love it. What's the very first job you ever got paid to do? working at my father's clothing store taking out trash i love it i love it that's awesome boxes and stuff like that yeah i love it um what did you want to be when you originally grew up like like like when you were young were you a lawyer or doctor or were you always hard-coded for development i think When I was younger, because my family was in the clothing business, I wanted to just work in the clothing business with them.

And that was kind of the first thing. But the first thing I actually tried to do seriously was law. And I dropped out very quickly because I couldn't deal with the school part of that. I hear you. I hear you. Let me ask you this. Is there is there a career mistake you're oddly grateful for? Like looking back on maybe not a mistake, but like something you did at the time, you're like, I probably wasn't the best thing. But in hindsight, it kind of worked out. think there's been a lot of things that i really wanted to happen that didn't happen that i was sad about at the time that in the long run ended up being like a blessing you know like failures that that actually weren't failures and a lot of that was kind of like asking for a raise at a job that i wouldn't have wanted to be at uh or like like not getting an offer at a job that i thought i wanted things like that so i think like you know just being able to move past those things and not let it affect you you end up finding something better yeah agreed um let me ask you guys if i told you tomorrow that you couldn't do anything in tech anymore but i pay the same amount of money what hobby would you pursue for a living probably some some form of teaching really yeah i love it i love it um any specific subject I like philosophy a lot, and I don't know how I would teach that, but I would like to figure it out.

I love it. I love it. I love it. All right, last question again. Thank you for everybody who showed up today. The chat was popping, so I appreciate you all. So 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 anybody to turn to and ask for general career advice. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Natter if you were to go back in time and tell him something? I would say it's probably something around the feeling of imposter syndrome or the feeling of not being ready to do something and waiting to do something as opposed to just doing it.

I think that that's kind of a very well-discussed thing now these days in the general zeitgeist, but just being able to kind of ship things when you're not feeling like you're confident enough to ship them, putting things out in the world and just moving forward quickly without having to worry about anything that's like in the past would be kind of scary to do. But I think that that's kind of the main thing, just kind of like, just do it, just ship it. Just, you know, no one's ready. You know, you have to kind of just like prepare yourself that things might not be perfect, but you're going to learn something from it.

It's better than not doing anything. Yep, absolutely. And then the last question, Coke or Pepsi? Coke. I love it. I love it. Awesome. All right, y'all. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate y'all. We are back next week. Nader, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. But y'all have a great one. Connect with Nader, and we'll see you online. Y'all have a good one. Peace. Thank you.