Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 16: Dealing with recruiters and learning new things without frustration

Episode Date: June 27, 2016

In episode 16, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: From listener David Renne: What’s the best way to talk to random LinkedIn recruiters, recruiter calls and emails? I prefer the reverse lookup apps to determine if an unrecognized phone number looks like a recruiter it goes straight to voice mail during business hours. As a mid-level dev, i sometimes get frustrated when i try learning new things. how can i be more comfortable as a beginner? Sometimes i get frustrated with myself when i don’t immediately grasp something that i perceive to be very simple. It makes me less motivated to try new things and take risks on new technology, and really feeds my impostor syndrome.

greetings podcast universe and welcome to soft skills engineering episode number 16 i am one of your hosts dave smith i am one of your other hosts jamison dance this concludes our list of hosts it's a tuple yeah it's a tuple with arity 2 i thought that was it no tuple is going to have any number of elements and the number of elements is called the element 2 i think that's a common misconception oh my goodness it is not too it's t-u-p-l-e some people say tuple yeah and like you know in postgres like database records are called tuples i thought it was like the old english ye old tuple yeah from yeah it's germanic no the arity a-r-i-t-y is the number of elements there you go your little that was a not a soft skill that we just demonstrated there yep

That was a hard skill. All right. So I think we have a couple of listener questions today, right, Jameson? Yep. I will kick it off with the first one. So this is from David Rennie, and he asks, what's the best way to talk to random LinkedIn recruiters, recruiter calls, and emails?

I prefer the reverse lookup apps to determine if an unrecognized phone number looks like a recruiter, and if it does, it goes straight to voicemail during business hours. Clever. i actually didn't know you could do this and then dave told me that's an android thing yeah i think it is and and that's cool it's to make up for the fact that your phone doesn't work most of the time that was rude yeah that's not a soft skill either bashing on technology i i only speak out of personal pain but other people love it okay um i i want to open with a

brief rant about this, which is the rant on my friend. Some people like to kind of humble brag about developers and they just complain about how annoying it is to get all these emails and calls from these people offering you money. And like, there are people that cannot get a job or that are stuck in these dead end industries. Like if you're in manufacturing right now, you're kind of looking around with scared eyes, wondering how long you're going to be there. So it feels kind of gross to me when we complain about how horrible it is that people are bugging us trying to get a get us to take jobs oh these people want to hire me and pay me money it's so awful yeah it's yeah it's kind of the i don't know it's kind of gross so maybe don't do that but it doesn't seem like

this is doing that um this this question is just kind of asking what do i do yeah yeah and i and listener david renny i don't we didn't mean to insinuate that you are like that nope so sorry sorry about that yes dave is apologizing for me thank you someone's got to do it yeah uh yeah so always be nice i think that's the number one rule you you probably never want to just curse people out or flame them or send them i've seen people do that especially when the recruiter makes a technical mistake like hey we're looking for developers with c plus experience you know it's like it's like how could you possibly mistake the name of a programming language yeah and then they rage on them that by the way is a great way to not get the job

well often it feels like there's no cost to it because you you might not be looking for a job so you can just like just yell at this random faceless person and then maybe tomorrow you get laid off and suddenly that random faceless person is the only gateway between you and a great job yeah so i i don't receive a ton of phone calls uh those i usually just am very brief and say no thank you and hang up the emails i have a little canned form thing that i send that says like i'm not looking right now i'll let you know if i'm interested and then i just kind of filed away and i haven't maybe other people are more rock stars than i am and they get people kind of like pounding down their door but for most of it it's it's like two seconds to respond and then

that's the end of it so when i when i uh drive home at the end of my work day there's usually a couple recruiters at my house waiting for me to get home do you not have that uh no it's so annoying man that must be really hard to have that lifestyle dave i also have a little form letter and i like to tell recruiters hey thanks for the note thanks for reaching out because i know it's you know they're really putting their neck out there and they probably are emailing 100 candidates and and they probably get uh yelled at a lot because you know that whole rock star mentality and um i like to say thanks for the note i'm not interested right now but i might be in the future so keep me on your lists and let's stay in touch you know and i find that

this keeps it professional keeps it friendly and courteous and i think that uh a recruiter can really appreciate it because at the end of the day this is a human being with a job to do and it sucks to get yelled at he asks specifically about the um the phone calls though i've i've received many more emails than phone calls and it's a lot easier to just deal with the emails but yeah so you handle the phone calls one time uh about five years ago when i had a an actually a company provide a desk phone um you may have seen these strange devices that sit on desktops and you can actually they're like a cell phone but they're plugged into the wall they're so they're kind of different. And I actually got a call from my receptionist. And she was like,

hey, Dave, I've got so and so Bob, thus and such from company XYZ on the phone for you. And I'm like, what? It turns out she transfers the call turns out it's a recruiter. And I'm like, hey, please don't call my company during work hours, especially to reach me if you're trying to take me away from my company. It was not cool. So that doesn't happen very often anymore. And nowadays, It's almost all from emails and the occasional cell phone call for me. Yeah. How do you deal with it now when they call you on your cell phone, especially when you're at work? I just, so actually I get more calls from people wanting to sell me recruiting services now to recruit engineers for me than I do about people wanting to actually recruit me.

And I just say, hey, why don't you send me an email with information and we can connect by email. That's how I respond on the phone. Sure. Cool. I like that strategy. Maybe we can take a second to talk about why you would ever want to talk to a recruiter because I, I, I know people that just don't understand why they exist and only see them as annoyances. Yeah. So what's the, I mean, you talked about, so besides the obvious, like be a good human thing, why would you ever care about maintaining a relationship with a recruiter?

well recruiters there are two kinds of recruiters and uh in my experience the first one is like a free agent who tends to recruit for multiple companies and then they collect a finder's view and they place somebody with them and the second kind of recruiter is uh employed full-time or by contract with a single company and is exclusively recruiting for that one company google's a good example of someone like that in the first case that recruiter will have access to lots of different companies and they will know things that are not apparent from just a Google search of job listings.

Like they'll know a little bit more about company culture than what you can actually sometimes read online in job descriptions. And then after talking to you, they can sometimes make connections that you really would be unable to make on your own just from internet research. So that's one reason.

Salary ranges are another huge part of that. I mean, if they place people at that company, then they have information about how much that person they placed got paid. so good point yeah uh so what you're saying is they can get you access to jobs that you might never never encounter i guess yeah and in fact the current job i have right now was a result of connecting with a free agent recruiter who was working for several different companies i would he just approached me out of the blue about one company and that i had heard

actually really bad things about so i wanted to go interview there and see if the bad things were true just kind of go look at the tire fire yeah and it was glorious it's on fire it's so warm so anyway that didn't work out but then after the interview now he knew a little bit about me and i knew a little bit about him and he knew a little bit more about what i was looking for and he goes you know there's this other company i think you should go check out and sure enough he connected me and it worked out great and here i am i'm in my fifth year with that company so the potential payoff is you you could get access to some job that you wouldn't have access to and you might end up being a great job there's this myth or not myth there's uh this advice you

hear a lot about finding jobs through networking and that is very true i mean talking to friends and and finding out what's going on at their company and what's good about is a great way to find jobs but that's not the only way and if you only do that then you'll only work at places where you already have good friends which is fine like you'll have friends there but but but it's also there are many more yeah there are many more companies than than friends probably unless you have a lot of friends i don't know uh so another thing to consider is why recruiters do this um and and for me this kind of opened my eyes when i learned about their business model the way that the contract recruiters that are sorry the the freelance recruiters that they've talked about

work is they usually get a percentage of the candidates year one salary yep so if someone gets hired at a job for 80 000 they get 20 of that on top of it's not like they get a chunk out of the salary the company that hires through the recruiter pays 20 of whatever the salary they paid to that candidate is yeah exactly and the candidate doesn't take a hit for that but yeah yeah well well not usually i guess hopefully not um and and that explains why they just send out these massive emails and do things that kind of seem annoying is because there's an enormous amount of money in it for them so that's kind of their motivation if they send out a thousand emails and even two people respond and get placed

then they could easily make 30 to 40 50 000 off that yeah they could place five people in a year and that's a great year and that that kind of makes their living so they they kind of have this incentive to spam just to reach a wider number of people yep um dave you kind of compared them to real estate agents right yeah yeah exactly so um this goes back to the incentive thing so a real estate agent if they're selling your house and uh they like really really want to sell your house you know and you have a price where you're like i want to sell my house for x dollars and the real estate agent is like, I just want to sell your house. You know, like I'm going to get two, 3% commission off the sale price. So if I have to knock a thousand dollars or $10,000 off

the sale price in order to close the deal, I'm happy to do that. You know, cause the difference to them is no commission versus, you know, 98% commission. Um, and I think recruiters are a little bit similar. They want you to change jobs. That is what they are financially incentivized to do. Now that's not true for the second kind of recruiter generally who works for a company like recruiters that i currently employ they are paid a salary they are not paid a commission based on the first year salary of the people they place they're just paid salary but the free agent recruiters are they really really want you to change jobs and in fact when i was uh considering this job i remember i was a little bit wishy-washy toward the end of the process about whether i

would really change jobs and the recruiter sent me like this decision workflow it's like here this will help you make a decision follow these steps and and i read through the decision workflow and i was like this is all about making me change jobs that's what this is all about it was like every it was like choose your own adventure but every adventure ends in changing jobs yeah wait a minute this flow chart everything goes to the same place so they are incentivized that way financially at least um but you know there are also safety mechanisms so that if people get like fired after say three months on the job they might not collect their commission so that happens too so they are incentivized to place you somewhere that you're going to stay at

least enough time to get the commission and and another incentive that you kind of mentioned is the monetary thing so their percentage of what they make off of placing you is much higher than what a real estate agent would make so uh that can be both good and bad in that they they probably have more financial incentive to help their candidates get placed at a higher salary the downside could be they might um push you towards things that might pay more but have other trade offs you're not interested in like maybe crazy hours or bad perks or something because the only thing that affects their their paycheck is how much money you make at the end and i could imagine that but i don't think i've ever seen that in practice have you ever i mean it just sounds

sounds reasonable but i've never seen it i have never worked with a recruiter to get hired i've only worked with them on the other side so i have no idea okay i'm just pulling stuff out of nowhere the other thing i want to quickly mention about treating recruiters is that in my experience people who go into recruiting have very good memories for remembering people and this is something i struggle with where it's like oh what was that person's name you know but the all the recruiters i know they remember people and they remember their names and they remember what they said and how they acted and so i like to to treat them all as if they have very long memories and And so be nice, be kind, be professional, because there's a really good chance that

if this person is recruiting for a company X today, they might be recruiting for company Y where you really want to work next year. Sure. And they just might remember you. So I have one final question about this. How do you tell if a recruiter is good? So say you decide you might be interested in exploring options. You want to go and talk to a recruiter and see what's out there.

How do you pick the one that you talk to? You give them a short online programming challenge. hmm well i'll take your advice for it i've never done it okay i what i have found is that it's really hard to tell but if a recruiter talks to you a lot and asks what you're interested in and really tries to get to know you i think that's a pretty good sign um because it tells me that they are trying to find a match you know um and i think you can tell If they really are, if they really try, I think you can tell. And I don't mean just try to get you the job.

I mean, they try to find for you a place that works well. Now, I thought that's all I really have for that. Sure. Oh, but there was one more thing I wanted to say. Oh, I forgot. Oh, no. Well, if you remember, I can edit it back in. Sing me some sound of music.

Heck no. That worked last time. I think you remembered in spite of me singing. Oh, well. Okay. So question answered with a little asterisk mark. We may come back to this. Dave is going to remember tomorrow and just like sit up in bed gasping.

I forgot to tell him about the poison. But you'll never know. Great. Should we move on to our second question? Yeah, let's do it. I'll read this one. as a mid-level developer i sometimes get frustrated when i try learning new things how can i be more comfortable as a beginner sometimes i get frustrated with myself when

i don't immediately grasp something that i perceive to be very simple it makes me less motivated to try new things and take risks on new technology and it really feeds my imposter syndrome so i have a story about this um this was towards the beginning of my career and i was really comfortable in the current technology that i had that i knew and was using and i was trying to kind of stretch and learn a new thing and this was it was really the first time uh post school that i had tried to just like throw away all the stuff i knew and learn something totally different and it was super hard and i just really struggled and i saw people that were in the community of the technology i was trying to learn and they just kind of uh they were really excited about it

so they said they talked a lot about how easy it was for them to learn and just how simple and and powerful this concept was this is so easy yeah exactly like man once you grasp the simplicity of the reverse monoid it didn't have reverse monoids but it was stuff like that and and i was just kind of sitting on the outside looking in like how can they think this is easy i'm dying here uh and and the end result was um due to that and a couple other things i i ended up not ever really getting into this technology despite really wanting to so i can understand this pain of of feeling like you really want to learn stuff but it's hard and i think sometimes the the rhetoric that the people who are really excited about it turn to um

it can make it harder for people that struggle because they see that it's not easy for them and they assume that they must be dumb or something or not capable of learning it yeah yeah yeah it is hard and uh i know exactly what you're talking about that feeling it really sucks to be like, why don't I get it? What's wrong with me? You know? So I have a similar experience to you, James. And about four, four and a half years ago, I changed jobs.

And the reason I changed was to completely reset my technology stack and my tools that I had been using at a previous job. I went from writing almost all C++ code to writing a whole bunch of Python and JavaScript code. And I got to tell you, the first three months, literally three months on this job, i felt like i had made a terrible mistake i was like this is awful um but it took three months

which is i mean it was a long time uh to become comfortable where i'm like okay now i'm productive now i can really work and build cool things but it sucked so i think we're just validating you dear listener that it's okay to feel yep really crappy about where you are sometimes when you're learning a new technology uh hang on one second i gotta do some sorry we had people come in okay i'll have to do a little bit more editing there uh so how did you not get fired in those three months. Sounds like you're a pretty crappy at your job, Dave. Well, you know, they say imposter syndrome. I was actually an imposter. Another thing that I want to talk about is there's this idea of deliberate practice.

It's kind of this area of scientific study about how people get really good at things. and one of the things that they've identified is you need to be practicing things in a way that is consistently just beyond your current ability um and and if you don't push yourself in that way then you're not improving anymore you won't get better just by doing the thing that you're already comfortable with and good at so um to some extent this feeling of of being bad at it or or not understanding what's going on that's kind of the feeling that comes with growth uh it's it's kind of like lifting weights there's this idea called progressive overload which means that you continually increase the amount that you're lifting either the volume or

the weight and if you don't you you stop getting stronger if you just lift the same every every week or whatever then your body stops adapting so you continually kind of change the the load you're putting on to encourage your body to continue to grow. So I think basically the, the feeling of being confused or lost or out of your comfort zone is, is good. That means it's working. I agree. I totally agree. In fact, I think you should embrace the discomfort and instead of seeing it as a reason to become discouraged, see it as a, uh, an indication that you are growing and learning and try to channel your energy that way and say this is good like this hurts and this sucks but this is good and i feel like an imposter right now because i

am i'm still learning and that's okay and then uh become comfortable with discomfort i would also say that becomes easier over time the more you learn stuff so this person specifically mentions uh themselves as a mid-level developer and i think the sometimes we assume that senior developers know everything already. And that's totally not true. There are tons of things they don't know, but I think they are in general better at learning. They're better at embracing that feeling of uncomfortableness. I totally agree. That's a word. Uncomfortability. We could also call it discomfort, I guess. Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to be fancy. So I believe that this skill, the ability to pick up new things quickly and effectively and move through this

discomfort curve is the single most important skill that any developer can have and i'm i'm willing to stand behind that statement jameson what do you think do you agree with me i'm uncomfortable with it so it must be good i i think that is pretty powerful yeah and i think you can learn a lot from watching people who are really talented developers um learn a new thing and just how they explore and how quickly the the thing that sticks out to me is how quickly they they just make a thousand mistakes really fast yes just as fast as possible they just break stuff and do the wrong thing but they're they're getting feedback very quickly and they're not worried about looking dumb because they kind of assume like i kind of know what's going on already i've

done all this cool stuff the fact that i don't know like double rails the the secret successor to ruby on rails already that's fine like i can i can learn it and i'll be stupid and make dumb mistakes at first but they're not worried about looking dumb that's how they learn it's a really good point and i think the more experience you get as a software developer the more you realize that there will always be much more that you don't know than what you actually know and i think you become more comfortable with that and it's like this state of being is okay um i want to say one more thing you know when uh have you ever gone on a diet and you're trying to lose weight today i am just starting right now well no i didn't just start but yeah i was i was hangry today

oh okay and do you use a scale to weigh yourself and do you have you ever had the phenomenon where you weigh yourself every day and the scale kind of goes up and down seemingly a little bit randomly like it doesn't seem to follow what you had hoped based on what you had done the previous day oh it's not random it follows what i eat it doesn't follow what i hope Like, huh, I did eat 15 blueberry muffins yesterday. Well, what I have found is that when I'm trying to lose weight, if I weigh myself every day, I often become discouraged. And instead, if I weigh myself like every week or every month, a little bit less frequently, I find that the trend line is easier to spot and it's a little

more reliable. The same, I think, goes with learning. If you every day say to yourself, oh my gosh, I'm not learning fast enough, you're going to become discouraged. But if you check in with yourself every few months and say, Oh, look at all this stuff I've learned over the last month or six months. I think you'll be a lot happier and you'll be less likely to, uh, to, um, get discouraged. Yeah. It's, it's easier to see progress over a longer period of time. That's definitely true. Exactly. And I have one other thing I want to tell you. This is, this story is tongue in cheek, but it's a, I think it reveals a little bit about me. Um, that I guess may or may may not be good. You can take it for what it's worth. But about six or seven years ago, I decided

to learn iOS development. And it was so hard for me. Now, granted, iOS development was in a different state back then. There was no Swift. There was no, what do they have now, like auto reference counting and stuff. It's like a basic garbage collection. There was none of that. You had to do your own reference counting. We had this really weird interface and interface builder for connecting outlets to whatever they're called in it was just so messed up oh and app delegates and all this stuff i just couldn't figure it out i successfully built my app but it had memory leaks and it was crappy and instead of getting mad at myself i just got mad at the technology and i wrote a nasty blog post about how awful it was and moved on so you can challenge you can channel your rage uh toward

the technologies you're learning um but don't channel it toward the people who use those technologies that's just mean well and we saw that after that blog post ios was it just better no i was gonna say it was doomed to to fail and everyone's moved on so it's true we're all writing react native now thanks dave you you really put apple in its place let me tell another story so a few months ago there's this local meetup for elm that just sprouted up uh or actually it was at jameson's place of employment which was really cool and so i went because i wanted to learn more about elm and i knew nothing going into it and i sat down in this room with about 20 other developers and we were working on a little toy problem together and i was i was pretty lost i just did

not know what the heck was going on and i was reluctant to ask questions of the people next to me because i thought it looks like they already know what they're doing and i'm just going to look really stupid if i ask and so after a few minutes i realized i was just imposing this dumb thing on myself all for image and so i said you know what i'm just going to ask and i asked them the question and they were like oh you know i don't actually know and then we asked someone else like i don't know the answer to that either and then like three or four of us figured it out together and i realized which i've had to realize this a lot of times in my career that if i'm wondering about something i'm probably not the only one and if just by asking a question you're

not going to look dumb i mean yeah you're going to reveal that you don't know something but there's a really good chance the other people don't know it as well and that it's a common question so don't be afraid to ask well said so kind of to sum it up getting used to that feeling of being uncomfortable was the theme

of our advice I think that everyone does it that people who are really experienced but learning a new thing especially they're great at that and it's not an admission of weakness and if you can push through that then you'll get better at

getting better awesome and we are all imposters yes except dave i'm the only true developer everyone else is just impostering me yeah great well thank you for your question yeah so jameson where do people find out more about the podcast they can go to soft skills eng on twitter they can search for us in itunes soft skills engineering or whatever podcast app you choose i think we're on pretty much all of them and if you if you like it please please share it on your podcast app subscribe tweet at us tweet to other people about it we'd love to share what we're doing with more people yeah and many of you have done that and thank you all right well thanks very much we'll catch you next week